Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative

Author(s): SEYLA BENHABIB

Source: Social Research , SPRING 1990, Vol. 57, No. 1, Philosophy and Politics II (SPRING
1990), pp. 167-196
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40970582

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 Hannah Arendt and /
the Redemptive /
Power of /
Narrative / by seyla benhabib

1 he question of Jewish identity and the fate of the Jewish

people in the twentieth century were the undeniable condi-
tions which inspired a rather unpolitical student of the
Existenzphilosophie of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger to
become one of the most illuminating, and certainly one of the
most controversial political thinkers of our century.1 At the
center of Hannah Arendt's political thought is a tension and a
dilemma, indicating that these two formative forces of her
spiritual-political identity, German Existenzphilosophie of the late
1920s and her political experiences as a Jewish-German
intellectual, were not always in harmony. When Arendt reflects
on the political realities of the twentieth century and on the
fate of the Jewish people in particular, her thinking is
decidedly modernist and politically universalist. She looks for
political structures that will solve the nineteenth-century
conflict between the nation and the state. Although the
modern states established after the American and French
revolutions made the recognition of the individual as a
rights-bearing person the basis of their legitimacy, nationalist
developments in Europe revealed that one's right to be a

1 See Arendt's letter to Jaspers, dated Nov. 18, 1945, explaining rather coyly that she
had become something between einem Historiker und einem politischen Publizisten ("a
historian and a political publicist"): Hannah Arendt- Kar I Jaspers: Briefwechsel (München,
1985), p. 59.

SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Spring 1990)

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168 SOCIAL RESEARCH

person was safeguarded only in

specific nation:

From the beginning the paradox

inalienable human rights was that
human being who seemed to ex
question of human rights, theref
bly blended with the question of
emancipated sovereignty of the
seemed to be able to insure them.2

On these matters Arendt was a political modernist who

pleaded for the realization of this basic principle of political
modernity, that is, the recognition of the right to have rights
simply because one is a member of the human species.
Arendt's major theoretical work, The Human Condition,
however, is usually, and not altogether unjustifiably, treated as
an antimodernist political text. The same historical process
which brought forth the modern constitutional state also
brought forth "society," that realm of social interaction which
interposed itself between the household on the one hand and
the political state on the other. "The rise of the social," as
Arendt names this process, primarily meant that economic
processes, which had hitherto been confined to the "shadowy
realm of the household," emancipated themselves from this
domain and entered the public realm.3 A century before,
Hegel had described this process as the development in the
midst of ethical life of a "system of needs" {System der
Bedürfnisse), of a domain of economic activity governed by
commodity exchange and the pursuit of economic self-interest.
The emergence of this sphere meant the disappearance of the
"universal," of the common concern for the political associa-
tion, for the res publica, from the hearts and minds of men.4

2 H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1979), p. 291.

3 H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1973), pp. 38-50.
4 See G. W. F. Hegel, Rechtsphilosophie (1821), #189ff; Hegel, The Philosophy of Right,
tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1973), pp. 126ff.

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 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 169

Arendt sees in this process the occluding of th

social and the transformation of the public
into a pseudospace of social interaction, in w
no longer "act" but "merely behave" as econ
consumers, and urban city dwellers.
This relentlessly negative account of the "rise
the decline of the public realm has been identif
Arendt's political "antimodernism."5 Indeed, at
text is a panegyric to the agonistic political sp
polis. What disturbs the contemporary reader i
high-minded and highly idealized picture of G
which Arendt draws, but more her neglect of t
agonistic political space of the polis was poss
large groups of human beings like women, slav
borers, noncitizen residents, and all non-Greek
from it and made possible through their "labo
necessities of life that "leisure for politics" which
then is the critique of the rise of the social, w
these groups from the "shadowy interior of th
a critique of political universalism as such?6 Is
the public space" under conditions of modernit
elitist and antidemocratic project which can har
with the demand for universal political eman
universal extension of citizenship rights?7 To
polemically: Arendt's own version of the predica
man-Jewish Mt. Parnassus," first identified by
for his generation of German-Jewish intellectu
they "had to administer the intellectual prop
which denies us the rights and the abilities to

5 Cf. Christopher Lasch, "Introduction" to Special Hann

Salmagundi 60 (1983): vff.; Jürgen Habermas, "Hannah Are
Concept of Power," Social Research 44 (1977): 3-24.
6 Cf. Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 212-220.
For a sympathetic critique of Arendt along these lines, cf. Ha
On Relating Public and Private," Political Theory 9 (1981): 327
Moritz Goldstein, "Deutsch-Juedischer Parnass," as quoted
"Walter Benjamin," in Men in Dark Times (New York, 1968), p

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 170 SOCIAL RESEARCH

her continuing adulation of Greek

following the tradition of the Germ
from Hölderlin over Hegel to Heide
current of her work contrasts shar
persecuted Jew in the twentieth
modernist analyses and reflection
conflicts of the West since the Enli
In this essay I will explore Ar
modernism" by beginning with her
as a new and unprecedented form
history. Particularly those sympath
who discovered Arendt's work duri
and antiwar movements in the United States in the 1960s have

tended to reject her theory of totalitarianism as a paradigmatic

instance of cold-war social science.9 My thesis is that the
historiography of National Socialist totalitarianism presented
Arendt with extremely difficult methodological dilemmas with
normative dimensions, and that while reflecting upon these
dilemmas Arendt developed a conception of political theory as
"storytelling." In light of this conception, her analysis of the
decline of the public space cannot be considered a nostalgic

