11 - Hannah Arendt between Europe and America: Optimism in Dark Times

Summary

Affecting to make sense of Hannah Arendt, every scholar tends to disclose herself, every writer (as Richard Bernstein rightly says) finds he is telling a story. Here is mine: In 1968, when I was writing my first published work to be called “Conceptual Foundations of Totalitarianism,” a critique of the term totalitarianism as it was being used by social scientists during the Cold War to mark the Soviet Union as a Nazi-like regime, I read The Origins of Totalitarianism, just seventeen years after it had been published. Over the summer of 2006, nearly forty years later, I read it again, this time against the backdrop of a new war on terrorism, a war against a “Islamofascist totalitarian” enemy. Like so many young political theorists, I was a fan of Arendt on democracy back then; but I was far less sympathetic to her book on totalitarianism. Over time, however, while I did not come to share all of Arendt's political opinions, living as I do in the building on Riverside Drive where she lived, in the same line and just two stories above the apartment where she died, I do quite literally nowadays share her “view.” The result of these quirky facts is this chapter, more sympathetic to Arendt than I might have thought possible before I started to write it.

It is a chapter about how Hannah Arendt's deep European pessimism, so heartbreakingly grounded in her European experience, was palliated by a newly acquired American optimism, rooted – if not in the black and white realities of American history (which she tended to colorize) – in her own liberating American experience. It is meant to help us understand the place of her seminal work on totalitarianism in the scheme of her thinking, and hence help us understand the term itself. This focus allows the chapter, if only incidentally in terms of its primary analysis, to illuminate and rebut sundry claims made today by increasingly hysterical critics of Islamic fundamentalism. These critics toss around terms like “Islamofascism” and “totalitarianism” in a manner that obfuscates the nature of the threat we face even as it distorts the conversation about totalitarianism that has been under way since the early 1930s, when The International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences first gave the novel term currency.