Arendt, Hannah - Politics and Anarchy.pdf - Arendt - MKTK

Inquiry , 47, 20–41

Political Itineraries and Anarchic

Cosmopolitanism in the Thought of

Hannah Arendt

Annabel Herzog

University of Haifa

In this paper, I argue that Arendt’s understanding of freedom should be examined

independently of the search for good political institutions because it is related to

freedom of movement and has a transnational meaning. Although she does not say it

explicitly, Arendt establishes a correlation between political identities and territorial

moves: She analyzes regimes in relation to their treatment of lands and borders, that

is, speciﬁc geographic movements. I call this correlation a political itinerary . My aim

is to show genealogically that her elaboration on the regimes of ancient, modern, and

‘dark’ times is supported by such a correlation. I read Arendt in light of the current

clash between an amorphous global political identity (and ‘new’ international order)

and the renewal of nationalisms. I show that, for Arendt, the world is divided by

necessary frontiers – territorial borders and identity frames – and that the political

consists precisely of the effort to transgress them. Arendt never proposed a restoration

of authority but, on the contrary, a worldwide anarchic (that is, based on no

predetermined rule) politics of de-localization and re-localization; in her terms, a

politics of free movement of founded identities, a cosmopolitanism , which,

nevertheless, would have nothing to do with global sovereignty.

Arendt did not conceptualize a ‘best regime’ nor did she systematically

indicate the characteristics of good political institutions. She theorized

freedom as the ‘ raison d’ˆtre ’ of politics, 1 but, as widely noted in the

literature, she left us with more questions than answers because her

argumentation on the need for authority contradicts her concept of freedom.

In my mind, Arendt’s understanding of freedom should be examined

independently of the search for good local political institutions because it is

related to freedom of movement and has a transnational meaning. I argue that

Arendt’s conception of the political in general is linked to the notion of

displacement and, hence, transcends the limits of localized structures.

Although she does not say it explicitly, Arendt establishes a correlation

between political projects – meaning constitutions and identities – and

territorial moves: She analyzes regimes in relation to their treatment of lands

and borders, that is, speciﬁc geographic movements. I shall call this

correlation between political projects and territorial displacements a political

itinerary . My aim in this paper is not to reveal a misunderstood political

DOI 10.1080/00201740310004396

2004 Taylor & Francis

Politics and Anarchy in the Thought of Hannah Arendt 21

philosophy, but to show genealogically that Arendt’s elaboration on the

regimes of ancient, modern, and ‘dark’ times is supported by such a

correlation. I read Arendt in light of the current clash between an amorphous

global political identity (and ‘new’ international order) and the renewal of

nationalisms. I show that the world conceived by Arendt is divided by

necessary frontiers – territorial borders and identity frames – and that,

according to her, the political consists precisely of the effort to transgress

them.

In order to expose the notion of political itinerary in the work of Arendt, I

disregard the dichotomy totalitarianism-free republic (or democracy)

traditionally established by Arendt’s scholars, and I read her according to

the conceptual triad, authority-imperialism-cosmopolitanism. I ﬁrst focus on

her conceptualization of authoritarian regimes as repeated policies of ‘return’

to one land and one founding rule. The authoritarian itinerary has been proven

to limit freedom because of its centralization on a sanctiﬁed land and a once-

in-history foundation whose values were considered as essential principles of

behavior. However, modernity has taught us that the destruction of all

foundations, that is, ideology, has more severe consequences than the absence

of freedom. Therefore, in the second part of the paper, I discuss Arendt’s

contention that imperialism, seen as the ﬁrst ideological policy, replaced the

authoritarian itinerary in annihilating both the idea of foundation and that of a

territorially delimited homeland. In the third part, I turn to Arendt’s proposed

alternative to the imperialist itinerary. I argue that Arendt does not propose a

restoration of authority but, paradoxically, a worldwide anarchic (that is,

based on no predetermined rule) 2 politics of de-localization and re-locali-

zation; in her terms, a politics of free movement of founded identities, 3 a

cosmopolitanism , which, nevertheless, would have nothing to do with global

sovereignty.