9 With the revolutionary transformations which have taken place in 1989 in Eastern
Europe and the collapse of Soviet-backed communist regimes in these societies,
historically the cold war has come to an end. In light of these transformations, theories
of totalitarianism dating from the 1950s, and in particular those like Hannah Arendt's
which were formulated primarily with the National Socialist experience in view, will
have to be reconsidered. In this essay I am assuming that Arendt's theory of
totalitarianism was most illuminating with respect to National Socialism but that it had
severe limitations in explaining "Soviet-style" totalitarianisms. Cf. note 23 below on this
point. Ironically, even if her empirical and historical model of totalitarianism is
inadequate in explaining these societies, in her political and philosophical reflections
on Rosa Luxemburg, on the Kronstadt rebellion, and on the Hungarian revolt of
1956, Arendt noted certain features of "revolutionary experience" in these societies
which, if anything, have been proven completely right by recent developments in
Poland, Hungary, Czechoslavakia, East Germany, and Romania. In these societies the
people appear to have discovered the "lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition" by
creating spontaneously and by "action in concert," a power strong enough to topple
tyrants like Ceausescu, and lasting enough to create a "public space" of action and
deliberation, be it in the squares of Prague, the union rooms of Solidarnozs, or the
streets and churches of Dresden and Leipzig.

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 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 171

Verfallsgeschichte (a history of decline). Rat

viewed as an "exercise" in thought, the chief ta
dig under the rubble of history and to recover
past experience, with their sedimented and
meaning, so as to cull from them a story th
mind in the future. Yet the tension between Arendt's
modernism and her antimodernism, which almost correspon
to the Jewish and German legacies in her thought respectiv
is never resolved. It animates her vision of theory and polit
to the end.

Methodological Puzzles of Arendt' s Analysis of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt did not engage in methodological reflec-

tions, and on those few occasions when she characterized her
own work she appeared to confuse matters further, as in the
case of her various prefaces to The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Here she distinguished between "comprehension" and "deduc-
ing the unprecedented from precedents,"10 and between
"totalitarianism" and "its elements and origins."11 The "ori-
gins" of totalitarianism is actually a misnomer for this work,
which originally appeared in England under the title The
Burden of Our Times. In these prefaces Arendt makes clear that
she is not concerned to establish some inevitable continuity
between the past and the present of such a nature that one has
to view what happened as what had to happen. She objects to
this trap of historical understanding and maintains that the
future is radically underdetermined,12 but that more signifi-

10 Arendt, 1950 preface to Origins of Totalitarianism, p. viii.

Arendt, 1967 preface to Part One of Origins of Totalitarianism, p. xv.
12 Arendt's claim that the future is radically underdetermined, and can never be
foretold on the basis of the past, is rooted in her ontological analysis of human
"spontaneity." This is the capacity to initiate the new and the unexpected. It
corresponds to the human fact of birth. Just as every birth signifies a new life story,
one which can never be foretold at birth, so the human capacity for action can always
initiate the new and the unexpected (see Human Condition, pp. 243ff.). This capacity

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 172 SOCIAL RESEARCH

cantly to place the present in an i

with the past will lead to failure in
what has taken place. The key term
her method in The Origins of Totali
and the "crystallization of elemen
the "elements" of totalitarianism; for those currents of
thought, political events and outlooks, incidents and institu-
tions, which once the "imagination of history"13 has gathered
them together in the present reveal an altogether different
meaning than what they stood for in the original context. All
historical writing is implicitly a history of the present, and it is
the particular constellation and crystallization of elements into
a whole at the present time that is the methodological guide to
their past meaning. In language that resonates with Walter
Benjamin's introduction to The Origin of German Baroque
Drama,14 Arendt explains:

The book, therefore, does not really deal with the "origins" of
totalitarianism- as its title unfortunately claims- but gives a
historical account of the elements which crystallized into totalitari-
anism. This account is followed by an analysis of the elementary
structure of totalitarian movements and domination itself. The

for spontaneity is essential for political life, for the building of the city is due to such an
act of spontaneity, just as the continuity of the city is dependent upon the coordination
of human activities. Totalitarianism aims at destroying this capacity for a new
beginning, thus making political life impossible.
Arendt does not really explore how this thesis of the spontaneity of human action is
related to the perspective of the social sciences, which, by focusing on the enabling and
antecedent conditions of action, enhance our understanding of the course of action
while diminishing our sense for its spontaneity. Arendt would appear to be claiming
that social science is only possible insofar as humans do not "act" but "behave," i.e.,
insofar as they repeat socially established patterns. A more interesting account of the
impossibility of a social science of a nomological and predictive nature, which bases this
thesis on the narrative character of action rather than its spontaneity, is offered by
Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, 1981).
13 This is the phrase used by Merleau-Ponty in describing Max Weber's analysis of
the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism; cf. M. Merleau-Ponty, Les Aventures de
la dialectique (Paris, 1955), p. 29.
14 See Susan Buck Morss s exploration ot the terms configuration and
"crystallization of elements" as methodological categories of Benjamin's work, The
Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York, 1977), pp. 96-111.

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 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 173

elementary structure of totalitarianism is the hidden

the book while its more apparent unity is provid
fundamental concepts which run like red threads
whole.15

Indeed, from the standpoint of established disciplinary

methodologies, Arendt's work defies categorization while
violating a lot of rules. It is too systematically ambitious and
overinterpreted to be strictly a historical account; it is too
anecdotal, narrative, and ideographic to be considered social
science; and although it has the vivacity and the stylistic flair of
a work of political journalism, it is too philosophical to be
accessible to a broad public. The unity between the first part
on anti-Semitism, the second part on imperialism, and the last
part on totalitarianism is hard to discern. One of the first
reviewers of this work, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin,
maintained that the arrangement of the book was "roughly
chronological," and that is was "an attempt to make contempo-
rary phenomena intelligible by tracing their origin back to the
eighteenth century, thus establishing a time unit in which the
essence of totalitarianism unfolded to its fullness."16 Voegelin's
interpretation of Arendt's method as one of traditional
Geschichtsphilosophie (philosophy of history) was undoubtedly
more indebted to the curious distortions caused by his own
hermeneutic lens; nonetheless, his question about the unity of

15 Arendt, "A Reply," Review of Politics 15 (January 1953): 78 to Eric Voegelin's

review of The Origins of Totalitarianism; my emphases. Cf. Benjamin's Addition to
Thesis 18 of the English edition of the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (which
Arendt edited in English): "Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal
connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is cause is for that
very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through the
events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this
as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary.
Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite
earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the "time fo the now"
which is shot through with chips of Messianic time" (Illuminations [New York, 19691).
16 See Eric Voegelin, review of The Origins of Totalitarianism, in Review of Politics 15
(January 1953): 69.

