Hannah Arendt (Archive Episode)

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Hello, I'm Simon, producer of In Our Time.

Following Melvin's announcement that he's stepped down from In Our Time after almost 27 years, we're taking the time to celebrate his outstanding work with some favourite episodes from our archive.

And thanks to everyone who's been in touch more and more every day, and we're passing all of those messages on to Melvin.

In due course, course we'll return with new programmes and a new presenter but now we have this listener favourite to offer from 2017.

Here's Melvyn.

Hello, Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 near Hanover in Germany where her family rarely mentioned their Jewishness.

She said she first encountered the word Jew in the anti-Semitic remarks of children as she played in the streets.

She escaped to America in 1941 and spent much of her time trying to understand why totalitarianism had dominated Europe so murderously in the 20th century.

To prevent its return, she argued, everyone should engage in political life, as in an idealised ancient Greek state.

She also wanted to know what motivated so many to act so atrociously in the Second World War.

And it was at the trial of Eichmann, one of the main organisers of the Holocaust, that she described what she called the banality of evil.

With me to discuss Hannah Arendt R.

Lindsay Stonebridge, Professor of Modern Literature and History at the University of East Anglia, Frisbee Sheffield, Lecture in Philosophy at Girdon College, Cambridge, and Robert Eagleston, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at the Royal Holloway University of London.

Frisbee Sheffield, can we briskly talk about the early stages in her life?

Yes, so as you've mentioned, she was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany to secular Jewish parents.

She excelled at school, studied ancient Greek from a young age, which gave her a lifelong interest in the classics.

She then went on to the University of Marburg to study philosophy and theology, where she met the philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Then she wrote a doctoral dissertation on the concept of love in St.

Augustine with another philosopher, Karl Jaspers, at the University of Heidelberg.

After that she moved to Berlin and

came face to face with the growing Nazi movement.

She was gathering information about anti-Semitism and was detained by the Gestapo.

Can we we spool back to Heidegger?

Because she had a big affair with Heidegger, which marked her one way or another for the rest of her life.

Yes.

What was that?

His wife was anti-Semitic.

He then switched, or whatever, he became a Nazi and an admirer of Hitler.

She was obviously

devastated by this.

Can you say rather more than I've said about that?

Yes, well, she had a long-standing romantic attachment to Heidegger, and I think that's why she moved to do her doctoral dissertation to Heidelberg to work under the direction of Karl Jaspers rather than staying at Marburg.

And yes, there was a rupture in their relationship, of course, when he joined the Nazi Party

and proclaimed support for their views when he was rector, I think, at the University of Freiburg.

And she was really, she struggled to come to terms with that a lot, and you can see that as a theme in some of her writings.

And I think we'll be talking about that in a bit more detail later.

I'd rather keep talking about it now, and we'll see, because if we forget to talk about it later, it'll be a pity, won't it?

What was the impact that he had on her?

Can you briefly tell us

in political-philosophical terms?

You're looking around.

We'll go on with the other thing.

How easily can her work be classified?

She's a philosopher, she's a classicist, she's a political commentator.

How would you place her?

Yes, I mean, there's a great range to her writings.

I mean, if we think about where she started with the concept of love and central gust in her work on totalitarianism, her philosophical, most philosophical work, perhaps the human condition, and then her thinking through the faculties of the mind and the life of the mind.

So she wrote on a great range of topics, although there is a consistent interest in politics and political themes throughout her works.

But even there, she's rather hard to place.

I mean, she resisted being called a political philosopher because of what she saw as an inherent hostility towards politics in most philosophers.

So one might call her a political thinker or theorist.

But even there she's quite hard to pin down.

She doesn't seem to fit into established categories of political thinking.

She's not a liberal in any straightforward sense.

Some people put her in the tradition of civic republicanism in its emphasis on democratic politics as a space to promote individual flourishing and happiness.

Some people align her with the communitarian tradition, insofar as she

thought that civic participation was very important, but she didn't aim at any shared conception of the common good.

So she's very hard to categorise and pin down.

Had you not had the rupture with Heidegger, do you think she'd have gone on to study in more detail more existentialism and become more part of that group?

Yes, that's an interesting question.

I think

the war and the events of the war had politicised her and got her very heavily involved in politics.

And also her husband, Heinrich Blücher, a revolutionary socialist.

Mrs.

Mrs.

After Heidegger.

Yes, she met in Paris.

She met him in Paris and she said that he

from him she learned how to think politically.

So I think her work was moving more in that direction anyway.

Lindsay Sternbridge, he we can we talk a bit more about the influences?

I've mentioned Heidegger twice, sort of slightly blurry around, and we've talked about the ancient Greek connection, learning it and that

accompanying her all her life and how precocious she was as a a scholar from a very early age.

Can we just say what person we have when

she starts to write her own work?

What was in her mind?

