UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

FACULTY OF HISTORY

POLITICAL THOUGHT AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

RESEARCH SEMINAR 2013-14

Series 2

Monday 10 February 5.00 - 6.45

Old Combination Room, Trinity College

Philosophical History in Hannah Arendts Poli t ical Thought

Waseem Yaqoob,

Pembroke College, University of Cambridge

2014, Waseem Yaqoob

Work in progress: not to be cited or further circulated without permission.

1

I

In the prologue to The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt described the launch of

Sputnik 1 as an event second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom1

.

The launch of the first artificial earth satellite appeared to challenge the natural limits to human

activity. Finished within months of this occasion, and drafted at a time of widespread fears of

nuclear war, The Human Condition was as much a cautionary tale about scientific and political

hubris as a paean to the agonistic spirit of the ancient Greek polis. Driven by anxieties about

technological development and bureaucratic government, Arendt embarked on a

philosophical-historical exploration of the impact of science on human consciousness, narrating

the rise of earth alienation, which had led humanity to view the earth from an Archimedean

point situated beyond it.2

Contemporaries recognised that this history contained some of her

most arresting insights.3

Commentators since, however, have largely ignored this narrative,

treating it as marginal to her wider social and political thought.4

This paper will argue that the narrative Arendt presented in The Human Condition was

part of a much wider historical project that structured her political thought during the 1950s, a

formative period in her intellectual trajectory. It suggests that she is fruitfully understood as a

philosophical historian as much as a political philosopher, organising historical material and

topics using empirical methods familiar to historians, but framing them in reference to

problems of philosophical and political significance. This is not to argue for her importance as

a source of truth about the past. As academic critics have pointed out, her interpretations of

political and historical events often demanded more evidence and rigour than she mustered.5

1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1998), 5. 2 Ibid., 248-289. 3 British historian Elie Kedourie noted that some of Miss Arendts most brilliant chapters dealt with the transformation of scientific thought, Manchester Guardian Weekly in December 1958, Washington D.C., Library

of Congress, Arendt Papers, Box 86, ms. 0048dff. See also a review by George Drury in The Chicago Critic in

September 1958, Reviews of The Human Condition, 1958, Arendt Papers, Box 86, ms. 0009. 4 See, for example Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: a Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1994), 76-81; The few studies that discuss Arendts perspectives on science and

technology are directed toward establishing her contemporary relevance, rather than charting their development in

context. See for example Pieter Tijmes, The Archimedean Point and Eccentricity: Hannah Arendts Philosophy

of Science and Technology, Inquiry 35.3 (1992): 389-406; For a comprehensive survey aimed at gleaning

ecological insights from Arendts work, see David Macauley, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Place: From

Earth Alienation to Oikos, in Minding Nature: Philosophers of Ecology, ed. David Macauley (Guilford

Publications: New York, 1996); For a convincing historical analysis of Arendts writings on technology that says

little about her sources or interlocutors, see Barry Cooper, Action Into Nature: Hannah Arendts Reflections on

Technology, in Democratic Theory and Technological Society, Ronald Beiner, Richard B Day and Joseph

Masciulli, eds., (ME Sharpe: New York, 1988). 5 An otherwise glowing contemporary review for The Human Condition noted that there was little support in the writings of economists or philosophers for the distinctions she drew between human activities, forcing her to rely

heavily on philological arguments. Reviewing On Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm referred to her lack of interest in

mere fact...a preference for metaphysical construct or poetic feeling over reality. Bernard Crick recalls Isaiah

2

But it is to say that her political thought cannot be understood independently of her critique of

philosophies of history, treatment of the political significance of such narratives, and own

historical claims. Scholars have often regarded her historical narratives as a form of

storytelling, aimed at rejecting universalising philosophical claims, and placing agency at the

centre of political theory by encouraging identification with past political actors.6

While this

approach captures aspects of Arendts hermeneutic attitude towards the past, it marginalises the

respect she held for historical truth. Reconstructing her intellectual trajectory in the 1950s

belies the characterisation of her as a storyteller and points to her consistent focus on

establishing a viable historical ground for her claims concerning political theory and practice.

Arendt defined her philosophical history in response to two interconnected problems. The

first was the imperative to understand the history behind totalitarianism, and the conditions for

the suppression of free political activity and judgment. The second stemmed from the need to

prevent totalitarianism resurfacing in the postwar global order without resorting to the mixture

of bureaucratic technocracy and mass movements that she argued had catalysed it. Her

response to both problems was to theorise the means by which political action and judgment

could be made responsive to political reality, something that she argued would require

historical understanding rather than religious ethics or social science. The natural sciences had

to be a central object of this understanding. They had legitimised experimental intervention

into nature and society, providing the metaphysical basis for philosophies of history such as

Marxism that regarded humanity as a collective agent capable of acting instrumentally on

nature to refashion the world. They had also advanced a technocratic domain, which she

termed the the social, that suffocated free political activity and judgment. As she extended her

historical purview, she also argued that the natural sciences had eroded faith in divine

revelation, driving secularisation and grounding the need for a form of politics that could

generate meaning for individuals without relying on theology. The prospects for politics were

therefore closely linked to the trajectory of scientific change.

Berlin describing her arguments to him as sheer metaphysical free-association. James Scanlan, Man as Laborer,

Dehumanized, The Review of Politics 22.2 (1960): 298-301; E.J. Hobsbawm, On Revolution By Hanna

Arendt, History and Theory 4.2 (1965), 255; Bernard Crick, Hannah Arendt and the Burden of Our Times,

Political Quarterly 68.1 (1997), 78. 6 For a measured assessment of the storytelling claim, see Canovan, A Reinterpretation, 94-98; For a sample of the wider literature on storytelling, see Lynn R Wilkinson, Hannah Arendt on Isak Dinesen: Between Storytelling

and Theory, Comparative Literature 56.1 (2004): 77-98; Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling: Violence,

Transgression, and Intersubjectivity (Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen: Copenhagen, 2002);

Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: Life is a Narrative (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2001); Annabel Herzog,

Illuminating Inheritance: Benjamins Influence on Arendts Political Storytelling, Philosophy & Social Criticism

26.5 (2000): 1-27; Lisa J Disch, More Truth Than Fact: Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the Writings of

Hannah Arendt, Political Theory 21.4 (1993): 665-94; Seyla Benhabib, Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive

Power of Narrative, Social Research 57.1 (1990): 167-96.

3

Arendt extended her exploration of all three of these themes in The Human Condition,

arguing that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had seen a shift from a natural science

that exploited natural forces to a universal science that channelled cosmic forces into nature,

rendering obsolete previous understandings of the relationship between humanity and the

natural world. The resulting forms of mathematical and calculative thinking grounded

contemporary logical philosophy and behavioural sciences, and threatened the hermeneutic

political understanding that she sought. In contesting images of the stable epistemic authority of

science and positivist approaches in the humanities, however, she was not simply levelling a

politicised humanism against scientific methods. Her engagement with the history and

philosophy of science in The Human Condition was part of an exploration of the possibilities

of politically and philosophically-informed historiography. Reinterpreting Arendt in this light

as conducting a form of critical philosophical history allows a reconsideration of her thought

and milieu, and her often-criticised claims concerning social and economic modernisation.

This paper maps Arendts engagement with the idea and practice of philosophical history

through the prism of her history of science and technology. She began this engagement with

critiques of the pseudo-scientism of totalitarian ideology and Marxist philosophies of history.

These were central to her placement of a historiographical component at the core of her theory

of action, as well as her decision to engage with the history of science. This latter move cannot

be understood apart from her critical engagement with Heideggers writings on technology, and

her concern in the mid-1950s with nuclear weapons and the political problems posed by

organised scientific inquiry. While, in a hitherto unexamined relationship, Heidegger

influenced her treatment of these latter issues, she went on to critique his approach. As a result,

in The Human Condition she presented scientific and technological change through a history

of human action and practices rather than a history of metaphysics. Writing this philosophical

history led her to engage with thinkers with whom she has rarely been connected. She drew on

the work of the French philosopher of science Alexandre Koyr, and American philosophers

Alfred North Whitehead and Edwin Burtt. Situating Arendts writings in this international

context sheds light on the transatlantic transfer of discourses on scientific and technological

development. It also shows that in treating the relationship of science to politics and

philosophical inquiry, she found a model for philosophically-informed historiography that

shaped her conception of the tasks of political theory.

