Shiraz Dossa- Human Status and Politcs- Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust

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Human Status and Politics: Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust

Shiraz Dossa

Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique , Vol. 13, No. 2.(Jun., 1980), pp. 309-323.

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Human Status and Politics: Hannah Arendt on theHolocaust

SHIRAZ DOSSA University of algary

About nothing does public opinion everywhere seem to be inhappier agreem ent than that no one has the right to judge som ebodyelse. Hannah Arendt

The decline of political philosophy is one of the salient facts ofcontemporary intellectual life. Liberalism s significant role inconsolidating the triumph of economics over politics has been noticedand documented. Sheldon Wolin, among others, has brilliantly chartedthe modern rise to pre-eminence of social and economic concerns at theexpense of politics in the older sense of public citizenship andparticipation in the common realm. In this climate of relativism and freeenterprise, it is to Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin that we owe anintellectual and moral debt of the first order. Strauss, in particular,battled unceasingly to recover and articulate the heritage of classicalpolitical philosophy. Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that thelearned and magisterial presence of Leo Strauss lurks behind all thosewho read Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and even Locke and Marx. Onemay wish to challenge Strauss on Plato or Hobbes, but it is not possibleto ignore him 2

Ironically Strauss s very success has in some ways worked againstthe impulse to think and speculate anew about political matters. Straussbrought to vibrant life the Socratic beginnings of political philosophy.He revived in his peculiar, cautious way the normative essence of thePlatonic paragraphs; its moral vision, its intellectual coherence and itshuman excellence. He laid bare the heart of the classical teaching onpolitics as the quest for the just and the good order.3 In the wake of

Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 296.1 Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), chap. 9.2 Eric Voegelin is less well known because of the more esoteric and involved style of histhought and exposition. See for example The New Science of Politics (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1952).3 Stmuss s works include the Poli tical Philosophy of Ho bbes (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1963); Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago

Canadian Journal of Political Science Revue cnna dk nw de science politique , XIII:2 Jua l juin 1980 .Printed Canada 1 Imprim6 au anada


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310 SHIRAZ DOSSAStrauss, serious students ofpolitics and political things, not unnaturally,became adept students of the history of political philosophy. But therewas an unnoticed price paid for the zealous mastery of the classical textsof our tradition. The original encounter which led to politicalphilosophy, the ebb and flow of normal civic life, was almost entirelyforgotten. The real world of political events seems not to invite theattention of the serious students of political philosophy.

To put this matter otherwise: students of political philosophy are nolonger doing political philosophy, that is philosophy which concernsitself with the fate and the quality of this world; most are satisfied withelucidating aspects of the political thought of a Plato or a Rousseau, forexample, even though it is not self-evident that new and important thingsremain to be said about Plato or Rousseau. This in itself is certainlyworthwhile as a contribution to the history of political philosophy but itis not the same as doing political philosophy. Strauss and Voegelin didpolitical philosophy in the act of recovering the western heritage; it ismany of their followers who seem unable to venture beyond theachievements of their mentors.

Hannah Arendt stands out among contemporary classicalthinkers as one whose thinking constitutes political philosophy in theproper sense of this term.4 Her forte is not patient and indiscriminateexegesis of texts in the tradition for its own sake, nor is her thoughtsystematic and easily understandable. She can be properly criticized forher opaque style and darkness of t h ~ u g h t . ~hese elements of herapproach account in large part for her marginal status in the recenthistory of political philosophy. But when all is said and done, it isobvious that she chose to study and understand the crucial political andmoral issues of this age in the traditional manner of a theorist confrontedwith a deranged world. The Holocaust is one such significant eventwhich occupied her erudite and probing attention. From this inquiryemerged a fundamental statement about man and politics.The purpose of this critical essay is a limited one: to examine therelationship between a particular notion of politics and that of humanstatus which underscores part of Hannah Arendt's complex treatmentof the totalitarian Holocaust. In particular, it will be argued that she sawan intimate connection between living in a political way and laying claimto human status. Further, it will be suggested that her thesis isethnocentric in certain essential respects.

