Enemies and friends: Arendt on the imperial republic at war
2009; Routledge; Volume: 36; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2009.11.006
ISSN1873-541X
Autores Tópico(s)Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy
ResumoAbstract Hannah Arendt's existential, republican concept of politics spurned Carl Schmitt's idea that enmity constituted the essence of the political. Famously, she isolated the political sphere from social conflict, sovereign regimes, and the realm of military violence. While some critics are now interested in applying Arendt's more abstract political ideas to international affairs, it has not been acknowledged that her original reconceptualization of politics was in fact driven by her analysis of global war, and in particular, the startling new challenges raised by nuclear warfare. Arendt's early, unpublished manuscript on the nature of politics contains important reflections on the nature of war and empire. Surprisingly, these reflections tentatively explore the relationship between war and political freedom. A close reading of this work on war can help explain both her later, more radical non-violent concept of political action, and the difficulties she faced integrating her existential republicanism within the global context of conflict in the Cold War. Keywords: Carl SchmittHannah ArendtCold WarWorld federalismOmnicideLimited war Notes 1 See Jeffrey Isaac, 'A new guarantee on earth: Hannah Arendt on human dignity and the politics of human rights,' American Political Science Review 90 (1996), 61–73; Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Thought (Cambridge, 1994); Mary Dietz, 'Arendt and the Holocaust', The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge, 2000); Gareth Williams, 'General introduction', Hannah Arendt, ed. Williams (London, 2006), 4–6. 2 Hannah Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social (Chicago, 1998). 3 Hannah Arendt, 'On violence', Crises of the Republic (San Diego, 1972). 4 For example, Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, 1996); Jerome Kohn, 'Freedom: the priority of the political', Cambridge Companion, ed. Villa; Andreas Kalyvas, 'From the act to the decision: Hannah Arendt on the question of decisionism,' Political Theory 32 (2004), 320–46; and on the critical side, Richard Wolin, Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton, 2003). 5 One of the more influential, if controversial, readings of Arendt and Benjamin in this context is Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA, 1998). See also Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (London, 2000). 6 See Hannah Arendt and International Relations: Readings Across the Lines, ed. Anthony F. Lang, Jr. and John Williams (New York, 2005); Patricia Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford, 2007); Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: the Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington, IN, 2006); Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters (New Haven, CT, 2006). 7 Arendt was well aware of Schmitt's Weimar works and his writing during the Nazi regime. See, for example, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edition (San Diego, 1968), 339, note. 8 Arendt, 'Pol. Exp.'s in the 20th Century', Subject File 1949–1975, n.d., The Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.). 9 Mark Reinhardt, 'What's new in Arendt?,' Political Theory 31 (2003), 443–60. 10 Jeffrey Isaac, 'Situating Hannah Arendt on action and politics,' Political Theory 21 (1993), 534–40. 11 Arendt, Denktagebuch: 1950 bis 1973, ed. Ursula Ludz, Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich, 2002), 307; translations are my own. Further references in the text. Two years earlier, Arendt quoted Montesquieu's famous aphorism on war – 'L'objet de guerre, c'est la victoire; celui de la victoire, la conquête; celui de la conquête, la conservation' – and added: 'That is no longer precisely the case. The aim of war is extermination even at the cost of victory. The aim of victory is annihilation even at the cost of making the victory meaningless; the aim of conquest is the permanent transforming of reality into the totalitarian fiction even at the price of not being able to conserve what one has.' (Munich, 2002), 151. 12 See Peter Stirk, 'Carl Schmitt's Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung,' History of Political Thought 20 (1999), 357–74. 13 Carl Schmitt, Der 'Nomos' der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Cologne, 1950). English translation as The 'Nomos' of the Earth in the International Law of the 'Jus Publicum Europaeum,' (New York, 2003). 14 Arendt, 'Preface to the first edition', The Origins of Totalitarianism (1950), ix. 15 Patricia Owens wants to make this comparison but she surprisingly makes no effort to explain any of the obvious historical and intellectual links between Schmitt and Arendt. She does not, for example, even seem aware of Schmitt's critically important Nomos of the Earth, or of Arendt's direct and indirect allusions to this text. See Owens, Between War and Politics, 25–6. Hans Lindahl does recognize the importance of Schmittian concepts of nomos in Arendt, but does not recognize that Arendt read Schmitt in this period; see Hans Lindahl, 'Give and take: Arendt and the nomos of political community,' Philosophy and Social Criticism 32 (2006), 881–901. Recently, Hans Sluga has traced some of these connections, highlighting the intellectual context shared by both Schmitt and Arendt and pointing to the importance of pluralist ideas in both figures. Hans Sluga, 'The pluralism of the political: From Carl Schmitt to Hannah Arendt,' Telos 142 (Spring, 2008), 91–109. 16 Arendt, Origins, vii. 17 Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Köhler and Hans Saner (New York, 1992), 168. 18 Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Köhler and Hans Saner (New York, 1992), 302. 19 Arendt, Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlaß, ed. Ursula Ludz (Munich, 1993); English translation as 'Introduction into politics,' in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York, 2005). Further references (German/English) in the text. Though never published in Arendt's own lifetime, this text introduces some ideas and vocabulary developed in The Human Condition and in On Revolution. 20 Arendt to Karl Jaspers, February 17, 1957, Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 309. 