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174 SOCIAL RESEARCH

the work, which prompted o

attempts at methodological self-c
If one interprets the unity of
intended it to be read- "the eleme
anism is the hidden structure of the book"- one must not
begin where the book itself begins, with Enlightenment
attitudes toward human nature and the social condition of the
Hoffjuden, but with the chapter entitled "Total Domination" on
the extermination and concentration camps. In the 1951
edition, this was the final chapter preceding the inconclusive
"Concluding Remarks"; in the 1966 edition Arendt expanded
these into a chapter on "Ideology and Terror." The chapter on
"Total Domination" is significant not because it brings fresh
empirical data into the discussion- it does not- but because of
Arendt's interpretive thesis that the camps are the "guiding
social ideal of total domination in general" and that "these
camps are the true central institution of totalitarian organiza-
tional power."17 The camps reveal elementary truths about the
totalitarian exercise of power and about the structure of
totalitarian ideology. Paradoxically, their darkness casts light
upon those moral, political, and psychological assumptions of
the Judeo-Christian tradition which, after the establishment of
the camps, are irrevocably placed in doubt.
Arendt is concerned to stress that the camps served no
"utilitarian" purpose in totalitarian regimes and hence could
not be explained in functionalist terms: they were needed
neither to intimidate and subdue the opposition nor to provide
for "cheap and disposable" labor.18 The camps are the living
laboratories revealing that "everything is possible," that
humans can create and inhabit a world where the distinction
between life and death, truth and falsehood, appearance and
reality, body and soul, and even victim and murderer are

17 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 438.

18 Ibid., p. 443. Cf. also Arendt's review called The History ot the Great Crime ot
Leon Poliakov, Breviary of Hate: The Third Reich and the Jews, in Commentary, Mar. 13,
1952, p. 304.

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 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 175

constantly blurred. This totally fabricated univer

ideological impetus of totalitarian regimes to cre
of meaning which is wholly self-consistent and
devoid of reality and immune to proof by it.
As the crystalline structure through whose blin
totalitarian form of domination is revealed, th
first that the belief in the juridical personality o
to be shattered; second that the moral persona
had to be destroyed; and finally that the indiv
self had to be crushed. Arendt's analysis in
sections of The Origins of Totalitarianism is de
how certain "elements" were present in the polit
culture of European humanity in the preceding
which, in retrospect and in retrospect alone, cou
harbingers of a new form of political dominat
history.
The death of the juridical subject, of the person qua bearer of
rights, is the story Arendt tells in the section on imperialism,
when she traces the paradoxes of the nation-state and of the
universal belief in the rights of man. She recounts the collapse
of Western moral standards through the confrontation with
Africa, both in the case of the Boer colonization of South
Africa and in the case of the later "scramble for Africa." These
experiences seem to say that mere humanity as such is no
guarantee of one's juridical status as subject of rights. The
death of the juridical subject is signed and made historical
testament when the minority treaties at the end of World War
I create millions of homeless, nationless, and displaced
persons. The juridical subject becomes a "superfluous" human
being.
The murder of the moral person in humanity, the death of the
moral self, accompanies the death of the juridical subject. The
specifically modern form of anti-Semitic prejudice plays a
special role in this process. Such anti-Semitism ascribes moral*
guilt and blame in a way which defies traditional moral
categories. The traditional anti-Judaism of Christian doctrine

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 176 SOCIAL RESEARCH

and practice had blamed the Jews f

against the Son of God. For one's
conversion, by penance, by denun
But modern anti-Semitism, which e
begin to enter "society," without ful
morally more perverse. Enlighten
from traditional conceptions of the
however, Jewishness now becomes
condition which is other and unde
becomes a "vice." Whereas a crime is an act, a vice is a
condition, a spiritual disposition, a trait of character; its
transformation is much harder since it is less easily identifiable.
The figure of the Jew increasingly becomes associated with
forces and powers that bear little or no relation to the
empirical individual. She or he thus ceases to be a morally
accountable self and becomes instead a specimen of the species
of Jews.19
The third element in the crystalline structure of totalitarian-
ism, as revealed via a retrospective analysis of the death camps,
is the disappearance of individuality. The emergence of the
mob and the universalization of the condition of worldlessness
as a result of war, political upheavals, and mass unemployment

19 In Arendt's account of modern anti-Semitism, the historical-institutional role of

the Jews in modern bourgeois society plays a major role. Nonetheless, it is important to
recall that the peculiarities of modern anti-Semitism cannot simply be explained by the
identification of Jews with the sphere of circulation and exchange. These equations are
only meaningful because "enlightened" society has gotten rid of the figure of the Jew
as the murderer of the Son of God and has replaced him/her by the image of the Jew
as the potential carrier of an unreformable, unredeemable "vice," namely, the "fact" of
Jewishness as such. Modern anti-Semitism focuses on Jewishness not as an act but as a
condition, as a form of identity. For this reason, it is more insidious; it requires that
this identity be changed or that the fact be eliminated. Undoubtedly, the strange
visibility of the Jews in modern European society - from the bankers who financed the
absolutist kings, to the assimilated bourgeoisie who used its connections established
under the Old Regime to continue commercial relations in the new capitalist economy,
to the Jews who, like money itself, seemed to be the only truly supra-European
community, members of the national state yet supranational in their historical ties,
family relations, and languages- this visibility made them the object of human
resentments.