Press, 1953); and Thoughts on Machiavelli (Seattle: University o f Washington Press,1969).4 This view is shared, for exam ple, by Margaret Can ovan, The Political Thought ofHannah Arendr (London: J M. Dent and Sons , 1974), chap. 15 J M. Cameron in his review of two o f Arendt's books in The New York Review ofBooks, Nov emb er 6 , 1969. Soon after her death, M aurice Cranston quite rightly saidthat, as a thinker, Hannah Arendt was altogether hors catkgorie (in Encounter,March 1976, 56).


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L'humain et le politique: Hannah Arendt et le totalitarismeLe totalitarisme a Pte l objet de bea ucoup d attention au cours de s dernitresanne es. Auc une de s e tudes re centes toutefo is ne de passe l ouvrage de b ase d eHan nah Are ndt qu i deme ure toujours l u n des plus fouille s, d es plus com plets e tdes plus cri t iques. En ef fetp ou rH an na h Arendt le total itarisme suppose a la foisplus que l inhum anite et plus que l imm oralite . Se lon cel le-c i, il repre sentel e chec d ram atique du politique et il im plique une attaqu e de libe re e contre leconcept de l humain s icher a la tradition hum aniste oc ciden tale. No us e tudionsdon c le lien qu il y a dans le traite de Hannah Arendt entre le politique etl hum ain. No us pensons que sa t ht se repose sure un point d e vueessentiellement ethnocentrique.

In his review of The Origins of Totalitarianism Eric Voegelindisagreed with Arendt's method of treating the existential phenomena oftotalitarianism as identical with its essential nature. Voegelin arguedthat its essence could only be grasped with the aid of a well developedphilosophical anthropology, otherwise the emotionally existing willovershadow the e~ se nt ia l. ~oegelin wished to stress the essentialsameness of totalitarianism and similar catastrophes in the occidentalpast, not withstanding the phenomenal differences between them.

By asserting the need for a philosophical anthropology , Voegelinintended to invoke the weight of the classical tradition as crucial inevaluating this phenomenon. He argued that totalitarianism could onlybe understood if it was acknowledged that its doctrinal root was theheretical immanentist sectaranism traceable to the MiddleAges.' ForVoegelin, immanentism, the spiritual disease of modernity, was theanti-transcendental ground on which totalitarianism eventuallyflourished. Voegelin was claiming that modern totalitarianism was notnew in essence because totalitarian practice was foreshadowed in therise of the irnmanentist movement, and that it came to fruition in thetwentieth century.* For Voegelin, modem totalitarianism was notunexpected since the immanentist attack on the classical tradition ofGreek and Christian transcendence. Thus what came to pass was amatter of time, once the notion of spiritual limits had lost ground.

Voegelin was both right and wrong. He was right to see that Arendtinsisted on the essential novelty of totalitarianism. But he was wrong inarguing that Arendt derived the essential nature of totalitarianism purelyin terms of the phenomenal evidence embedded in it. There was more toher analysis than that. In considering her view of totalitarianism we shallalso be able to point to the substantial difference between Voegelin's andArendt's attitude to the classical tradition.

Review o Politics 15 1953), 74.7 Ibid.

Ibid.


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3 2 SHIRAZ DOSSAArendt sees the event of totalitarian domination it se lf ' as

extraordinary. Nothing like it had ever occurred, even if close parallelscould be found in the occidental past. The event itself wasunprecedented in the most exacting sense of the word. But while itsunprecedentedness was true on the level of phenomenal differences, itwas not exhausted by it. For Arendt, the unprecedentedness oftotalitarianism had also to do with the intimately related fact that itsconsidered policies have exploded our traditional categories of politicalthought (totalitarian domination is unlike all forms of tyranny anddespotism we know of) and the standards of our moral judgement(totalitarian crimes are very inadequately described as 'murder' andtotalitarian criminals can hardly be punished as murderer^'). ^