What had formed her mind?

Well, I think going back to Frisbee's remarks about Heidegger, what drew Arendt to Heidegger was he taught her how to think, and not just how to think and how to think about things or how to think in order to do things.

He taught her that thinking was a way of being a person, of being.

What does that mean?

It means that

how you think is how you exist.

You're thinking about your existence.

She loved the word perplexity that she borrowed from Socrates.

But you've established yourself in the world through thinking and through language.

So she went to Markberg specifically to work with Heidegger and she describes being entranced by his lectures.

There were performances of a man.

talking and thinking.

So that's one thing that's really important.

And also she was driven by language.

She thought in language.

She was very much a kind of existentialist in that way.

She thinks we think through words, we think in language.

And what she found in Heidegger was a passion for language.

She once said, We met in the German language.

She always adored the German language.

I mean, some critics will say she's too poetic, she's too esoteric, and that really comes from her sense of it's possible to be someone in language.

So that was very important to her.

But as you said,

let me just clarify.

I mean, it's brilliant.

I'm enjoying it a lot.

But what does to be someone in language mean?

That's brilliant.

You see why I resisted.

Yes, we're asking about Heidegger.

I mean, in some sense, the answer is: well, how else can we be?

Because we're always, as soon as you think about being, you're in a word, you're using words.

I mean, Arendt will always come back to the thing she borrows from Socrates and from Heidegger, which is the two-in-one dialogue we always have in our heads.

When we're thinking, we're having a conversation in our heads all the time.

And that, she says, is a way of being in the world.

So rather than looking for big abstract concepts, rather looking for a ground, she's saying we're constantly working out what it means to be a person in words, in thought, in thinking.

Is the conversation I had between two parts of ourselves or several parts of ourselves?

Well, usually she's.

It's bound to be real when you come to think of it.

Anybody else inside there is a lot of people.

Well, she really loves that great speech from the beginning of Richard III, that great soliloquy where which she says he's talking to himself you know am i a villain to prove myself a villain um and she loves that because that's exactly you know a kind of model for the thinking moral self i mean richard's really evil thinking moral self where does morality come into it well for richard um um who is of course evil he talks himself into doing evil and i know we're going to talk about this later but the non-thinking self won't even have that conversation.

Won't even, you know, she says, you have to, if you're having a dialogue with yourself, your actions in the world must reckon with the fact you're going to have to come home to yourself, to that voice inside your head.

Richard had that voice.

It didn't mean he wasn't evil, but he at least had that voice to prove myself a villain.

Someone like Eichmann didn't have that voice, didn't have that conversation.

Yeah,

that's just the distinction we were looking for.

She was hounded, she worked,

she found, she worked on

anti-Semitic, Semitic literature.

She did all the things that you would expect a brave, intelligent woman to do at that time, which she did all of them.

The Gestapo got hold of her, she got away from them, she escaped to Czechoslovakia, she went to South France.

She ended up in America.

She ended up in America and she was a refugee there, a stateless refugee.

Can you just give us a little vignette of her in America at the beginning?

Well, there's a lovely story.

After she'd come through Europe,

she was detained in a detention camp.

She was one of the lucky who got an American visa.

And when she arrived in America, the first thing she did was learn English.

I mean, she wrote in her third language and she went off to Massachusetts to work, to stay with the family for a crash course in English.

And what she soon discovered, one is she had to smoke outside, which for a European intellectual was just like the worst thing that could possibly happen.

There are these great letters, which she says, I can't believe this.

But the other thing she liked about America and disliked is, one hand, it was very socially conformist.

So you have to smoke outside, you have to behave yourself.

But the other thing that she liked about it was its political structures.

There was a political freedom in America, which she really felt wasn't there

in Europe.

But she was very conscious of her status as a refugee.

She wrote, I mean, earlier in her work, she'd written about the distinction between the Jew as pariah, the Jew as other, the Jew as the troublemaker, the other, and the Jew as Parvenu, the refugee who wants to assimilate, the refugee who just doesn't want any trouble.

And it became very clear to Arendt and a lot of other people

by the early 20th century that the assimilation PAVNU option was not working.

So in her thinking and her being, she adopted the position of the pariah.

There's a great essay, a furious essay she wrote called We Refugees.

And the first sentence of that reads, in the first place, we do not like to be called refugees.

It's absolutely defiant.

Thank you very much, Robert.

Robert Eagleson.

The origins of totalitarianism brought her some fame.

Can you tell us about that work?

What was its aim to start with?

Well,

the aim of the origins is really to describe the essence of totalitarianism.

It's got lots of history in it, but it's really about a sort of philosophical inquiry as to what really is at the core of totalitarianism.

And she finds really two essential things.

One we'll call roughly ideology and one about terror.

And they're both quite complex kinds of ideas.

We can take complex.