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 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 177

play a special role in rendering "autonomy

chimera. For Arendt, the mob is a new historica
political scene, replacing le peuple. The mob is th
the lonely masses of totalitarianism. It is com
refuse of bourgeois society, of those individuals
the cracks of the social system, who belong to n
particular, who can be identified with no spe
work, who have been made superfluous by th
social changes brought about by industrializa
tion, and commercialization. They are worldle
that they have lost a stable space of referenc
expectation which they share with others.
particular social perspective from which to view
are particularly open to ideological manipulat
believe anything and everything for they ha
perspective which is tied to having a certain pla
Their condition is one of loneliness. The destruction of the
individual in concentration camps by methods of torture,
terror, and behavior manipulation only shows that a humanity
that has become worldless, homeless, and superfluous is also
wholly eliminable. Arendt sums up:

Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of

totalitarian government ... is closely connected with uprooted-
ness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern
masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have
become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last
century and the break-down of political institutions and social
traditions in our own time. To be uprooted means to have no
place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be
superfluous means not to belong to the world at all.20

Even if it is possible to interpret the unity of Arendt's work

in light of the principles of a "crystalline structure" or the
"elements of a configuration," as I have suggested above,

20 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 475.

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178 SOCIAL RESEARCH

questions remain: Why did Arend

manner of exposition and to an
explanation in her account of to
another example of the idiosyncrat
nature of her political though
intentions and methodology in The
have focused primarily on the
totalitarianism,21 the usefulness o
for "comparative studies of fasci
the inner workings of totalitarian
questionableness of treating Nazism
ian regimes of the same kind,
explanations in the case of the two

21 See Manfred Funke, ed., Totalitarisme: Ein S

moderner Diktaturen (Düsseldorf, 1978).
¿¿ See Hans Mommsen, "The Concept of T
Comparative Theory of Fascism," in Ernest A. M
(Port Washington, N.Y., 1981), pp. 146-167.
23 Karl Buckheim, "Totalitarismus: Zu Han
Ursprünge Totaler Herrschaft'," in Adalbert Re
Ihrem Werk (Wien, 1979), pp. 21 Iff. This last p
Particularly in the wake of the cold war, a
underwent a change and became "operationalize
and Z. Brzezinski to fit positivist understand
totalitarianism came to be almost synonymo
Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitar
(Cambridge, 1965). See in particular the pre
Interestingly, in recent years East European
revived this concept (Heller, Feher, Havel); se
Eastern Left, Western Left: Totalitarianism, Freed
whatever the merits of this concept to help us
there is little doubt that Arendt's historical ac
Nazism to the same extent and in the same way
Whereas it could be argued that there is mo
imperialism, anti-Semitism, and the subsequent
two phenomena, namely, imperialism and mode
formative-hermeneutic role in the emergence
century Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism as spe
this discussion is far too cursory, and the con
future developments in the Soviet Union rem
prove that the dislocations caused by World W
to the creation of "mass" society, in the same
with inflation and depression, come to cause it

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 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 179

These empirical and historical problems o

interpretation of totalitarianism still cannot dis
work's greatness. Bernard Crick, for example, h

If the book does seem unbalanced in the space it giv

perhaps this is a fault, but to see it as a gross fault
misconceive the whole purpose and strategy of
would be rather like, having been able to gra
queville's Democracy in America is really meant to
whole of Western European civilizations, to then
should have given equal and explicit space to Fr
England.24

I am personally less sanguine that this intellig

Arendt's strategy can suffice to rectify the p
parallel treatments of National Socialism and S
is more important in Crick's observation, and w
further light on the puzzles of Arendt's analysis
ism, is the affinity between Tocqueville's Democ
and Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America b
tendencies in the life of this nation, such as the rise of
social equality, the tyranny of the majority, the spread of
individualism, which he thought were exemplary of the
developmental trends of modern societies at large. Neverthe-
less, the political institutions and trends of nineteenth-century
America were not only exemplary but also unique, or better

mass society and the abolition of traditional classes, rather than preceding Stalinist
rule, are consequences of it. It is Stalin's war against the peasantry that finally dissolves
the fabric of traditional society on the land. See Robert C. Tucker, "Between Lenin
and Stalin: A Cultural Analysis" in Praxis International 6 (January 1987): 470ff., and
Alvin Gouldner, "Stalinism: A Study of Internal Colonialism," Telos, no. 34 (Winter
1977-78): 5-48. Also, the absence of a racially based anti-Semitism as the centerpiece
of Stalinist ideology (of course, anti-Semitism was used by Stalin as the trial of the
Jewish doctors reveals, but one cannot claim that it was the center of the Stalinist
Weltanschauung) throws even greater doubt as to the sense in which the developments
outlined by Arendt in the first two sections of The Origins of Totalitarianism can be
"crystalline elements" of Stalinism and National Socialism alike.
24 Bernard Crick, "On Rereading the Origins of Totalitarianism," Social Research 44
(Spring 1977): 113-U4.

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 180 SOCIAL RESEARCH

still, one could capture what

them- the tendency of modern
conditions" and social leveling--
ness-namely, democracy not
government but as a social con
Tocqueville emphasized that "A
for a world itself quite new,"25
left "to wander aimlessly," unabl
present.
Whereas for Tocqueville a new reality required a new
science to comprehend it and extract meaning from it, for
Arendt totalitarianism required not so much a new science as a
new "narrative." Totalitarianism could not really be the object
of a new "science of politics," even if Arendt believed that
there could ever be such a thing, for totalitarianism signified
the end of politics as a human activity, requiring freedom of
speech and association, and the universalization of domination.
Under these conditions one required a story that would once
again reorient the mind in its aimless wanderings. For only
such a reorientation could reclaim the past so as to build the
future. The theorist of totalitarianism as the narrator of the
story of totalitarianism was engaged in a moral and political
task. Put more sharply: some of the perplexities of Arendt's
treatment of totalitarianism derive from her profound sense
that what had happened in Western civilization with the
existence of Auschwitz was so radically new and unthinkable
that to tell its story one had first to reflect upon the moral and
political dimensions of the historiography of totalitarianism.
Although the politicization of memory was part of the destruction
of tradition in the twentieth century that Arendt lamented, the
politics of memory and the morality of historiography were at the
center of her analysis of totalitarianism no less than of her
reflections on Eichmann.