Totalitarian domination was unique but unique in such aspectacularly immoral way that it made no sense at all. The grotesquelyinhuman character of the event defied even the outer reaches of humancredulity. Voegelin took this to mean that Arendt was arguing theessential and positive continuity of occidental practice until thisevent, and he was rightly dubious about her claim. In fact, Arendt'sthesis centred not on the substantive continuity of occidental history assuch, but on the intellectual and moral continuity of our capacity tounderstand historical practice prior to this event. In other words,totalitarianism constitutes an unprecedented event in the stream ofoccidental practice because it ruptured all our traditions of thoughtand judgment.1 Contra Voegelin, consequently, the extant theoreticalinstruments according to Arendt, are not just pitifully inadequate butirrelevant: the event had shattered the universe of meaningful moral andpolitical discourse. Indeed, Arendt's thesis about totalitarianism is notfully intelligible unless this event is understood as an unprecedentedassault on the hallowed categories of western metaphysics:totalitarianism has usurped the dignity of our tradition.

For Arendt the nature of totalitarian domination largely un-dermined the validity of classical political judgment. Totalitarianismintroduced practices into political life which were not anticipated in themost morbid speculations of classical thinkers on civil perversion. InVoegelin's view, on the other hand, totalitarianism was the direct resultof the modern denial of classical transcendentalism: it fed on thespiritual disease of agnosticism [which] is the peculiar problem ofmodern masses. 12 For him, totalitarianism represented no more thananother departure-albeit an extremely foul one13-from the classicalwisdom on politics. Unlike Arendt's, Voegelin's faith in the absolutevalidity of the classical tradition has remained intact.9 Ibid., 80.

10 Understanding and Politics, Part isan Review 20 1953), 379.Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1958), ix.12 Review o Pol i t ics 73.13 Ibid., 68


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Human Status and Politics 3 3For Arendt, there is another sense in which the event of

totalitarianism marks a hiatus in occidental political practice; it is a senseso basic to human existence that it left a permanent scar on Arendt'smoral sensibility and profoundly influenced her approach to politics. Inher view, none of the recorded events in the history of western man priorto the Holocaust ever ruptured the human structures of reality;14notjustthe particular reality of a specific period or time, but the sense andstructure of reality as such. Unless this is appreciated in all seriousness,much of what she has to say about politics may seem peripheral, if notoutlandish. Indeed, the notion of reality recurs in her work with analmost oppressive frequency. For Arendt, politics has much to do withthe human sense of reality.

From the outset Arendt concedes with equanimity thatthrough centuries the exterm ination of native people w ent hand in hand w ith thecolonization of the A me ricas Australia and Africa; slavery is one of the oldestinstitutions of man kind. No t eve n concen tration camp s are an invention oftotalitarian mov emen ts. They em erge for the first time during the Boer W ar.All this clearly points to totalitarian methods of domination.15Domination and extermination of men by men are as old as the history ofman. For Arendt, violence and suffering are not unusual phenomena atall. To suffer and inflict suffering is for her quite normal: she isreconciled and somewhat inured to the practice of violence among men.More significantly she is far from condemning the exercise of violenceper se: the human necessity for violence and domination emerges as oneof the central motifs of her vision of true politics developed at length andwith subtlety in The Human Condition .I6For her, violence is a naturaland quite human activity, a legitimate prelude to founding a regime andto the life of citizenship. Hannah Arendt and Machiavelli are entirely inaccord on this issue.

Hardly less important is the fact that Arendt is not particularlyperturbed by the numbers involved in past instances of violence,domination and extermination. She herself draws attention to themurder of over 25 million Africans in the Congo between 189 and 191during the reign of Leopold 11. To be fair to her, however, she doesrecognize the immensity of Leopold's crime but the nature of herremarks does not suggest that she was truly shocked by it. In fact, thisoccurrence serves as just another instance in her argument that grandatrocity is more or less a settled habit among men.I7 In view of her standon these matters it may seem astonishing that Arendt was moved bythe Holocaust.14 Origins of T otalitarianism 350-53.15 Ibi d., 440.16 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (N ew York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959),

especially chaps. 27 and 28, and On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace andWorld, 1970), particularly 63.17 Origins of Totalitarianism 185 and passim.


