The Religion of Politics: Reflections on the Thought of Hannah Arendt
Schwartz, Benjamin I.
Reflections on the Thought of Hannah Arendt IN A PERIOD RICH with controversy one should perhaps allow fading quarrels to die. It is not my primary intention to rekindle the heated...
...It is, of course, quite true that this concept of life does not depend on "everlasting fame," 31 to give it significance (although the value of a "good name" is highly appreciated within the Jewish tradition...
...It is most fascinating to note, however, that she nowhere explains why this nefarious Jewish leadership cooperated so eagerly in its own destruction as well as in the destruction of the Jewish people...
...18 Ibid., p. 310...
...They didn't know we were Weathermen...
...It would not fit her framework to assume otherwise...
...Many young Jews have turned against the "bourgeois" Jewish stress on "sheer life" in Hannah Arendt's sense, and it must be candidly admitted that in the United States there has been a tendency for many Jews to interpret their tradition in such a way as to accommodate it to what have been conventionally-called suburban values...
...It is, of course, in Hegel that we first find the distinction between the state and civil (biirgerlich) society which, in somewhat modified form, plays so large a role in Miss Arendt's political philosophy...
...In fact, though not absorbed into it, the Jews "became the symbols of Society...
...Nor can she deny that this failure of insight had something to do with her Jewish internationalism...
...Political power, in Athens, Rome, and elsewhere, may not have been based on violence but in achieving its ends it had constant recourse to violence...
...In fact, which "progressive forces" showed any prospect 27 Ibid., p. 184...
...THE RELIGION OF POLITICS of realizing Miss Arendt's conception of the good society...
...Like Hegel before him and Miss Arendt after him, the young Marx is "puzzled" that men who have just begun to savor the joys of public life should turn their attention from public happiness to the pursuit of private interests...
...27 "Palestinian Jewry" should have made itself the vanguard of this movement...
...BENJAMIN I. SCHWARTZ Nor is the central significance of political action to be sought in any metapolitical goals to which it is instrumental...
...Even later in his Philosophy of Right Hegel was to state that war among nations was one of the strongest forces in creating public virtue by its ability to overcome the privatism and self-interest of "civil society...
...The application of power in "foreign affairs" and the organization of physical violence were areas in which Jewish capacities had atrophied, although nothing in the whole tradition inherently ruled them out...
...It appears under the by-line of "Liberation News Service...
...The final upshot is that imperialism, bureaucracy, and mass society—all aspects of "Society"—have once again led to the disappearance of the life of public happiness and freedom...
...In one passage Miss Arendt implies that at a certain indeterminate point in time "the powerful trends toward equalization of all citizens from the side of the state and incorporation of each individual into a class from the side of society" might have made assimilation possible had it not been for the continued perverse Jewish interest in group survival...
...One of the most sublime activities of the ancient citizen was his willingness to die for the fatherland on the field of battle...
...19 This notion that the Jews as a people were controlled hand-and-foot by these lay leaders is simply assumed by Miss Arendt, as if it required no proof...
...One of the many matters that arouses no curiosity in Miss Arendt is the nature of internal community life among the Jews through the centuries...
...Thus, Abraham cared not at all for the fatherland, or for political life—only for a transcendental God who would assure his own security and posterity...
...The press also mentioned Manson's supposed fear of blacks—he reportedly moved into rural California to escape the violence of a race war...
...by the fact that they may, after all, have shared the dumb instinct for self-preservation which was a characteristic of the people as a whole...
...Where political power becomes corrupt, it is wholly due to the sinister influence "Society" exerts upon the political realm...
...One must assume that it began when the Jews in Babylon presumed to survive as a group even though their state had been destroyed...
...He had probably been an obscure job-holder, and while we know nothing about his inner sources of strength, they probably had nothing to do with "public happiness" or the desire for earthly immortality...
...That's what we're about, being crazy motherfuckers and scaring the shit out of honky America...
...She went on to tell the war council about Charlie Manson, accused leader of the gang which allegedly murdered the movie star and several others on their Beverly Hills estate...
...The French Revolution—so the young Hegel had thought at the beginning of the revolution—would witness a resurrection of the beautiful life of the antique political community...
...Yet the "public affairs" with which they dealt were not necessarily less significant than the usual agendas of her cherished New England town meetings...
...I shall here confess, in the face of Miss Arendt as well as a certain segment of Israeli opinion, that I do not take the absence of these "Roman" civic-martial virtues to be a sign of total depravity...
...We read that as early as his high-school days he joined the Jungfront Kampferverband which was more likely than not anti-Semitic...
...The kind of overseas expansion occurring from the sixteenth century on took place at a time when Europe was ruled not by "bourgeois Society" but by political elites...
...While she thinks poorly of most Jewish intellectuals who were overwhelmingly concerned with assimilating to Society and mainly devoted to a petty pursuit of fame (not the sacra Tama of political life...
...With whom should the Jews have negotiated...
...Miss Arendt points out with approval that, however much the ancient Greeks may have gloried in the creations of art, they had a certain contempt for the artist, since even this highest form of production was marked by a kind of philistine (banausic) isolation from public life and a subordination to the constraints of matter...
...I shall not enter here into the intricate chains of reasoning by which this bourgeois dominance produces the disintegration of classes and the emergence of the mob and masses which create the material for the organization of total domination...
...men who while savoring all the joys of freedom and equality are by 7 Mainly to be found in Hegels Theologische Jugendschriften, Herman Nohl, ed., Mohr-Siebeck (Tuebingen, 1907...
...In the Combinations THE VIENNA FORUM—where ponderous Marxists and ponderous theologians meet— recently published an article based on the visit of its editor to a "commune...
...In this pamphlet Marx, to be sure, sharply departs from Hegel's faith that the "political realm" as it existed in the Germany of his time embodied man's universal ideal nature...
...The fact that, at various times and places, members of ruling groups have treated each other as peers by no means diminishes their common concern with rulership...
...it It is noteworthy that, for the young Marx, while Christianity is an illusion, it is an illusion that projects man's ideality, while Judaism is simply the incarnation of materialistic egotism...
...32 The many would continue, it seems, to live lives of obscurity unillumined by worldly immortality...
...Since citizens interacted as free equals, there could be no question of rulership within the political realm...
...THE RELIGION OF POLITICS no means concerned with their own private interests but instead are consumed with a passion for the destiny of the polis–honor, glory, and sublimity...
...In fact, however, these spontaneous popular impulses to revive the antique political virtues were invariably betrayed by revolutionary elites, bureaucracies, and all the corruptions of "Society...
...The life of politics is often highly satisfying to those who participate in it, although there is no warrant for assuming that those who most enjoy public happiness are necessarily most notable for public virtue...
...the case of the German sergeant Anton Schmidt who actively helped Jewish partisans to escape and was finally executed for his deeds...
...33 Ibid., 284...
...Devoid of political virtue and capacity, they were unable to achieve the radical assimilation of the Jews into the nation-state, and when one section of Jewish leadership did finally engage in the gloriously Roman act of founding a nation-state, this state fell far short of her stringent classical ideals (far less stringent when applied to other states...
...Judaism plays in all these ruminations...
