Reading Arendt Now →

People often ask me, “Why Arendt?” The honest answer is that I fell in love with her writing my freshman year of college, reading The Human Conditionon a brown leather sofa in the library, between the stacks. I found her by accident while looking for Erich Fromm, and there was no turning back when I read: “In 1957, an earth-born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies — the sun, the moon, and the stars.”

When I got to graduate school my dissertation adviser told me on day one that I couldn’t write a dissertation on Arendt, because if I did my job prospects would be limited to, and he said this with some derision, “the cult of Arendtians.” (I didn’t listen.)

Sometimes authors open us up; for me it’s been Friedrich Nietzsche, Tennessee Williams, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Frank O’Hara. When we read authors who resonate with us their language makes us feel at home in a world that can be lonely and alienating. And their voices provide us with companionship, while provoking us to think. When I talk with people about Arendt, they often share experiences similar to my own; a kind of falling in love, an enthrallment with the words. This doesn’t mean that I agree with everything Arendt writes — to the contrary; but it does mean that she provokes me to think in new ways; her work expands the imagination. Which is why I find it so frustrating to read thoughtless criticisms of Arendt, written by writers who are quick to blame the “cult of Arendt” for her renewed resonance during this political moment, eager to skip over the hard work of serious engagement.

Writing for the New York Review of Books, Paul Mason argues “Reading Arendt is Not Enough.” Beginning with the popularity of Arendt’s work since the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, Mason argues that reading Arendt cannot help us explain our contemporary political moment. This seems a bit of a straw man: has anyone argued that reading Arendt alone will help us divine the political crises we face? Mason doesn’t mention anyone, and while he twice invokes the “cult of Arendt”, he doesn’t offer a single name, let alone actually cite an article or reproduce an argument. Perhaps for Mason, the “cult of Arendt” is a catchall for anyone who wants to think through contemporary political questions with Arendt. This would be a shame, since there have been many good critical works published over the past few years that engage with Arendt’s ideas: Roger Berkowitz’s review of The Origins of Totalitarianism written after Trump’s election; Richard Bernstein’s book Why Read Hannah Arendt Now, a volume of collected essays on Arendt’s idea of The Right to Have Rights, edited by Stephanie DeGooyer et. al., and a recently published essay by Lyndsey Stonebridge on “Why Hannah Arendt is the philosopher for now,” to name just a few. Still, Mason’s overarching argument is that, “The paradox of today’s cult of Arendt is that, among all the anti-authoritarians of that era, her thought is the least equipped to help us answer those questions.” Those questions being the questions of the post-war world. Yet the authors I just mentioned, and many others like them, are thinking about questions of power, nationalism, statelessness, and rights, and while many of them disagree on these questions, what they share in common is a thoughtful engagement with Arendt’s writing.

Mr. Mason’s criticism of Arendt and her readers appears to move from the reception of her work rather than from her writing, and in so doing offers a gross misreading of the method with which Arendt undertook her study of totalitarianism. Mason writes, “Arendt never explained why Europe’s social and political structures broke down. She preferred to describe innate tendencies toward evil, in the subterranean culture of antisemitism, or imperialist white supremacy, that “crystallized” into Nazism and Stalinism.” But Arendt wasn’t attempting to explain what happened, she was trying to understand the various elements that crystallized and laid the groundwork for the phenomenal appearance of totalitarianism in the 20th century. Mason notes Arendt’s use of the word “crystallization” from The Origins of Totalitarianism and writes dismissively that “crystallization is a physical process with cause and effect.” Conceptually, though, crystallization is a move against cause and effect. The idea of crystallization comes from Walter Benjamin and his work On the Concept of History which proposes that we think about political crises as historical materialists rather than determinately through frameworks of historicism and rectilinear time. This idea of crystallization is important for Arendt because it means that the Holocaust didn’t have to happen; that it was a phenomenal event that appeared in the 20th century, and that it was not historically inevitable. Mr. Mason argues that Arendt’s thought “cannot explain” the political phenomena that we face today, that our current moment doesn’t fit her “script.” But “explanation” is not a particularly accurate or useful way to identify Arendt’s aim. She was interested rather in the work of understanding, which requires critical engagement with the material being considered and coming face-to-face with the world as it is rather than as we might wish it to be. As she writes in the preface to Origins, “This book is an attempt at understanding what at first and even second glance appeared simply outrageous.”

Central to Mr. Mason’s criticism of Arendt is the question of class, reducing her analysis to a few passages about the alliance between the elite and the mob. Origins was published in 1951, the same year Arendt received American citizenship, and spans nearly six hundred pages tracing social, cultural, economic, and political phenomena to try to begin to understand how we could live in a world with death camps. In the final pages, she turns our attention to loneliness, which Mason glides over with a couple sentences, in order to think about how the human condition has radically changed in modernity. At the center of Arendt’s understanding is the changing class structure of society which occupies the key chapter in Origins, “The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie,” where Arendt focuses on how private business men mobilized state power in order to shore up business ventures. This is important to Arendt’s argument about the collapse of the nation state for a few reasons: It illustrates how the bourgeoisie has always been apolitical, interested in the pursuit of power and money with disregard for the good of humanity; it undermines dignity in politics by revealing the hypocrisy of the businessman who is only after power; and it creates a culture of cynicism which leads to the breakdown between fact and fiction.