25 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, tr. George Lawrence

(New York, 1969), p. 12.

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 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 181

The Politics of Memory and the Morality of Hist

For Hannah Arendt, writing about totalita

particular about the extermination and conc
which she saw as the most unprecedented f
domination, presented profound historiogra
Let me summarize these around four heading
and salvation; the exercise of empathy, i
historical judgment; the pitfalls of analogical t
moral resonance of narrative language.

Historicization and Salvation. All "historiograph

salvation and frequently justification," notes A
ography originates with the human desi
oblivion and nothingness; it is the attempt to
of the fragility of human affairs and the i
death, something "which is even more than
Proceeding from this Greek and even Home
history, for Arendt the first dilemma posed by
phy of totalitarianism was the impulse to destr
preserve. "Thus my first problem was how to
about something- totalitarianism- which I d
conserve but on the contrary felt engaged to d
The very structure of traditional historical na
as it is in chronological sequence and the log
and succession, serves to preserve what has hap
ing it seem inevitable, necessary, plausible, und
in short justifiable. Nothing seemed more abho
than the dictum that die Weltgeschichte ist
(world history is the court of the world). Her
dilemma was the same as Walter Benjamin's: to
of narrative continuity, to shatter chronolo
structure of narrative, to stress fragmentarine

26 Arendt, "A Reply," p. 77.

¿/ Ibid., p. 79.

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 182 SOCIAL RESEARCH

ends, failures and ruptures. Not o

mentary historiography do justic
by telling the story of history in
efforts, but it is also a way of pre
enslaved by it, in particular wit
political imagination stifled by ar
sity." Arendt stumbled upon this h
reflecting upon totalitarianism, b
this method of writing history
canons of historical narrative gui
of the action of the Judenräte in
her account of the French and American revolutions in On
Revolution.

Empathy, Imagination, and Historical Judgment. Arendt main-

tained that there was a special relationship between historical
understanding {Verstehen) and what Kant had called Einbildungs-
kraft (literally, the power of creating, producing images).28 In
each case, one had to recreate from the evidence available a
new concept, a new narrative, a new perspective. For historical
understanding could never be the mere reproduction of the
standpoint of past historical actors; to pretend that historical
understanding amounted to complete empathy was an act of
bad faith which served to disguise the standpoint of the
narrator or the historian. In this context Arendt painstakingly
distinguished "judgment" from "empathy."29 The historical
narrator no less than the moral actor had to engage in acts of
judgment, for Verstehen as well was a form of judging-
certainly not in the juridical or moralistic sense of the delivery
of a value perspective but in the sense of the recreation of

28 Ibid. Cf. also H. Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political
Significance," in Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York,
1961), p. 221.
29 Arendt, "Crisis in Culture," pp. 220-221; cf. also S. Benhabib, "Judgment and the
Moral Foundations of Politics in Hannah Arendt's Thought," Political Theory 16
(February 1988): 29-53.

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 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 183

shared reality from the standpoint of a

concerned. Historical judgment revealed
nature of the shared social world by represen
in narrative form. At stake in such represent
was the ability "to take the standpoint of the
did not mean empathizing or even sympat
other, but rather the ability to recreate the w
through the eyes of others.
In recreating this plural and perspectivai
shared world, the historian could accomplis
only to the extent to which his or her faculty
was not limited to one of these viewpoints. Ar
fine line between the practice of judgment by
the one hand and the moral dilemmas of
relativism on the other. The commitment
narrative form every perspective, as the objec
the equivalent of the God's-eye view of t
relativism is equally problematical, for the m
fragmentary social and historical reality appe
one gain the conviction that there is no share
and that all our moral concepts are smoke
perspectives and preferences- a consequence
by whose perspectivalist epistemology Aren
inspired, did not hesitate to draw.30
As in moral philosophy so in historiography
refused to deal with these problems via
positions and insisted that the cultivation
moral judgment amounted to the ability to
distinctions" among the phenomena and
plural nature of the shared human world b

30 When Arendt discusses Nietzsche extensively in The Life of t

(New York, 1978), pp. 158-172, she treats him first and fore
the will and not as an epistemologist. Nonetheless, Nietzsche's
Arendt is hard to miss. On Nietzsche's perspectivalism, c
Literature (Cambridge, 1985).

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 184 SOCIAL RESEARCH

standpoint of others.31 Accord

Arendt herself excelled in this ar
extent that she was more success
the anti-Semite than of the Jew,
of African natives.32

The Pitfalls of Analogical Thinking. One of Arendt's chief quar-

rels with the social sciences of her day was that the dominant
positivist paradigm led to ahistorical modes of thinking and to
hasty enthusiasm for analogies and generalizations. Since the
method of science was considered the inductive one of assem-
bling ever more instances of the same law, in social science as
well one searched for the generalizable and cross-culturally "sim-
ilar," thereby ending more often than not in banal generaliza-
tions.33 For Arendt, the problem with this approach was not
just methodological but also moral and political. This search for
nomological generalizations dulled one's appreciation for what
was new and unprecedented, and thus failed to confront one
with the task of thinking morally anew in the face of the un-
precedented. Politically, this method also stultified one's capac-
ity for resistance by making it seem that nothing was new and
that everything had always already been.34
Following this concern with the unique rather than the
general, the unprecedented rather than the commonplace, in
the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt
employed the category of "radical evil" to describe what had

?1 I have dealt with some of the dilemmas of Arendt's moral theory in my article
"Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics in Hannah Arendt's Thought." The
obligation to take the standpoint of the other is part of a universalistic-egalitarian
morality which needs a stronger justification in moral philosophy than Arendt was
willing to offer.
á¿ See George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (New Jersey, 1983), pp.
61-63.