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3 14 SHIRAZ DOSSAFor Arendt the absolute uniqueness of the Holocaust has to do with

the nature of the astringent and experimental aesthetics of Nazi terrorand its implications for the status of men. The bureaucratic finesse,untainted by personal pleasure, with which the Nazis disposed ofundesireables is truly shocking. The normal kn~wledge '~hat thesepeople were human beings with some claim to humane treatment waseffectively supressed.

First, it is a fact, argues Arendt, that Nazi policies were devoid ofany utilitarian motives and self-interest of the ruler^. '^ Hitler wasimpelled by a sense of racial mission, sustained by visions of teutonicdestiny, in which temporal motives were suspect. To Arendt, motives,no matter how sordid or silly, have limited aims and thus retain theirhuman comprehensibility because they participate in the ordinarypolitics and economics of reality: power and wealth. This is a crucialpoint: the principle of self-interest is a necessary ingredient in theconstruction of reality and an effective foil against the asceticselflessness of the totalitarian mentality .20 n Arendt's view selflessness,because of its indifference to personal interest, may well be a moralvirtue; it is certainly not a political virtue and may even spell doom in thehuman world.21 n human affairs, as was the case with Nazism, moralideals often brook no opposition: the Jews stood in the way of aparticular vision of German unity and they had to die.Second, the victims were treated as if they no longer existed, as ifwhat happened to them was no longer of interest to anybody. 22 In theprivacy of the concentration camps, away from the public realm, thevictims were deprived of the elementary right to be objects of humancare and concern. Few relations and friends on the outside knew if thosewithin were dead or alive. Unseen and unheard, they had ceased to existfor the world outside. The Nazis were thus able to experiment with,to consume bit by bit, the prepared bodies of its mastered victimswithout any trace of passion. Outside the realm of life and death,which need public confirmation to assure their reality, even death wasdeprived of its minimal dignity.

Third, there was the discovery of racial origin as the criterion ofnatural guilt. For the Jews as the center of Nazi ideology 23 life in themost basic sense became impossible within this macabre context.18 Eichmann in Jerusalem 86.19 Origins of To tal i tarianism 440.20 Ibid., 439-41.21 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1%8), 53;Arend t insisted that doctinaire morality had no place in politics. When it didemerge asthe dom inant impulse behind political action, a s in the Fren ch Revolution of 1789, itinvariably led to indiscriminate violence and terror; see her On Revolution (New

ork Viking Press, 1965), especially chap . 2.22 Origins of To tal i tarianism 145.23 Ibid.,6-7.


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Hum an Status a nd Polit ics 315Whatever one did or did not do ceased to matter at all: to be Jewish (orGypsy or Slav) was quite enough. In her own words, under nocircumstances [could] the concentration camp become a calculablepunishment for definite offense^. ^^ Death became the automaticconsequence of the accident of racial origin. Hannah Arendt painfullynotes that the choice of the Jews as the main target of Nazi policies wasnot fortuitous. As a people who insisted on their unique status as achosen group (racial), they served as both the primary model ofemulation and the primary threat to Nazi delusions about thechosenness of the Aryans. From the point of view of the Nazis, in

other words, the conflict between the Jews and the Aryans was a moralbattle between two superior peoples: either the Jews or the Aryans hadto perish.25Finally, there was the shocking efficacy with which the objectivedifference between murderers and victims was resolved into a tacitmoral equality of the persecutors and the persecuted. This was thehorrible result of the Nazi practice of using Jewish c a p o s who weremore hated than the SS, 26 to escort their fellow Jews to their death.Guilt and innocence became mere words in the face of this reality, asirrelevant as the distinction between fact and fantasy outside thestructure of consequence and responsibility of normal politics.