Let's start with ideology.

Well,

she says that in a totalism arises out of a

when people are disconnected from each other, other, when they're sort of atomized, and when social bonds

aren't as strong as they had been.

And a movement or a strongman arises, and he offers a story, an ideology, which claims to explain everything, why people are unhappy, to its adherents.

And this story becomes more and more powerful.

It means that you can't argue with people who have become Nazis or Stalinists.

Because there's only one way to think.

Because there's only one way to think.

And even more bizarrely,

the adherents can't even experience their own experiences.

What does that mean?

Well, she has this fantastic example from the 30s, from the Stalinist trials, where a man is arrested and accused of being a saboteur, a factory saboteur.

And he says,

well, the party is always right.

And I don't think I was a saboteur, but the party is always right.

And if the party says I was a saboteur, I must be a saboteur.

So it even takes over people's own experience of their own lives.

And she calls this the rule from within, and this sense that totalitarianism colonizes the inside of people's minds, their beliefs, and it makes them unable to argue or even, to say, to experience their own experiences outside of that system.

That's terrific, isn't it?

And the second thing,

the terror

about totalitarianism is terror.

And again, this ties up with some things we were talking about.

Heidegger and Aristotle.

So Aristotle,

so emerging out of Aristotle and out of Heidegger, is the idea that there are, in in a sense, two bits to what it is to be a human being.

Part of that is your sort of animal bit, the sort of meat that we all are, and part of that is your sort of social and political and legal life.

When I've talked to my students, I say that's like that's your name.

You know, when you go to the doctor, you're a body, but here you're a name, you're a person.

So, he's two bits of what it is to be a human being.

And what totalitarian terror does is to split those two bits.

So, totalitarian regimes take away your name, your identity, your rights,

your bios, Aristotle calls it, your social, world, and reduces you just to your body.

And once you're made just to be a body, Arendt says you're superfluous.

And she says once human beings are made superfluous, you can kill them the way you might kill a flea.

They're nothing, they're just bare life.

And that's the logic inherent in totalitarianism.

So those are the two crucial ideas from that book.

And she proved, she proved those in that book.

That's terrific.

She proved those in that book, does she?

Yeah, I mean, the book is a.

I first read it on holiday.

It's like a thriller.

You know, it's 500 pages, but it's really gripping.

It's full of historical detail, aspects of it being challenged and

tried to be refined.

But those are the crucial ideas about it that come out.

Any comments on this book, Lindsay?

Do you want to talk about that?

It is like a thriller, but also I think the really important thing as well is the way she tells that story.

You know, there are several things that will allow totalitarianism to happen, the terror and the ideology, anti-Semitism, racism, uncontrolled imperial expansion, what happens when the elite get together with the mob.

But not any one of those things can cause totalitarianism.

You need a kind of perfect storm of different elements working at the same time.

So within a historical imagination, it's fascinating because she actually says, I'm trying to, it's like trying to put together a crystal and trying to see all the different elements, rather than do that narrative which says, this happened because this happened.

That's right.

Lots of people read it as a history book, but it's not really a history book, although there's plenty of history in it.

It's really trying to pull out what the essence of these things are, what's really going on with imperialism.

What impact did it have at the time?

Well,

it made her reputation as a thinker.

It was

widely discussed.

What days are we talking about earlier?

1950-51, it came out.

That's right, yeah.

It made her reputation as a thinker.

In a way,

of course, there are accounts about the Nazis just after the war.

In a way, it's the first big sort of theoretical account of what had happened.

But in fact, one of the things about it is that it's so full of ideas that it's still sort of unrolling in academic circles now.

Principal Sheffield,

Amrenda, you talked at the beginning of her early knowledge of Greek.

She held to it to the rest of her life.

It was extremely important to her, particularly Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates.

How did she...

What was it about the Greek philosophy in terms of the modern breakdown?

It's quite a big jump, but somebody, one philosopher said, oh, Western philosophy was a footnote to Plato, so it's maybe not all that big a jump.

What's happening there?

Well, the connection for her is that she held that

there had been a rupture in political thought.

After the Second World War, the established categories of political thinking needed to be fundamentally rethought.

And so

the ancient Greek philosophers are part of that project for her.

She puts them in this vital and urgent context of rethinking politics after the war.

We inherited many of our concepts from them.

They have shaped the way in which we see ourselves as political actors in the world.

You've said that, it's terrific, but can you give us an example of that?

We've shaped the way in which we see ourselves.

Can you illustrate that?

Yes.

So

central to her reading of the Greek philosophers is a contrast between the active and the contemplative life.

Aristotle and Socrates had a very positive conception, she thought, of the active life, and that came to be degraded by Plato.

That's a big thing to say.

Yes,

so should we start with Socrates and Aristotle?

So, Socrates, for Arendt, was the last great philosopher-citizen.