...As has been shown by others, Miss Arendt's "utilitarian" argument that such a resistance would have saved more lives is absolutely without foundation...
...In her Human Condition she spells out in enormous detail what she regards as the basic alternate modes of human existence...
...This would have meant an alliance with all progressive forces in Europe...
...However, those who select themselves for active participation— so we are assured—will necessarily be "politically the best," for only those who as voluntary members of an "elementary republic" have demonstrated "that they care for more than their private happiness and are concerned about the state of the world would have the right to be heard in the conduct of the business of the republic...
...M M iss ARENDT'S VIEWS on alleged NaziZionist collaboration lead us, of course, directly to Eichmann in Jerusalem and a consideration of the extent to which that disputed work must be viewed in terms of her whole "system...
...Honkies are going to be afraid of us," Dohrn insisted...
...In the dichotomy polis/household, the Jews opted entirely for the dismal household, and to the extent that the household is the ultimate source of modern bourgeois society the Jews may be considered the primal ancestors of the bourgeoisie...
...Thus it may be quite true that Jewish history of the last several centuries did not prepare the Jewish communities of Europe for the organization of physical resistance against Nazism...
...The Roman empire was entirely different because it integrated "the most heterogeneous peoples by imposing upon them a common law...
...They relate to certain tendencies in the New Left, to the role of Jews in the New Left, and to certain characteristic forms of Jewish self-flagellation...
...Thus the 31 Between Past and Future, Viking Press, p. 48...
...With the decline of the ancient polis men retreated into the narrow world of their own petty concerns...
...Only, Miss Arendt contends, if they had as a group joined the healthy political forces— the revolutionary forces attempting to reverse the onward march of bourgeois society...
...The whole notion that ultimately the monstrous evils of Nazism were simply due to the lack of Miss Arendt's "public virtue" is in fact trivial...
...It is to be sought in the absence of that supreme good—the noble life of political action, public happiness and public freedom...
...The notion that the Hebraism of the last two millennia has been completely devoid of value because the Jews lacked the ambiguous virtues of political life (pace Miss Arendt: John Adams was profoundly aware of their am biguity) must be repudiated, whether it is advanced by some Israelis or by their bitter opponent Hannah Arendt...
...Instead he transported the diseases of Society into the political realm...
...W W HAT UNITES Hegel, the young Marx, and Miss Arendt is a belief in the ideality of political life in classical antiquity...
...It was not that Jewishness caused anti-Semitism but that the Jews and their enemies together helped to bring down the structured island of coherence represented by the nation-state...
...What we call "Society" in the modern world (society considered apart from the political realm) is a kind of monstrous extension of the old household principle to the whole societal entity...
...There is a close affinity between Christian privatism and bourgeois privatism, and it was out of this privatistic egotism that there emerged modern "civil society"—a human association held together only by the necessities of individual and group selfinterest...
...She ascribes to Christianity in particular a concern with the ethics of intrapersonal relations—a kind of goodness that remains obscure and hidden from public knowledge...
...Socrates, Plato, and the whole post-Socratic philosophic tradition had initiated the fatal turn from the life of political action to an exaltation of the contemplative life, and later they were followed by Christianity...
...One may, of course, have various opinions of Disraeli as a statesman...
...Nor is it necessary to make a blanket defense of the enormous variety of human types she classifies under the category "Jewish leadership...
...One may—contrary to Miss Arendt—feel that the political sphere is functional to other human ends without denying that it can become a source of deep meaning to those who participate in it...
...One should say a word about the relevance of Miss Arendt's ideas to our present circumstances...
...The vagueness of this suggestion, while in line with previous Arendt doctrine, passeth understanding...
...As a layman in classical studies, I have the impression that Miss Arendt's version of classical antiquity bears the same relation to the realities of Greek and Roman politics as Winkelmann's writings bear to the true glories of classical art...
...Eichmann was a product of Society...
...I would argue that the word "life" refers here to vast areas of human experience belonging neither to the realm of mere life-maintenance nor to that of political action...
...Part of armed struggle, as Dohrn and others laid it down, is terrorism...
...Soon, however, it became apparent that it would lead to the triumph not of the citizen but of the bourgeois...
...They remained within the unwholesome realm of Society but even here they were not assimilated by any of the social classes, those classes that were the only comparatively healthy element in society, since through the political parties they were incorporated into the political structure of the state...
...The happiness of private life...
...Mis Arendt does not devote much analytical attention to the inner life of the Jews...
...Organized to assure biological survival in terms of both production and reproduction, the aims of the household were narrowly utilitarian and privatistic...
...In Christianity, which took over this attitude from the Jews, "work itself—that is, the activities which are necessary to keep the life process moving, were at least par 14 Vita Activa, Kohlhammer Verlag (Stuttgart), p. 307...
...One could go on at length in this consideration of Miss Arendt's religion of politics, with its manichaean insistence on the "political realm" as the region of the good and "Society" as the region of evil...
...She is not merely charging the Jewish people with a lack of prudence...
...In her article "Zionism Reconsidered," 26 written in 1945, her querulousness is so diffuse that it is difficult to discover the heart of the matter...
...One may be entirely responsive to the glory that was Greece, to its art, literature, and philosophy...
...Her ideas about the general condition of man in the modern world seem peculiarly related to her ideas about Jews, and one is also inclined to feel that the reverse is equally true...
...One occasionally finds a theme in Miss Arendt that runs counter to the overwhelmingly negative account of Jewish rootlessness...
...One might say that Marx's downgrading of the political realm was the revenge of a disappointed lover who had once shared Hegel's vision of the role of the antique state...
...15 Ibid., p. 308...
...she is charging them with a wilful indifference to life's highest good...
...The fragmentary writings of the young Hegel 7 furnish us with striking examples of rhapsodic invocations of ancient Greek political life...
...The history of internecine group conflicts in Republican Rome, so clearly marked by the ascendancy of one group over another, nowhere receives her attention...
...Disraeli, incidentally, is one of Miss Arendt's pet hatreds...
...Yet historically it was a conception of life that in the middle ages led many of its adherents to martyrdom and collective suicide...
...22 Precisely because of their cosmopolitanism, some few Jews were able to play the role of "good Europeans...
...Weatherman, the "Bureau" says, digs Manson, not only for his understanding of white America—the killer purportedly wrote "pig" in blood on the wall after the murder —but also because he's a "bad motherfucker...
...In dealing with the institutions of local government in Puritan New England before the American Revolution—institutions which, of course, she ardently admires—Miss Arendt feels obliged to observe that "if there was any theoretical influence that contributed to the compacts and agreements in early American history it was of course the Puritans' reliance on the Old Testament and especially their rediscovery of the concept of the Covenant of Israel...
...But even a superficial reading of Thucydides would indicate the extent to which many of Athens' colonies regarded themselves as harshly ruled from above...
...To judge from her ideal ized treatment of the Roman Empire, one suspects that she regards the Athenian em pire (which she never discusses) as a fed eration of equals...
...They provide in spirit the political equivalent of what Winckelmann represents in the aesthetic sphere, and they remind us as well of the pseudoclassical canvasses of David...