In a nutshell, men were plunged into the darkest and deepest abyssof primal equality, like cattle, like things that had neither soul nor body,nor even a physiognomy upon which death could stamp its seal. 28Willing victims for the most part, these people marched quietly to theirdeath. And in the manner of their torture and death lies a profoundchallenge to the humanist tradition in Western thought and practice. InArendt's view, the new forms of domination correspond to a newprinciple completely unknown to us'' that everything is possible. 29Implicit in this principle is the view that nothing is a priori forbiddeneven if the proposed course serves no utilitarian interest. In other words,there is no such thing as moral knowledge and therefore no sense oflimits whatsoever in the human realm. Everything becomes possiblewhen moral knowledge is itself denied. Arendt frequently laments themonstrous immorality of totalitarian domination because she sees the

human condition in some ultimate sense as being distinctively moral intexture. Ironically, however, she refuses to see politics as primarilymoral in intention or although she accepts that moralknowledge does exist.24 Ibid ., 449.25 Ibid., 6-7; see also Eichman in Jerusalem 297.26 Origins of Totalitarianism 452-53.27 Ibi d., 445.28 Commentary September 1 946, 292.29 Origins of Totalitarianism 440.30 See The Human Condition especially sections I and V .


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Hu ma n S ta tu s a nd Po li ti cs 3 7For Arendt , then, the absolute uniqueness of the Holocaust iscontained in the parallel assaults on the public structu re of normalreality, and the personal structure of individuality and freedom. In its

successful (temp orary) elimination of spon taneity and difference , Na zitotalitarianism radically underm ined the human statu s of man : hum annature as su ch is at stake 38 that is , human nature as we had co me toknow i t was being transformed in the concentrat ion camps. Neitherpolitical practice nor political theory in the past had anticipated thechallenge to hum an n ature eviden t in the metho ds o f totalitarian terror.The notion of reality in Arendt is intrinsically related to that offreedom: at this level politics is the affirmation and the shaping offreedom into an independent reality. Paradoxically freedom is as muchth e driving impulse of politics a s it is a potential th rea t to its reality. Ifpolitics is impossible without the factuality of human freedom, thenfreedom is inconceivable outside the order of ultimate responsibili tywhich politics establishes. Thus totalitarianism is in essence notdistinguished by its me re abu se of freedom-as in the cas e oftyranny-but by its immoral discovery tha t freedom can be used toeliminate its own conditions of existence: plurality and individuality.Totalitarianism is an exercise in the liquidation of freedom and restraint,and the arbi trary mastery of men.

In Arendt 's amplification of her thesis on the uniqueness oftotalitarianism a s eriou s and significant tensio n merits critical notice . Inher own terms human plurality is violated more intensely when morepeople are murdered. But the absolute novelty of the Holocaust ispredicated specifically on the nature of the violation of individuality.Indeed , Arendt 's real concern is less with the fact of mass murder orwith the num ber of victims, 39 than with the manner of murd er.Ho wev er, in her private sentence on Eichmann, s he cond emn s him todeath for not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and thepeople of a num ber of other nat ions. This is the reason an d the on lyreason you m us t hang . 40 Eichm ann stan ds accus ed of participating inthe genocidal attack o n both hum an plurality and hum an diversity. ButArendt is well aware that genoc ide was the o rder o f t he day in~ n t i q u i t y . ~ ~f, therefore, violation of hum an plurality is the reason forhanging Eichmann, then the absolute uniqueness of the Holocaustbecom es very doubtful because hum an plurality h as been violated moreeffectively in the p ast. W hile it is true that E ichman n wa s condem ned forwhat he [had] done i t is crucial to remember that he was condem ned38 Ibid., 459; her view of human nature is neither ontological in the Platonic sense nor

thoroughly historical in the Marxian sense. For her, man is to a large degree ahistorical creature but he is endowed with permanent capacities for thought. freedomand action.39 Ibid., 458-59.4 Eichmann in Jr r i~ sa lem , 79 emphasis added).41 Ibid., 88 emphasis added).


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318 S H I R A Z D O S S Afor his deeds as a member of the Nazi state and its larger responsibilityfor the Holocaust.

From The Origins of Totalitarianism to Eichmann in Jerusalem,Arendt shifts the ground of indictment from violation of individuality tothe violation of plurality as the primary crime. Obviously the two areinterrelated, but distinct enough as far as the character of the crime inquestion is concerned. In this case, then, it becomes vitally important toknow how the Holocaust differs substantially from instances ofgenocide in the past. To put the issue bluntly, the manner of totalitariangenocide may have been unique but it is arguable if it indeed was uniquebearing in mind the availability of new instruments of destruction in thetwentieth century. What is beyond dispute is the identical nature of theconsequences: genocide, or in Arendt's terms, violation of humanplurality. And it is in fact the consequence--mass murder-for whichEichmann and others must be punished, even as we grant that themanner of murder was undescribably heinous. As Arendt herself saysmass murderers must be prosecuted because they violated the order of

mankind. 42 Genocide in the past, she knows well, violated the orderof mankind with equal ease. Why then does she insist on the absoluteuniqueness of the Holocaust?