21 Arendt to Karl Jaspers, March 4, 1951, in Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers Briefwechsel, 1926–169, ed. Lotte Köhler and Hans Saner (Munich, 1985), 202. English translation (which unfortunately obscures the clear allusion to Schmitt's work) in Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 166. 22 See Sluga, 'Pluralism,' for a more comprehensive account of Schmitt's ideas on politics and plurality. 23 Arendt's perspective on Greek nomos was obviously shaped by Schmitt's Nomos der Erde, which she was reading at exactly this time. 24 Arendt here frankly acknowledges a critique Martin Jay will make of her work, some years later. See Jay, 'The political existentialism of Hannah Arendt,' in Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York, 1985). 25 Schmitt, Nomos der Erde, preface. On these issues, see David Bates, 'On revolutions in the nuclear age: The eighteenth century and the postwar global imagination,' qui parle 15 (2005), 171–196. 26 In a diary entry, Arendt observed that today, people are certain that civil wars are the most bloody. Plato, however, made exactly the opposite claim, arguing that Hellenistic warfare was less brutal than that waged against the Barbarians. War is natural when the two parties are absolutely foreign to one another. Arendt went on to give a rather Schmittian argument for our modern reversal of this ancient position. 'Of course, the difficulty proper to modernity is that, especially today, we must extend this ancient concept of kinship, which is otherwise erroneous, to all of mankind. Thus the external enemy, which, in truth, guaranteed the kinship of those who were 'related,' finds itself eliminated. On the occasion of an attack by the inhabitants of the planet Mars against the inhabitants of planet Earth, Plato's concept will instantly reappear. It is consistent with the presupposition of an absolute stranger/foreigner [Fremden].' Denktagebuch, 222. Before the war, Schmitt made a similar remark: 'Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet.' Schmitt, Concept of the Political, tr. George Schwab (Chicago, 1976), 54. 27 Arendt would (using Schmittian language) repeat this analysis of nomos and lex in The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), 63, note 62, and again in On Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1990), 186–7. She wanted to show that there was an alternative to the traditional view that law required some transcendent authority. Roman law was sacred precisely because of its radical foundational character. Cf. Arendt's earlier essay, 'What is authority?' in Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (Cleveland, 1963). 28 As she noted in Was ist Politik?: 'It took the Cold War, or so we may be tempted to think, to teach us what the primacy of foreign policy really means.' (199) On the Cold War context of these sections on war in Was ist Politik? see Jacques Taminiaux, 'Athens and Rome', The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge, 2000), 173. 29 For example, see the prefatory remarks in Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (Freiburg, 1959); English translation, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA, 2000). 30 Arendt discusses these themes in a manuscript of a lecture course at Berkeley, from 1955; the concluding fragment is published as an epilogue to 'Introduction into politics,' Promise of Politics, 201–204. 31 Dean Hammer, 'Hannah Arendt and Roman political thought,' Political Theory 30 (2002), 124–149. 32 Hannah Arendt, 'Home to roost', in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York, 2003), 257. Originally published in The American Experiment: Perspectives on 200 Years, ed. Sam Bass Warner, Jr. (Boston, 1976). 33 John V. Lindsay, 'The great American driftx', in The American Experiment, 122. 34 Sam Bass Warner, Jr., 'The two revolutions', in The American Experiment, 22–3. 35 Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr., 'The rights of man', in The American Experiment, 60. 36 Arendt to Martin Heidegger, March 17, 1968, in Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, 1925–1975, ed. Ursula Ludz, tr. Andrew Shields (Orlando, Fl., 2004), 138. 37 Arendt, 'Is America by nature a violent society?,' New York Times Magazine, April 28, 1969, 25. 38 Arendt, 'On Violence,' in Crises of the Republic, 107. 39 Arendt, 'On Violence,' in Crises of the Republic, 108. 40 Raymond Aron, The Imperial Republic: The United States and the World, 1945–1973, tr. Frank Jellinek (Washington, D.C., 1974), xxxv. This book was originally published in French in 1973. The American edition includes a new preface on the Watergate scandal. 41 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency, new edition (Boston, 1989). Originally published 1973. (This new edition appends an epilogue to the original text.) 42 Recent contributions on this topic include the vilified John Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 (Chicago, 2005), which presents a rather tendentious reading of constitutional history, while providing a fairly accurate account of actual presidential practice up to and including the recent administration. Cf. Peter Irons, War Powers: How the Imperial Presidency Hijacked the Constitution (New York, 2005); ed. Mark Tushnet, The Constitution in Wartime: Beyond Alarmism and Complacency (Durham, NC, 2005); and earlier, Donald Westerfield, War Powers: The President, the Congress, and the Question of War, with a foreword by Donald Rumsfeld (Westport, Conn., 1996). 43 Schlesinger, Imperial Presidency, 60. 44 Schlesinger, Imperial Presidency, 188. 45 'Home to Roost,' 263. Cf. Arendt, 'Lying in politics,' in Crises of the Republic, 17–8. 46 Arendt, 'Home to roost,' 265. 47 Arendt, 'Home to roost,' 259. 48 See Arendt's late essay, 'Thoughts on politics and revolution' in Crises of the Republic. 49 Aron, Imperial Republic, 254. 50 Aron, Imperial Republic, 258–9. 51 Aron, Imperial Republic, xx. 52 Aron, Imperial Republic, 317. 53 Aron, Imperial Republic, 279. 54 Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, 2004). 55 See Pierre Hassner, The United States: The Empire of Force or the Force of Empire? (Paris, 2002). 56 The dangers are outlined, in rather dramatic fashion, by Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York, 2004).
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