Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics

Fiction as Poison

I translate the question, “What does it mean to think about politics?” into “What does it mean to think about politics today in the spirit of Hannah Arendt?” Thinking in the spirit of Arendt signifies among other things that we should summon up attentive worry about the fate of constitutional government in times of both real and artificial crisis; at the same time, we should expect developments that demonstrate the fragility of constitutional government and that simultaneously increase that fragility because of the establishment of precedents that will further erode constitutional democracy in the future. For Arendt, constitutional government is a high practicable ideal that unlike other high ideals may be regularly institutionalized. In particular, the U.S. Constitution is, in her judgment, perhaps the greatest achievement of constitutionalism in human history. But she was extremely sensitive in her lifetime to the ubiquitous assaults all over the Western world on the structures of, and aspirations to, constitutional democracy—free, popular, limited, lawful, and moderate government. In the United States, she was particularly worried by the assaults of McCarthyism and related Cold War tendencies in the 1950s. But the encroachment on constitutionalism, owing in large part to an adventurist foreign policy, did not monopolize Arendt’s attention. She was attentive to foreign policy for its own sake and found in it much cause for worry. The Vietnam War called forth acute analysis and eloquent worry in her essay on the Pentagon Papers, “Lying in Politics.” We can say that there is an affinity , not only a causal link, between an unnecessary and hence aggressive war abroad and encroachments on constitutionalism at home: both phenomena display an urge to violate, to destroy prescriptive barriers and cross lawful boundaries. War provides a cover for anticonstitutionalism, which in turn intensifies the illusion that war is necessary and urgent. Each is thus a contrived means for the other, and each is an end that leads beyond itself into a Fiction as Poison g e o r g e k a t e b Facing: Chapter 10 of Hannah Arendt’s heavily annotated copy of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. This page shows Arendt’s note-taking, which fills many of her books with selective underlinings and marginalia. The heading “Power process” is written at the top of the page, emphasizing her reading of Hobbes’s “nature of power” as a process. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Collection, Stevenson Library, Bard College. 30 Fiction as Poison thrilling sense of indefinite potentiality for transgression. Besides the urge to violate and its two modes of fulfillment, there are other unscrupulous urges bred from too much wealth and power. Arendt’s attentive worry was, of course, born in her experience of the Nazi movement and was then intensified by its years of rule. This worry fed her studies in the extremist nature of European imperialism in the nineteenth century and of long-standing European racism, including antisemitism. These studies help us to understand the cultural conditions that made up a large part of the background that favored the triumph of Nazism. It should be noticed , however, that she insists that Nazism was neither their inevitable outcome nor a merely incremental advance in the same direction. Nazism in its fully developed policies was an unpredictable phenomenon, and it could not be grasped by inherited modes of understanding political life. Running through Arendt’s work, even aside from her studies of totalitarianism , is the conviction that attentive observers of political life will always have cause to worry. That is so for many reasons, but in her analyses, one reason stands out, and that is the ferocious human proclivity to become enclosed in ideologies or fictions; this proclivity is frequently combined with another , which is to become obsessed with images—that is, with appearances, with notions and symbols of prestige and reputation. When I speak of appearances , I do not refer to her celebration of shining appearances, the beauty that memorable deeds and creations bestow on observers, but rather appearances closer to Machiavelli’s sense: deceptive or illusionary manipulations carried out in speech or actions. Yet, just as those who disseminate ideologies to the mass are those who are most prone to believe them, those who manipulate appearances are themselves taken in and come to believe—perhaps always believed —what they want others to believe. Both the ideological enslavement and the self-deception of warmakers figure in “Lying in Politics.” In her analysis of totalitarianism, Arendt gives special explanatory emphasis to the attractiveness...