The answer lies elsewhere. The core of Arendt's thesis has to dowith issues other than the factual horror of totalitarian crimes: it is aboutthe morality of mass murder in the broad context of culture andcivilization. Consider her views on European imperialism in Africa.

When imperialist adventures in Africa, the Dark continent,encountered and killed "black savages" without any historicalrecord, they somehow were not aware that they had committedmurder.43To think of murder in the presence of these people seemedwholly inappropriate, almost ri d i c u l ~ u s . ~ ~ndeed, in what way couldone approach, wonders Arendt, strange and alien people who had themost tenuous claim to humanity? Here murder seemed wrong but didnot matter much since how else could one respond to human beingswithout the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment [people] whohad not created a human world, a human reality and [for whom] therefore42 Ibid., 272.43 In he r controversial report on the tr ial of Eichma nn, Han nah A rendt noted with shock

that Eichmann m ade a clear distinction betw een "cultured" and "primitive" Jew s.On this basis, he w as opposed not to the m urder of Jew s as such, but at "the idea ofGerman Jew s being murdered," that is , the cultured Jews (Eichmann in Jerusa l em,96 . Aren dt 's apparent shock is quite incongruous with her lack of concern fo r themurd er of "primitive" Africans. Pe rhaps it is not unfair to suggest that what offendedArendt wa s the Nazi attem pt to divide ag rou p into higher and low er orders, wh o werecollectively a civilized and cultured p eople. As well, the fact tha t the Jew s are-for allintents and purposes-a Euro pean people, may well have something to d o with hermoral discomfort in this con text.

44 Origins o Tota l i tar ianism, 191-92.


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Human Status and Poli t ics 3 9nature had rema ined, in all its majesty the overwhelming reali ty. naturalhuman beings who lacked the spec ifically human ~ h a r a c t e r . ~ ~The blacks were proudly at one with nature in all its organic glory. Theywere as natural as nature had made them without any hint of "thespecifically human character" evident in their conquerors. Inevitablythey were murdered in good conscience. Yet, ironically, Arendt goes onto accuse the imperialists of doing exactly what she would haveexpected them to do in the circumstances. Inability to master naturesufficiently, to fabricate an artifice beyond the one naturally given, toestablish public bodies-that is the combined political human failure ofthe Africans. In broader and related terms the blacks testify, in Arendt'sview, to a general lack of human culture and morality: people who had"escaped the reality of c i~i l izat ion ."~~or Arendt, although theirmurder is clearly unjust it is somehow not immora l . This shockingconclusion is unequivocally transparent in her claim that "in a certainsense. the real crime began only when Indians and Chinese weremurdered by the imperialists: "there could be no excuse and no humanlycomprehensible reason for treating Indians and Chinese as though theywere not human beings."47 In Arendt's view, Indians and Chinese wereafter all civilized, historical people with undeniable claims to humanstatus. In the case of the Africans, on the other hand, no "real crime"was involved in their murder because they had renounced theirhumanity by their inability, or their unwillingness, to establish thehuman reality of politics. Humanness or human status, in other words, ispartly a function of politics and its common life of citizenship; a politicalcommunity is thus also a moral community which endows its memberswith a measure of humanity. The stoical point Arendt wants to makesurpasses the factual one: that the right to life per se, let alone any otherrights, is unavailable to anyone who can claim no more than "theminimum fact of [his or her] human origin."48 More accurately, the rightto life itself is in jeopardy when that right is unsupported by a frameworkof politics. In passing, it is worth noting that her view of the blackpredicament is drawn in part from Conrad's Heart o f Darkness: in herhands a literary tale becomes the vehicle for making a seriousphilosophical argument.