I. Authoritarian Itineraries: Ontological Foundation

In ‘We Refugees’, in which Arendt describes the life condition of German

Jews ﬂeeing Nazism, she writes: ‘The desperate confusion of these Ulysses-

wanderers who, unlike their great prototype, don’t know who they are is

easily explained by their perfect mania for refusing to keep their identity.’ 4

The difference between the refugees and Ulysses is that the former had no

place to come back to because they forgot who they were. For Arendt, identity

does not consist in a determined background that follows one everywhere like

a shadow, but rather in a process of return , which is at the same time a

territorial return and a return in memory. Ulysses remembers who he really is

and, accordingly, agrees to reveal himself to others only when he hears the

story of his own life ‘out of himself, an “object” for all to see and to hear’, told

22 Annabel Herzog

by a bard at the court of the king of the Phaeacians. 5 His memory of his

journey or, as Arendt interprets it, his ‘reconciliation’ with his own reality, is

parallel to his concrete return to his island: one day after he hears and tells the

story of his life Ulysses eventually reaches and re-conquers Ithaca, his home. 6

Arendt’s reference to the journey of Ulysses in such a ‘refugee’ context

reveals the twofold meaning of the myth (twofold for our purpose, manifold

in general), namely, its ontological and political levels; ontological ﬁrst

because it is the story of the elaboration of identity as a dialectical process of

alienation and re-appropriation, which ends up in a reinforced sameness.

Unlike the refugees who ‘whatever [they] do, whatever [they] pretend to be…

reveal nothing but [their] insane desire to be changed, not to be Jews’, 7

Ulysses estranges himself from his family and his small land whose borders

are clearly established, and crosses the seas to discover and confront

otherness, with the constant aim to come back and reintegrate his own

landscape and his own traditions. Enriched by his adventures, one might say

that he becomes ‘more himself than himself’ at the end of his journey. The

meaning of his trip, its essence, is the return. Ulysses travels in order to come

back; he leaves the known for the unknown for the sake of the known . This

ontological myth is, in parallel, a political myth. King Ulysses chooses to

leave his kingdom and participate in the Trojan War. He visits remote lands

where he ﬁghts and defeats various powers and comes back to re-conquer his

Ithaca, coveted, like Penelope, by the suitors. The return of Ulysses is that of a

victorious king and of his speciﬁc political order. By contrast, argues Arendt,

the German-Jews ﬂeeing Germany never cared for political involvement. 8

They had nothing to come back to because they had lost a political identity

that never existed: ‘remember that being a Jew does not give any legal status

in this world’. 9 Identity is political. Its loss is a loss of belonging to, and acting

in a speciﬁc community and a speciﬁc place.

The similarity of ontology and politics as a search for reconciled identity

or, put differently, the understanding of politics as a quest for unity and

sameness, is as old as Western culture and is reﬂected in traditional

philosophy. Arendt dedicates The Life of the Mind to analyzing and criticizing

this similarity and, like many of Heidegger’s students, 10 she there claims to

attempt ‘to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its categories’. 11

When referring to traditional philosophy, or metaphysics, she turns to another

Greek journey, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Political philosophy, she writes,

‘began with the philosopher’s turning away from politics and then returning

in order to impose his standards on human affairs’. 12 As Patrick J. Deneen

recently argued, the Allegory of the Cave shares a great deal with the story of

Ulysses: ‘Odysseus offers for Plato the example of a protophilosopher, one

who is cognizant of the attractions of life both inside and outside the cave and

who, like Odysseus, chooses ﬁnally to return to mortal life inside the cave, if

informed throughout by his journey above and by prudence once below’. 13

Politics and Anarchy in the Thought of Hannah Arendt 23

The Allegory of the Cave, like the story of Ulysses, uniﬁes ontological and

political processes. On the one hand, the philosopher comes back enriched by

the contemplation of the essence of Being, that is, of true and perfect unity; on

the other hand, he comes back as a philosopher-king. 14 Arendt argues that it is

Plato’s originality to have thought of sameness and ‘“truth” in terms of

standards applicable to the behavior of other people’ and that ‘he tried to

modify the theory of ideas so that it would become useful for a theory of

politics’, and so that it would become the basis for ruling the public sphere. 15

This wish to rule, she adds, comes from Plato’s fear of the mob that killed

Socrates. Recall that the mob in the cave claims to know the truth and does

not ‘recognize’ the philosopher as the truth-teller, as the suitors aspired to

Ithaca and Penelope and did not recognize their king.