...What particularly aroused her fury was the resolution of the World Zionist Organization of 1945 calling for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth...
...Here we have the prototypical "normal" philistine job-holder, good to his family, without any real belief in any ideas and completely privadistic...
...Political assassination—openly joked about by some Weathermen—and literally any kind of violence that is considered anti-social were put forward as legitimate forms of armed struggle...
...one may 20 Ibid., p. 53...
...Power is a kind of energy engendered among political men active in the public space...
...The liberalistic concept of freedom stresses freedom from politics, a freedom to immure oneself in private existence...
...Could the Jews have possibly achieved true assimilation into the nation-state...
...Why these latent aspirations to participate in public affairs should have existed at all is by no means made clear...
...John Adams and James Madison, whom Miss Arendt constantly displays in their Roman togas bathed in an atmosphere of "public happiness," were often in deep distress over the issues they faced...
...She never raises the question why men like Socrates and Plato were so profoundly discontented with the political life of Athens...
...Lack of access to or interest in the "political realm" may be seen as an evil even by those who do not regard the "political realm" as the headquarters of all man's highest virtues...
...Again and again we are told that totalitarianism is marked by the disintegration of the nation-state, of social classes, and even of true nationalism...
...The Jewish leadership, devoid of political virtue and political capacity—a lack of virtue which manifested itself primarily in its inability to organize resistance—could only have pursued this damnable course...
...While she can understand why a splendid national representative like Clemenceau allowed himself to become the spokesman of French imperialism, she will not tolerate a Jewish polity that relates itself to the world as it is...
...269-302...
...It involves deeds and speech exchanged among men, and its true significance lies in itself...
...In all spheres of life there is a complex relationship between ends and means...
...Otherwise, it would appear 21 Ibid., p. 13 that the Jews were doomed to remain in their "abnormal position" outside of the Society and nation...
...10 Finally, we find here that the Jews—or Judaism—are the spirit incarnate of bourgeois society—of bourgeois egotism, and that Judaism is the religion of "practical need...
...but instead we shall turn to a consideration of the rela tionship between this religion and Miss Arendt's views on Jews and Judaism...
...We are also amazed to learn from Miss Arendt that the nation-state as such is in no way responsible for imperialism...
...Jewish history offers the extraordinary spectacle of a people, unique in this respect, which began its history with a well-defined concept of history and an almost conscious resolution to achieve a wellcircumscribed plan on earth and then, without giving up this concept, avoided all political action for two thousand years...
...One must assume that her reply would be No, since these communities had no "real" political power...
...25 Ibid., p. 21...
...Labor and production (even artistic production) cuts off man from genuine relations with other men...
...Nothing," we learn, "lay further from the Old Testament than classical antiquity's contempt for the trouble and toil of sheer living, for work and the bearing of children...
...Similarly, in Miss Arendt, medieval Christianity does carry on the values of the contemplative life...
...More important in her scheme of things than the distinction between the contemplative and active life is the enormous range of distinctions she discerns within the life of action itself—a category embracing within its limits both man's highest potentialities and his most ignoble modes of existence...
...BENJAMIN I. SCHWARTZ gentlemanly concepts of the limits of national expansion...
...And this, as we shall learn, was a most unfortunate contribution...
...The reason why the ancient city-state or modern nation-state so often insist on ethnic homogeneity is that they hope to eliminate as far as possible those natural and always present differences and differentiations which by themselves arouse dumb hatred, mistrust and discrimination because they indicate all too clearly those spheres where men cannot act and change at will .3 Only those who are fundamentally alike, it would seem, can act together as equals within the political realm...
...Having thus freed themselves from the "idiocy" of private life, the citizens confronted each other as peers within the public realm where they vied with others in noble deed and word...
...In the end the danger lies not in the totalistic presumptions of the nationstate but in the proliferation of stateless "barbarians" who threaten the state's very existence as a political community...
...Elsewhere she shows a deep understanding of why nation-states and their statesmen have fallen short of her civic ideals...
...We live, she believes, in an age of deep spiritual, cultural, and political crisis, and on this broader issue my own prejudices tend to coincide with hers...
...One can only conclude that the explanation is to be sought in her whole preestablished system...
...What is this, however, if not a restatement of Hegel's vision of Judaism as the religion of mere clinging to material existence...
...It was this division of labor within the household that produced the patriarchic hierarchy of master and servant and thus provided the general model for despotic hierarchic relations—while the concern with household management (oikonomia) later provided the prototype for impersonal bureaucratic administration...
...Since Athenian and Roman citizens confronted each other as equals within the political space, politics, properly speaking, has nothing to do with ruling or being ruled...
...BENJAMIN 1. SCHWARTZ tion" on the national question," 24 which led to an utter misunderstanding of the degree to which the working classes were organically— and wholesomely—linked to the nation-state...
...On the contrary, where tyranny arose in Greece and Rome, this may be considered an introjection of the household hierarchy of master and servants into the political realm...
...Manson has been portrayed in the media as a satanic, magnetic personality who held near-hypnotic sway over several women whom he lent out to friends as favors and brought along for the murder scene...
...one may reject a dogmatic "group interest" theory of politics...
...And naturally, any discussion of Athenian or Roman imperialism is automatically ruled out...
...The melancholy fact remains that some of the most enthusiastic participants may continue to be persons animated by motives far more questionable than anything contemplated in her religion of politics...
...but Miss Arendt's hysterical attack on him as an unmitigated charlatan has no basis whatsoever in any cool comparison of his accomplishments with those of other nineteenth-century British statesmen...
...17 On Revolution, p. 171...
...They saw in them the backward remnants of the Dark Ages and hated them as financial agents of the aristocracy...
...Yet in spite of her rapturous praise of Rosa Luxemburg, she feels obliged to reject her "self-decep 22Ibid., p. 23...
...It would thus be interesting to consider to what extent her view of Hebraism fits the tradition...
...Miss Arendt, however, retains a pristine faith in the "political realm" and must indignantly reject Marx's utopia where active political life would no longer play any role...
...What then can we say of the Hebraic conception of the good life which led to this fatal decision...
...One gathers throughout that she will condone a Jewish nation-state only if it conforms to her most classical ideals...
...Does the deuteronomic injunction "Choose life" really mean, "Choose mere physical survival...
...Misfortune, however, is not vice...
...Nothing in their experience had prepared them for either...
...It became clear to me that the Eichmann book can be understood only in terms of a certain preestab lished conceptual framework...
...Miss Arendt's precursors in the cult of the political glory of classical antiquity— Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel, and others—were by no means diffident in acknowledging the degree to which civic and martial virtues had gone hand-inhand in ancient Greece and Rome...
...A state that can exist side by side with civil society, a state that can comfortably accommodate the "spirit of Judaism," can hardly 9 Letter of Marx to Ruge, May 1843...
...but for Miss Arendt the only true freedom is "public freedom"— freedom to participate in the ennobling life of political action...
...24 "A Heroine of Revolution," New York Review of Books, October 6, 1966, p. 23...
...Of special interest to him and his readers was the number of possible sex combinations which he correctly figures to be S=in (n-1), including, perhaps inadvertently, the homosexual and lesbian acts...