What becomes strikingly apparent in the totalitarian Holocaust isthe murder of eminently "civilized" victims by equally "civilized"killers. For Arendt, the issue becomes a profoundly moral one in thiscontext when "unnatural" human beings are both reduced to andmurdered as pathetically "natural" beings, as if they knew neither ahistory, a tradition, nor apast of human achievement. For the European5 Ibid.46 Ibid., 190.47 Ibid., 206 (emphasis added).48 Ibid., 300.


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32 SHIRAZ DOSSAJews, unlike the Africans, were unmistakably human. Their right to lifeand citizenship were established legal facts. In a series of Laws, from theNuremburg Laws down, the Nazis carefully deprived them of their

basic juridical and poltical rights: the condition of completerightlessness was created before the right to live was challenged. Thus,the Jews were systematically transformed from political beings intonatural creatures without any legal claims. Only then could they be andwere, expelled, literally, from h ~ m a n i t y . ~ ~or Arendt it is significantthat the de-politicization of European Jewry (prior to theirextermination) coincided with the Nazi celebration of blood andrace- natural sentiments par excellence. In the new world therewere to be no citizens, only natural members by right of race anddestiny. The Nazis perfected the worst of all polities because it at-tempted to do without any consensus iuris whatever, 50 and thusremained completely isolated from moral law and justice. In NaziGermany, natural man viciously quashed political man, and thehuman being. In her words, man's 'nature' is only 'human' insofar

as it opens up to man the possibility of becoming something highlyunnatural that is, a man. 51For Arendt, then, the moral and cultural context decisivelyinfluenced her understanding of the absolute uniqueness of thetotalitarian Holocaust. But only on the basis of a narrowly ethnocentricpremise is her meaning apparent. To impute narrow ethnocentrism to atheorist of the calibre of Hannah Arendt has its share of difficulties. Shewas well known, after all, for her personal humanity, for hercompassion for the displaced and the stateless, and for her criticalappraisal of the role of some of her own people in the H o l o c a u ~ t . ~ ~Nevertheless this accusation can be sustained, and sustained in aforthright manner.

The ethnocentric strain is explicit in her reading of imperial historyand implicit in her normative political theory. In the preceding pages hernegative view of Africans was noticed; some further instances will helpin clearly establishing her view on this matter. She understood Africanhistory as ahistorical, as the worthless doings of natural men: the blacktribes had vegetated for thousands of years. She took Conrad'sdamning descriptions of the blacks to be the most illuminating work onactual race experience in Africa. 53 As Arendt describes it, thisexperience brought out the worst in the white men who went through it.Indeed like Conrad's, her sentiments about the white explorers andadventurers faced by black savages, turn out to be quite sympathetic.49 Ibid., 296-97.50 Ibid., 462.51 Ibid., 455 (emphasis added).52 Ibid., chap. 9; Eichmann in Jerusa lem 124-26, 297.53 Orig ins o f To ta l i tar ianism 194, 185.


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Human Status and Politics 321In particular, she began to understand their brand of racism: the blackswere a horrifying experience of something alien beyond imagination orcomprehension; it was tempting indeed to simply declare that thesewere not human beings. 54In her later works she made quite similar statements about blacks,although the contexts in which they were made were different. In thecourse of discussing the good fortune of eighteenth-century Americaand the equality of its citizens, she wrote As it is, we are tempted to askourselves if the goodness of the poor white man's country did notdepend to a considerable degree upon black labor and blackmisery.. . . 55 Speaking of the student rebellions in the United States,she had this to say about Negroes and Negro demands: Negrostudents, the majority of them admitted without academicqualification. heir interest was to lower academic standard^ ^^ [Noevidence was cited for this claim]; and this 'education' in Swahili (anineteenth century kind of no language . African literature, andother non existent subjects will be interpreted as another trap of thewhite man to prevent Negroes from acquiring an adequate e d ~ c a t i o n . ~ ~