4

II. Totali tarianism, science, labour

Arendts interest in science and technology emerged from her theory of totalitarianism. As

early as 1946 she had argued that European politics had been shaped by ideological visions of a

human world ordered by natural forces, driven by the tendency of modern philosophy to

ground existence in biological laws and by increasing faith in the possibility of predicting and

controlling human behaviour.7

In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) she depicted

totalitarian movements as the most extreme manifestation of this development. Such

movements aimed to create political communities whose only freedom would consist in

preserving the species8

. The concentration camp inmate, stripped of juridical and moral

personality and reduced to a never changing identity of reactions was the endpoint of this

drive.9

Biological understandings of humanity were a central feature of the totalitarian world

view.10

Her analysis relied much more on National Socialist than Stalinist ideology.

In part to justify her pairing of National Socialism with Stalinism, in the 1950s Arendt

began to de-emphasise biology, arguing instead that the idea of universal laws applicable to

social organisation encompassing laws of motion and matter as well as evolutionary concepts

was a core feature of totalitarian ideology. In Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of

Government (1953), she argued that regimes saw themselves as harmonising positive and

natural law in order to allow the laws of race or class to transform humanity into an active

unfailing carrier of a law to which human beings otherwise would only passively and reluctantly

be subjected .11

Though totalitarianism could not eradicate human capacities to act freely, it

destroyed the institutions and norms sustaining the world: the artifice of objects, laws and

institutions that grounded political action and separated individuals from nature and one

another. The levelling of the artificial world in the name of nature or history modelled on

natural processes was the thread linking science to totalitarianism. Understanding how and why

7 Hannah Arendt, What is Existential Philosophy?, in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (Schocken Books: New York, 2005), 166; Hannah Arendt, The Ivory

Tower of Common Sense, in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed.

Jerome Kohn (Schocken Books: New York, 2005) 195-96. 8 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt: New York, 1951), 305-340, 438. 9 Arendt, Origins, 99. 10 The influence of Arendt's treatment of the inmate can be seen in Giorgio Agambens notion of bare life. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. V Binetti and C Casarino (University of

Minneapolis Press: Minneapolis, 2000). 14-44. 11 A translated version of Ideology and Terror was added to the first German edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1955), and then to the second English-language edition, which was published in 1958. For a

discussion of the broader significance of Ideology and Terror to Arendts theory of totalitarianism, see Roy T

Tsao, The Three Phases of Arendts Theory of Totalitarianism, Social Research 69.2 (2002), 604-12; Hannah

Arendt, Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government, The Review of Politics 15.3 (1953), 307.

5

she worked these themes into the history of science and technology in The Human Condition

requires a brief examination of her critique of Marx.

Following the publication of Origins, Arendt embarked on project entitled Totalitarian

Elements of Marxism. She sought to account for the emergence of Stalinist doctrine from

Marxism through a combination of political history and a novel study of the changing status and

character of labour and work.12

Though she never completed the project, the essays, lectures

and notes that resulted prompted The Human Condition, led to several of the essays collected

in Between Past and Future (1963), and fed into her controversial account of the social

question in On Revolution (1963). There were two central planks to her interpretation of

Marx, both of which were based on a questionable reading of his thought. First, she argued, in

conceiving of man as a labouring animal, Marx had valorised the least elevated of human

capacities. As a form of metabolism with nature, the repetitive processes of labour bore a deep

resemblance to the directionless and cyclical character of animal life.13

By treating the past as a

series of struggles to liberate this labouring process from social fetters, he naturalised human

history, giving it the devoluntarising character of evolutionary science.14

Second, Arendt argued, Marx combined his view of history with a quasi-Platonic and

humanist concept of instrumental action on nature, lauding the capacity of humanity to direct

the course of history. Treating history simultaneously as nature and akin to the domination of

nature, his thought was therefore easily adapted into Bolshevik and finally Stalinist doctrines

mandating the violent transformation of society in the name of communist utopia.15

Arendts

argument rested on a problematic separation of Marxs thought into an anti-humanist concept

of labour and a humanist concept of work, with the latter understood as a form of Platonic

rulership and mastery. The distinction reflected a tension in her project: she sought to reject

crude depictions of Marx as a proto-totalitarian while nevertheless linking him to world views

central to the emergence of totalitarianism.16

She argued that he prophetically linked the

12 Hannah Arendt, Project: Totalitarian Elements in Marxism Project Outline (1951), Washington D.C., Library of Congress, Arendt Papers, Box 64. 13 Hannah Arendt, Religion and Politics, in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (Schocken Books: New York, 2005), 377. 14 This determinist, scientistic picture leant heavily on Engelss depiction of Marx as the Darwin of the human world and the interpretations presented by theorists of the Second International. For the Darwin reference, see,

for example, ibid. n21, 288. 15 Hannah Arendt, From Hegel to Marx, in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (Schocken Books: New York, 2005); Hannah Arendt, The Impact of Marx Lecture notes (1952), Arendt Papers, Box 68; Hannah

Arendt, Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought, Social Research 69.2 (2002), 282-83. 16 While Arendts implicit points of reference for polemical treatments of Marx were contemporary philosophers such as Karl Popper and Jacob Talmon, she criticised more openly ex-Communists turned Cold Warriors. See

Hannah Arendt, The Ex-Communists, in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and

Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (Schocken Books: New York, 2005); Hannah Arendt, The Eggs Speak Up,

6

inhumanity of the Industrial Revolution to the vastly increased technical capacities of humanity

in politically disastrous ways.

As well as a prehistory of totalitarianism, Arendts analysis of labour and work in

Totalitarian Elements of Marxism was an extrapolation from the supposed effects of

technological development on modern societies. The idea of automation played a central role

in her view of how this might lead to disaster. If labor is the most human and most productive

of mans activities, she wondered, what will happen whenlabor is abolishedwhen man

has succeeded in emancipating himself from it?.17

If economic life absorbed individuals wholly

into functional labouring or jobholding roles, the automation of labour processes and ensuing

unemployment might make them superfluous in the eyes of society. Without politics to give

meaning to lives otherwise immersed in the introspection of private and social life, individuals

would be left without an interest in the stability of the human world and vulnerable to the allure

of totalitarian movements.18

One possible outcome of the economic changes that Marx

conceptualised, she suggested, might not be Stalinist totalitarianism, but an end of history in

the Western democracies, terminating in the bureaucratic management of docile populations

with the aid of the burgeoning behavioural sciences.19

Arendt had modulated her theory of totalitarianism to account for the postwar prosperity of

the United States and Western Europe. She was also critiquing the optimistic prognoses of

liberal end of ideology thinkers. She had been present at a key moment in the formation of

this emerging consensus: the September 1955 meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom

(CCF) in Milan, at which political theorist Daniel Bell and sociologists Talcott Parsons and

Edward Shils, amongst others, had declared their agreement that the societies of the Free

World North America and Western Europe were witnessing an end to the age of

ideological politics.20

What remained were the self-interested and autonomous subjects

in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (Schocken

Books: New York, 2005). 17 Hannah Arendt, Tradition and the Modern Age, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York, 2006), 24. 18 Arendt, The Human Condition, 322. 19 Arendt, Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought, 295; Hannah Arendt, The Threat of Conformism, in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn

(Schocken Books: New York, 2005); Contemporary modernisation theory provided a macro-historical vision

suited to this. See David Engerman, Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War

(University of Massachusetts Press: Cambridge, MA, 2003); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization

Theory in Cold War America (The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 2007). 20 Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Twayne Publishers Prentice Hall International: New York, 1998), 34, 37; Job L Dittberner, The End of Ideology and American Social

Thought, 1930-1960 (UMI Research Press: Ann Arbor, 1979); Chaim I Waxman, The End of Ideology Debate

(Funk & Wagnalls: New York, 1969).

7

assumed by the empirical and behavioural political sciences.21

The day before she presented a

paper at the conference, Arendt wrote to her friend, German philosopher Karl Jaspers,

claiming to be worried that her contempt for almost everyone would be all too evident.22

Arendts concerns about technocracy and hostility to the politics she discerned in the end of

ideology thinkers shaped The Human Condition. She presented the first draft of the book at

the Walgreen Foundation Lectures at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1956, before

completing the manuscript in 1957. Conservative philosopher Eric Voegelin had been the

invited speaker in 1951, subsequently publishing his lectures as The New Science of Politics

(1952), and in 1952 Leo Strauss had presented most of what became Natural Right and History

(1953).23

She was joining a line of migr critics of liberal political science. Even her

presentation of Marx in The Human Condition was geared towards delegitimising liberal

behavioural political science.24

She referred to the communistic fiction lying behind liberal

political economy, which presented the image of a plurality of conflicting interests, but masked

an assumption of a wider harmony of social and economic interest that pervades society as a

whole.25

Continuing her problematic and biologistic reading of his thought, she argued that

Marx had diagnosed these trends in his valorisation of labour. But instead of a free association

of labourers, the elevation of the status of labour and the advent of mass democracy had

resulted in the decline of the public sphere and political freedom. She controversially twinned

the elevation of labour to the extinction of politics under the aegis of the bureaucratic state.26

This was the implication of the account of the social that occupied much of the first half of The

Human Condition.

21 For the paradigmatic statement of this thesis, see Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: on the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Free Press: New York, 1960). 22 Letter, Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers (September 13, 1955) in Lotte Khler and Hans Saner eds. Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers: Correspondence: 1926-1969, trans. Rita and Robert Kimber (New York, 1992), 267.

She subsequently described the conference to him as simply boring. Everybody talked in clichs. See Letter,

Arendt to Jaspers (September 20, 1955) in Correspondence, 268. For her paper, see Hannah Arendt, Breakdown

of Authority (November 23, 1953), Arendt Papers, Box 72. 23 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1953); Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: an Introduction (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1952). 24 For key examples of behaviourist approach, see David Easton, The Political System: an Inquiry into the State of Political Science (Knopf: New York, 1953); David Truman, The Governmental Process: Political Interests and

Public Opinion (Knopf: New York, 1951). 25 Arendt, Human Condition, 44; Arendt was citing a well-known work by economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. See Gunnar Myrdal, The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory, trans. Paul

Streeten (Routledge: London, 1953), 194-95; For Myrdal in the context of American political science in the 1950s,

see Rogers M Smith, Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: the Multiple Traditions in America, The

American Political Science Review 87.3 (1993): 549-66. 26 The revolutionary working classes, she claimed, by virtue of being the only organized and hence the leading section of the people, has written one of the most glorious and probably the most promising chapter of recent

history. But, she argued, once the working classes were admitted to the public sphere, their political demands

were invariably defeated. Arendt, Human Condition, 215.

8

The product of nineteenth-century social and economic development in Europe and the

United States, the social referred to a conformist and expansionary domain of consumption

and production that dissolved the boundaries between private and public life27

. This led to the

decline of public spaces in favour of a vision of politics as the management of the national

household.28

In the mid-twentieth century the behavioural sciences, she claimed, far from being

unrealistic fantasies about the harmony of individual self-interest with economic development,

were the best possible conceptualization of these trends.29

In presaging the reduction of

humans to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal, they were ideally suited to the

devolution of government to pure administration, a process that had been gathering pace

since the emergence of the bureaucratic welfare state.30

III. Action and history

Arendt circumscribed the range of possible political responses to the development of the social

by implicitly criticising socialism humanism. Her narrative of the decline of the homo faber, the

utilitarian creator of the human artifice targeted its basis.31

Though she presented this

argument as a philosophical criticism of the circularity of utilitarianism, coupled to a critique of

consumerism, it was grounded in her reading of Marxs concept of work, which she now tied to

her view of secularisation.32

She referred to the self-understanding of homo faber as lord and

master of the whole earth.33

His creativity was seen in the image of a Creator-Godwhere God

creates ex nihilo, man creates out of given substance.34

As a result, human productivity

necessarily led to a Promethean revolt because it could erect a man-made world only after

destroying part of God-created nature.35

Secularisation together with technological

27 Arendt, Human Condition, 41; For an early criticism of the inegalitarian implications of the social, see Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Justice: on Relating Private and Public, Political Theory 9. 3 (1981): 327-52. 28 Ibid., 38-49, 44. 29 Ibid., 322. 30 Ibid., 45, 322. 31 Arendt, Human Condition, 139; Max Scheler had argued in 1926 that the technological will to power had altered humanity so much that the term homo sapiens should be changed to homo faber, or working being. Max

Scheler, Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (Der neue Geist Verlag: Leipzig, 1926), 447. 32 Ibid., 154. For her treatment of Marxs notion of work, see Hannah Arendt, From Hegel to Marx, in Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (Schocken Books: New York, 2005); Hannah Arendt, The

Impact of Marx, Arendt Papers, Box 68; Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political

Thought, Social Research 69.2 (2002), 282-83. 33 Arendt, Human Condition, 139. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. In depicting the psychological effects of modern society and the Prometheanism generated by instrumental modes of conceiving the world, Arendts analysis resembled that of the Frankfurt School. Her critique of Marx,

however, set her apart from thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. See, for example, Theodor W

9

development encouraged the attribution of divine capacities to humanity understood as a

collective subject, with the destructive political consequences witnessed in the twentieth century.

In any case, though the prestige of homo faber as a model for human organisation had risen

with the Industrial Revolution, it declined in the nineteenth century as a result of the nihilism of

its instrumental means-ends categories, which led to a

degradation of all things into means, their loss of intrinsic and independent value, so that

eventually not only the objects of fabrication but also the earth in general and all forces of

nature, which clearly came into being without the help of man and have an existence

independent of the human world, lose their value because [they] do not present the reification

which comes from work.36

This relativisation of values revealed the absence of any meaning other than usefulness at the

heart of attempts to build a more comfortable home for humanity on earth. Without a higher

source of meaning, technology and industrial modernity led to rise of the social: mass societies

dominated by the individual and collective instrumental pursuit of interests, with the spare time

of the working individual never spent in anything but consumption.37

This led to the grave

danger that eventually no object of the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation

through consumption.38

Arendts critique of homo faber was also a rebuttal to optimistic

treatments of secularisation and modernisation she found in the contemporary social sciences.

She suggested that instead of leading to a new worldliness in opposition to Christian

otherwordliness, modernity had seen humans thrown into introspection and radically alienated

from the world.39

Against homo faber, Arendt presented a model of non-instrumental political activity she

found in the ancient Greek polis. The depiction of political action that resulted was a central

part of The Human Condition. The regular participation of ancient Greek citizens in public

affairs, she claimed, had connected them to a world beyond their private lives. Through joint

speech and action they created spaces in which freedom was an objective state of human

existence, in contrast to modern conceptions of freedom as choice or as the liberation from

necessity delivered by technology.40

Individuals imbued the world they inhabited with meaning,

and marked it with a name that persisted after death. Practices of remembrance the polis

itself was a kind of organised remembrance ensured that despite their mortality individuals

Adorno, The Culture Industry (Routledge: London, 2001); Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (Oxford

University Press: Oxford, 1947); Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1942). 36 Arendt, Human Condition, 156. 37 Ibid., 133. 38 Ibid. 39 Arendt, Religion and Politics, 368-72; Arendt, Origins, 305-326. 40 Ibid., 71.

10

could attain relative permanence, enabled by the narration and commemoration of the

political deeds and words.41

This would inspire others to participate in politics, and would

produce a sense of responsibility to present and future generations.

As suggested negatively by her interest in critiquing Marxs philosophy of history, Arendt

saw political agency as shaped by individual experiences of time and the meaning individuals

derived from history.42

The time-bound nature of all human activities was part of the basic

structure of her conception of politics, constantly accompanying, and sometimes trumping, the

need for physical political space.43

She sought to avoid the model of historically-grounded

freedom that she found in Marxism, which entailed liberation from necessity and a violent

break with the past.44

Treating freedom as arising from temporally-understood human

propensity for action, Arendt portrayed it as immanent, grounded in a basic human capacity.

Such a philosophical anthropology held out a ground for a relatively egalitarian counterweight

to the solipsism and meaningless of existence in mass society.

There was a strong historical dimension to the idealised form of action Arendt drew from

the polis. Action, she commented, insofar as it engages in founding and preserving political

bodies, creates the conditions for remembrance, that is, for history.45

The connection she drew

between political durability, remembrance and history pointed to the limitations of the polis as

a political model. In his Funeral Oration, Pericles had suggested that the performance of great

deeds itself was enough to save them from being forgotten. Athens had no need for Homeric

poets to reify its endeavours.46

Given the ultimate decline that awaited Periclean Athens, Arendt

commented that this claim was hubris, best read with the sad wisdom of hindsight by men who

knew that his words were spoken at the beginning of the end.47

Though she said comparatively

little about Rome in The Human Condition, earlier notebook entries suggest that she saw it as

a more stable political model than Athens.48

The sacred city of Rome itself was the Roman

41 Ibid. 42 Arendt, From Hegel to Marx; Hannah Arendt, Concern With Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought, in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed.

Jerome Kohn (Schocken Books: New York, 2005), 433. 43 For a nuanced discussion of this, see Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger, trans. Michael Gendre (State University of New York Press: New York, 1997), 25-27. 44 For an example of a detailed exploration of these issues in On Revolution, see Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt (Cambridge University Press:

Cambridge, 2008), 187-291. 45 Arendt, Human Condition, 8-9. 46 Ibid., 197-198, 205. 47 Ibid., 205. 48 For two discussions of this that do not mention the treatments of Rome in her notebooks, see Jacques Taminiaux, Athens and Rome, in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge

University Press: Cambridge, 2000); Roy T Tsao, Arendt Against Athens: Rereading the Human Condition,

Political Theory 30.1 (2002): 97-123.

11

Homer, providing an institutionalised space for great deeds and historiographical

remembrance.49

The Athenian polis was not a model to be emulated because it neglected the

narrative dimension of action in favour of pure performance.50

A better model of political-cultural practice, Arendt suggested, was to be found in Greek

tragedy, which reified action and passed it into remembrance by respecting its performative

dimensions while simultaneously showing to spectators that action almost never achieves its

purpose.51

In doing so it taught against the misleading instrumental and predictive conceptions

of politics characteristic of homo faber. Tragedy trained citizens to experience and judge the

world in ways that were responsive to political reality. Despite making few direct references to

judgment in The Human Condition, in a 1953 notebook entry Arendt honed in on the

practical judgment encouraged by the Athenian deliberative assemblies Aristotle described in

his Rhetoric. Having worked her reading into a series of lectures she gave the following year, in

The Human Condition she connected these practices to Greek tragedy and to the political

value of modern historical practice.52

While the pedagogical effect of tragedy relied on the institutionalisation of the theatre in the

polis, in the modern world Arendt emphasised that historiography played a similar role, rooted

in the universal human condition of mortality. That every individual life between birth and

death can eventually be told as a story with beginning and end is the pre-political and pre-

historical condition of history.53

But what made history truly human was that its narratives were

with many actors and speakers and yet without any tangible authors and the outcome of

action.54

Histories were not constructed through acts of will on historical objects by historians,

but by reworking reified actions from the past into various forms, such as documents, artworks

or even monuments.55

In the process, they revealed the identities of individual subjects.

Historiography was therefore a form of immortalising. It was also a goad to political

spectatorship. Nothing, she added,

49 Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch: 1950 1973, vol. 1 (Piper: Munich, 2002), 429. 50 Tsao, Arendt Against Athens, 112-13; Taminiaux, Athens and Rome, 165-69. 51 Arendt, Human Condition, 184. 52 Arendt, Denktagebuch, 408. 53 Arendt, Human Condition, 184. 54 Ibid. 55 Arendt noted that monuments to the Unknown Soldier after the First World War revealed the existential need for people to find an identifiable somebody whom four years of mass slaughter should have revealed. Ibid., 181;

For more on Arendts relevance to thinking about memory and memorial, see Natan Sznaider, Jewish Memory

and the Cosmopolitan Order: Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Condition (Polity: Cambridge, 2011).

12

indicated more clearly the political nature of history its being a story of action and deeds

rather than of trends and forces or ideas than the introduction of an invisible actor behind the

scenes whom we find in all philosophies of history.56

She pointed to Adam Smiths invisible hand, Marxs class interest and Hegels world spirit.57

These philosophies of history, however, delivered the opposite message to tragedy. Instead of

focusing on mortal deeds they suggested heteronomy, fatalism, and in the case of Marx, all of

these mixed with a Promethean sense of mastery over historical processes. Arendt had outlined

the origins of these tendencies in modern philosophies of history prior to beginning work on

The Human Condition.

In a lecture series she gave at the University of Notre-Dame in 1954, entitled Philosophy

and Politics: The Problem of Action and Thought after the French Revolution, Arendt had

briefly hinted that the development of natural science had potentially cleared the way for new

conceptions of politics and history that dignified human action, previously subordinated to

spirituality in Christianity and contemplation in the philosophical tradition. These changes were

seen more quickly in the development of historiography than in political philosophy.

Exemplified by Giambattista Vico, the new science of history valorised action in a manner

very different from antiquity.58

Instead of being understood as unpredictable and non-sovereign,

human action in historical time was viewed as instrumental, modelled on scientific

experimentation and, in the nineteenth century, on industrial manufacturing. Human history

was now only seen as reliable when regarded in terms of instrumental action and fabricated

processes, exemplified in Vicos claim that the only knowable history was that made by

humanity. Arendt was extending her critique of Marxs conception of history into a broader

account of philosophical modernity. Modern notions of history also suggested to her a new

form of immortalising practice radically different from ancient Greek concepts. Immortality

was no longer attributed to worthy individuals, but to the whole of mankind, understood in

natural scientific terms as subject of a process in which individual men and their actions were

submerged.59

Hegel, she noted, achieved what nineteenth-century historians such as Jules

Michelet had sought to do, creating a history of the entirety of mankind construed as it were

56 Arendt, Human Condition, 181. 57 Ibid., 185. 58 Hannah Arendt, Philosophy and Politics: The Problem of Action and Thought after the French Revolution (1954), Arendt Papers, Box 76, ms. 023391. For more Vicos conception of history, see David L Marshall, Vico

and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2010). 59 Ibid., ms. 023392.

13

the biography of this monstrous, gigantic individual.60

This was the antithesis of the pluralist

focus on individual political deeds Arendt lauded in ancient historiography.

The narrative of the history of science and technology that Arendt presented in The Vita

Activa and the Modern Age, the final section of The Human Condition, superseded the brief

account she gave in her Philosophy and Politics lectures. It should be seen in light of the

pedagogical function she ascribed to the political remembrance found in the polis, and as part

of her critique of the universal histories exemplified by Marx. Her narrative also continued her

opposition to the teleological views of secularisation, modernisation and technological progress

that she discerned in the contemporary social sciences. Against these varied forms of historical

understanding, which she would later unite under the rubric of the modern concept of history,

she sought to provide an alternative narrative of science and secularisation that emphasised the

unpredictable role of human actions rather than a teleological march of Reason.61

Yet at the

same time her narrative was a teleological story of the breakdown of the philosophical

tradition under the assault of science, and its replacement by mathematical and scientific

forms of philosophy that influenced the behavioural sciences and threatened human capacities

for judgment.

IV. Questions concerning technology

Encouraged by the conviction that atomic energy signalled a new era in mans relationship to

nature and the world, during the period leading up to the publication of The Human

Condition, Arendt had the opportunity to sharpen her understanding of the scientific

dimensions of modernity. Teaching at the University of Berkeley, California in 1955, she

attended lectures by the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Khler on the relationship between

psychology and physics.62

She found his lectures interesting, and remarked to Blcher that her

understanding of physics was improving.63

She would have been aware that the university and

the Radiation Laboratory it managed for the Department of Energy were major centres for

physics research. The following year she began collecting American and German press

clippings on a range of scientific issues ranging from astronomy, germ plasma, hydrogen fusion

60 Ibid., ms. 023386. 61 Hannah Arendt, The Modern Concept of History, The Review of Politics 20.4 (1958): 570-90. 62 Stuart W Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (Columbia University Press: New York, 1993), 141, 148. 63 She did, however, refer to him as that jackass Khler. See Letter, Arendt to Blcher (March 30, 1955), Within Four Walls, 243.

14

and after the launch of Sputnik, the space race.64

Together with the view she expressed to

Jaspers that the philosophy faculty there had gone the way of semantics, it seems that her time

at Berkeley piqued her interest in science and technology as an area in which to contest

universal histories.65

In treating technology as a political and historiographical problem Arendt was participating

in a widespread and long-standing discourse that presented it as a force unamenable to human

control.66

Such notions were a feature of cultural life in all the countries France, West

Germany and the United States in which she spent significant amounts of time during the

1950s. They were particularly prevalent in Germany.67

During the 1920s and 1930s,

intellectuals such as Ernst Jnger and Oswald Spengler had denounced the materialism and

nihilism of technologically-driven mass society, casting Soviet Russia and America as standard-

bearers for these developments and the principal threat to Germanys role as custodian of

European civilisation.68

Heidegger took a similar line. In Einfhrung in die Metaphysik (1953),

the published version of lectures he originally delivered in 1935, he qualified a laudatory

reference to the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism, with the claim that its

greatness lay in staging an encounter between global technology and modern humanity.69

Europe, he argued, lay in the great pincers between Russia on the one side and America on

the other, both representing the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and rootless

organization of the average man.70

Though intellectuals in West Germany continued to draw close connections between the

hegemony of the United States and global technological development, following the integration

of Germany into American-led political and military alliances, critiques of technology became

64 Hannah Arendt, Science Folder (1951), Arendt Papers, Box 84. 65 Letter, Arendt to Jaspers (February 6, 1955) in Correspondence, 251-2. 66 For the most thorough examination of Arendts engagement with mass society discourse see Peter Baehr, The Masses in Hannah Arendts Theory of Totalitarianism, The Good Society 16.2 (2007): 12-18; See also Peter

Baehr, Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2010). 67 The popularity of these discourses in Germany contributed to the widespread acceptance of a notion that historian Richard Beyler has aptly termed the demon of technology. See Richard Beyler, The Demon of

Technology, Mass Society, and Atomic Physics in West Germany, 1945-1957, History and Technology 19.3

(2003), 2. 68 See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1984); For the relationship between Jnger and Heidegger, see Michael

E Zimmerman, Heideggers Confrontation With Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (Indiana University

Press: 1990); For Spengler, see Dina Gusejnova, Concepts of Culture and Technology in Germany, 1916-1933,

Journal of European Studies 36.1 (2006): 5-30. 69 See Martin Heidegger, Einfhrung in die Metaphysik (Max Niemeyer Verlag: Tbingen, 1953), 152. In Arendts copy of the text, now kept along with the rest of her library in Bard College, NY, this phrase is underlined. 70 Heidegger, Einfhrung in die Metaphysik, 40.

15

less imbued with anti-democratic and anti-Western sentiment.71

Idioms of German

exceptionalism declined as the axis of global struggle swung from German Kultur versus

shallow Western Zivilisation to political freedom versus communist unfreedom.72

This was a

shift to which Arendt had contributed: while discussing German culpability for totalitarianism,

she also analysed it as a European phenomenon that could not be reduced to the idiosyncrasies

of German history.73

Geopolitics and the burden of the Nazi past encouraged German

intellectuals migrs such as herself included to treat technology less as a point of

differentiation within Western Europe and between Europe and America, and more as a

general feature of modernity.

Occupying an interstitial position between the two continents, Arendt argued that though

European fears about American power were misdirected, they merited attention as indicators

of wider historical change. In a trio of essays published in 1954 in the lay Catholic journal

Commonweal, she claimed that the process which Europeans dread as Americanization,

involving runaway economic growth and mass culture, was simply the emergence of the

modern world with all its perplexities and implications.74

The central problems of the

contemporary world, she argued, lay in the political organization of mass societies and the

political integration of technical power.75

These convictions filtered into The Human

Condition. On the prospect of technocratic political rule she wrote in the concluding

statements to the book: It is quite conceivable that the modern age which began with such an

unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity may end in the deadliest, most

sterile passivity history has ever known.76

The most salient influence on this pessimistic

assessment was Max Webers Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904),

particularly his depiction of the shell as hard as steel formed by modernity around the

individual by the demands of socioeconomic life.77

Arendt was also, however critically engaging

with Heideggers writings on technology.

71 Karl Jaspers, for example, favourably disposed towards the United States, wrote in a letter to Arendt in 1950 that if heightening tensions in Korea did not lead to war, it would teach the Americans that a world order cant be

attained with technology alone. Letter, Jaspers to Arendt, (19 August, 1952) Correspondence, 155. 72 Daniel Morat, No Inner Remigration: Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jnger, and the Early Federal Republic of Germany, Modern Intellectual History 9.3 (2012): 661-79. 73 Hannah Arendt, Approaches to the German Problem, in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (Schocken Books: New York, 2005). 74 Arendt, The Threat of Conformism, 426. 75 Ibid., 427. 76 Arendt, Human Condition, 322. 77 In The Human Condition Arendt stated that despite differing with Weber over the meaning of secularisation, she did not want to deny the greatness of his discovery of the enormous power that comes from an

otherworldliness directed toward the world. She had cited his interpretation of the Protestant Ethic as early as

1930, in a review of Karl Mannheims Ideologie und Utopie (1929). See Ibid; Hannah Arendt, Philosophy and

16

Though Heideggers turn from ontological matters in metaphysics to cultural questions had

been in train since the early 1930s, his renewed influence on Arendt was most marked from

1953, the year in which he delivered the lectures Die Frage nach der Technik and

Wissenschaft und Besinnung, and oversaw the first publication of Einfhrung in die

Metaphysik.78

Arendts interests had at this time begun to drift away from Marxism and towards

a wider history of modernity.79

In a survey paper on European thought she delivered at the

American Political Science Association in 1954, she suggested that Heideggers historicity

provided a mode of philosophical and historical analysis suited to examining the processes that

constituted modernity.80

Historicity, Arendt argued, linked insights into the temporally-bound structures of human

life to historical change, without subordinating either to the revelation of a Hegelian absolute.

As a result, Heidegger was highly sensitive to general trends of the time, to all the modern

problems that can be best understood in historical terms, such as the technicalization of the

world, the emergence of one world on a planetary scale, the increasing pressure of society upon

the individual, and the concomitant atomization of society.81

Her summary amalgamated

Heideggers earliest discussions of technology in 1935 with his most recent lectures from 1953.

In Einfhrung in die Metaphysik, Heidegger had written that when the farthest corner of the

globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any

incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you

like, then time became nothing but speed, instaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has

vanished from all Dasein of all peoples.82

Arendt echoed some of these claims in The Human

Sociology, in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed.

Jerome Kohn (Schocken Books: New York, 2005), 40; Max Weber, Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des

Kapitalismus, Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 1 (1904); As Peter Baehr has noted, shell as hard

as steel is a more accurate translation of Webers original phrase stahlhartes Gehuse than the famous rendering

of it as iron cage by Talcott Parsons, which has long since become conventional in social thought. See Peter

Baehr, The Iron Cage and the Shell as Hard as Steel: Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehuse

Metaphor in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, History and Theory 40.2 (2001), 153-54. 78 This dating is suggested by a heavily underlined copy of the first edition of Einfhrung in die Metaphysik, as well as her correspondence with Jaspers and her husband in addition to Heidegger. For a succinct summary of

Heideggers Kehre (turn), see Peter Gordon, Neo-Kantianism and the Politics of Enlightenment, The

Philosophical Forum 39.2 (2008), 226. 79 In a 1954 letter to Heidegger, Arendt stated that the Marx project could not be made concrete without its all becoming endless. See Letter, Hannah Arendt to Martin Heidegger (May 8, 1954) in Ursula Ludz ed. Letters:

1925-1975, Hannah Arendt & Martin Heidegger, trans. Andrew Shields (Harcourt: San Diego, 2004), 120. 80 Arendt, Concern With Politics, 432-35. 81 Ibid., 433. 82 Heidegger, Einfhrung in die Metaphysik, 40.

17

Condition; describing, for example, the relationship between technology, motion and history

through the apparently limitless economic accumulation process.83

Arendt was not simply reiterating Heideggers treatment of technology. In her 1954 paper

she had argued that historicity was fundamentally problematic for the study of history due to its

neglect of the center of politics man as an acting being.84

Historicity avoided the permanent

questions of political science such as What is politics? Who is man as a political being? What

is freedom?.85

Heidegger, she argued, could grasp world-historical processes, but not the

political character of the world that was in the process of being lost. Rather than treating

science and technology in terms of unfolding essences, she sought to stress their contingent

development as part of a parable about the unpredictability of human action. Though still

concerned with totalitarianism, she was responding to a political and cultural situation

dominated by horizons of technological change rather than the immediate threat of barbarism,

seeking to account for what she argued were the real social, economic and perceptual shifts that

had collapsed the distinction between nature and the human world, as opposed to the

ideological glosses on that reality found in Nazi biologism or Marxian labour. By the mid-1950s

she thought that the importance of technology had gone much beyond the now-familiar

debates about the soullessness of a country dominated by modern technology, the monotony of

the uniformity of a society based upon mass-production.86

The advent of quantum mechanics,

nuclear power and spaceflight marked a new epoch. Her suggestion that now-familiar debates

needed to be superseded must be understood in the specific context of nuclear power.87

V. Nuclear power: the bomb that wil l bring us together

Arendts view that contemporary science had entered a new stage of development with

important political consequences must be viewed in light of the prominence of scientific

research in postwar public life. The Second World War had seen enormous increases in

federal funding for practice-oriented research projects in the United States. As tensions with the

Soviet Union heightened, money flowed into organisations and agencies such as the Atomic

Energy Commission and the National Science Foundation and scientists figured increasingly in

83 Arendt, Human Condition, 250. 84 Arendt, Concern With Politics, 453. 85 Ibid., 433. 86 Hannah Arendt, Europe and the Atom Bomb, in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (Schocken Books: New York, 2005), 418. 87 Ibid.

18

public life.88

Equally prominent in the popular imagination, however, were fears of atomic

warfare.89

Positioned between European and American publics, throughout the 1950s Arendt

reflected on the implications of the intertwined political and technological circumstances of the

two continents. Particularly affected by uncertainty in Germany about the interpenetration of

scientific research, technology and politics, in 1954 she noted that a major driving factor in this

was a more general European fear of nuclear destruction.90

Arendts closest interlocutor on the political ramifications of atomic weapons was Karl

Jaspers.91

Despite noting that the destructive power of the bomb was such that its use could not

be countenanced, in an important 1951 essay, Jaspers did not make a case for an outright anti-

nuclear stance. It was inconceivable, he argued, that a world that tolerated forced labour in

concentration camps, deportation of entire population groupsplanned extermination of entire

peoples would be able to eliminate nuclear weapons on a moral basis especially when failed

past attempts to ban destructive weaponry were taken into account.92

He was not, however,

wholly pessimistic. The destructiveness of nuclear weapons might spur a moral transformation

in society; only this could make an end to the bomb possible, or even desirable, given the

totalitarian threat. Jasperss ambivalence reflected international circumstances: he understood

the bomb in part as an unfortunate but necessary instrument to defend Europe from Soviet

expansionism.93

As even more destructive hydrogen bombs were tested by the United States

and the Soviet Union, and civilian uses for atomic energy mooted, Jaspers fleshed out his

stance.

In a radio broadcast in 1956, extended and published as Die Atombombe und die Zukunft

des Menschen (1958), Jaspers expanded on the position he took in 1951.94

Insisting on

disarmament as a precondition for peace his book was awarded the Peace Prize of the

88 Leslie, The Cold War and American Science, 133-59; See also the essays collected in Rosemary B Mariner and G. Kurt Piehler eds. The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives (University of Tennessee Press:

Knoxville, 2009). 89 Cathryn Carson, Science as Instrumental Reason: Heidegger, Habermas, Heisenberg, Continental Philosophical Review 42.4 (2010), 491. 90 Arendt, The Threat of Conformism, 426. 91 Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 300; For a useful treatment of Jasperss thoughts on nuclear technology, see Beyler, The Demon of Technology, 228; For a general overview of Jasperss thought, see Chris Thornhill, Karl

Jaspers: Politics and Metaphysics (Routledge: London, 2002). 92 Karl Jaspers, Rechenschaft und Ausblick (R. Piper: Munich, 1951), 314-15. 93 Ibid. 94 The original radio broadcast was published in 1956. References during the following discussion will refer to the English version, published as The Future of Mankind, which Arendt helped facilitate through University of

Chicago Press. Karl Jaspers, Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen; ein Radiovortag (Munich, 1957);

Karl Jaspers, Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen; Politisches Bewusstsein in unserer Zeit (Munich,

1958); Karl Jaspers, The Future of Mankind, trans. E.B. Ashton (Chicago, 1961). Letter, Arendt to Alexander

Morin (March 8, 1959) Arendt Papers, Box 34, mss. 00048-00049.

19

German book trade he nevertheless made a fundamental distinction between Western

freedom and expansionist Soviet totalitarianism that made unilateral disarmament impossible.

For the time being, the only alternative to living with the atom bomb was Total Rule.95

For his

stance he was heavily criticised by opponents of German rearmament. He was intervening in a

fraught nexus of politics, physics and nuclear technology. In 1953, as part of its New Look

policy, the United States government had proposed placing large numbers of nuclear weapons

in Western Europe, buttressing a strategy of massive retaliation in the event of Soviet

aggression.96

In 1957, the German government announced that it might be necessary to arm the

Bundeswehr with some of these weapons. Amidst increasing controversy, a group of physicists

subsequently known as the Gttingen Eighteen joined to condemn the policy of nuclear

deterrence, splitting public opinion. Despite much support, many Germans regarded them as

nave at best and treasonous at worst.97

Jaspers agreed that deterrence was in the long-run

untenable, but asserted that in the short-run the scientists were being politically irresponsible.98

While sharing some common ground with Jasperss position on nuclear weapons, as she

explained in a 1955 letter to her husband, Heinrich Blcher, Arendt was more forthright in her

criticism of their rationale. In 1954 she had criticised the principle of retaliation embedded in

NATO policy, arguing that the consequences of nuclear warfare, even conducted by the

American Republic, would destroy political life and nullify freedom.99

Deterrence neglected

the unpredictability of politics. Arendt expressed sympathy with the anti-nuclear movement in

Germany whose ranks included her ex-husband, Gnther Anders that Jaspers criticised.100

Shortly before the publication of Jasperss book in Germany in 1958, she wrote to Blcher:

Here in Germany, nothing but nuclear unrest; I am surrounded by people who see it as

hysteria and manoeuvring by the Social Democratic Party. I disagree.101

Nevertheless, she

argued that the totalitarian world was reconciled to the possibility that any future large-scale

war would harbour a threat of destruction to the existence of mankind, even to the existence of

95 Jaspers, The Future of Mankind, 110-11, 160-173. 96 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: a Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2005), 125-96. 97 Beyler, The Demon of Technology, 232-34. 98 Jaspers, The Future of Mankind, 160-73; Cathryn Carson, Heisenberg in the Atomic Age: Science and the Public Sphere (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2010), 325-26. 99 Arendt, Europe and the Atom Bomb, 420. 100 See Holger Nehring, Cold War, Apocalypse and Peaceful Atoms: Interpretations of Nuclear Energy in the British and West German Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movements, 1955-1964, Historical Social Research 29.3

(2004): 150-70; Paul van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology: the Philosophical Contribution of

Gnther Anders (Rodopi: Amsterdam, 2000), 52-61. 101 Letter, Arendt to Blcher (May 19, 1958), Within Four Walls, 318.

20

organic life on earth.102

Despite her sympathy for the anti-nuclear movement, she shared

Jasperss conviction that deterrence and the bomb were contemporary geopolitical facts that

could and should not be reversed.

The bomb also betokened an atomic era of wider import. Arendt and Jaspers feared that

by reducing the need for labour, atomic energy would accelerate processes leading to the

superfluity of individuals who, as Jaspers put it, might succumb to rage at a liberation that

destroyed the traditional ways of work and life.103

Neither, however, saw this era as a

straightforward extension of the technical development of mass society; the threat of total

annihilation set it apart. Jaspers, arguing that the world peace required for the elimination of the

bomb cannot be achieved in laws and treaties alonewithout a change in man, suggested that

the threat might bring about radical ethical action and the founding of cosmopolitan and

philosophically-grounded republics.104

Arendt, though less sanguine, expressed a similar hope.

By putting in jeopardy the survival of mankind and not only individual life orthe life of a

whole people, she argued, the atom bomb might transform the individual mortal man into a

conscious member of the human race, of whose immortality he needs to be sure in order to be

courageous at all and for whose survival he must care more than for anything else.105

If

totalitarian attempts at world domination had brought about the recognition of a common

humanity, the bomb might turn individuals into cosmopolitans forced to view the political

world from the perspective of mankind.

The idea that atomic danger might bring new possibilities in mans relationship to nature

and technology was also expressed by Heidegger. In Die Frage nach der Technik he

suggested a relationship between extreme danger though not to be understood in the literal

sense of nuclear devastation and a saving power that would allow humans to gain an

authentic relationship to technology and the world.106

Yet the notion of historicity that framed

his approach, Arendt argued, neglected the contingency of the historical developments that

defined mans present relation to technology, and their beginnings in human action.107

For

similarly political reasons, she found Jasperss response to the nuclear age unsatisfactory.

Writing to Blcher in 1958, she described Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen as

102 Hannah Arendt, Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution, The Journal of Politics 20.1 (1958), 20. 103 Jaspers, The Future of Mankind, 178-79. 104 Ibid., 187. 105 Hannah Arendt, Dream and Nightmare, in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (Schocken Books: New York, 2005), 422. 106 Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach der Technik, in Vortrage und Aufsatze (Neske: Pfullingen, 1954), 99-100. 107 Arendt, Concern With Politics, 433.

21

an exceptional book, but added: if he would only refrain from all the moralizing; but he cant,

thats precisely what is most important to him.108

She had previously chided Jaspers for his

substitution of ethics for politics in discussing German guilt, something Blcher had also found

infuriating.109

By the mid-1950s, the political problems raised by nuclear weapons had

encouraged Arendt to balance moralising on the dangers of new technology with a historical

understanding grounded in theoretical physics and the history of science. In the last half of The

Human Condition she presented a philosophical and historical investigation of the relationship

between human beings and nature, framed by contemporary physics and the belief that the

universal perspective now forced upon politics was tied to the emergence of universal science

through earth alienation.110

VI. Mathematisation of the world

As scholars have noted, The Human Condition is focused less on politics itself than on the

spaces necessary for its practice.111

In narrating how these spaces had become swamped by

large-scale social and economic processes, Arendt presented a cautionary history of the human

capacity for action. This capacity had been channelled into scientific endeavour as action into

nature, setting off unpredictable processes while fostering the illusion of instrumental control.112

At the root of these changes lay the development of earth alienation.113

Arendts conception of

earth, devoid of connotations of place, dwelling or homeliness, reflected a wariness of

valorising blood and soil and eliding the distinction between the human and the natural.114

She

instead attached these characteristics to her humanist concept of the world.115

Though

influenced by Heideggers criticism of modern representations of the world as a Weltbild, she

was careful to distinguish between world and earth alienation, and in historicising the latter

shied away from granting the earth any originary meaning prior to its alienation.116

She only

108 Letter, Arendt to Blcher (June 24, 1958), Within Four Walls, 331. 109 Anson Rabinbach, The German as Pariah: Karl Jasperss the Question of German Guilt, in In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (University of California Press:

Berkeley, 2000), 148-52. 110 Arendt, Human Condition, 268-325. 111 Canovan, A Reinterpretation, 99-154; Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendts Concept of the Social (University of Chicago Press: London, 1998), 98-115. 112 Arendt, Human Condition, 52. 113 Ibid., 264. 114 See Macauley, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Place: From Earth Alienation to Oikos, 103-104. 115 Arendt, Human Condition, 7. 116 As David Macauley notes, Arendt was wary of the vlkisch connotations of Heideggers use of earth. It should be noted, however, that she made this judgment during the late 1940s, when she was highly critical of Heideggers

work. As her correspondence in the early 1950s shows, she became more positively inclined towards his thought.

22

discussed the earth in the alienated sense she claimed it was given by early-modern science;

located in universal space and measured or viewed from a perspective outside itself.117

Though Arendt described them as of minor significance in comparison with earth

alienation, the two other forms of alienation that she referred to in The Human Condition

inner and world are essential to understanding her notion of earth alienation.118

Rooted in her

critique of Marxs concept of labour and work from Totalitarian Elements of Marxism, they

formed the core of her account of modernity. World alienation, produced in the twofold

process of expropriation and wealth accumulation following the Reformation, saw peasant and

church lands expropriated and sucked into globalising markets.119

These changes, accelerated

by the Industrial Revolution, were grounded in repetitive, quasi-biological processes of labour

that undermined the permanence and stability of the human world by absorbing worldly

objects tools, clothing, dwellings into cycles of production, consumption and

obsolescence.120

While her narrative reflected a sympathetic view of Marxs political economy,

Arendts concepts of world and inner alienation owed more to Weber, in particular his notion

of inner-worldly asceticism from Die Protestantische Ethik.121

To illustrate inner alienation, Arendt referred to the withdrawal from terrestrial proximity

fostered by cartography and the exploration of the world, which put a decisive distance

between man and earthalienating man from his immediate earthly surroundings.122

This was

estrangement from the natural and human world rather than Marxian alienation from the

product of ones labour.123

Inner and world alienation encouraged a flight from the whole outer

world into the inner subjectivity of the individual, which formerly had been sheltered and

protected by the private realm.124

The result was the modern discovery of intimacy that drove

nineteenth-century Romanticism and contemporary psychological speculation on inner life in

mass societies.125

Arendts depiction of the effects of social and economic change on human

See Hannah Arendt, What is Existential Philosophy?, in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954:

Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (Schocken Books: New York, 2005), 181; Arendt,

Concern With Politics, 432. 117 See Macauley, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Place: From Earth Alienation to Oikos, 108. 118 Arendt, Human Condition, 264. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid., 118-35. 121 Max Weber, Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 1 (1904), 53-125. 122 Ibid., 251. 123 Arendt, Denktagebuch, 106, 112. 124 Arendt, Human Condition, 69. 125 Ibid. See also Arendt, Denktagebuch, 52, 106, 112; Arendt was dismissive of psychoanalysis. Letter, Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers (13 May, 1953), Correspondence, 213; Her biography of the Jewish salon hostess Rahel

Varnhagen dealt with the Romantic notion of intimacy in detail. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: the Life of a

Jewess, trans. R. and C. Winston (San Diego, 1974).

23

consciousness was a history of the present; both communist and democratic societies albeit to

differing degrees prioritised economic growth while rejecting the need to sustain public

spaces for political action, the only sure bulwark, in her view, against totalitarianism.126

Earth alienation overlapped chronologically and thematically with inner and world

alienation, beginning with the exploration of the world and invention of the telescope. The

invention of the telescope in particular, Arendt argued, spurred the development of modern

science, premised on the adoption of the Archimedean point, a subject position lying outside

the earth.127

To explain this, she drew on sources in the history and philosophy of science,

especially the work of American philosophers Edwin Burtt, Alfred North Whitehead, and

above all, French philosopher of science, Alexandre Koyr. Having met in the 1930s in Paris,

during the 1950s Arendt and Koyr met several times and exchanged regular

correspondence.128

Her narrative of the history of science drew extensively on his From the

Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957).129

The similarities in the framework with which

they approached the history of science can be seen in the opening pages of Koyrs book.

In terms Arendt would draw upon to depict the effects of world alienation, Koyr had

declared his intention to historicise the seventeenth century changes that led to man losing his

place in the world, or more correctlythe very world in which he was living.130

He examined

the changes wrought by Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and other figures in early modern

philosophy and science, leading to the eclipse of a closed, ordered notion of the world by a

conception of the universe characterised by never-ending geometrically-understood space.131

During 1956 and 1957, Arendt began to read the works of early-modern science and

contemporary commentaries used by Koyr for his argument, taking notes in particular on

Copernicuss On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (1543), Keplers The New

Astronomy (1609) and Galileos The Starry Messenger (1610).132

In The Vita Activa and the Modern Age, the final section of The Human Condition,

Arendt acknowledged that she was in part following Koyrs argument. Copernican astronomy,

she claimed, had needed no telescope to assert that, contrary to all sense experience, it is not

126 Arendt, Human Condition, 31. 127 Ibid., 248, 262-3, 284-5. 128 Hannah Arendt, Correspondence with Alexandre Koyr 1951-1963, Arendt Papers, Box 12. 129 This text was based on lectures he gave in 1953. Alexandre Koyr, From the Closed World to Infinite Universe (The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1968). 130 Ibid., 2. 131 Ibid.. 132 Hannah Arendt, Science - Excerpts and Notes (undated), Arendt Papers, Box 84, mss. 027308, 027310-027317, 02789-027293

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the sun that moves around the earth but the earth that circles the sun.133

Though the

heliocentric system was ancient, the philosophical speculations of Nicholas of Cusa and

Giordano Bruno and the mathematically-trained imagination of the astronomers Copernicus

and Kepler were vital in mounting a vigorous new challenge to the finite, geocentric world-view

which men had held since time immemorial.134

A historian looking for the unfolding of ideas

with predictable courses, Arendt argued, might therefore conclude that empirical confirmation

was unimportant in discrediting the geocentric system. Like Koyr, Arendt thought that the

astronomy of Kepler and most importantly, Copernicus in his Siderus Nuncius (1610) marked

a decisive shift away from geocentric conceptions of the universe.135

Arendt placed more stress than Koyr on the role of the telescope in aiding the ascent of

heliocentrism. Drawing on Burtts claim in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science

(1932) that the influence of philosophers such as Giordano Bruno was felt only after the

telescope confirmed the claims of their speculations, she argued that its use brought about the

abandonment of geocentrism and constituted the decisive event of the modern age.136

She was

applying her category of event to the history of science. For Arendt, events were constellations

of human acts and unpredictable consequences, inexplicable through causality alone, but

capable of beginning chains of further events that allowed the identification of an unbroken

continuity, in which precedents exist and predecessors can be named.137

The telescope, and

Galileos subsequent discoveries alongside the discovery of the Americas and exploration of

the earth were events, but not in the same way as political phenomena such as the French

Revolution.138

Earth alienation revolutionised mans relationship to nature and the world

through scientific action. Arendt described a modern form of action that had superseded that

found in the ancient world of the polis.

By the mid-1950s totalitarianism seemed less threatening to Arendt than hydrogen fusion,

whose implications were clear from the first hydrogen bomb tests by the United States in 1952

and the Soviet Union in 1953. By 1954, attempts to harness the energy produced by hydrogen

fusion for civilian use were receiving significant attention from the press. In West Germany,

leading scientists including Werner Heisenberg who, as we shall see, would be a major

133 Arendt, Human Condition, 258; For Koyr on Copernicus, see Koyr, From the Closed World, 34-35. 134 Arendt, Human Condition, 258. 135 Ibid. 136 Edwin Arthur Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (Anchor: New York, 1932); Arendt, Human Condition, 273. 137 Hannah Arendt, Copernicus and Galileo, Science - Excerpts and Notes, Arendt Papers, Box 84. 138 At the start of The Vita Activa and the Modern Age, Arendt uses the French Revolution as an example of a quintessential modern event. Arendt, Human Condition, 248.

25

influence on Arendts reading of modern science made advances in fusion research at the

Max Planck Institute of Physics.139

The process of releasing energy through the fusion of

hydrogen into helium, she noted, replicated processes that took place in the sun; it appeared to

transcend the limits of the natural world as given to human beings.140

The acceleration of earth

alienation and pre-eminence of notions of process dominated the atomic era. Treating these

developments as irreversible, she did not suggest a return to Aristotelian forms of

understanding nature that might parallel the Greek view of the polis. Instead she looked for an

answer to the universal perspective from within the history of universal science. She would

find one in the development of modern physics.

Perhaps the greatest change wrought by these changes, she argued, was the shift from a

natural to a universal science. The erosion of geocentrism allowed the circumvention of the

sensory limitations of the body, enabling the observation and explanation of nature as if from

an Archimedean point located outside the earth. This innovation, clarified in philosophical

language permeated by scientific terminology, allowed humans to conceive of themselves as

moving freely in the universe, choosing our point of reference wherever it may be convenient

for a specific purpose.141

Whilst inner alienation sanctioned a withdrawal from terrestrial

proximity, earth alienation positively demanded that man orient himself from the universal

standpoint, the Archimedean point lying outside the world.142

The resulting drive to mastery of

the earth was a rejection of aspects of the human condition that entailed humans being

earthbound and subject to contingency. It enabled enormous technological advances,

subjecting the earth and mankind itself to human control, and ultimately prepared the way for

nuclear technology and spaceflight.143

These changes marked a shift from Aristotelian notions of nature to mechanistic and

mathematised hypotheses underwritten by the practices of experimental science. While claims

concerning the neo-Aristotelian tenor of Arendts political thought have been overstated, she

was undoubtedly committed to the idea of political communities rooted in a stabilising

139 See Reimar Lst, Heisenberg and the Scientists Responsibility in Fundamental Physics, eds. Gerd W. Buschhorn and Julius Wess (Springer: London, 2004) 15-23. For Arendts contemporaneous references to

Heisenberg, see Arendt, Human Condition, 261; Hannah Arendt, History and Immortality, Partisan Review

24.1 (1957), 86; Hannah Arendt, The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern, in Between Past and Future:

Eight Exercises in Political Thought (Penguin: New York, 2006), 86. 140 Arendt, Human Condition, 231. 141 Ibid., 263. 142 Ibid., 264. 143 Ibid., 257-68.

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relationship with nature.144

The polis was one such form of community, but similar sentiments

also shaped the contrast she drew between modern science and the stable relationship between

natural and human domains found in the ancient world. Prior to the telescope and modern

experimental science, Aristotelianism had understood nature as purposive and embedded in

qualitatively differentiated space.145

Earth alienation supplanted Aristotelian conceptions with an understanding of nature as a

range of universal processes located in infinite and homogenous space. Arendt took the radical

disregard of the Galilean method for the sensual and material reality of nature as axiomatic,

promising to deliver the secrets of the universe to cognition with the certainty of sense-

perception.146

These changes in thought were accompanied by experimental practices that

prescribed man-thought conditions to natural processes and forced them to fall into man-made

patterns, recreating them in the laboratory.147

Arendts reference points were Francis Bacon

and Isaac Newton. In the experiment, she wrote,

man realized his newly won freedom from the shackles of earth-bound experience; instead of

observing natural phenomena as they were given to him, he placed nature under the conditions

of his own mind, that is, under conditions won from a universal, astrophysical viewpoint, a

cosmic standpoint outside nature itself.148

Koyr had claimed that geometrical and mathematised conceptions of the world had

resulted in the utter devalorization of being, the divorce of the world of value and the world of

fact.149

Arendt agreed, but rather than lingering on the loss of meaning and value in a

scientifically-understood world, she discussed new sources of meaning derived from nature that

had shaped modern understandings of history and action. Drawing on Whiteheads claim that

nature is a process, she made the notion of processes central to this new meaning and action

produced by experimental science.150

The need for experiments to recreate the process of making by which natural objects

came into existence fostered an understanding of the world in terms of processes. The

144 For a critique of the neo-Aristotelian reading of Arendt put forward by theorists such as Habermas, see Dana R Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: the Fate of the Political (Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 1996), 78. 145 For this she drew heavily upon S. Samburskys The Physical World of