...On the contrary, she finds its behavior quite understandable...
...Despotic as these leaders of the Jewish people were, they nevertheless found it to their interest to perpetuate the existence of the Jews as a separate group within society, even when they themselves began to tread the path of assimilation...
...For the absence of this highest good is by no means confined to the present age...
...But so were his victims, the Jews and particularly the Jewish leaders...
...The motivation of the actors within the public space was a kind of courageous rivalry for distinction...
...As a matter of fact, the only instance of genuine virtue cited in the entire book is a case not of public but of private virtue 29 Eichmann in Jerusalem, Viking Press, p. 34...
...It should simply be noted that we are still dealing here with the contrast between the political realm as the center of all man's highest impulses and the realm of "Society," of economic production as the source of unbridled greed and lust for domination...
...It is also most convenient for Miss Arendt that Eichmann for his own self-serving purposes was quite anxious to construct a similar image of himself...
...From Miss Arendt's silence, it might also appear that, unlike Christianity, Judaism contributed nothing to the contemplative side of life...
...In striking contrast to the narrow and mean existence that characterizes "homo faber," we have what Miss Arendt defines as the life of action (handein) properly speaking...
...Occasionally Miss Arendt even shows a certain scorn toward the "welfare state" concept, with its implication that the main purpose of political life is to secure the economic welfare and security of society...
...Miss Arendt's proof that he never shared Nazi convictions is derived from his own testimony and contradicted by her assertion that he later displayed "telltale signs of an unregenerate Nazi outlook...
...In the course of time this renunciation of violence clearly alienated the Jewish people from a familiarity with the uses of violence, whether offensive or defensive...
...The young Eichmann seems to have been anything but a good job-holder by nature...
...Miss Arendt is not among those complacent philosophers who believe that all the agonies of our time are merely small eddies in the "process of modernization...
...Neither that which was worst nor that which was best in the lives of these people—both leaders and led— prepared them for this role...
...A 20-foot long poster adorned another wall of the ballroom...
...In all the great revolutions of modern times—I paraphrase Miss Arendt—there have arisen from the people themselves spontaneous impulses to create local "elementary republics" (the French revolutionary societies, the Paris Commune, the Russian Soviets, the Hungarian workers council) which, if they had survived, would have distributed the right to political participation and public happiness throughout society...
...5 As in Hobson, imperialism is wholly the creation of a corrupt bourgeois society—of a finance capitalism with infinite transnational expansionist aims...
...Her dream of local "elementary councils" that would provide access to the "public space" on a local grassroots level bears some resemblance to the ideas of those on the New Left who call for local participatory democracy...
...When one asks how the Israelis could have established a political entity in Palestine if they had accepted all her prohibitions, her reply is that a movement should have been launched "to organize the Jewish people in order to negotiate on the basis of a great revolutionary movement...
...What is more, in France at least the radicals were themselves heirs of the enlightenment thinkers who "despised the Jews as a matter of course...
...There is one extreme variant of political Zionism that gives an analysis of Jewish history not entirely different from that of Miss Arendt, and we know that in the early thirties Miss Arendt herself was won for a time to the Zionist cause, only to turn against it after the war with all her characteristic vehemence...
...One may share the feeling that in political life men can rise above concern with particular interests and become the voice of more universal interests...
...Furthermore, like the ancient polis, the nation-state rested on a kind of "homogeneity of population" which made possible a structured political community...
...9 Like Hegel before him, Marx finds that the French Revolution, instead of reviving the political glories of ancient Greece and Rome, had simply given free rein to bourgeois society...
...To her the issues involved in public affairs simply provide the occasion for great deeds and words...
...Athenians also competed for power...
...And if this was probably true of Periclean Athens, what are we to say of those sordid corruptions and dark intrigues of Cicero's Rome which seem completely absent from Miss Arendt's consciousness...
...Indeed there are even pages in Miss Arendt's own writings which suggest that the defensive violence of physical resistance is one of the clearest signs of the presence or absence of civic virtue...
...What is more, many of Miss Arendt's themes (quite apart from the famous theory of totalitarianism) are—if one may use the cliche--highly relevant to a range of current concerns...
...Christianity was also the heir, however, of the tradition of the Old Testament, which particularly insisted on an exaltation of "life as highest of all human goods...
...Although they might have used their financial influence within the nation-state and later in the international world of finance to wield real power—to become similar to how they were depicted in anti-Semitic fantasies—they were not really interested in political power (no compliment, from Miss Arendt...
...He continues: `If N is the number of members and n the number of lovers at any given time, then the correct formula is: fl—In In the case of 5 communards that already gives 197 combinations...
...Here too, however, we have seen that Miss Arendt's a priori views about the nature of "Jewish leadership" had crystallized long before the Eichmann book...
...It is fascinating to observe the extent to which Miss Arendt's Eichmann fits this preestablished scenario...
...So far I have not treated Miss Arendt's conception of totalitarianism...
...To what extent was the agenda of the Athenian assembly taken up with the rulership of Athens' noncitizens and slaves...
...The modern nation-state, on the other hand, should represent the ancient ideal of the public, the universal and the whole...
...We must be concerned with the political sphere because only there can many of our problems be confronted, and not because the "public space" is more immune to selfishness, corruption, and sordid struggles for THE RELIGION OF POLITICS power (power—not distinction...
...17 Rather than admit this unpalatable possibility, however, Miss Arendt chooses to believe that the Mayflower Compact was due to no "theoretical influence" whatsoever but was basically a response to the logic of events...
...Here we find a beautiful and free people...
...The fact that, due to their powerlessness, Jewish leaders have through the centuries been placed in deeply humiliating positions has indeed been a misfortune...
...It is interesting in this connection to read Miss Arendt's lengthy discussion in her Origins of Totalitarianism 2 of the hopeless plight of the stateless refugees during the period between the world wars...
...On Revolution, p. 279...
...The citizens of the polis relegated the tasks of assuring life's necessities to the obscurity of the household where much of the prosaic day-to-day work was unfortunately carried on by slaves...
...s Ibid., p. 125...
...This belief in the latent aspiration of the people to create "elementary republics" represents, as it were, the utopian populist side of Miss Arendt's political philosophy...
...Within the nation-state there did arise a political realm—a "public space"—within which men "with a taste for public freedom" could continue to cultivate the political virtues...
...BENJAMIN 1. SCHWARTZ charge that until recently the Jews have lacked "political ability," including the ability to engage in the defensive violence of organized resistance, may have some ground...
...than any other realm of human experience...
...Unfortunately, like Miss Arendt, they seldom occupy themselves with the agonizing problem of how local participatory democracy is to be related to those developments in the modem world that seem to demand centralized control— in some areas, perhaps even more centralized control than we now have...
...Their financiers were deeply involved in the initial stages of imperialism and in an odd convoluted way they provided a kind of model for all those unhealthy forces in Europe that were most hostile to them...
...There is no need, however, to become locked into Miss Arendt's Germanic version of the Hellenism/Hebraism controversy...
...There is a more positive aspect of this Jewish alienation from the nation-state, although it is a "surface phenomenon...
