Hannah Arendt—or, more precisely, the field of scholarship that has developed around her—plays a central role in a newly emerging hostility against the nation state. At the time of her death in 1975, Arendt was a famous public intellectual, but she did not yet occupy anything resembling her present position. That changed dramatically after 1989. The end of the Cold War opened the floodgates to what Elhanan Yakira calls “Arendtism”: the transformation of Arendt into perhaps the most influential twentieth-century political thinker.
There is a serious gap between Hannah Arendt and the phenomenon of Arendtism. The two are separated not only by approximately fifteen years, but also by profound changes in cultural and intellectual attitudes towards the nation-state. The elevation of Arendt into her current status as “Die Denkerin der Stunde” (“the thinker of the hour”), as Philosophie Magazin recently put it, involved recruiting her into the post-1989 cosmopolitan project of moving beyond the nation-state. The main work in which Arendt deals with the nation-state is her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, and her assimilation into cosmopolitanism relied heavily on this text. The problem is that what Arendt says there about nation-statehood is far less negative and more complex than what contemporary Arendt scholars would have us believe.
There is a serious gap between Hannah Arendt and the phenomenon of Arendtism.
I am not an Arendt devotee, and my mission is not to rescue her legacy from scholars with whom I disagree. I do think, however, that before one can take a position for or against a thinker, one needs a minimal understanding of what that thinker actually says. In this sense, contemporary Arendt scholarship has seriously compromised our ability to evaluate Arendt—whether positively or negatively—because, as we shall see, it has profoundly distorted some of her most basic claims. The point of correcting such misconceptions is less to insist on Arendt’s greatness than to expose the shallowness on which much of today's Arendt obsession rests. The clearest expression of such intellectual inadequacies, in my view, is the curious unreceptivity of Arendt scholars to statements that contradict the depiction of Origins as, in Judith Butler’s words, “a trenchant critique of the nation-state”.
I see Arendtism as a symptom of a broader deterioration in our ability to think about the nation-state: a contraction of the historical and conceptual parameters within which debates on this phenomenon take place. Arendtism is what happens when contemporary scholars project a typically flat post-1989 hostility to nation-statehood onto a thinker who—however one judges her—at least had the capacity to recognize that the nation-state is thoroughly ambivalent and complex.
Arendtism is what happens when contemporary scholars project a typically flat post-1989 hostility to nation-statehood onto a thinker who had the capacity to recognize that it is thoroughly ambivalent and complex.
How does contemporary Arendt scholarship understand her broader account of the nation-state, and particularly her claims in Origins?
Much of this literature reads into Origins the claim of a fundamental continuity between the nation-state and Nazism. Seyla Benhabib, for example, describes Arendt’s position as a “theoretical and normative rejection of nationalism and the idea of a nation-state”. According to Judith Butler, the analysis of Nazism in Origins forms part of Arendt’s “larger critique of how the nation-state perpetually produces the problem of mass refugees”. Ronald Beiner describes the book as the “theoretical ground for [Arendt’s] anti-nationalism”, adding that her thinking centered on “the process whereby nationalism turned into fascism, the nation-state turned into the totalitarian state”. Susie Linfield, offering perhaps the most elegant formulation of this claim, asserts that “Arendt argued that every nation-state not only could but would become the Third Reich”. In short, according to contemporary interpreters, Arendt believed in a near-inevitable progression from the modern nation-state to totalitarian regimes.
According to Judith Butler, the analysis of Nazism in Origins forms part of Arendt’s “larger critique of how the nation-state perpetually produces the problem of mass refugees”.
The fact is that these readings collapse even upon a superficial engagement with the text. On the very first page of the first chapter, Arendt rejects what she calls one of the “hasty explanations” of Europe’s political collapse: “the identification of antisemitism with rampant nationalism and its xenophobic outbursts”. On the contrary, she writes, “modern antisemitism grew in proportion as traditional nationalism declined and reached its climax at the exact moment when the European system of nation-states and its precarious balance of power crashed”. She then adds that the Nazis “were not simple nationalists”. They had “a genuine and never revoked contempt for the narrowness of nationalism, the provincialism of the nation-state, and they repeated time and again that their ‘movement’, international in scope like the Bolshevik movement, was more important than any state, which would necessarily be bound to a specific territory”.
Arendt rejects “the identification of antisemitism with rampant nationalism and its xenophobic outbursts”.
Arendt is saying right at the beginning—and she repeats this claim throughout the text—that totalitarianism develops out of the destruction of the nation-state. The nation-state does not evolve into totalitarianism; it disintegrates into totalitarianism. Nevertheless, in a way that parallels Arendt’s frustration with this hasty identification of Nazism with nationalism, Arendt scholars nowadays continue to insist that Origins is a book about the continuity between the national and totalitarian state. The irony here is striking: Arendt opens the book by locating the failure to understand Nazism in a stubborn impulse to explain every outburst of xenophobic violence in terms of rampant nationalism. Then her followers read her as saying that Nazism was an instance of rampant nationalism, thus manifesting the exact same impulse her book aims to criticize.
Arendt’s point does more than undermine the claim of continuity between the nation-state and the Third Reich. More damagingly for her anti-nationalist followers, it raises the possibility of an affinity between cosmopolitan and totalitarian forms of hostility toward nation-statehood.