33 In light of post-Kuhnian developments in the social sciences in particular, some of

Arendt's observations on the topic of generalization have proved remarkably
prescient; cf., on the general topic, R. J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and
Political Theory (Philadelphia, 1976).
34 Arendt, "A Reply," p. 83.

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 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 185

happened in the death camps. Subsequently,

result of her analysis of Eichmann, she wit
position to the term "banality of evil." H
Elisabeth Young-Breuhl, recounts that this c
posterior for Arendt.35 This cure meant, h
forgiveness nor forgetting. (Arendt alwa
Eichmann had to be condemned for his dee
was on what principles and according to which
By this much maligned and much misun
Arendt raised a question which has remaine
today: namely, how "ordinary," dull, everyday
who are neither particularly evil, not partic
depraved, could be implicated in and acq
commitment of such unprecedented atrocit
phrase than the "banality of evil" might
"routinization of evil" or its Alltäglichung (
Analogical thinking governs the logic of the
we orient ourselves by expected and establis
rules. For this reason, analogical thinking ro
izes, and renders familiar the unfamiliar. In
reinforce the "normal" and the "everyday
unacceptable, of the unprecedented and the

The Moral Resonance of Narrative Language. Are

had praised her work as passionate and had
sentimental.38 Arendt's response to this w
parted quite consciously "with the tradition of
in her analysis of totalitarianism, for not
indignation or not to seek to arouse it in on

35 E. Young-Breuhl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (N

367.

See the exchange with Karl Jaspers on this point, in Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers:
Briefwechsel, pp. 457ff.
See Hans Mommsen, "Vorwort," in Eichmann in Jerusalem: Ein Bericht von der
Banalität des Bösen (München, 1986), pp. xiv-xviii.
38 Cf. E. Voegelin, review of The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 71.

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 186 SOCIAL RESEARCH

have been equivalent to moral c

concentration camps sine ira is
condone them; and such condon
condemnation which the author
but which remains unrelated to
moral resonance of one's language
the explicit value judgments whic
subject matter; rather such reson
narrative itself. The language o
moral quality of the narrated obj
narrate makes the theorist into a
gift of every theorist to fin
storyteller.

The Theorist as Storyteller

It may seem less perplexing n

what she was doing, "storytelling
answers Arendt gives.40 The vo
storyteller is the unifying thr
philosophical analyses from the
her reflections on the French and the American revolutions to
her theory of the public space and to her final words to the
first volume of The Life of the Mind on Thinking,

I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now
have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy
with all its categories, as we have known them from their
beginning in Greece until today. Such dismantling is possible
only on the assumption that the thread of tradition is broken

39 Arendt, "A Reply," p. 79.

4U See Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 22; Between Past and tuture, p. 14. 1 here is an
excellent essay by David Luban, which is one of the few discussions in the literature
dealing with Hannah Arendt's methodology of storytelling; cf. D. Luban, "Explaining
Dark Times: Hannah Arendt's Theory of Theory," Social Research 50 (1983): 215-247;
see also E. Young-Bruehl, "Hannah Arendt als Geschichtenerzaehlerin," in Hannah
Arendt: Materialien zu Ihrem Werk (München, 1979), pp. 319-327.

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 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 187

and we shall not be able to renew it. Historically spe

actually has broken down is the Roman trinit
thousands of years united religion, authority, and t
loss of this trinity does not destroy the past. . . .
What has been lost is the continuity of the past. . .
then are left with is still the past, but a fragmented pas
lost its certainty of evaluation.41

The past that claims authority on us because

things were done is "tradition."42 The events of
century, however, have created a gap between pa
of such a magnitude that the past, while st
fragmented and can no longer be told as a uni
Under these conditions, we must rethink the gap
and future anew for each generation, we mus
own heuristic principles, we "must discover a
pave anew the path of thought."43
This recovery of the past must proceed an
proceed outside the framework of established
tradition no longer reveals the meaning of the
without a sense of the past is to lose one's self, o
for who we are is revealed in the narratives we tell of ourselves
and of our world shared with others. Even when tradition has
crumbled, narrativity is constitutive of identity. Actions, unlike
things and natural objects, only live in the narratives of those
who perform them and the narratives of those who under-
stand, interpret, and recall them. This narrative structure of
action also determines the identity of the self. The human self,
as opposed to things and objects, cannot be identified in terms
of what it is, but only by who one is. The self is the protagonist
of a story we tell, but not necessarily its author or producer.44
The narrative structure of action and of human identity means
that the continuing retelling of the past, its continued

41 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1, Thinking; (New York, 1978), p. 212.
42 See her essays, "What Is Authority?" and "What Is Freedom," in Between Past and
Future.

43 Arendt, Thinking, p. 210.

Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 18 Iff.