Mason claims that “What distinguished Arendt, then and later, was her refusal to explain why totalitarian ideologies triumph.” But Arendt spends a good part of Origins talking about the triumph of ideology and how it laid the groundwork for the emergence of totalitarianism; from racism to antisemitism, to Nazism — thinking about the way –isms supply men who are hungry for meaning with simple answers to political problems. In her section on Totalitarianism, she writes, “Ideologies-isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurrence by deducing it from a single premise-are a very recent phenomenon and, for many decades, played a negligible role in political life.” Arendt’s argument emphasizes the importance of totalitarian ideologies.

In the same vein, Mason asserts “Arendt’s humanism was based on ‘what ought to be,’ not on what is. Human beings, she wrote, should resist totalitarianism by trying to live an active life of political engagement, and by carving out freedom to think philosophically.” But Arendt didn’t espouse a human-ism in the sense that Mason wants to say; she argued that we must share the earth we live on and the world we make common. She argued that all men are equal in their distinction and in their ability to appear before one another in their difference, and she argued that the fundamental condition of the world is plurality. What is most troubling in this passage from Mr. Mason is the idea that her supposed humanism was based on “what ought to be.” It is difficult to see how Mr. Mason could draw this conclusion from Arendt’s writing. He offers no evidence, and it seems to appear in his argument primarily to set up the claim that Nietzsche was in part to blame for the Holocaust. Arendt says quite clearly at the beginning of Origins and elsewhere that we should turn away from radical optimism and despair, and that loving the world means coming face-to-face with the world as it is rather than as we might want it to be. Her understanding of humanity moves from her experiences as a human being in the 20th century, as a woman, as a refugee, and as a Jew who was captured twice, and forced to flee and emigrate.

Mr. Mason continues his criticism arguing that “Arendt never explained why Europe’s social and political structures broke down.” Here again, the inaccuracy is startling. Arendt’s Origins was groundbreaking at the time precisely because it described the breakdown of Europe’s social and political structures in a new way, arguing that the emergence of fascism and totalitarianism was not the triumph of the nation state, but rather the result of the collapse of the nation state caused by the boomerang effect of imperialism and colonialism. In her other work on the loss of tradition and authority, Arendt focuses on how the collapse of the nation state led to tumultuous political conditions, and warned about the continued expansion of presidential power in the United States.

Toward the end of his essay, Mason moves to dismiss Arendt by focusing on her refusal to abandon Nietzsche, while taking a stab at her relationship with Heidegger. He writes “To her dying day, she remained in awe of Nietzsche’s leading pro-Nazi follower, and her one-time lover, the philosopher Martin Heidegger.” Mason’s argument is that we ought to be morally repulsed by Nietzsche, because his political philosophy laid the groundwork for fascism for fear the working class might usurp the bourgeoisie. And because Arendt doesn’t read Nietzsche the way Mr. Mason does, he concludes that Arendt’s thought cannot explain what we’re living through now, “because she refused to understand fascism as the elite’s response to the possibility of working-class power, or to understand the essential role of irrationalism in all such reactionary movements, and because hers was a philosophy based on American exceptionalist assumptions of immunity to totalitarian impulses.” What Mr. Mason seems to ignore in this move is that the philosopher Arendt turns to in trying to understand totalitarianism was Hobbes, not Nietzsche. It was Hobbes who conceptualized power as power after power, and who understood man as a power-seeking being, which gave credence to the imperialist attitude. Arendt was not so reductive in her thinking as to assume that fascism was simply the elites response to the working-class; she looked at class dynamics alongside other social and political phenomena like racism and antisemitism in order to understand how they laid the groundwork for totalitarianism.

Mr. Mason does not seem interested in reading Arendt or engaging seriously with her ideas, though. Rather, he is attacking the anonymous people who think that reading Arendt alone is sufficient, and he seems to think that Arendt’s work itself lends credence to this idea. Arendt, however, was a voracious reader. When she sat down to write Origins a few short years after she was released from the Gurs internment camp, she read all of the antisemitic literature she could get her hands on. And she did not restrict herself to the academic field of political theory she found herself in. It is hard to see how this text, and indeed all of her writing, would not be more likely to encourage the practice of wide and careful reading, than an attitude of pious devotion to a single author.

For many, Arendt is a frustrating thinker because she is not interested in providing easy answers. She is interested in dialogic thought, poetic metaphor, and in thinking which for her is never “productive.” She doesn’t engage in the work of explaining; she is interested in critical, self-reflective thinking, and understanding. Concepts like totalitarianism, she said, are never ends in themselves, but wellsprings from which we begin the work of thinking. In Origins, when Arendt is laying out her project, she writes,

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us-neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality-whatever it may be.

Mr. Mason seems to hold a belief that everything that happens must be comprehensible. He is after the commonplaces Arendt warns against. From a few skimmed passages he patches together a criticism of those who have turned to the work of Hannah Arendt today to try to understand our contemporary political moment. Perhaps some people, perhaps even many people, merely “copy and paste” Arendt’s writing, as Mr. Mason suggests. But many also attempt to think with and through her work. Mason’s essay is an example of how criticism passes for critique these days, and how some are disposed to only thinking against, while refusing to do the difficult work of thinking with. This kind of agonism is not conducive to nourishing scholarship that expands the realm of ideas and thinking, which we so desperately need.