He moved amongst plural human beings in the world.

He was interested in talking to his fellow men and interested in their doxa, their opinions.

He wanted to know what they thought, to ask them to take account of themselves and to help them negotiate between the plural perspectives of others.

So in its critical aspect, Socratic conversation for her was about adjusting to the plural perspectives of other people in a communal space like the Agora, the marketplace where Socrates talked.

So he moved among men and was concerned with what people thought.

And so you're there for a political and fool person in that speech by Pericles, saying, if you don't do that, you're not a fool man.

Yes,

she connects Aristotle more to that passage in Thucydides and Pericles' funeral oration.

She was interested, too, in some of Aristotle's thoughts, for example, his idea that man is by nature a political animal.

And she held there that what was important for Aristotle is he thought that we realise a distinct human freedom by acting together, talking together with others in a communal space.

And in a way, this is,

for simplification, but you'll notice, you make it complicated, I hope, in a way, that was the best thing, and then Plato bombed that.

Yes.

How did he bomb it?

Yes.

So that's exactly right.

There was a particular historical moment she locates this to, which is the trial and death of Socrates in 399.

She says that Plato's despair at the death of Socrates motivated an inward turn and a flight from the political realm.

What did that mean?

What it meant, particularly, she's thinking here about the image of the cave in the Republic, where Plato describes ordinary men trapped in a cave of experiences.

And he describes that in terms of darkness, deception, and illusion, and encourages a turning around to the realm of ideas outside that plural realm to the light of ideas.

And she says, here we can see a rejection of what Plato thinks of as the senseless doings of men in their plurality in favour of the solitary reflection of the isolated philosopher.

So we have a turn away from the plural world of politics to thinking about man in the singular.

And in a way, to turn away from action with everybody else to solitude and contemplation.

Can we take that along, Lindsay Stonebridge?

Did this make, in her view, if one could re-realise that for a vibrant community?

And have,

is it that falling away that was the cause of the terrible things in the 20th century?

It was that falling away, but also the growth of what she called the social, or the blob, as she called it.

And she said the real distinction there is between

the life of the mind, thinking and doing, but also the idea that instead of having a political space where ideas are discussed, the social moved into that space.

People became job holders' functions.

You didn't have that marketplace of ideas.

So the social, she thought, was a real threat

in that way.

Well, just one second.

Is there any re is there any?

Do you have any?

Did she have any philosophical reason why having a marketplace of ideas was essentially and necessarily better than thinking by yourself and coming up with your own idea?

How did she prove that?

I'm not sure how, I wouldn't say she proved it.

I thought what she wanted at the heart of any vibrant political community was the notion of consent and dissent.

There had to be a conversation, there has to be something new.

So when she's looking back to the Greeks, as Fritzby was saying, she's not trying.

A lot of of people say she was nostalgic for the Greek polis, and I don't think that's quite right.

What she was nostalgic for was the marketplace of ideas, the idea that something else might happen, that something might change.

That's what she was nostalgic for.

So in the human condition, she borrows the concept.

That's another book, The Human Condition.

She borrows the concept, it's from Herodotus, of isonomia.

And that's basically the principle of equal liberty.

She says any vibrant community needs, which is the point at which you just say, that's not fair.

Why can my child have an education and not yours?

Why can't I travel freely and you can't?

And there are these moments of that's not fair.

And so you need a vibrant political community that can change,

that can produce change without risk.

So the other two things you need to keep that political community in place is a community that is okay with promising, because that's the way if you promise to do things, you make things less dangerous, you stabilise things.

Sometimes you have to break promises, but you have to have a kind of good, trust, promise community.

and you need a culture of forgiveness because things go wrong.

So, a grown-up political community will be one that says, Yes, we can take this, yes, we can have this marketplace of ideas and this rather difficult

moments of you know

potential violence.

But in the end, you know, we need to be able to promise one another and forgive one another.

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Is she finally saying, she is in a sense saying, Robert Egglessen, that if you have a plurality of ideas, if people are contradicting each other and it's just been said, I want that, if he's got that,

that will necessarily prevent the rise of tyrannies and totalitarianism.

She certainly thinks if you have civic engagement and bonds and articulate disagreement with the things that Lindsay was talking about.

That is the sort of thing that prevents totalitarianism.

It's a strong civic culture

and respect for others is exactly what she thinks will stop totalitarianism.

But she's also aware that

the plurality arises just because people are different.

And she's very aware that people are different.

And her critique of Plato is that Plato thinks that he's like the lone philosopher contemplating by himself.

But in fact, we should be thinking about ourselves together, all different.

So philosophy should begin not with the I, I think, therefore I am, or

the lone philosopher, but with the us, with the we, thinking and arguing and talking together and recognising our differences.

And once we lose that, which Plato did, we're on the path to losing all individuality.

That's exactly right.