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 188 SOCIAL RESEARCH

reintegration into the story of

reassessment, and reconfigurat
of the kinds of beings we are. If
the modality through which tim
the thread of tradition is brok
longer authoritative simply becau
us and we cannot avoid placing ou
we are at any point is defined by
present.
Narrative then, or, in Arendt's word, storytelling, is a
fundamental human activity. There is then a continuum
between the attempt of the theorist to understand the past and
the need of the acting person to interpret the past as part of a
coherent and continuing life story. But what guides the activity
of the storyteller when tradition has ceased to orient our sense
of the past? What structures narrative modes when collective
forms of memory have broken down, have been obliterated, or
have been manipulated beyond recognition? To elucidate the
activity of the storyteller, Arendt resorts to "a few lines" which,
according to her, say "better and more densely than I could"
what one does in the attempt to cull meaning of a fragmented
past. She quotes Shakespeare:

Full fathom five thy father lies,

Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.45

After the storm, the theorist as storyteller is like the pearl

diver, who converts the memory of the dead into something
"rich and strange." Arendt first cites this passage from
Shakespeare in her 1968 essay on Walter Benjamin:

Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of

45 Arendt, Thinking, p. 212, quoting The Tempest, act I, scene 2.

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 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 189

authority which occurred in his life-time were ir

he concluded that he had to discover new ways of
the past. In this he became a master when he disc
transmissibility of the past had been replaced by
that in place of its authority there had arisen a st
settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to dep
of mind," the mindless peace of complacency.46

In using the same lines from Shakespeare

Benjamin's efforts and her own exercises in
Arendt revealed the significant influence Be
on the Philosophy of History" exercised
historical narrative.47 Of course, Arendt herself did not
replace the transmissibility of the past by its citability, but
quotations for her, just as for Benjamin, became interesting
fragments, archaeological curiosities whose meaning lay "full
fathom five." In order to find those "pearls that were his eyes,"
one had to dive deep and excavate the original meaning of the
phenomena which lay covered by sedimented layers of
historical interpretation. Once one brought these pearls to the
surface, one could unsettle the present and deprive it of its
"peace of mind."
In Arendt's Benjamin essay the figure of the pearl diver is
accompanied by that of the collector:

The figure of the collector, as old-fashioned as that of the

flâneur, could assume such eminently modern features in
Benjamin because history itself- that is the break in tradition
which took place at the beginning of this century- had already
relieved him of this task of destruction and he only needed to
bend down, as it were, to select his precious fragments from the
pile of debris.48

Arendt was well aware that by arguing that the activity of

46 Arendt, "Walter Benjamin," p. 193.

47 I would like to thank Maurizio P. D'Entreves for first drawing my attention to this
link between Arendt and Benjamin in the first chapter of his doctoral dissertation,
"The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt: A Reconstruction and Critical
Evaluation," Boston University, 1989.
40 Arendt, "Walter Benjamin," p. 200.

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 190 SOCIAL RESEARCH

storyteller was like that of the pe

she was consciously leaving out
Benjamin for being ultimately
sings to eternalize the city and
deeds of human greatness and the
no identifiable human city, there
of the Vaterstadt, as Brecht knew
an environment;49 the city m
generationally transmitted remem
dried up the sources of poetry, t
diver and the collector, but unlike
under the rubble of history,
whatever pearls could be recovere

The Unresolved Tension: "Agonisti

If one reads Arendt's account of the "rise of the social" and

the decline of public space in the context of her historiograph-
ical considerations, we can no longer view her account as a
nostalgic Verfallsgechichte but must understand it as the attempt
to think through the human history sedimented in layers of
language and concepts. In this procedure, we identify those
moments of rupture, displacement, and dislocation in history.
At such moments language is the witness to the more
profound transformations taking place in human life. Such a
Begriffsgeschichte, a history of concepts, is an act of remember-
ing, in the sense of a creative act of rethinking which sets free
the lost potentials of the past. "The history of revolutions . . .
could be told in a parable form as the tale of an age-old

49 In her essay on Brecht, Arendt quotes "Of Poor B.B.": "We have sat, an easy
generation/In houses held to be indestructable./Thus we built those tall boxes on
the/island of Manhattan/ And those thin aerials that amuse the/Atlantic swell./Of those
cities will remain what passed/through them, the wind!/The house makes glad the
eater: he/clears it out./We know that we are only tenants, provisional ones/And after us
will come: nothing worth talking/about." See also B. Brecht, "Die Rückkehr."

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 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 191

treasure which, under the most varied circum

abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears again, u
mysterious conditions, as though it were a fat
Arendt's thought, however, is not free fro
Ursprungsphilosophie which posits an original
point as the privileged one. As opposed to ru
ment, and dislocation, this view emphasizes
between origin and the present and seeks t
privileged origin the lost and concealed
phenomena. I would suggest that there ar
Arendt's thought, one corresponding to
fragmentary historiography and inspired by W
the other, inspired by the phenomenology
Heidegger, and according to which memory
mimetic recollection of the lost origins o
contained in some fundamental human exper
second line of interpretation, reminders aboun
Condition concerning "the original meaning of
lost distinction between the "private" and the
In this essay I have argued that in the final a
Benjaminesque method of fragmentary his
governs Arendt's activity as a political theorist
of Ursprungsphilosophie is never quite lost. A
of her major theoretical concepts may illustrat
unresolved tension in her thought.
Arendt believed that Greek philosophy, more
distorted the experience of Greek politics. Plat
with his exemplary hostility toward the fragilit
and unpredictability of human affairs, introdu
the realm of poiesis (making) to think about po
craft, has rules that can be learned and taught
is reasonable that those inexperienced in a p
submit to the authority of those with know

50 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 5.

51 Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 23, 28, 38ff.

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192 SOCIAL RESEARCH

enee. As is well known, Socrates u

Republic to justify the distinction
For Arendt, what is ominous for
ment is the claim that political ma
those who know dictate and tho
rules. Arendt stumbles upon th
statements such as "but we were
higher-ups" in her reflections on
dictatorship and the issue of colle
this latter question are then inextric
geschichte of concepts like politics

The argument is always the same:

obedience to superiors as well as o
land. Obedience is a virtue; witho
other organization could survive. . .
word "obedience." Only a child o
actually supports the organization
that claims "obedience."52

Arendt then analyzes why obedience seems like such a natural

virtue in politics in light of the Platonic legacy that teaches that
the body politic consists of the rulers and the ruled. These
notions, however, have

supplanted earlier and, I think, more accurate notions of the relations

between men in the sphere of concerted action. These earlier
notions said that every action, accomplished by a plurality of
men, can be divided into two stages- the beginning, which is
initiated by a "leader," and the accomplishment, in which many
join in order to see through what then becomes a common en-
terprise.53

As this passage indicates, again the language of Ursprungsphilos-

ophie- the "earlier notions" which are also the more correct
ones -erupts in the midst of Arendt's search for the fractured

52 H. Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," The Listener 72 (August

1964): 200.
53 Ibid.; my emphases.

