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Every attempt to solve the social question by political means leads to terror. h a n n a h a r e n d t, On Revolution Terror and its cognates have come to signify the darkest excesses of contemporary and twentieth-century political life. They include in their fold aggressive claims to purity; murderous manifestations of programmatic and religious self-certainty; paranoid and devastating responses to threats to national security ; and more generally, an intensity of instrumental forms of thinking and acting that give to individuals, groups, and states a broad warrant for deploying violence as a means to their purposefulness. Hannah Arendt reflected deeply on the implications of such high-minded and bellicose purposefulness. Understanding terror was a sustaining motif of her political thought from the time she left Germany in 1933. Yet, precisely because she reflected with such moral seriousness about terror and politics, it is important, as the epigram suggests, to recognize that Arendt also associated terror with something utterly commonplace, whose reach and provenance extended well beyond the twentieth century—namely, in the political attempt to address ubiquitous social questions. In Arendt’s view, the propensity to terror stemmed from a simple hubris in which politics, as a kind of activity, did not abide by its own appropriate limits and instead was seduced by the prospect of offering what it could not deliver. Terror was an implication of this hubris, which also endangered politics itself. It is striking that Arendt saw in this transgressing of politics— beyond its own legitimate bounds—not merely a failure but also the immanence of terror. After all, such terror is not, at least obviously, sanctioned by the monstrous, the banal, the incomprehensibly strange or the recklessness A Discriminating Politics u d a y m e h t a Facing: Postcard from Walter Benjamin to Hannah Arendt. It reads: “Dear Hannah [Arendt] Stern, Both of us have been, each on our own initiative, seeking French discoveries this summer. This mountainous region [on the postcard], with the fort by Vauban in the background, has won me for the Dauphiné for a long time. Perhaps there will be a chance one day to display our finds. In the meantime, I had hoped to see you and H[einrich] B[lücher] on my last evening in Paris. I am very sorry that nothing came of this. I hope to find H. once again proof against all weathers on the command bridge when I return. This will have to happen quite soon. My “horses” (i.e., knights in chess) are already neighing impatiently to exchange bites with yours. With all my compliments, Benjamin.” Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Collection , Stevenson Library, Bard College.  A Discriminating Politics with which it is today typically associated. Instead, it stems from something Arendt understood to be constitutive of modern politics: the social question, namely the impulse to redress the needs of the body and to make good on the promise of equality. Since by the social question Arendt meant issues of material destitution, suffering, and inequality—the very features with which politics is now so closely, indeed inextricably, linked—her view is an especially trenchant perspective on the implications of the general contours of politics and its purposefulness. As such, it widens the possible causes and ambit of terror well beyond the familiar horrors with which it is associated in the twentieth century and in the contemporary era. It is a view that highlights the contrast between her conception of politics and that which has undergirded the predominant tilt of modern, and especially twentieth-century, constitutionalism . Could something as ubiquitous and mundane as social issues implicate politics with an inevitable complicity with terror and violence? Arendt thought it could, and her deep-seated skepticism regarding modern politics is substantially anchored in this thought. The claim about the relation between the social question and terror was one of the central planks by which Arendt distinguished the American and the French revolutions and the constitutional settlements that followed them. For her, the singular calamity of the French Revolution, on account of which it led to terror and constitutional instability, was that the revolution did not constitute itself as a moment for securing public freedom, but rather by the redress it prospectively offered on issues of destitution and social inequality. It offered this redress via the political framework it brought into being, namely a capacious form of constitutional government. In contrast, in the American case, by substantially ignoring the social...

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