To cite more passages in a similar vein is unnecessary. Thesesentiments are ethnocentric in the precise sense that they are udgmentsmade from an intellectually and culturally European point of view, andin the sense that they presuppose the truth and the validity of this pointof view. More crucially, these sentiments assume the inhumanity ofthe blacks as self-evident. The issue is not that all of these views arenecessarily and entirely wrong but that they treat the matter as settled.Ethnocentrism entails an intellectual predisposition in favour of one'sown group or race, and one which is used as the right measure ofjudgment. For this reason Arendt described the murder of Indians andChinese, as we have seen, as a real crime because the latter measureup to European standards of humanity and civilization, notwithstandingtheir particular differences.From the philosophical side, ethnocentrism is tacitly sanctioned inHannah Arendt's normative political theory. Theoretically, that is tosay, the ethnocentric line of argument is not ruled out. In her ontologicalgallery of human types, the pride of the stage is the public actor closelyfollowed by the worker, homo faber . On the lowest rung stands, or54 Ibid ., 195.55 Arendt, On Revolution 65.56 Arendt, On Violence 18.57 Ibid., %. Her ignorance of African culture and literature was truly astonishing.

Suffice it to say here that Kiswahili is being taught and used in primary and second arysc ho ols in Tanzan ia. It is the official language of deba te and legislation in the nationa lParliaments of Keny a and Tanzania. A lso worth m entioning is the fact that JuliusNyerere, President of Tanzania, has translated Shakespeare's Julius aesarinto Kiswahili--certainly a startling achievem ent for a no ne xis ten t kind ofno-language


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322 SHIRAZ DOSSArather lies, the labourer, animal labor an^.^^ He is the natural man parexcellence who lives to consume and consumes so that he may live. Heknows no other code than that of nature and its cyclical rhythm oflabour, consumption and rest. For Arendt, animal laborans is at onewith nature, he is the legitimate prince of organic life.59He has nothing incommon with the worker or the actor, he is their unequal in all significantrespects, he barely belongs to the same species. The animal laborans isimprisoned in the privacy of his own body, caught in the fulfilment of

needs in which nobody can share and which nobody can fullyc omm~ nic a t e . ~ ~For Arendt the inequality of the animal laborans is the naturalinequality of men who know nothing apart from the laws of bodilyappetite, instinct and aspiration. These are the natural slaves ofAristotle, though no longer in the legal garb of slaver-y.61 heir inequalityhowever is the essential foundation of politics and humanity. Like Platoand Aristotle, Arendt understood the life of citizenship as lived in leisureand with dignity. The life of labour precludes by its very nature moralchoice and the pursuit of public excellence. I t is inimical to the formationof character and purpose, suited to the high-minded life of surpassinghumanity .62 For this, it is essential to separate the higher from the lowerto rank men in a manner befitting their capabilities. The bodily mentalityof the animal laborans cannot and must not be allowed to intrude intoand sap the higher life of politics. For Arendt, in sum, for there to be atruly human world, not all men can be human, nor is it necessary thatthey should be.63

To argue that the image behind her portrait ofthe animal laborans isthe black man in his natural setting is not warranted. To say, however,that her picture of the animal laborans evokes much of her floriddescription of the blacks in Africa, is true and relevant. For Arendt, theblacks represent the animal laborans as it were, at his natural best. Inthis sense, it is true and legitimate to say that her political theory entails astrong ethnocentric strain, in that, collectively, the blacks as contrasted58 The whole of h e Human Condi t ion is essential to understanding her ontology ofpolitics and the condition of man. In this context see also her shocking essay ondesegregation of public schools in the United S tate s, Reflections on Little Rock,

Dissent (Jan .-Feb. 1959 , 45-56. In bare outline her argum ent was a s follows:educ ation is a social interest, as oppos ed to being a political on e, and citizenshave a right to discriminate in this sphere . Th us the federal governm ent ought not tointervene and enforce desegregation of public schools. In effect the federalgovernment, according to her, ought to turn a blind eye to segregation, in directcontravention of the principle of equal treatment enshrined in the Constitution.Needless to say the Negroes bore the brunt of the discrimination.

59 h e H u m a n C o n d i t io n 102, 86, passim.60 Ibid., 102.61 Ibid., 30-31.62 Ibid., 112-13.63 Ibid., 156-57.


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Documents

Shiraz Dossa- Human Status and Politcs- Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust