We Are Free to Change the World:
Hannah Arendts Lessons in Love and Disobedience
by lyndsey stonebridge
hogarth, 368 pages, $32
One of the greatest beneficiaries of Donald Trump’s 2016 election was Hannah Arendt—or at least, her literary estate. In the first year of Trump’s presidency, sales of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism soared by 1,000 percent. New editions of Arendt’s works appeared, in which intellectual celebrities argued that Arendt’s reflections on totalitarianism anticipated all the great ills of the present, from Trump’s America to Putin’s Russia. These commentators saw themselves as engaged actors, using Arendt to launch a new political resistance.
Lyndsey Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham, owes the inspiration for her book to this post-2016 moment. We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience begins by invoking the 2016 election and the renewed interest in Arendt’s work prompted by this purported crisis. In the first few pages alone, there are several familiar references to “climate apocalypse,” “post-truth,” and “the age of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.” Stonebridge writes earnestly about the importance of “combating populism” and “jump-starting social democracy.” America takes center stage as a country “that is reckoning (or refusing to reckon) with its violently racist history.” The book also contains cameo appearances from the contemporary leftist canon of heroes and villains, with some curious glosses. Elon Musk’s ambitions to relaunch space exploration make him an imperialist, a new Cecil Rhodes. Volodymyr Zelensky is rebranded as “Jewish-Ukrainian,” a spokesman for hyphenated identity and pluralism. Joe Biden turns up as an intellectually curious young senator requesting a copy of one of Arendt’s speeches—a hopeful hint that under his presidential leadership, America might finally turn a corner.
From its early pages, one might expect We Are Free to Change the World to be yet another tedious distillation of leftist clichés, but Stonebridge mostly spares her readers. Although her book belongs to the genre of #Resist, it is elegantly written. Instead of a clumsy “If Arendt were alive today . . .” tract, Stonebridge offers a conversational, personal reflection on Arendt’s life and work. She generally distinguishes her own conclusions from Arendt’s and avoids straightforward political commands. As befits the genre, the book has an obvious political angle, but because Stonebridge largely takes for granted an ideologically sympathetic audience, she is not heavy-handed. As exposition, We Are Free to Change the World renders Arendt legible, mesmerizing, and relevant to those beset by the anxieties of contemporary leftism. Yet the book has a greater significance. It inadvertently exposes the fault lines between Arendt’s thinking on the totalitarian phenomenon and that of the contemporary left.
Born in 1906 in Germany, Arendt grew up mostly in Königsberg, Immanuel Kant’s hometown. Her early interests were philosophical, but she also showed a habit of contrarian fortitude. Her parents taught her that if her teachers made antisemitic remarks, she was to leave class, go home, and report exactly what was said, so that her mother could protest to the authorities. Yet if her schoolmates united against her in antisemitic taunts, she was not to withdraw but to confront them directly, asserting her Jewishness. As Arendt would later say, being a Jew was one of the “indisputable facts” of her life, not something to change or disclaim. She had “a basic gratitude for everything that is as it is; for what is given and not made.” Jewishness, like womanhood, was a received part of her being, something that demanded a response of thanksgiving; it was not a category for identitarian victimhood. This disposition goes a long way to clarifying Arendt’s often tense relationship with other Jewish or feminist thinkers.
At eighteen, Arendt left home to study theology, philosophy, and Greek philology. A gifted student, she attracted the attention of one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers, Martin Heidegger. Stonebridge recounts their love affair in terms that, perhaps justly, favor Arendt and diminish Heidegger. Arendt’s fondness for Heidegger’s thinking and for the man himself persisted long after the Second World War—a fact that has embarrassed many of Arendt’s disciples, who would have preferred her to follow antifascist fashions and publicly denounce him. It is to Arendt’s credit that she could always distinguish Heidegger’s politics from his philosophical brilliance.
In 1933, while Heidegger dallied with National Socialism, Arendt left Germany for France, and when the German army followed her there, she fled to the United States, where she spent the rest of her life. Although Arendt joined the social milieu of northeastern liberal intellectuals, she disavowed the central tenets of liberal politics. “I never believed in liberalism,” she later said. “When I came to this country I wrote in my very halting English a Kafka article, and they had it ‘Englished’ for the Partisan Review. And when I came to talk to them about the Englishing I read the article and there of all things the word ‘progress’ appeared. I said: ‘What do you mean by this, I never used that word,’ and so on. And then one of the editors went to the other in another room, and left me there, and I overheard him say, in a tone of despair, ‘She doesn’t even believe in progress.’”
The allied victory in the Second World War was followed by an outburst of optimism. That triumph remains the lodestar of modern progressivism, which is why so many critics of post-2016 politics hearken back to the postwar moment to rally their cause. To them, it provides a ready-made political script for remaking the world according to the tenets of liberal internationalism, which will always succeed, provided irrational populists or authoritarians don’t get in the way.
Not so for Arendt. Whereas others saw the postwar moment as an unmitigated triumph, she saw it as an indication of utter ruin. Arendt spent the immediate postwar moment writing The Origins of Totalitarianism, which first appeared in 1951. She portrayed totalitarianism as emerging from a sweeping, centuries-long social and political breakdown, from which, she contended, the West might never recover. Stonebridge, a perceptive reader of Arendt on this point, argues that Arendt’s basic insight on the postwar situation was simple yet devastating: “Western culture was completely wrecked.” If Arendt is right, then the fact that this wreckage is still with us means that totalitarianism hasn’t been banished. It can all too easily ascend again. However, few of her contemporaries wished to ponder this prospect. Postwar experiments in existentialism turned this modern catastrophe into a personal problem. Enthusiasts for human rights law turned it into an administrative problem. These were but two of the many ways in which the postwar West blinded itself to what had gone wrong in its politics.
Rather, as Heidegger argued that Western philosophy had distorted the meaning of Being, so Arendt came to believe that the tradition of political philosophy had lost sight of the meaning of politics. The Platonic impulse was either to turn away from politics as a lesser activity than that practiced by the philosopher, or to return to politics in order to impose the philosopher’s standards on human affairs. The Marxist reaction—the decision to abjure philosophy and “change the world”—was no better, because it subordinated thinking to political objectives. As her unpublished writings make clear, Arendt was fascinated by another approach: that of Socrates, who understood thinking and politics as distinct human activities.
According to Arendt, Socratic thinking is a temporary withdrawal from the world, a silent dialogue conducted with the self in order to see things as they really are. This interior examination is also the requirement for moral action that builds up a common world. Socrates discovered conscience, although he did not call it such. The reason you should not kill, even when nobody can see you, is that you cannot possibly wish to conduct this silent dialogue with a murderer. By murdering, you deliver your thinking to the company of a murderer for as long as you live.
From the Socratic point of view, then, the great danger is thoughtlessness—the refusal to enact this inner dialogue with oneself. The thoughtless person would be capable of anything. Focused as he was on awakening others from slumber, Socrates did not want to play a political role in the sense of helping to install new rulers or being a ruler himself. He wanted to be a gadfly, Arendt argued, “to make everyone around him, and first of all himself, more truthful.”
Stonebridge grasps the importance of Socrates, but she turns him into an intellectual insurgent, a freedom fighter whose goal is “goading people into discovering freedom in acts of thoughtful resistance.” Stonebridge’s Socrates is destined for a showdown with the Athenian state, a corrupt democracy governed exclusively by men. And his execution, which rather than flee he accepts on his own terms, shows him exercising “his freedom from the state.”
This interpretation is commonplace for modern American readers of Plato’s Apology, but it is not Arendt’s reading. It puts thinking at the service of politics. It distances Socrates from Arendt—who chose to flee from tyrannical states. And by downplaying Socrates’s role as “gadfly,” it misses something about Arendt’s great intellectual controversies.
In the late 1950s, American liberals were celebrating Brown v. Board of Education and the newly discovered power of the Supreme Court to desegregate Southern schools. Arendt contradicted them by publishing “Reflections on Little Rock.” She argued that court-enforced desegregation was the wrong way to end Jim Crow: not just because the Court ruling might not work in practice, but because it dissolved the distinction between the political realm of equality, where sameness is expected, and the social realm of education, where parents decide how their children are instructed (and therefore where difference is expected). Moreover, it undermined both federalism and freedom of association. (Arendt would have preferred that the Court overturn miscegenation laws, since they violated freedom of association by preventing interracial couples from marrying.)
Arendt made some factual errors in her argument about court-ordered school desegregation, and, true to the Socratic spirit, later modified her position. But some of her doubts were vindicated. In the segregated Southern states, ten years after Brown was decided, only 1.2 percent of black children attended schools with white children. Arendt saw that the court-enforced civil rights project contained delicate trade-offs in essential constitutional freedoms, which could not be cleanly resolved. Moreover, Brown marked the beginning of the end of public trust in the progressive project of government-provided (but not federal government–controlled) schooling. Since Brown, education has become one of the most ferocious battlegrounds at all levels of American politics. As Arendt anticipated, the disputes hinge on whether it is federal judges and bureaucrats, or parents and elected local representatives, who are ultimately in charge of schools.
But nothing Arendt wrote on Brown compared to the firestorm caused by her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which Arendt described one of the chief engineers of the Holocaust as a mediocre, “banal” bureaucrat. Her critics believed she was downplaying Eichmann’s responsibility. In fact, Arendt was trying to do the opposite: She aimed to develop a new moral vocabulary that could properly address the enormity of his crimes. Eichmann exemplified “thoughtlessness.” He was incapable of having the Socratic dialogue with himself. Nevertheless, a concerted campaign was launched to destroy Arendt’s academic reputation. At its peak, this campaign involved an international anti-Arendt lecture series and four different Jewish organizations that hired scholars to go through her work, line-by-line, to find mistakes.
Following Arendt’s biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Stonebridge observes that many of Arendt’s critics were upset less by what she said than by how she said it. They misunderstood Arendt’s irony, another Socratic trait. Arendt came to realize that her irony did not always serve her well. In a television interview in 1971, she said that she regretted using the word “banality” in Eichmann’s case, not so much because it offended, but because it led to misleading accounts of the modern phenomenon she was trying to describe. But as with so much in her thought, Arendt never resolved this issue. That was mostly deliberate. As she put it in an address at Princeton University in 1973, two years before her death, the results of thinking are always liable to be questioned, “to be subjected again to the thinking process.”
The challenge in reading Arendt’s work is to allow ourselves to be questioned by it. Herein lies the real failing of We Are Free to Change the World. Stonebridge gleefully unsettles right-wing beliefs and assumptions. But she shields her own political priors from Arendtian scrutiny. As a result, she misses some of Arendt’s shrewdest insights into the totalitarian phenomenon and its origins.
Take, for instance, Stonebridge’s commentary on sovereignty. Arendt regarded sovereignty as an illusory concept, bound up with a notion of freedom as individual will. In both cases, as she puts it in The Human Condition, one aspires for an impossible ideal of “uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership” that contradicts the “human condition of plurality.” Arendt’s critique is especially pertinent, Stonebridge argues, to an era in which we hear all “about taking back control, being great again, and shoring up borders.” Brexit and Trump, in other words, arise from a foolish longing for sovereignty. But Stonebridge doesn’t bother to ask which institutions these movements are revolting against.
If she had, she might have noted one of Arendt’s recurring themes: the totalitarian potential of bureaucratic governance. Bureaucracy is the system of government that, through a myriad of confusing institutions, ensures that neither one, nor the few, nor the many can be held responsible. It is rule by Nobody, and is therefore, under the classical definition of tyranny, “the most tyrannical of all,” because no one is left to give an account of the exercise of power. It is literally unaccountable. This condition is, Arendt goes on to say, “among the most potent causes of the current world-wide rebellious unrest.” Writing at the very end of the 1960s, Arendt sees the popular revolt against unaccountable bureaucracies as one of the most important emerging political dynamics. This analysis provides a good way to understand much of what has happened in the world since then.
In an aside, Stonebridge acknowledges that Arendt “would have disliked the over-bureaucratized European Union of the 2000s,” but this concession shields bureaucratic governance from real censure. Arendt’s thinking can help us see that the intensification of bureaucratic control in Europe is one of the great transformations of our time, as it represents the loss of participatory democracy on a continental scale. Contemporary populists are not trying to manifest dreams of absolute domination; they seek to recover participatory democracy while we still have a collective memory of what that practice looks like. Yet to analyze this effort would involve a more sympathetic account of populism than Stonebridge is willing to consider.
Stonebridge can’t give a sympathetic account of this populist struggle against elites because she regards it as an expression of racism—itself presumed to be the chief precursor to totalitarianism. Racism is certainly an important part of Arendt’s argument, but its connection to totalitarianism is, in her account, much more subtle. Origins begins with an analysis of modern antisemitism, culminating in an examination of France’s infamous Dreyfus affair, in which the framing of a Jewish officer became a dividing line in French society and a proxy war for conflicts about the status of the army and the Church. As Arendt showed, the affair revealed that hatred of Jews could mobilize large swathes of the population.
But as is so often the case in her work, Arendt saw several other aspects to the story. Most critically, the conflict exposed the inefficacy of France’s republican institutions. The minority fighting for Dreyfus had to do so outside of parliament; when parliament finally intervened on Dreyfus’s behalf, it did so by offering “an ambiguous pardon” and “even more ambiguous amnesty.” The political classes celebrated this resolution of the controversy as the great victory of French republican institutions, but their celebrations concealed the critical failure of their political system.
For Stonebridge, however, the Dreyfus affair is about only one thing: “an early demonstration of how easy it was to whip up a racist mob by capitalizing on the widespread dislike of social elites.” This reading misses Arendt’s focus on political institutions; it also oversimplifies her class analysis. In Arendt’s telling, high society and the underworld in France “were so closely bound together” that the anti-Dreyfusards could not simply be placed in elite or popular classes.
By placing the responsibility for the origins of totalitarianism on the racist many, Stonebridge’s version of Arendt reassures the educated few. The presumption is that elites are not responsible for creating the circumstances that make totalitarianism possible. This portrayal diverts attention from the two phenomena Arendt wanted to study: how potentially destructive mass movements garner support from high society, and how most elites prefer not to see—let alone address—the erosion of the political institutions they mythologize (“our democracy”).
The Origins of Totalitarianism is, in no small part, a book about racism. In Part II, Arendt describes the emergence of racism alongside imperialism. Is she, then, rehearsing the common argument that nationalism leads to racist imperialism leads to totalitarianism? Stonebridge says as much. White supremacy, she argues, is a story invented by nations suffering from a psychic inferiority complex (nations “far from secure in themselves”). She concludes that “Racism was the catastrophe” that befell the West in the twentieth century. And she cites Arendt to make the point: “Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization.” It’s a powerful pull quote. But the context of Arendt’s observation is worth examining, because Stonebridge errs in two respects.
First, Arendt’s account focuses on the ways in which racial categories and bureaucracy work together. Racial categories are a bureaucratic reaction to tribes “of whose humanity European man [is] ashamed and frightened.” Bureaucracy serves as the impersonal tool by which one cohort rules another cohort it regards as inferior yet deserving of special protection. In an important respect, bureaucracy serves a moral need in modernity. It “is the result of a responsibility” that no man or people can bear for another. This moral need works in concert with conceits about historical necessity, another impersonal force that helpfully lifts the weight of moral responsibility—the weight of freedom—from our shoulders. “At the basis of bureaucracy as a form of government,” Arendt writes, “lies this superstition of a possible and magic identification of man with the forces of history.”
Bureaucratic governance offers itself as a comprehensive form of social control that arranges and rearranges its subjects so as to execute the laws of history, to realize history’s inner meaning. Arendt perceived that the very thing bureaucrats pride themselves on—their determination not to be affected by the supplications of their clients and to offer aloof and often anonymous treatment—actually separates them from their subjects and ensures that they cease to inhabit a common world with them. This mode of governance leaves no space for participatory democracy or even the acknowledgement of such possibilities. Race and class categorizations fit perfectly into this scheme, because they provide reasons to develop new forms of administrative control that annihilate the remnants of a common human world. This is why bureaucracy is so vulnerable to totalitarian movements: It intensifies human loneliness.
There is a second mistake in Stonebridge’s reading of Arendt’s remark on racism. Arendt portrays modern racism as a consequence of other catastrophes. One is the breakdown of national identities and nationalism—not their strengthening. The full passage is as follows:
Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization. When Russians have become Slavs, when Frenchmen have assumed the role of commanders of a force noire, when Englishmen have turned into ‘white men,’ as already for a disastrous spell all Germans became Aryans, then this change will itself signify the end of Western man.
Arendt is drawing attention to the breakdown of the communities that made modern republican politics possible. She warns of the demise of citizenship and the rise of movements that purport to transcend the ties of civic communities—the rise, in other words, of what we now call “identity.” As she recognized, the racist movements that National Socialism inflamed emerged after the breakdown of the European nation-state. That breakdown made the Nazi takeover possible. Nationalism was an obsolete tool taken up by the Nazis, then discarded. Blood superseded soil. Stonebridge seems unable to entertain the possibility that something similar is happening in what passes for progressive politics today.
Arendt views totalitarianism as emerging out of the breakdown of group loyalties and communities, a breakdown she sees as a consequence of Western uprootedness and as culminating in the loss of the common world that makes politics possible. Loneliness becomes not a marginal but an everyday experience. Yet Stonebridge bypasses this analysis. She ties the origins of totalitarianism to nationalism and racism—not, as does Arendt, to the general disintegration of a shared life in which “ordinary” politics is possible. As a result, nationalism appears to Stonebridge more significant and more aggressive than the totalitarian movements themselves. This explains how she can draw the astonishing conclusion that “Putin’s claims on Ukraine were even more imperialist than those of the Bolsheviks.”
Leftists are right to think that the degeneration of Western political culture lends a fresh importance to Arendt. But though their reflections can remind us of the richness of Arendt’s thought, their preoccupations expose the poverty of their own. In the Arendtesque literature of #Resist, one accounts for the origins of totalitarianism by reducing it to nationalist and racist upsurges. This is a dubious reading of Arendt. But the deeper problem is that it turns attention away from the increasingly tyrannical political forms that now strangle real political life in the West. They render participatory democracy impossible, more often than not in the name of antiracism and antifascism. Instead of examining the responsibility of social elites and their manifest failures as the source of our present political woes, we are to content ourselves with blaming the racist and fascist masses.
This narrative reinforces the insolence of contemporary elites and confirms them in their thoughtlessness. Thus they become capable of anything as they exercise their prerogative to fortify the bureaucratic rule of Nobody.
Nathan Pinkoski is research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Politics at Saint Patrick’s Seminary.
Image provided by flickr, public domain. Image cropped.