...11 However, in the shoddy Hegelianizing that characterizes this pamphlet, symbol and reality cannot be separated...
...Both were acutely aware of the complex role of interest in public affairs...
...And while outside Society, they made their own contributions to its unfortunate development...
...This turn to Zionism occurred at a time when her despair of achieving radical assimilation seems to have been most intense...
...She presents us with a series of sharp dichotomies and categorical classifications designed to encompass the entire experience of man within their tyrannical embrace...
...It should be clear by now that Miss Arendt seeks—and finds—the model of ideal political action in classical antiquity...
...Nor did it matter much to Hegel whether this privatism manifested itself as a concern for one's own physical "life security" or for individual salvation in the afterlife...
...In the ancient world the household was the basic unit of economic life...
...Jewish businessmen and intellectuals (most of them quite as apolitical as the businessmen) were bent on being accepted in Society...
...And as Miss Arendt continues to insist with tireless vehemence, political power has nothing to do with violence...
...This is, at it were, to make the highest serve the lowest...
...Although he did rise to the pinnacle of the "political realm" in one of Europe's most important nationstates, he was not redeemed by this participation in public affairs...
...It chains him to the necessities of biological existence and subordinates him to the laws of nature...
...Her prejudice on this point leads her to slander a man like Leo Baeck, whose physical courage (one of the civic values she appreciates) compares favorably with her own and ours .—simply because his conception of how to meet the catastrophe was not, in her sense, properly political...
...13 12 On Revolution, p. 280...
...The significance of the political life lay precisely in the "grandeur" and "public happiness" men derived from participation in public affairs...
...The Jewish value: life is the highest good...
...Martin Buber, not necessarily less discerning than Miss Arendt, was convinced that his I-thou conception was entirely consonant with the Biblical conception of life...
...The balance-of-power principle was universally and decorously respected, since expansion as a supreme aim of politics "is not really political at all...
...One's mind boggles at the thought of the millions of Chinese whose lives both past and present have, in Miss Arendt's view, been utterly devoid of true significance...
...Her attitude is not, however, fundamentally utilitarian...
...Neither science, philosophy, culture, nor any other good can in any way compensate for this "lost treasure...
...She taunts the kibbutzniks in Israel for not relating themselves to the "wickedness of the world," but she will have no Jewish state that has any truck with the Imperialist Great Powers or that accepts "charity" from the bourgeois Jewish establishment of America, etc., etc...
...She is mainly concerned with their unfortunate role in the world surrounding them, but what she does have to say is trenchant and unequivocal...
...That, she believes, is represented by the life of political action...
...said Bernardine Dohrn...
...THE RELIGION OF POLITICS be little attracted by his romantic conceptions of the role of "the Jewish race" (to make him an important father-of-racism is sheer fantasy...
...10 "Zur Judenfrage," in Karl Marx, Die Friihschriften, Kroner Verlag (Stuttgart), pp...
...The emphasis on mere living naturally ranged the Jews on the side of "homo faber...
...The young Hegel, uninhibited by twentieth-century pacifist scruples, is by no means inclined to suppress the martial aspects of these antique virtues...
...The following report on a recent conference of the Weatherman faction of SDS is taken, word for word, from the January 10, 1970 issue of the pro-New Left paper, the Guardian...
...At the lower limit we find the THE RELIGION OF POLITICS life of labor and production—the life of "homo faber...
...The same is true, however, of military life, and even of the life of work and business...
...However, says Miss Arendt, this bourgeois imperialism was resisted by the nation-state and its political representatives to the very end, since "no nation-state could with a clear conscience ever try to conquer foreign peoples...
...so Miss Arendt accepts Eichmann's own explanation that he was simply obeying the spirit of Hitler's orders...
...H H ANNAH ARENDT DOES NOT ASSIGN to Hebraism the initial responsibility for the decline of political life in the ancient world...
...13 Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 8. THE RELIGION OF POLITICS Having learned how highly Miss Arendt values "political action," we can measure the full weight of this indictment...
...In offering these qualifications and disclaimers, one need not deny the existence of what Miss Arendt calls "public happiness...
...Most important for our purpose here is that the real foundation of totalitarianism was to be the "masses of coordinated philistine job-holders and good family men who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives...
...They were condemned to be either pariahs or parvenus and thus remained a peculiarly unhealthy element in the amorphous growth of that bourgeois society which was eating away at the structures of the nation-state...
...Hence it must be different in kind...
...Whatever the answers to these questions may be, it was clear that meanwhile the "Zionists" had already failed to live up to Miss Arendt's ideal of political virtue...
...Dostoevsky—Thou Should'st Be Living at This Hour...
...Yet does the word "life" in the Hebrew Bible refer exclusively to sheer life-maintenance...
...This is not the place to consider Miss Arendt's account of imperialism as a con 4 Ibid., p. 125...
...represent man's higher potentialities...
...It was covered with drawings of bullets, each with a name...
...That they should have chosen to remain the leaders of the Jews when they had such glamorous opportunities for achieving power in the large world of European affairs can only be explained 18 Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 27...
...The fact that life-maintenance is not despised and even sanctified in Jewish tradition has been used as a pretext to spread a thin veneer of God's blessing over a mode of life that has stressed, above all, material goods and the mechanics for obtaining them...
...It may even account for certain simpleminded and absolutist views about the relations between ethics and politics which are often prevalent among Jews when they relate themselves to politics...
...The whole thing began when "the bourgeoisie grew increasingly hostile to national institutions and power...
...The real heart of animus is that, given her analysis of the role of the Jews in the nation-state, no genuine radical assimilation was possible...
...194-195...
...Reflections on the Thought of Hannah Arendt IN A PERIOD RICH with controversy one should perhaps allow fading quarrels to die...
...Miss Arendt herself candidly admits that even when and if her dream is realized, only the few will participate since "the political way of life has never been and will never be the way of the many...
...18 By their sanctification of mere life and celebration of work as a value, both Judaism and Christianity helped create the preconditions for the triumph of homo faber and homo laborans—hence the triumph of 161bid., p. 390...
...It appears that she favored something like a joint Jewish-Arab state...
...The result was that the political history of the Jewish people became even more dependent upon unforeseen accidental factors than the history of other nations so that the Jews stumbled from one role to another and accepted responsibility for none...
...This did not signify, we learn, any intention on their part to participate in public affairs or any particular loyalty to the nation-state...
...It is, of course, true that the Old Testament reveals no contempt for the realm of biological necessity...
...Miss Arendt's absorbing discussion of the difference between the life of action and the life of fabrication reminds one to a degree of Martin Buber's distinction between the I-thou and the I-it relationship...
...When Miss Arendt goes so far as to imply that political elites are more interested in preserving their own freedom than in ruling others, 12 one must observe that all human experience cries out against her...
...The analysis she offers of our situation is clear and definite...
...Were the German statesmen and politicians who had "tasted public happiness" during the Weimar period conspicuously more resistant to the Nazi plague than any other sector of the population...
...it refers to food, shelter, physical comfort, reproduction, etc...