The ontological political identity exempliﬁed in these myths consists,

therefore, in a double process of return: return to preexisting rules whose

value is discovered and strengthened during the estrangement ‘abroad’, and

return to a speciﬁc and limited territory: Ulysses comes back to Ithaca and the

philosopher comes back to the cave. Arendt insists on this normative and

geographic return, which appears to inform the authoritarian order, and

which I call the authoritarian itinerary , as distinct from authoritarian

institutions. Arendt argues that authority as theorized by Plato was, in

practice, a Roman creation, the particularity of the Romans being that they

‘were bound to the speciﬁc locality of this one city [Rome]… [They] were

really rooted in the soil, and the word patria derives its full meaning from

Roman history’. Moreover, Roman-conquered lands were subsumed

ontologically, as it were, under the laws of the homeland and they ‘were

nothing but Roman hinterland’. 16 In this context, authority meant a constant

‘return’ both to the land of Rome and to the values of ancestors considered

sacred and immutable. 17

As emphasized by Honig, 18 Arendt’s analysis of authority is ambivalent,

not to say, contradictory. On the one hand, she contends that authority helps to

‘prevent deterioration’ of the political realm. 19 On the other hand, she

criticizes authority in that it may lead to ‘an attraction to the tyrannical’, both

in philosophy and in practice, 20 because authority always implies obedience

and a hierarchy. 21 The compelling nature of the rules, even if they represent

the standards of reason, risks degeneration into coercion. 22 At the same time,

therefore, authority is a necessary condition for political life and authority

hinders freedom and the human capacity to begin something new. Pirro asks:

‘Why does Arendt afﬁrm the necessity of limiting the very thing [freedom]

that she values the most?’ And he rightly answers: ‘Political authority, as it is

manifested in customs, manners, traditions, and positive laws, serves to

stabilize human affairs by providing a framework within which initiative-

taking in politics can take place’. 23 In other words, authority is useful for

political life to the extent that it provides a ‘framework’ but it endangers or

24 Annabel Herzog

limits freedom to the extent that this framework subsumes newness under

given standards. Accordingly, it is my thesis that, for Arendt, what is needed

for good political life is not authority per se , which may degenerate into

tyranny, but a framework or, more precisely, a framework that will allow or

even provoke newness. Such a framework, independent of authority but

included in some forms of authority, is called by Arendt a political

foundation .

A foundation is the actual event that realizes the link between sameness

and newness and on which a community constitutes its speciﬁc identity, be it

that of a nation-state or of any other form of public community of acting men

and women. It is an ‘event in which the “world had become ﬂesh”, that is…

an absolute that had appeared in historical time as a mundane reality’, and it is

the necessary starting point of all actions. 24 The founded political identity

may be more or less related to previous structures: A modern revolutionary

foundation tries to cut all bonds with former regimes, whereas some antique

foundations, like that of Rome, voluntarily maintain a link with ancient

customs or traditions. 25 In any case, for Arendt, following Aristotle, a

political foundation never consists in a passage from a state of nature to a

political state: It institutes a particular political tradition, or constitution ,

replacing another particular political tradition. Indeed, it consists partly in a

return to sameness: It establishes the political but it is, at the same time,

already based on a political situation. Then the foundation of a political

community constitutes its identity because, or when, its actual occurrence is

remembered. Ancient foundations, for instance, were kept in memory in the

form of legends through which people assumed responsibility for the past and

on which they built their political will. 26

In her analysis of foundations, Arendt recalls a third Greek journey, that of

Theseus, ‘the legendary founder of Athens’. 27 She recalls it brieﬂy, but her

laconism should not prevent us from remembering the whole myth. Like

Ulysses, or the philosopher of the Cave, Theseus ‘comes back home’ but he

comes back to a home where he has never been before: His homeland is not

his land of birth and youth. His trip, from Troezen to Athens, is a quest for

identity, for he is willing to meet Aegeus, his father. In Athens, however, he

does not perpetuate his family’s regime but establishes a new regime,

democracy. He accomplishes his glorious deeds and defeats his cousins, the

ﬁfty sons of Pallas, not to re-conquer a lost kingdom, but to found a new

political order. In the three Greek myths recalled, that of Ulysses, that of the

Cave (developed in the whole theory of The Republic ), and that of Theseus,

the hero comes back reconciled with himself, represses some kind of

rebellion, and strengthens his political power. However, only in the case of

Theseus is this power radically ‘new’, that is, ‘free’; 28 indeed, it is a regime of

freedom. (For Arendt the authoritarian regime of the philosopher-king

described in The Republic has nothing new because it is based on the

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