I'm coming quite quickly, zipping from totalitarianism in the human condition to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, which she was there in 1961, 62, when he was tried.

He was one of the

main managers of the Holocaust.

And she

had this phrase which was wrung down the decades, and I think will run down many more decades, the banality of evil.

What's the context for that phrase?

Well, as you say, Aicheman was a high-level death killer in the Holocaust.

He was taken, seized by the Israel Secret Service in 1960 and tried in Jerusalem.

And Arant had been thinking a lot about the quest of evil right from 1945.

So it was the question of the the future, it was a question of what is evil.

And so she took the opportunity to see Eichmann, the trial, as you say, and she saw him

behind his glass box.

He was kept in a glass box on trial.

She wrote a pile long articles which became a book.

That's right, became a book.

And he spoke in clichés, he couldn't follow a train of thought, he couldn't understand other people's point of view, he was sort of vulgar.

And

she's thinking, well, how can you know this

man is this evil mass killer?

How can this be?

And so

she's always opposed to giving the Nazis sort of satanic greatness.

The Nazis love that with their SS uniforms and death head skulls.

And she was very opposed to that.

These are just

people, men.

Okay, how can they be evil?

And so she thinks about this phrase of the banality of evil.

Maybe you know much more than I do, but I don't think, did she say, how can they be evil?

They were evil.

She said, how can I explain in what way they were evil?

Exactly.

So

she comes up this concept of the banality of evil.

We might think of that as being like the normalisation of evil, the way in which something as evil as mass murder can be turned into routine, something that happens every day.

And she talks about, this is the crucial thing, Eichmann's thoughtlessness.

And it's not carelessness or it's his inability to think.

And she says he's hedged around by these linguistic clichés, by his refusal to question, by his lack of sense of the past.

And that makes him thoughtless.

Is that back to what Lindsay was saying earlier?

Very much.

It absolutely ties in.

Not being Richard III.

That's right.

It's like a living example of exactly that.

Eichmann has no,

is unable to talk to himself about what he's doing, so he's unable to question or think it through.

But we have to dig into why this, what sort of Ebil it was and what words are used, what concept to be reintroduced.

Because the idea of Ebil is the Goering figure, a great monstrous person, Rebecca Westley.

They looked like a brothel keeper, but basically he looked like a terrible chap on the film that's going to murder his children, that sort of thing.

And she was saying, no, he looks like a civil servant, which he was,

not able to answer questions properly, thinking he'd done a good deed by reducing the number of people in a carriage that he sent to us.

He needed a little bit of commendation for that.

I mean,

how...

That's the interesting madness, isn't it?

And how did she dig into that, of Risby?

What did she say?

More than that.

I mean, Robert's given us a terrific start.

Can you develop it?

I think, I mean, one of the things that it's important to be clear about, especially in light of the vitriolic criticism she received

by

her use of that phrase, is that she makes a very sharp and robust distinction between the doer and the deeds, as Robert's point.

There's nothing banal about the deeds.

They were monstrous and wicked.

Why was the criticism so banal?

No, say it first, then we come to criticism.

Well, I think part one of the reasons why the criticism was so vitriolic was

people didn't distinguish clearly enough, as she did, between the doer and the deeds.

So, some of her reviewers said she's claiming that the Holocaust was banal, which, I mean, you have to have a serious amount of ill-will to read it, that she neither says nor implies that.

And also, she did mean something quite specific by banality.

She didn't mean commonplace.

She was responding once to a reviewer who said that she was claiming that there was a little Eichmann in everybody.

She denied that and said, No, I do not mean by banal commonplace.

She meant specifically, as Roberts already suggested, that it wasn't

rooted in some evil motivation, some satanic greatness.

It was an absence.

In a sense, she can be seen as part of a Platonic tradition of thinking about evil as a privation, as an absence of goodness.

It was an entirely negative phenomenon for her, a thoughtlessness.

Lindsay, coming back again to what you said a couple of answers ago, how important

was it to her that Eichmann was thoughtless, that he did not think, could not think, would not think?

What was that word?

Why was that so important to her and linking it with banality?

Yeah, I mean I think it goes back to that two-in-one conversation but the other term I think would be helpful to have in the conversation is he was a bureaucrat.

One of the reasons that evil was allowed to thrive, albeit in a banal form in her view, was the bureaucratization of modern life.

And we become alienated from the way we relate to one another and we start relating to each other through systems.

And so one of the first things she did when she was a refugee in the States is write two very good essays on Franz Kafka.

And it's that world that she and She said Kafka could already see when people have been reduced to job holders, to identities, to names, allows you to function without having that two-in-one conversation.

And so, it's not quite, you know, he's an idiot, he's just obeying orders.

She's not saying that at all.

She's saying it's there's a context for radical thoughtlessness, and that context has everything to do with how we organise our social life together.