...Furthermore, contrary to Miss Arendt's neat dichotomy between Society as the realm of necessity and politics as the realm of freedom, men deeply involved in public affairs are fully conscious that just as freedom is by no means unknown in the nonpolitical transactions of human beings, so the tragic weight of necessity can place overwhelming constraints on their action...
...This was recognized by the Jews themselves, and it was the great merit of political Zionism to realize that under modern conditions, the sheer survival of the people may make it imperative to acquire capacities for political and even military power...
...I shall not here enter into the details of Miss Arendt's specific treatment of Jewish leadership during the Nazi holocaust...
...If we must reject the fantasy that the "public space" provides a refuge from the frailties of man, what can one say of Miss Arendt's notion that politics—properly defined— has nothing to do with rulership...
...Ibid., p. 301...
...The contemplative life, she implies, is positive only when found in a society with a vigorous and genuine political life...
...yet the fact remains that a consideration of "public affairs" can never be divorced from the clash of interests both inside and outside the "political realm...
...This was, of course, the solution of political Zionism...
...Ancient Judaism, we learn, made "life the highest of goods" and it was precisely on this point that the paths of Hebrew and pagan antiquity diverged so decisively.14 "Life" means brute biological survival...
...21 Whether such radicals would ever clasp the masses of unassimilated Jews to their bosoms remains somewhat doubtful, to say the least...
...That the Jews in Israel have acquired these capacities is cause for satisfaction and we must hope these capacities will continue to flourish...
...Adams, in particular, with his sober Calvinist heritage, by no means believed that mere participation in political life lifted men onto the high plateau of "public virtue...
...On the contrary, the rise of imperialism coincides with the decline and fall of the nation-state...
...The citizens of Rome and Athens were involved in ruling their large populations of noncitizens and even in ruling empires, but the word "political" ought to be applied only to transactions among free and equal citizens...
...that "political life should become a mere means whose end is the life of civil [bourgeois] society...
...It is interesting to note that Miss Arendt also attacks assimilated—or rather assimiating— Jews...
...Turning for a moment from Hegel to the Marx of On the Jewish Question, we are astonished to see how much of it is simply a more vehement reiteration of what is already to be found in the young Hegel— more vehement, perhaps, precisely because of Marx's Jewish self-involvement...
...Only in this life of interaction can man be said to be free, for here he can initiate creative deeds and creative speech, while in his attempts to fashion nature to his own ends man necessarily becomes enslaved to those impersonal processes governing the world of nature...
...We were in an airplane," Dohrn related, "and we went up and down the aisle 'borrowing' food from people's plates...
...Another modern area within which Miss Arendt finds a partial embodiment of the virtues of the polis is in the structure of the nation-state, particularly as it existed in the first half of the nineteenth century...
...Bernadine Dohrn is a Weatherman leader...
...One sure way of forever alienating the young from political life would be to foster in them the kind of fantastic expectations of political life encouraged by Miss Arendt...
...Being a philosopher herself, Miss Arendt by no means denigrates the contemplative life, but she does not seem to regard it as the highest mode of human existence...
...At most, they cared about the despotic power they exercised as absolute rulers of the Jewish people "The exclusive position of the house of Rothschild in the Jewish world," we read, "replaced to a certain extent the old bonds of religious and spiritual tradition...
...W W E ARE THUS DRIVEN BACK once more to a confrontation with Miss Arendt's views of Hebraism...
...as reviewers, critics, collectors and organizers of what was famous," 23 she nevertheless remarks that the peculiar transnational situation of the Jews did lead to the "modern type of Jewish productivity in the arts and sciences" with which she, like Isaac Deutscher, undoubtedly identifies herself...
...Wild...
...For our purposes, it may suffice to note that totalitarianism is seen by her as a direct outgrowth of the triumph of Society, a disease that arises out of the disintegration of the healthy forces of the nation-state...
...T T HE GRIM RESULT of all this is that the Jews did not come to play any role in the healthy "political realm" of the nation-state...
...Action is a transaction between man and man rather than a kind of making or fabrication...
...Along with the understandable targets like Chicago's Mayor Daley, the Weathermen deemed as legitimate enemies to be offed, among others, the Guardian (which has criticized Weatherman) and Sharon Tate, one of several victims in the recent mass murder in California...
...one may fully appreciate the Greco-Roman legacy of the ideal of active citizenship without succumbing to her "antique" religion of politics...
...Vying with each other for the admiration of their contemporaries, they hoped their acts would achieve a kind of "worldly immortality" by being recorded in history and poetry...
...Yet in On Revolution Miss Arendt makes it painfully clear that the healthy revolutionary forces of the nineteenth century were not at all prepared to adopt the kind of solution she considers essential for reversing the triumph of decadent bourgeois society...
...Perhaps then it would be Germany, after all, which would witness the true revival of the public virtues of antiquity...
...Their sin lay in their assumption that they still possessed what they considered to be the ingredients of a good communal life even after having lost their political soul...
...BENJAMIN I. SCHWARTZ young Marx there are again the rhapsodic odes to ancient Greece—to that principle of freedom "which disappears from the world with the Greeks and into the blue haze of heaven with Christianity...
...s Therefore, when Miss Arendt speaks of the collapse of the nation-state, what she means is the presumed capture of the nation-state by the imperialistic bourgeoisie who were able to delude even such sterling Jacobin political representatives as Clemenceau into the belief that colonial troops were necessary for France's survival...
...One may say—as some have—that they represented "reactionary interests," but Miss Arendt respects them too highly to accept so glib an explanation...
...28 Vita Activa, p. 200...
...Her heroine Rahel Varnhagen had tried to assimilate into German society and culture without realizing that the problem of Jewish emancipation was fundamentally political...
...8 Judaism, it would appear, was one of the main sources of the narrow concern with individual security that has dominated the Western world...
...Yet the whole notion that this is the sovereign remedy for all the spiritual, cultural, and social ailments of the age seems entirely wide off the mark...
...And yet, is it in fact true that her ideal of political virtue demands no compromise with evil, particularly in foreign affairs...
...Where have the states involved in imperialism fallen...
...When was this primal sin first committed...
...The higher significance of life lies in the dramas or "stories" in which men confront each other as fellow actors in a common human world, rather than as workers and producers organized for utilitarian goals...
...One is tempted to ask—where outside of the ancient polis was this ideal of the good ever realized...
...From all this we can see where Miss Arendt finds the ultimate source of the crisis of modern man...
...Like Lenin but for her own reasons, Miss Arendt insists on using the word imperialism exclusively to describe a situation that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century...
...A subsequent reading of the Human Condition, the essays entitled Between Past and Future, the book on Rahel Varnhagen, and a rereading of the Origins of Totalitarianism and other essays have suggested that the polemical attacks on Eichmann in Jerusalem, whatever their intrinsic merits, failed to do justice to Miss Arendt as philosopher...
...When it suits her thesis, the sceptical Miss Arendt seems most anxious to lend every credence to his account (although she admits he is a liar) . Yet even her own version raises enormous BENJAMIN I. SCHWARTZ questions...
...The German philistine of Hegel's own time who cared for nothing more than his personal income and salvation thus came to be seen as the modern embodiment of this Jewish spirit...
...Similarly, her fine and cogent analysis of the distinction between power and violence cannot remove the fact that the two have always been closely associated...
