Arendt in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 91

Beschreibung

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is rightly viewed as the world's most important female philosopher. No other thinker, female or male, had such a personal experience of the age of totalitarianism or analysed it so precisely and objectively. Arendt still attracts worldwide attention with her discoveries of "the rule of Nobody" and "the banality of Evil". In our modern mass societies, she argues, we obey authority far too easily and seldom take responsibility for ourselves. A typical modern man in this respect, she goes on, was the Nazi functionary Eichmann, who organized the transport of millions of human beings into extermination camps simply because it was "part of his job" to do it. Arendt was present at his trial for war crimes and made an amazing discovery. Eichmann was not, as many contended, a "perverted monster". Rather, "The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverse nor sadistic but were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal". It was here that Arendt formulated her brilliant but controversial thesis of "the banality of Evil". Because it was the "banal" mentality of "doing one's daily duty" of Eichmann and many others that made the horrors of Nazism possible. Still today we obey authority far too easily. But each citizen, Arendt argues, should be able, if need be, to think and act against all laws and rules. Should classes in such "civil disobedience" be part of our children's education? Is there an Eichmann in all of us? How much "civic courage" can and must still be demanded even of the modern individual? Hannah Arendt gives clear, trenchant answers to these questions. The book is published as part of the popular series "Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes.

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Contents

Arendt’s Great Discovery

Arendt’s Central Idea

The Origins of Totalitarianism

The Totalitarian Ideology of History’s “Final Goal”

The Central Element of Totalitarianism: Coordination Through Terror

The Human Condition and the Highest Form of Human Action

The Case of Eichmann and the “Banality of Evil”

Seeing Through the Myth of the “Demonic Evildoer” and Finding a Constructive Alternative

Of What Use is Arendt’s Discovery for Us Today?

Is Arendt Right? Is Our Democracy Still Today Threatened by “the Banality of Evil”?

The Milgram Experiment: How Quick Are We to Abandon Moral Principles?

The Limits of Legalism and the Duty to Resist

Arendt’s Legacy: Never Leave Thinking Up to the State Alone!

Bibliographical References

Arendt’s Great Discovery

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is rightly regarded as the most significant female philosopher who has ever lived. No other female – or indeed male! – philosopher had such close personal experience of the era of totalitarianism, nor has any other philosopher analyzed this era in such a precise and unprejudiced manner. The conclusions she draws for democracy remain, even today, extremely topical and relevant.

Arendt’s masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is surely a book closely linked to Arendt’s own biography. Born as the daughter of a Jewish family well-known and respected in the city of Koenigsberg, then one of the easternmost outposts of the German Empire, she was an avid reader already at age fourteen of the works of the great philosopher who had been a lifelong resident of this city, Immanuel Kant. At the age of eighteen she began to study philosophy in Marburg with the most eminent German philosopher of the day, Heidegger, with whom she fell in love and soon began a passionate affair. Although he was married at the time, Heidegger later admitted that Arendt was “the one great love of his life”.2

It must, then, have been all the more painful and incomprehensible for Arendt when, in 1933, her lover became, of his own free will, a member of the Nazi Party. She cut off all contact with him at this time. Just a few months later, she was arrested, on account of her Jewish origins, and interrogated by the Gestapo. After her release she fled to France, where she ended up, in 1940, in an internment camp. From here too, however, she escaped and succeeded, finally, in emigrating, via Lisbon, to the USA. There, she built up a new life and career as a journalist and scholar, acquiring some years later American citizenship.

After the end of the war she set herself to answering the great question: how could such a catastrophe as the Nazi dictatorship ever have come to pass? The answers she found to this question she put into The Origins of Totalitarianism, a book which brought her immediate fame all over the USA. The translation of the book published in 1955 in her native country of Germany also became a best-seller and established her as the most significant political philosopher also of the new Federal Republic of Germany.

This thousand-page-long book is devoted to the investigation of the common elements, and common causes, of National Socialism and Stalinism. But The Origins of Totalitarianism is much more than just a standard work of political theory. Arendt in fact formulates here her central idea, one which still fascinates the world today and which everyone who calls themselves a democrat needs to be familiar with.