She uses an analogy which suggests it becomes deep.

She says it's like a fungus.

In other words, it is a growth, isn't it?

It's something that gets inside you like a malaria cell and won't be stopped.

And she uses that advisory.

So you are turned into something else.

You look like you're a bureaucrat sitting at your desk, but there's this fungus inside you that's taken over your brain.

Yeah, and it spreads.

Actually, Rebecca West, who you mentioned earlier, also talked about a yeasty darkness in that period.

And this idea of yeast and fungus, because they don't have roots.

This isn't deep evil.

This isn't Richard III.

This is evil without roots.

It's on the surface.

It's sticky.

It gets everywhere.

You can't get rid of it.

Have we nailed it yet?

Robert, was there anything...

Why did...

Why did she...

We've talked about the criticisms.

Did she do her case any good the way she presented it at the time?

Because she came in for a great hammering and she was making a very fine point, I think.

Well, absolutely not.

It was terribly controversial.

The book was controversial.

This idea of the banana of evil, which at surface looks as if it's downplaying what had happened,

came to a great deal of criticism.

And she spent a lot of her time in the 60s after that book trying to explain what she meant.

What she meant, she talks about, as Lily says, that the two in one.

She talks about evil as a fungus.

But she's trying to articulate a new sense of evil.

I mean, with totalitarianism and with the Holocaust, she says that a new sort of evil has emerged in the world, and she's the first person to try and analyse it exactly as a fungus that isn't deep, that isn't rooted, that comes out of a sort of

atomized society.

She says that our society is like a desert, and totalitarianism is like a sandstorm that's whipped up in that desert.

Can we move to the human condition?

Is that a continuation in some way?

Yes, it's related to her concerns in the origins of totalitarianism because she held that political thought had been ruptured.

And the human condition is where she takes on the task of rethinking our established categories of political thought.

And she goes back to the Greeks.

She goes back to the Greeks indeed.

So she...

One of the central strands of that work is trying to clarify the active life, which, as we've said earlier, was dethroned at this particular historical moment for her by Plato.

So she tries to analyse the three fundamental activities of the active life in the human condition and to think about how they've been conceived differently in different periods.

So those three fundamental activities in the human condition are labour, work and action.

And she assesses each of those activities in terms of the contribution they make to human self-realization and freedom and how they're able to meet certain conditions of our human life.

For example, the fact that we're mortal, the fact that we live on the earth and inhabit the world, and the fact that we live amongst plural beings in the world.

Robert.

One example of it is she talks in the very famous action chapter about natality.

So, Heidegger's.

Natality, yes.

Yeah, Heidegger's Thorpe says that philosophy begins in our being towards death, our awareness that we're going to die, and that makes us think about ourselves.

And she, as it were, has

takes that idea but turns it the other way around.

And she says it begins precisely in our birth, both our first birth when we're born, but also when we're born into society.

She says it's a second birth.

So it's natality as being born into society where we take our role in the marketplace, where we're able to discuss things and sort of

talk about ourselves and talk and argue with people.

So that's an example of how she takes the Heideggerian concept and turns it around to talk about

action that Frisbee was talking about.

It is a curiosity of her life that although she was a great distance from him and ruptured him, she was prepared to defend him intellectually later, or some of his ideas anyway.

But let's stay with her.

Lindsay,

how does she try to say, look, we are where we are now?

Everything, not everything,

a massive society has been destroyed by these two great totalitarianisms and these two wars.

If we go back to the Greek, we can maybe just about hold it two and a half millennia across time and reset it for now.

How did she go about that?

Well, I'm not sure she did.

I don't think she does that straightforwardly.

What she liked, what she affirmed about America, was the Republic tradition.

So she thought you could recreate

voluntary associations, which were sort of small groups of people making new things happen.

And she liked America.

She liked the notion of republicanism with a small R, with a historic notion of republicanism, because that was possible.

But she also understood that it was under threat.

I mean, there can be no going back to

the Greek idea of the polis, not in the 1960s.

It would look like Star Trek.

You'd have people on the deck having these great philosophical discussions while they visited people in time and space who were doing all the work.

I mean, that's the only way you could have the Greek polis in the 1960s.

But what you could have, and she did see this as under threat all the time, and she wrote very persuasively about Nixon and Watergate and lying in politics, is what constantly needed protecting was the idea of there should be places where dissent and creation of the new are possible.

So I was rereading her essay on civil disobedience, American civil disobedience, this week, which is fascinating.

She says, you know, disobedience isn't just breaking the law.

Sometimes you need civil disobedience to make the law be the thing it can be.

So

it's a kind of way of restoring the republic, putting the republic, acknowledging the republics in crisis, but that will take smaller smaller groups of active citizens.

So she was very supportive of the student movement in the 1960s.

She didn't like it when they got involved in big ideologies.

