Last month the Library of America published a new expanded and annotated edition of the Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, a leading political thinker. One of its editors, Jerome Kohn, was Arendt’s teaching assistant and friend from 1967 to her death in 1975. He is one of Arendt’s most insightful critics who guarded her work from misconceptions or deliberate misinterpretations. He countered these by giving his own take that was probably closer to Arendt’s mind than most scholars ever got. Sadly he died in November 2024.
Kenan Malik, a writer and lecturer, took the new edition as an opportunity to remind readers of his Observer column of her importance. In particular he emphasised her importance for today’s pressing issues such as the legacy of imperialism; immigration, migrants and asylum-seekers; and anti-Semitism, Israel and Zionism. But as he showed how Arendt’s 1951 work still speaks to our times he only gave half the picture. As a result he distorted some of Arendt’s most important insights.
On imperialism, race-thinking and bureaucracy Malik rightly acknowledges the strength of Arendt’s analysis and how these elements laid the ground for Nazism. He commends her for being closer to the anti-colonial thinkers Aimé Césaire and Franz Fanon than her European intellectual contemporaries. Césaire is well-known for his Discourse on Colonialism (1955) in which he makes a parallel between the brutality of western colonialism and that of Nazism. His conclusion was that a direct line ran from western civilisation to the Nazis: “At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation there is Hitler” (p57).
Actually, the distance between Césaire and Arendt could not be greater. For Arendt there was no causal link between the western tradition and Nazism. Rather she saw Nazism as an unprecedented phenomenon that broke with the western tradition. It was not as a logical consequence of it: “Nazism owes nothing to any part of the western tradition, be it German or not, Catholic or Protestant, Christian, Greek or Roman ...On the contrary, Nazism is actually the breakdown of all German and European tradition, the good as well as the bad” (Essays in Understanding, 1994, p109). The importance of Arendt’s analysis is that although all the elements that eventually “crystallized in the novel totalitarian phenomenon” were part of “a subterranean stream of European history” (Origins p8), nothing led inexorably to Nazism – things could always have been different.
In a chapter in Origins, “the Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man”, Arendt coined the phrase “the right to have rights”. It is the loss of this right that captures the paradox that played out in the years between the first and second world wars, when many lost their right to belong to any political community. They found that the so-called universal rights of man proclaimed in the American and French Declaration of Independence were fictitious; there were only national rights.
Arendt vividly describes the plight of these stateless people, economic migrants and refugees in interwar Europe. The description bears an uncanny resemblance to the current situation today, as Malik notes. But the significance of Arendt’s “right to have rights” is not that it exposes the empty concept of human rights and that its loss creates a humanitarian crisis. For Arendt, the right to have rights was the right to a political life within a specific territory where opinions and actions matter. This may sound abstract but it is crucial to understand that the political was of paramount importance to Arendt’s thinking.
It could be why the editors of this new edition of the Origins added a chapter that was included in the 1958 edition but which Arendt subsequently removed. The added chapter, “Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution” is anything but abstract and it is one of the most exciting pieces of writing on political action I have read. Arendt describes how during the 1956 Hungarian uprising people spontaneously came up with the principles of the council system (similar to the Räte in the German revolution of 1918-19 and the Soviets in the Russian revolution of 1917) and of federation (the wards in the American revolution):
“Instead of the mob rule which might have been expected, there appeared immediately, almost simultaneously with the uprising itself, the Revolutionary and Workers' Councils, that is, the same organisation which for more than a 100 years now has emerged whenever the people have been permitted for a few days, or a few weeks or months, to follow their own political devices without a government (or a party program) imposed from above (Arendt 1958, p497).”
The first time Arendt wrote about this political pattern was in relation to the Jewish homeland in Palestine. She saw the promise of a new political formation in the experiment of the kibbutzim. She also saw a glimmer of hope in the possibility of Jewish-Arab cooperation based on the Haifa refinery where Jews and Arabs had worked together for years. In her May 1948 essay “To save the Jewish Homeland. There is still time” she said, “local self-government and mixed Jewish-Arab municipal and rural councils, on a small scale and as numerous as possible, are the only realistic political measures that can eventually lead to the political emancipation of Palestine. It is still not too late”.
Malik says that Arendt “had a deep investment in Zionist politics; what she hoped for, though, was not a Jewish nation state but a ‘Jewish national home’ within a binational Palestine”. Arendt’s view was not as straightforward as that. She initially supported neither partition nor a bi-national state but a federal system based on local regional government, as mentioned above. Later she came round to the thinking of a small minority of Zionists in Palestine headed by Judah Magnes who did call for a bi-national state.
Arendt had seen Zionism as the only political answer Jews ever came up with in the face of anti-Semitism. For that reason she supported it. But she fiercely opposed the Zionism of Theodor Herzl which became the mainstream. She also saw the Zionist refusal to acknowledge the existence of the Arab population in Palestine as unjust and dangerous. If no understanding was reached it would lead to Jews being surrounded by permanent hostility and would unleash a new wave of anti-Semitism in the region. The death of Judah Magnes in October 1948 extinguished her hopes of a different Zionist outlook. And it soon became clear that neither Jews nor Arabs were prepared to make any mutual concessions to each other. They could not reach an agreement to live together.
After Israel became an independent nation-state Arendt was a harsh critic of its policies but she remained deeply connected to it and its fate. She feared that it might be destroyed. In 1969 she wrote to a friend, the author Mary McCarthy, “any real catastrophe in Israel would affect me more deeply than almost anything else”. People like to pull Arendt into one camp or another, Zionist or anti-Zionist and anti-Israel. But every time Israel was attacked Arendt would support its right to defend itself. Her independent thinking, free from ideology, always led her to make her own judgements. That is certainly something we could learn from.
Stefanie Borkum completed her PhD in 2018 and after that vowed never to write anything longer than book reviews.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Radicalism of fools project.
Related article – Stefanie Borkum on Arendt on anti-Semitism