...There are vast cultures which have never even suspected the existence of what Miss Arendt proposes as the highest form of human existence...
...Much as they are to be pitied, the stateless have "lost all distinctive political qualities" and have "become human beings and nothing else" (in Miss Arendt's scheme a human being is infinitely less than a citizen...
...They could see that Athenians did not only "vie for distinction...
...All the others, one need hardly add, were in Miss Arendt's view men who emerged out of a long tradition of public life—hence non-charlatans by definition...
...Is it possible that, living as closely as they did to the "public space" of the Athenian assembly, they were aware that the public realm offers no escape from self-interest, lowly intrigues, and what seem to have been the manipulations of some of those whom they called sophists...
...Presumably their radicalism involves a commitment to the satisfaction of the lifeneeds of vast sectors of mankind...
...She was eight months pregnant...
...The Jewish God, in this view, was a "God of necessity" to whom the Jews abjectly submitted because he assured them mere life as an end in itself...
...Even in Greece itself, Socrates and Plato initiated that fateful turn from the life of the polis, that turn to an antipolitical philosophy which together with Judeo-Christian influence was to dominate the mind of the West for centuries...
...In ancient Athens and Rome the citizens confronted each other as equals within the public space, where all their deeds and words were displayed in all their effulgent radiance...
...Like the "political realm," the "nation-state" is a good thing by definition, for it is ruled by political representatives who have clear and 2 The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, Brace & World, pp...
...acts...
...26 Menorah Journal, Autumn 1945, p. 162...
...The fact that the Jews did not all go down fighting is rather a proof of their utter lack of "public virtue...
...And precisely within this group, alienated from all actual political experience, do we find the most exalted dream of the life of the ancient polis...
...THE RELIGION OF POLITICS classical civic virtue and public happiness do, indeed, reappear in Colonial America and reach their culmination in the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution, only to be lost in good measure by later generations of Americans who turned from the political realm to the narrow pursuit of private happiness...
...It might be well to remind Miss Arendt that some of our greatest dramas and "stories" have been written about precisely these areas of life—outside the political realm—in which men confront one another as "obscure," private human beings...
...16 One might indeed say that the Jewish God was a deus faber who bore little resemblance to the radiant divinities vying with each other for honor and glory on Mount Olympus...
...What makes life in the "public space" significant and full of glory and honor is precisely its public nature...
...Above all, however, she is drawn to those who, like her heroine Rosa Luxemburg, became "genuine" revolutionaries...
...The young Marx genuinely believes that Jewish money power is in firm control...
...It is not my primary intention to rekindle the heated debate that swirled about Miss Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, but rather to see that book within the larger context of her philosophy...
...No view of life that takes seriously the human person as a psychophysical entity can afford to be contemptuous of biological necessity...
...There is the dichotomy of the "political realm" and (bourgeois) "Society," of the public and the private, of the exaltation of life and the exaltation of public happiness, of power and violence, etc...
...What further unites Miss Arendt to her predecessors is a tendency to see the glories of Greco-Roman antiquity juxtaposed to the sad limitations of Hebraism...
...The statesman of the nationstate during the period before "bourgeois Society" captured the state thought "primarily in terms of established national territory...
...Why did such men as Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers who appreciated so well the joys of "public happiness" and found such fulfillment in public life still speak of politics as a means to some sort of metapolitical "pursuit of happiness...
...tially freed of that contempt which antiquity cherished for it...
...There is first the ancient distinction between the contemplative and the active life...
...The failure to resort to physical force during the centuries of the diaspora was probably based in the first instance on a sober realization that any such attempt was absolutely futile...
...All of this was quite compatible with demonic evil...
...Being free and equal, these political men have a clear sense of the limits of power and presumably do not try to dominate each other...
...It must in fact become the slave of that society...
...where their longing for "sacra fama" led them to lead lives of "public virtue" and to seek public rather than private happiness...
...Contrary to Miss Arendt's dogmas, there also were probably many deeply imbued with Nazi convictions, profoundly interested in achieving honor, glory, and earthly immortality, and even displaying individual initiative in serving their cause...
...They were still the Court Jews who conceived of their role simply as suppliant intermediaries between their own people and the power that be...
...With which progressive forces should the Jews have aligned themselves and which progressive forces were prepared to align themselves with the Jews...
...He sought from the princely state only what the Jews sought from their God...
...One thinks of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Rousseau...
...In sharp contrast to Buber, however, she vehemently insists that the only really significant life of action is the political life...
...She does not end her distressing account with a denunciation of the heartless exclusivism of the nation-state...
...they just knew we were crazy...
...Miss THE RELIGION OF POLITICS Arendt herself is, of course, able to avoid these details by adopting the Olympian stance of one who observes and does not prescribe...
...Anti-Semitic movements, Miss Arendt contends, tended to be transnational and rootless, rather like the rootless internationalist Jews they describe in •their literature...
...110-117...
...As the leaders of a pariah group that could not be absorbed by the healthy institutions of the nation-state, they could not possibly act correctly...
...Unlike antique Rome, these states were threatened on all sides by the encroachments of Society— by the bourgeoisie, by the mob, by the masses, and by imperialism...
...Later, when a Jewish state did emerge, not as a result of resolutions but out of the vortex of events, her hostility was to become even more intense...
...Because of their primal sin, however, the Jews were destined to play a still more unfortunate role in modem society...
...In the end, both Rosa Luxemburg's errors as well as her insights into the true nature of revolution (which Miss Arendt links to her own) led her to failure, since this is part of the "dismal failure of revolution in our century...
...It is especially interesting to note the role Hegel, Fragmente, Herman Nohl, ed., 233-239 (pp...
...15 Because of their convulsive clinging to life, the ancient Jews would have been incapable of understanding the reasoning which lay behind the Greek exposure of defective infants or the notion that a life without health is not worth living...
...For their private security, they were in fact willing to sacrifice everything to the totalitarian state...
...One reader, however, condemned this formula as "the product of a thoroughly bourgeois-late capitalist mentality, as it leaves out the wealthof possible group variations with more than two participants, and also the acoustical...
...To speak of the contents of public affairs is, of course, to become immediately aware of the nonpolitical matters with which these affairs are concerned...
...Without entering into the question of her treatment of evidence or attempting to discuss the questions raised in her book, I shall consider two themes that are closely linked, the analysis of Eichmann and the analysis of the role of the Jewish leadership in the Holocaust...
...I shall simply register the view that, once in power, totalitarianism did not lead to the disintegration of the nation-state or social classes or nationalism, all of which continued to live on within the totalitarian matrix and then quite successfully survived it...
...It has already been suggested that in the German variant of the cult of classical antiquity to which Miss Arendt adheres, there existed a kind of dialectic polarity between Hellenism and Hebraism...
...The stratagems, tricks, and compromises described in Thucydides do not seem to shake Miss Arendt's faith in the public virtues of the Greeks nor do the chicaneries and deceits of European diplomatic history in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century history shake her conviction that this was a period when a "comity of nations" prevailed...
...Before the end of the nineteenth century, when Europe was still ruled by political elites, a "comity of nations" prevailed...