She didn't really like the violence.

But the idea that you could form,

you know, she said, you know, to all societies are based on the notion of consent.

So

even when you're consenting, you know, there's a possibility of dissent.

That's your responsibility.

So that's where she saw possibility.

And she really did think that the American model held out the opportunity for something greater than it already was.

And she was very, very protective of it as well.

Was there a sense that now and then,

she put her foot in it and was rather careless of the consequences?

Yes, she was often.

I mean, that's an understatement, isn't it?

Yeah,

for you to say, me to suggest.

Yeah,

she was often tactless.

She often made mistakes.

There's a very famous case about integration, an article, essay on Little Rock, where she is on the sort of wrong side of history.

But I think these come out of her, you know, from her deep engagement in her thought and in civic society.

And these often made her very unpopular.

And it's also true that

she became seen as a great sort of cold warrior as well, because she was so opposed to totalitarianism.

And that also put her on certain sides of debates that she might not naturally have been on.

Yes, going back to the tactlessness, I would also like to say, I mean, she wrote very beautifully.

I mean, you read Hannah Arendt in these difficult ideas, but you come away with clarity.

But she also writes ironically, and that two-in-one we've been talking about, having two voices in your head,

the kind of way you write that is through irony.

Irony has always got two voices in it, you're doubling.

And when she wrote Icumen in Jerusalem, she wrote it in the ironic mode.

This did not go down very well with

the Jewish community.

This is the first time some survivors got to speak of their trauma.

It was an extraordinary emotional outpouring of grief, in Susan Stontag's words.

And to miss this and to be ironic was seen as deeply wounding.

So it was that kind of...

She thought it got in the way of the argument.

She did.

Well, also, she really thought that the testimonial culture was getting away.

The thing that we really need to do is, how do you invent a new law that can cope with crimes against humanity?

And if we distract ourselves from that, these crimes are going to keep on happening.

And I think she was quite right to do that, but to dismiss everything else was going on was a tactical error.

I mean, she won't be the first woman academic who thought she was being ironic and people just thought she was being offensive.

I'm very ironic about that.

I'm sure.

Look, you know 25 times more than I did, but it seemed to me to say there's a trial going on.

It's about an, as far as I am concerned, Hannah, it's about an idea.

Let's talk about personal experiences at another time.

I will just stick with the idea.

I mean, wasn't that what you were saying?

I don't think it was ironic.

I think she was commenting what was going on.

And she may have been completely wrong there.

And a lot of people thought she was totally wrong there.

And that

the tales of the stories of the survivors were more important than anything else.

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.

She was after something else, though.

She was.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

Brisbie,

in the human condition,

another,

is she thinking that change is possible?

Yes, it's quite optimistic.

And

she thought of calling the book Amor Mundi, Love of the World.

And I think that brings out this sense that she was rethroning the political space in contrast to the rejection of it that she saw in the Platonic and Christian tradition after him.

And I think it's the principle of natality here that is the principle of optimism in the work.

And she describes that once with a quote from Augustine, that a beginning be made, man was created, the principle of initiative, the possibility of starting something new, as long as we preserve those public spaces in which that can happen.

That

is one of the strands of optimism in the work.

Did you fear that totalitarianism might recur?

Yeah, she ab absolutely she did.

In Origin of Totalitarianism she talks about um how although Nazism uh had been defeated and by the time the third edition came out Stalinism had had uh gone, that all the conditions were continually moving around, continually about, and we should be constantly sort of aware um o of the dangers of totalitarianism, particularly when she says whenever uh human beings are made superfluous, so whenever you know our identities and so on are taken away from us, that's a really warning sign that identity is taken away from us, you treat it as numbers rather than

exactly

having our social and cultural and legal lives separated from our

stateless person.

I think it's very important.

She talked about elements of totalitarianism and she said that elements of totalitarianism linger in the political culture.

So the idea of organised lying, she was very concerned about Pentagon, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.

And so you can't just think totalitarians as this big dark cloud that descends on other histories and other places.

It's always that there are potentially elements of it always there.

She's had a roller coaster reputation.

What is it today?

But Lenzyani take us for this question.

It's quite simple.

It's very hard.

I mean,

she writes very beautifully, but she is quite hard to read.

As supposed to be said, it's not quite clear.

She's a philosopher or a political scientist.

Or, I mean, she described herself as a storyteller.

She's quite popular in the States, she's less popular in the UK.

I mean, it's quite an engagement.

But UK's intrusion about

analytical philosophy, she doesn't fit into that at all.

She really doesn't.

So they won't regard her as a philosopher from scratch, will they?

And she's quite rude about them, too, in The Life of the Mind.

Oh, I see.

I think she's having, I mean, British philosophy thinks she's a journalist.

But I think at the moment she's having a renaissance.

Origins of totalitarianism is selling very well.

