Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question

3 “The Three Realms of Human Life: The Political, the Social, and the Private”

3 “The Three realms of Human Life The Political, the Social, and the Private” Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little rock” is only tangentially about the school desegregation crises that occurred in arkansas. While this may seem like an odd claim to make, a closer look at the essay shows that the key themes taken up broadly address the division between the public, the private, and the social, as well as questions about social versus political rights; state versus federal rights (or the division of power); plurality; and the appropriate location of equality. There are obvious overlaps between arendt’s arguments in the Little rock essay and other writings considered more central to her political thought. elisabeth Young-Bruehl asserts, “The theoretical framework of arendt’s ‘reflections on Little rock’ was the one she had developed at length in The Human Condition, which was not widely known until afer her article appeared in a 1959 issue of Dissent.”1 Margaret Canovan has argued that arendt’s positions in “reflections” are quite consistent with many of her other major political writings, including not only The Human Condition but also The Origins of Totalitarianism, On Revolution, and On Violence. Having said that, my aim here is to examine arendt’s delineations between the political, the private, and the social by focusing on the Little rock essay and The Human Condition in particular. i am responding to Young-Bruehl’s claim that “when Hannah arendt wrote topical essays like ‘reflections on Little rock’ and ‘The Crisis in education,’ she employed the complex schematism elaborated in The Human Condition, but she seldom paused to recapitulate its main elements.”2 in contrast to Young-Bruehl, i take issue with the framework itself, not the lack of space (or complex history) available for arendt to make her distinctions clear in the Little rock and “Crisis in education” essays. arendt’s distinctions in “reflections on Little rock” in “reflections,” Hannah arendt identifies the three realms of human life as the political, the social, and the private. she examines two “altogether different” points that the civil rights program addresses: (1) the right to vote and (2) the issue of segregation . The first issue—the right to vote, along with the right to run for office— are proper political issues. arendt claims that “franchise and eligibility for office are the only political rights, and they constitute in modern democracy the very quintessence of citizenship” (rLr 51). The political realm is a realm of equality in arendt’s theoretical model, and she sees the u.s. republic as being based on the 43 44 | Hannah arendt and the negro Question equality of all citizens (47). Consequently, it is not only equality before the law, but also equality in political life that is vitally important (ibid.). she elaborates, “The point at stake, therefore, is not the well-being of the negro population alone, but, at least in the long run, the survival of the republic” (ibid.). Concerning the second issue—segregation—it both blurs and crosses the lines of the political, the social, the private, and the public. since de facto segregation, perhaps more than de jure, is not a political issue, but rather a social issue, the social question (a question arendt ofen also associates with class and economics ) is raised here in relation to discrimination. arendt asserts, “society is that curious , somewhat hybrid realm between the political and the private”; it is the realm through which we pass before we enter “the political realm of equality,” and it is a realm that demands discrimination (rLr 51; see also HC 33). discrimination is to society what equality is to the body politic. Whether this discrimination is based on race, nationality, class, or any other “social” factor, it remains “as indispensable a social right as equality is a political right” (ibid.). Therefore, the question is not how to abolish discrimination, but how to keep it in the social sphere. Within arendt’s framework, what occurs in the social and private spheres does not and should not concern the political sphere. Consequently, it is a violation of the social right to discrimination when legislation gets involved in social affairs. This is why, according to arendt, we should allow vacation resorts to be segregated. The decision about what company i choose to keep while on holiday is a social decision that should not be regulated by legislation. Thus she claims, “There cannot be a ‘right to go into any hotel or recreation area...