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 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 193

and forgotten meanings of terms- politics as t

coordinated action or of "action in concert."
The second example that would illustrate Arendt's equivo-
cation between fragmentary history and Ursprungsphilosophie is
the very concept of public space. This topographical figure of
speech is suggested at the end of The Origins of Totalitarianism to
compare various forms of political rule. Constitutional govern-
ment is likened to moving within a space where the law is like
the hedges erected between the buildings and one orients one-
self upon known territory; tyranny is like a desert. Under con-
ditions of tyranny one moves in an unknown, vast and open
space, where the will of the tyrant occasionally befalls one like
the sandstorm overtaking the desert traveler. Totalitarianism
has no spatial topology: it is like an iron band, compressing
people increasingly together until they are formed into one.54
Indeed, if one reads Arendt's concept of the public space in
the context of her theory of totalitarianism, the word acquires a
rather different focus than what appears to be more dominant in
the context of The Human Condition. I would like to use the terms
"agonistic" versus "discursive" space to capture this contrast. Ac-
cording to the first reading, the public realm represents that
space of appearance in which moral and political qualities are
revealed, displayed, shared with others. This is a competitive
space, in which one competes for recognition, precedence, and
acclaim; ultimately it is the space in which one seeks a guarantee
against the futility and the passage of all things human: "For the
polis was for the Greeks, as the res publica was for the Romans,
first of all their guarantee against the futility of individual life,
the space protected against this futility and reserved for the rel-
ative permanence, if not immortality, of mortals."55
By contrast, the discursive view of public space suggests that
such a space emerges whenever and wherever men56 act

54 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 466.

55 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 56.
Hannah Arendt s persistent denial ot the women s issue, and her refusal to link
together the exclusion of women from politics and this agonistic and predominantly

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194 SOCIAL RESEARCH

together in concert. Public space

can appear."57 It is a space not ne
or institutional sense: a town hall
do not "act in concert" is not a pu
dining room in which people ga
which dissidents meet with for
space; a field or a forest can also
are the object and the location of
constitutes these diverse topograp
presence of common action coor
persuasion. Violence can occur in
language is essentially private b
pain. Force, like violence, can be
way, it has no language, and nat
source. It moves without having t
however, is the only force that
comes from the mutual action o
once in action, one can make thi
source of "force."

The distinction between the agonistic and discursive public

spaces is to some extent an artificial distinction, for in every
public space something of who one is, one's strengths and
weaknesses, is revealed; and even a dramaturgical space exists
because people care to talk and act together. Nonetheless, this
distinction corresponds to the tension between the Greek and
the modern experiences of politics. For the moderns, the
public space is essentially porous: the distinction between the
social and the political makes no sense in the modern world,
not because all politics has become administration and because
the economy has become the quintessential public in modern

male conception of public space, is astounding. The "absence" of women as collective

political actors in Arendt's theory- individuals like Rosa Luxemburg are present- is a
difficult question, but to begin thinking about this means first challenging the
private-public split in her thought as this corresponds to the traditional separation of
spheres between the sexes (men = public life; women = private sphere).
57 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 4.

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 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 195

societies, but primarily because the struggle to

public is a struggle for justice. With the ent
group into the public space of politics after
American revolutions, the scope of the publ
The emancipation of workers made property
political issue, the emancipation of women has
family and the so-called private sphere become
the attainment of rights by nonwhite an
peoples has meant that cultural questions of co
other-representations have become "public" iss
it the "lost treasure" of revolutions that ev
partake in them, but equally, when freedom
action in concert, there can be no agenda to pr
of public conversation. The very definition
entails a struggle for justice and for freedom.
Perhaps the episode which best illustrates thi
Hannah Arendt's thought is that of school
Little Rock, Arkansas. Arendt interpreted the
black parents, upheld by the U.S. Suprem
their children admitted into previously all-w
being like the desire of the social parvenu to
in a society that did not care to admit him.
Arendt failed to make the "fine distinction" and confused an
issue of public justice- equality of educational access- with an
issue of social preference- who my friends are or whom I
invite to dinner. It is to her credit, however, that after the
intervention of the black novelist Ralph Ellison, she had the
grace to reverse her position.58
There is little question that Arendt's thinking on this matter
was clouded less by her polis-inspired vision of public space
than by her historical memory of Jewish emancipation and the
paradoxes it entailed, creating parvenus, pariahs, or total social

58 See H. Arendt, "Reflections on Little Rock," Dissent 6 (Winter 1959): 45-56; Ralph
Ellison in R.P. Warren, ed., Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York, 1965), pp. 342-344;
and Arendt to Ralph Ellison in a letter of July 29, 1965, cited in Young-Breuhl,
Hannah Arendt, p. 316.

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 196 SOCIAL RESEARCH

conformists. Undoubtedly, th
Arendt, the modernist, the story
sad witness of totalitarianism; Ar
Martin Heidegger and Karl Jas
polis and of its lost glory; Arendt
cease defending the Muttersprac
Kant, and Schiller to those Anglo
National Socialism the bankruptcy
these tensions remain. And it is
the method of political theory
storytelling which, in Arendt's
redemptive narrative, redeeming
defeated and the vanquished by
more their failed hopes, their
filled dreams.

* This article is a revised and shortened version of the German original, which
appeared as "Hannah Arendt und die erloesende Kraft des Erzaehlens," in Dan Diner,
ed., Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1988), pp.
150-175. I would like to thank Jerome Kohn for his encouragement and suggestions
in preparing this version.

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