A lot of us are teaching aren't in our classrooms.

The students are responding very well.

And that's, I think, that's a new thing.

It's too cool, too close to call, but she's, you know.

I mean, she's a gay.

Thank you very much.

Sorry about that, Robert.

Thank you very much, Robert Eagleston, Afrisby Sheffield, Lindsay Stonebridge.

Next week, we were talking about John Clare, who, according to one of our guests, was quote the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced and is one of the great poets of the 19th century.

So that next week, thank you for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

When did we miss out?

I think one of the things that she's she that I'm very struck with her is she's she's very keen on making distinctions between things.

So

there's the work,

work, labour, work and action.

And those are quite interesting but also a bit unstable sometimes.

So

labour is just sort of feeding ourselves and doing the washing up.

Work is more important.

Work is where we create and build something.

And she says that people who write laws are sort of work and work lives on.

Poets do work, that lives on.

Whereas action, which is really important when we do things together, is somehow very

evescent.

We do something together

and it's sort of gone.

We don't know what's going to happen to our action.

And indeed, she talks about in On Revolution, she talks about the lost treasure of the American Revolution, which is that sense of people doing something together, which is a wonderful feeling, and then it sort of evaporates.

So action, although it's really important for her, doesn't have a sort of legacy in a strange way.

I think the other thing that's interesting about her conception of action and how she differentiates it from labour and work is one of the reasons it's so important is because in labour

she thinks that in our activity of labouring, we're trapped and bound by natural necessities, so we can never really be free in those activities.

Work is prompted by the principle of utility, so it has some source of value outside of itself, whereas only in action can we really reveal who we are, as opposed to what we are as human beings.

So that's central to her characterisation of action.

And I also think that the storytelling thing, that who and the what, is a really interesting thing.

So storytelling reveals who we are, but it's always through a what, it's always through the telling of a story.

And I mean, she always says, I'm a storyteller, which is a way of getting out of difficult questions about, you know, what is your discipline exactly and how do you do that?

Well, there's a wonderful, sorry, there's a wonderful passage in The Human Condition where she talks about the great storybook of mankind.

There's a sense that even though we're all authors of our own stories,

we don't know what's going to happen to the meaning of those stories.

You disclose something, you don't know what's going to happen in the future or how it relates to the past.

So it's that network or web of storytelling that she

wants to affirm, and also the chanciness of that, that you don't quite know

where you are.

And that's how plurality seems to be so intimately connected to action because we need the presence of others to acknowledge our fine deeds and

living words and to tell our stories as human beings.

Exactly, exactly.

But going back to that point of plurality, I just want to track back a little bit to her experience of being a refugee and origins of totalitarianism because

she made a very important point there, which was born out of being a refugee, being on the refugee rat runs, being in camps.

That what the stateless people, as she called them of the late 1930s, revealed to her was that 18th-century Enlightenment idea of the rights of man had gone, had completely gone.

And what it revealed to her is the only rights that will protect you are the rights of the nation state, political rights, the rights that you're given.

Once you don't have a state, you're rightless.

And she said, you know, not long after, I think this was 1944,

the world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.

Once you were just human, you had no rights, you were bare life.

And I think we're still coming to terms with what that means.

I mean, she said, yes, we need a new legal system.

But she also said, the only people who give each other rights are other people.

We give rights and we take them away.

And that's why you need plurality.

Rights can't be given through big animals.

The idea of natural rights and my rights

is they're not.

They're made.

She says in Origins of Totalitarianism, she said, Ironically and reluctantly have come around to Burke's thinking that the only thing that protects you

really gives you rights are a national culture.

But that means that we need to rethink rights.

So she actually thought the natural rights tradition was basically dissolving in the mud of the camps.

It was gone,

it was dead.

And we're still coming to terms with that.

I think her critique of rights is so important.

But we hear the word rights all over the place now and there's always a little bell at the back of your head saying, hold on, by what do you claim these rights?

It's all over the place.

I have the right, you're taking away my right.

It starts at the age of five, it seems to me.

It intensifies.

Well, that's what she thought was wrong with the social.

If everyone's just saying my rights, my rights, you've got no kind of conversation or legislation.

The word responsibility largely pops up.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I mean, and responsibility is a big word for Iran.

And she's also very, I think this thing about the social also has its mirror in the political.

So for her, politics isn't just about administering things and sorting out the economy.

Politics is a sort of vocation that we all should be involved in, which is a sort of important thing.

thing in itself.

It's what it is to be a human being.

So, you know, when

you have a meeting, of course, the meeting has to decide to do various things, but part of the point of the meeting is just the meeting where you encounter others and talk about things.

And that's a really important bit of her thought.

I know.

Yeah.

Well, thank you all very much.

You look like you deserve a cup of tea.

We'd like to take a coffee.

In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by me, Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios production

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