By “loneliness”, as well as by the term “worldlessness” which she sometimes uses interchangeably with this latter, Arendt is referring to a phenomenon which has deeply marked all modern human beings: namely, the fact that modern Man, in contrast to his distant and even recent ancestors, no longer finds himself rooted in such things as extended families, craftsmen’s guilds and other social groups and communities. Instead, he most often lives in ways untied from all such rooting and orienting connections, as an anonymous waged or salaried employee perfectly interchangeable with any one of millions of his kind, all crammed together in enormous cities. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the population explosion of the past two centuries, there has arisen, Arendt argues, in a period that is short when measured against the whole span of history, an entirely new kind of society: so-called “mass society”. From around the beginning of the 20th century on, human beings have begun to feel helplessly exposed, interchangeable and superfluous:

Writing in the middle years of the 20th century, Arendt meant by “the last century and a half” the years between 1800 and the Second World War. The world did indeed see a dramatic growth in population in this period, increasing tenfold in certain nations of Europe, for example. There occurred an unprecedented urbanization and concentration of masses of people within the great cities. New forms of governmental institution, far more efficient than the loose administrative structures that had existed up till then, sprang up overnight as means of handling and directing the suddenly enormous populations. Hitherto, the figure who had “set the tone” for Western societies had been the self-confident “bourgeois” individual. But from this point such individuals faced the dilemma of either withdrawing from the newly-arising “mass society” or being submerged and absorbed into it. Large swathes of the population came to be familiar with such experiences as unemployment and with feelings of powerlessness and of themselves as interchangeable ciphers.

It was just this sense of no longer “having anything to hold onto”, argues Arendt, that nourished and prepared the ground for Nazism and Stalinism. Because “rootless masses”, she goes on, such as those which emerged in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have a structural tendency to embrace ideologies which offer them a new “meaning of life” and thus a new sense of self. Stalin promised to these “rootless masses” a world revolution followed by a socialist workers’ paradise that would emerge some time in the future. Hitler promised them a “thousand-year Reich” and the domination of the world by the “Aryan race”. In the place of loneliness and rootlessness, then, these ideologies offer a new sense of belonging and protection, sustained by mass organizations and paramilitary groups. The control of the mass media and the systematic application of terror tactics by the state ensure that the population come eventually to follow the ideology dominant in their own particular state to such a point that they entirely cease to think for themselves:

Arendt’s diagnosis of modern mass society’s susceptibility to ideology, and of what she calls “rule by Nobody”, is such a striking and engaging one because it does not apply just to the notorious dictatorships of 20th century Europe but also to our own democracies today.

We too, in fact, are all too familiar with “rule by Nobody” and the feeling of loneliness typical of mass societies. Elections are still held, indeed, from time to time in almost all Western countries in order to choose political representatives. But citizens themselves tend no longer to play an active role in forming and directing politics. Where an election carries a new ruling party to power, it is usually only the ministers at the heads of government departments that change. The massive bureaucracies that form these ministries go on working as before. We are governed and guided by them throughout the whole course of our lives. They are responsible for our birth certificates, the regulations that compel us to attend school, our driving licenses, our tax demands, the laws deciding the rates of social insurance we pay, the hours that the clocks go back at the changing of the seasons, the speed limits applying in various areas, right down to rates of unemployment benefit and old-age pensions:

This insight leads Arendt to draw the radical conclusion that, in our modern mass societies, the “free and self-responsible citizen”, who had once taken decisions about his life and had been held individually responsible for these decisions, has been replaced by “rule by Nobody”. That is to say: our lives are now ruled by faceless and impersonal authorities which issue rules and regulations that we just thoughtlessly accept. And not only this. We even experience the rules imposed on us by our living piled on top of one another in the great conurbations as necessary and normal things. But this “rule by Nobody”, Arendt goes on, is by no means so harmless as it seems:

Because we have been accustomed, since our childhood, to following the orders and instructions of bureaucrats, policemen and representatives of the state we continue to do so even when the orders in question prove to be false, unjust or even positively inhuman.

One extreme historical example, argues Arendt, for “the rule of Nobody” is the behaviour of the Nazi official and “department head” Eichmann who had simply carried out unquestioningly, to the letter, the instructions he received from the Ministry to which he was professionally subordinate. In execution of these instructions he organized the transport of millions of Jews into the concentration and extermination camps. Eichmann can stand as a representative symbol for those many thousands of administrators, railway clerks, judges, policemen and other citizens who provided active support to Nazism and later offered the excuse that they had “merely followed orders”. Eichmann, in other words, was not just one individual evil man:

It is here that Arendt formulates her controversial, but surely brilliant, thesis of “the banality of evil”. Because it was the “banal” attention to duty of Eichmann as well as of millions of others like him that alone made possible the whole enormity of the Nazi terror. It was only through so many men and women “merely following orders” and obeying laws down to their letter and logical conclusion that the Nazi regime was able to unleash, over a period of so many years, war and massacre without very much internal resistance.

No other political-theoretical thesis regarding Nazism and the Holocaust has, before or since, sparked off such a passionate controversy as Arendt’s thesis of “the banality of evil”.