The Weekly Sage hopes to regularly bring brief profiles of key contributors to thought and faith before a Christian audience for historical education and awareness of valuable resources.

Hannah Arendt

• “The philistine’s retirement into private life, his single-minded devotion to matters of family and career was the last, and already degenerated product of the bourgeoisie’s belief in the primacy of private interest. The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything – belief, honor, dignity – on the slightest provocation. Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives. After a few years of power and systematic co-ordination, the Nazis could rightly announce: ‘The only person who is still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep.’

In all fairness to those among the elite, on the other hand, who at one time or another have let themselves be seduced by totalitarian movements, and who sometimes, because of their intellectual abilities, are even accused of having inspired totalitarianism, it must be stated that what these desperate men of the twentieth century did or did not do had no influence on totalitarianism whatsoever, although it did play some part in earlier, successful, attempts of the movements to force the outside world to take their doctrines seriously. … Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is the best possible guarantee of their loyalty.”[1]

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a pre-eminent philosopher and theorist in the 20^th century. She addressed in voluminous fashion the most broad and challenging topics of the modern age, including concepts such as revolution, totalitarianism, imperialism, work, Marxism, class, and much more. The array of books that she published, and their incredible quality, demonstrate the amazing power of her mind, but her life story may be even more meaningful.

Born in the German Empire, Arendt was raised in a secular Jewish community, but lost her father at the age of seven, an early manifestation of the tumult she would have to face. By the time Arendt was 12, Germany had lost the First World War and was paralyzed by an atmosphere of street conflicts and uprisings.

These events doubtless shook the young thinker, but she persevered in excellent intellectual achievement. Her mother vigorously promoted her early education, and the young Hannah went from impressing her kindergarten teachers with her knowledge of Greek to studying under leading philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, as well as prominent liberal theologians Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich.

However, Arendt’s studies did not continue unimpeded forever. After finishing her dissertation in 1929, Arendt was disturbed by the increasingly anti-Semitic atmosphere in Germany, and sought to oppose this climate through her writing. Nevertheless, her attempts to research antisemitism led to her arrest by the Gestapo in 1933. Having been forced to flee the onset of the Russian army during World War I, Hannah and her mother once again bolted upon Hannah’s release from custody, settling in France. The war followed, unfortunately, and when France and Germany went to war, the French Government interned “enemy aliens,” and included Arendt in this decree. Fortunately, the operations of some enterprising American citizens and officials allowed many detainees to escape through Spain and Portugal, and Arendt managed to take this route to the United States, where she was able to finally settle in New York.

The post-war period was Arendt’s most intellectually fruitful, and it is disheartening to think how the years on the run might have been used to advance human understanding. Nevertheless, in a brief period of 12 years, from 1951 to 1963, Arendt produced an incredible volume of work, centered around the major volumes On Revolution, Between Past and Future, The Human Condition, and The Origins of Totalitarianism. Further, she contributed as a teacher at several American universities, such as on the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought from 1963 to 1967.

To attempt to assess, synthesize, and present Arendt’s thought to any significant degree is likely very foolhardy, as is indicated by my inability to limit and control the quotations. One previous borrower of a text of Arendt’s that I read noted in the margin that a particular passage was “entirely gobble-de-gook.” While disagreeing strongly, I note that Arendt’s work is not simple. The range of topics her mind reached is matched by the depth and individuality of her expression.

Still, Arendt’s fundamental position is that the modern age has broken with the Western tradition. Marxism, totalitarianism, science, and industrialism represent unprecedented realities, so that old truths no longer apply in the same manner. Thus, she noted both the excellence of key figures such as Augustine, Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, while also arguing that their insights are no longer properly valid for moving forward. And, for Arendt, forward movement was necessary, as the horrors of the twentieth century that resulted from the breaking of the tradition must be avoided in the future. Thus, she emphasized the centrality of free action and free movement to a healthy politics, with every child and every idea seen as a new beginning.

Regarding particular contributions, Arendt uniquely argued that modern capitalist democracy led to the death of the public sphere – a limited area limited by law where a few responsible citizens abandoned selfish pursuits for the good of their country, with other people aspiring to be such citizens. Thus, she prioritized localism and social institutions that could prevent people from being “de-classed” by the modern chaos, as such citizens are the masses that an extremist faction can rally to its cause in creating a totalitarian state. As a result, she lauded the American founders, who she believed recognized many of the same realities, and uniquely achieved a constitution that established a healthy power through their revolution, as opposed to simply proclaiming a new schema of rights.

Unfortunately, Arendt’s rejection of Christian principles as a secular Jew leads to particular kinks in her thought where believers cannot follow. For instance, her argument that men can be thankful that they are unlike God in being able to experience fellowship and intimacy with equals simply and tragically misses the reality of the Biblical Trinity. For this reason, I should note that reading Arendt is a dangerous proposition to a certain extent – if unaware of her deviations from the plain teaching of Scripture, the reader might be tempted to wholly accept an intellectually compelling and skilfully presented worldview. Still, I learned much more from Arendt than almost any other thinker with whom I have profoundly and fundamentally disagreed. Her personal life, career, and work all indicate the painful impact that even the greatest sages cannot escape after the Fall, that first horror from which all of Arendt’s modern tragedies were born.

• “The classification of the bourgeoisie as an owning class is only superficially correct, for a characteristic of this class has been that everybody could belong to it who conceived of life as a process of perpetually becoming wealthier, and considered money as something sacrosanct which under no circumstances should be a mere commodity for consumption.
  Property by itself, however, is subject to use and consumption and therefore diminishes constantly. The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours. Property owners who do not consume but strive to enlarge their holdings continually find one very inconvenient limitation, the unfortunate fact that men must die. Death is the real reason why property and acquisition can never become a true political principle. A social system based essentially on property cannot possibly proceed toward anything but the final destruction of all property.”[2]

• “Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modern mankind. The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become. This perplexing consequences came fully to light as soon as equality was no longer seen in terms of an omnipotent being like God or an unavoidable common destiny like death. Whenever equality becomes a mundane fact in itself, without any gauge by which it may be measured or explained, then there is one chance in a hundred that it will be recognized simply as a working principle of a political organization in which otherwise unequal people have equal rights; there are ninety-nine chances that it will be mistaken for an innate quality of an individual, who is ‘normal’ if he is like everybody else and ‘abnormal’ if he happens to be different. This perversion of equality from a political into a social concept is all the more dangerous when a society leaves but little space for special groups and individuals, for then their differences become all the more conspicuous.
• The great challenge to the modern period, and its peculiar danger, has been that in it man for the first time confronted man without the protection of differing circumstances and conditions. And it has been precisely this new concept of equality that has made modern race relations so difficult, for there we deal with natural differences which by no possible and conceivable change of conditions that become less conspicuous. It is because quality demands that I recognize each and every individual as my equal, that the conflicts between different groups, which for reasons of their own are reluctant to grant each other this basic equality, take on such terribly cruel forms.”[3]

[1] Hannah Arendt, The Burden of Our Time, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1951), 331-332.

[2] Ibid, 145.

[3] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), 54.