...During the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, the Jewish men of wealth—according to Miss Arendt the unchallenged leaders of the Jewish people—became the financial creditors of the nation-state...
...Because of its obsessive concentration on the satisfaction of biological needs, it fosters an orientation to material self-interest and comes to be the ultimate source of bourgeois privatism and greed...
...Finally, a word about the relevance of Miss Arendt's political vision to the general "crisis of our times...
...There is already a vast literature that has scrutinized her documentation and argumentation...
...Similarly, since political action involves power, the word "power" becomes in Miss Arendt's usage wholly eulogistic...
...But this is just her point...
...One need not deny that there were entire areas of political action in which the Jews had little experience during the last two millennia...
...23 Ibid., p. 52...
...Having defined the word "political" in accord with this idealized vision of the ancient polis, Miss Arendt systematically proceeds to sever it from all the unpleasant associations it has acquired in ordinary usage...
...test between the healthy forces of the nationstate and the sinister forces of bourgeois Society...
...Here again we find ourselves in the realm of Miss Arendt's normative definitions...
...A portion of the German intelligentsia of this period found itself enormously frustrated by the lack of political life in the princely states of Germany and highly envious of the role intellectuals were playing in the political life of England and France, particularly after the French Revolution...
...Nevertheless, one can profoundly sympathize with the effort to reopen the whole question of local communal participation in political life...
...But the Jews, as a separate rootless group, remained entirely outside the nation-state...
...This was, of course, an eminently honorable view shared by many serious persons, although it is hardly consistent with her insistence elsewhere that ethnic homogeneity is one of the necessary ingredients of a healthy nation-state...
...Was there anything in it she might recognize as belonging to public virtue...
...Miss Arendt manages to maintain her lofty view of "public affairs" by never discussing the actual content of these affairs...
...There were no doubt many "job-holders" among the hordes of Nazi functionaries...
...To what extent was it taken up with the rule of the BENJAMIN I. SCHWARTZ Athenian empire...
...Living in a society largely organized around economic processes means that our lives are governed on a grand scale by those motivations and attitudes which in ancient Greece and Rome were confined to the privacy of the household...
...33 We cannot, alas, accept Miss Arendt's assurances...
...She ridicules those she calls the socialists...
...Much of the Hebrew law and many of the events in the Bible are concerned with human as well as religious encounters in the area of human life, unsanctified by "public virtue...
...But the peculiarly exalted image of politics we find in her writings seems to derive more immediately from a version of the cult of antiquity that emerged in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century...
...In recent centuries 1 On Revolution, Viking Press, p. 284...
...29 What is more, we know that in spite of his own cliche about "cadaver obedience," he was to show enormous initiative in undertaking the liquidation of the Hungarian Jews against Himmler's orders 30 While he did not initiate the idea of the Final Solution, once he had made it his mission he was fully bent on achieving immortal fame and glory by carrying out his task with distinction and a full sense of its grandeur...
...But the "Transfer Agreements" whereby the Jewish Agency was able in the early period of the Nazi regime to provide for the emigration of Jews on condition that the emigrants transfer their property in the form of German goods she treats not as an agonizing political decision but as an immediate proof of NaziZionist collaboration...
...If they are prepared to sacrifice or curtail these developments in the interests of local participatory democracy, they—like Miss Arendt —seldom descend to concrete discussions of what is to be discarded and how...
...An agreement that our predicaments are serious does not, however, lead us very far toward a common diagnosis, and I shall confess at the outset that I find hers basically unconvincing...
...The heart of Miss Arendt's views about the Jews can be found in the following passage: One should bear in mind that lack of political ability and judgment have been caused by the very nature of Jewish history —the history of a people without a government, without a country and without a language...
...Ultimately, there can be no true freedom apart from the political life...
...Even though the large modern nations were divided into social classes, the state provided these classes with "equality before the law" and incorporated them into its articulated political structure...
...In any event, the unwholesome attitudes that have frustrated these noble aspirations have in the last century achieved a clear ascendancy...
...At least one press report explained the "pig" on the wall by saying that Manson wrote that in order to throw suspicion on black people...
...In her Origins of Totalitarianism she implies that the dread power of totalitarian terror produces in its victims an acceptance of their fate, but in the Eichmann THE RELIGION OF POLITICS book she is unprepared to allow this escape from moral responsibility...
...Nor is it even proven that he was not touched by anti-Jewish ideas as a youth, in spite of his Jewish relatives and alleged Jewish mistress...
...BENJAMIN I. SCHWARTZ modern bourgeois society...
...it lies within the political drama itself...
...She concedes the existence of a kind of life of action which is not political...
...There may, after all, exist political problems which can best be solved on this level, and local government may indeed give some "public happiness" to many persons endowed with a taste for political life...
...The following reflections were actually prompted by a reading of Miss Arendt's On Revolution which, at least for this reader, suddenly revealed a certain unity of structure that can be discerned in all her writings...
...T T HERE WAS ANOTHER ALTERNATIVE: that the Jews constitute themselves into a nation-state of their own...
...The possibility mentioned by some—that ancient Jewish ideas may have contributed something to modem political thought—is not, of course, entertained by Miss Arendt...
...She then assures us that "these strictly religious influences and movements including the Great Awakening, had no influence whatsoever on what the men of the Revolution did or thought...
...We return to the Jewish sanctification of mere life and life maintenance, for it was, after all, this initial sin that led to the fatal decision to survive as a nonpolitical people even after the demise of the ancient polity...
...One is impelled to ask—what decline of which nation-states...
...1 Indeed, in the absence of this treasure they may even play a deleterious role...
...Abraham was concerned only with preserving the life of himself and his descendants...
...20 Assimilating Jews remained Jews whether they hated or, like Disraeli, took a perverse pride in their origins...
...One need but point to the Maccabean Revolt and the particular trend which led to the Zealot revolts against Rome...
...25 Rosa Luxemburg provides a clear illustration of the degree to which the revolutionary political forces of Europe were unprepared to accept what cosmopolitan Jewish revolutionaries had to offer...
...One of the main tragedies of the life of most men is that their lives are passed in private, obscure insignificance...
...Dig it, first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach...
...While never really accepted into the bourgeois class,they fully shared the moral responsibility of that class for the rise of totalitarianism...
...Miss Arendt is also "puzzled" that the revival of "public happiness" after the American Revolution should have fallen so far short of Greco-Roman ideality...
...At the same time, unless our young radicals are prepared to admit that they share Miss Arendt's religion of the political life as an end in itself and apart from metapolitical welfare goals, they must continue to have a certain Jewish respect for ordinary lifeneeds...
...Apologists for the essay on the "Jewish question" insist that Judaism is treated by Marx merely as a symbol of bourgeois society...
...6 Ibid., p. 126...
...As she points out, Pericles, in his famous oration ' 28 and Machiavelli (another of her heroes) had both accepted the fact that political "grandeur" cannot be judged in ordinary terms of good and evil...
...M M ISS ARENDT'S RELIGION OF POLITICS is clearly based on a vision of classical antiquity that itself derives from a venerable tradition...
Vol. 17 • March 1970 • No. 2
