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’eˆtre’ 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

Inquiry, 47, 20–41

DOI 10.1080/00201740310004396

# 2004 Taylor & Francis

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

Politics and Anarchy in the Thought of Hannah Arendt

21

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

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Annabel Herzog

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

Politics and Anarchy in the Thought of Hannah Arendt

23

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

24

Annabel Herzog

ancestral ruling mode of the private space, and it does not allow much more
freedom than life in the cave.) Theseus’ journey paradoxically links a return
and the beginning of absolute newness: Theseus comes back to act; he comes
back for the future. Consisting of both a return and the beginning of
something contingent, his foundation becomes, in itself, a framework that
will allow further freedom to develop. Put differently, Theseus’ foundation
establishes the possibility of other foundations.

The recourse to the myth of the ‘founder of Athens’ allows us to better

understand the relationship between authority and foundations. By contra-
distinction with the multi-founding journey of Theseus, who, after pacifying
Athens, went on sailing up to Crete to challenge the tyranny of Minos over
Athens’ inhabitants, and then traveled to the land of the Amazons etc., in
other words, introduced newness at each stage of his leadership, the ‘return
home’ that characterizes the authoritarian itinerary exemplified by Rome is
based on the centrality of Rome and the memory of a once-in-history
founding of the city and of the values of its first and only founders. Arendt
stresses that this ‘eternal’ foundation of Rome prevents the possibility of
renewing itself and by this, differs from the Greek understanding of
foundations, paradigmatically represented by Theseus. She assumes that

[t]he polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its location; it’s the organization
of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies
between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.
‘Wherever you go, you will be a polis’: these famous words became not merely the
watchword of Greek colonization, they expressed the conviction that action and
speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location
almost anytime and anywhere.

29

For the Greeks, the political meant an endless founding process in lands
considered both as homelands and as new lands. The lands were necessary for
foundations and, hence, for political commitment. However, Arendt says that
in their refusal to sanctify these lands, the Greeks expressed a ‘critical’
attitude, perceptible also in their approach to political functions manifested in
democratic practices and in the way they treated cultural sources. She writes,
‘[T]he great Greek authors became authorities in the hands of the Romans,
not of the Greeks. The way Plato and others before and after him treated
Homer, “the educator of all Hellas”, was inconceivable in Rome…’

30

She

emphasizes that ‘[t]he Roman feeling of continuity was unknown in
Greece…’ because ‘[i]n contradistinction to the Romans, the Greeks were
convinced that the changeability, occurring in the realm of mortals in so far as
they were mortals, could not be altered because it was ultimately based on the
fact that, the young, who at the same time were “new ones”, were constantly
invading the stability of the status quo’.

31

We have to conclude, therefore,

that it is because they lacked criticism, that is, free renewals of foundations on
non-sanctified lands, that authoritarian regimes degenerated into coercion and

Politics and Anarchy in the Thought of Hannah Arendt

25

violence.

32

Indeed, Arendt claims that the difficulty to maintain an

authoritarian regime comes with the difficulty to keep a territory ‘sacred’
and ‘eternal’, as shown in Machiavelli,

33

and that this difficulty leads to

terror. We can now see that the problem of authority for Arendt comes from
the closure of its unique ‘return’, its unique foundation, or its limitation in
time and space. More often than not these regimes eventually maintain their
unique tradition through dictatorship.

II. Imperialist Itineraries: Regressive Progression

As shown, for Arendt, Theseus’ founding gesture and, in general, the early
Greek ‘invading the stability of the status quo’ oppose the authoritarian
itinerary understood as a ‘return’ to a sanctified once-in-history foundation.
However, these two ancient models have to be considered retrospectively, in
light of the new dangers of ‘dark times’. In modernity, an unknown category
of regimes arose, which destroyed the bases of authority without establishing
newness and freedom because these regimes were, strictly speaking, non-
founded policies. In Arendt’s terms, they were ideological expansions.
Arendt calls the modern form of power that imposes an identity ‘without the
foundation of a body politic’, that is, without ‘the possible creation of
something new’,

34

imperialism. As I will show in the last part of this paper,

she proposes an original alternative to ideological expansions based on free
and renewed foundations (hence, on Theseus’ model). In order to understand
her alternative, I shall now highlight the features of the imperialist itinerary.

As broadly emphasized in the literature, Arendt’s focus on imperialism was

genealogical and the object analyzed genealogically was ‘modern world
alienation’.

35

By ‘alienation’ Arendt meant depolitization. Politics disap-

peared in dark times because ‘private practices and devices were gradually
transformed into rules and principles for the conduct of public affairs’.

36

Referring to these words, many of Arendt’s readers understand her notion of
depolitization as based on the opposition between public and private spaces
established in The Human Condition. As a result, depolitization is interpreted
as an undue outgrowing of the social, that ‘never private nor public’ ‘hybrid
realm’,

37

followed by destruction of the public sphere. This understanding is

legitimate in any attempt to associate Arendt with participatory democracy
theory.

38

However, I focus here on another theme of Arendt’s theory, namely,

the continuity of time. In her thought, the erosion of a clear separation
between public and private spaces comes with the emergence of a gap
between past and future. In dark times ‘there seems to be no willed continuity
in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past or future, only sempiternal
change of the world and the biological cycle of living creatures in it’.

39

As

recalled above, for Arendt, the political means not only free plural and public

26

Annabel Herzog

actions, but also such actions based on the remembrance of a common past.
What is destroyed in dark times is not merely the ability to act in the public
space, but the ability to link newness and a preexisting political identity
consisting of ‘common historical memories’,

40

that is, between acting and

belonging to a founded community. In my opinion, Arendt’s entire theory
depends on this link, a link that establishes the elements it links: When the
link disappears, both political

initiative

and political

identity

are

neutralized.

Arendt contends that imperialism was involved in the destruction of this

link and, therefore, of the two components of all bodies politic, acting and
belonging, because it consists in expansion instead of action, and in ideology
instead of foundation. In focusing on expansion and ideology, Arendt tries to
distinguish imperialism from other forms of territorial conquest, for instance,
Roman conquest, which she never criticizes, or the colonization of America,
about which she is remarkably silent, as if colonization were legitimated by
the eventual constitution of a body politic. In other words, contrary to our
current views on conquest, the problem of imperialism, for Arendt, is not that
it negates the independence and cultures of entire populations but that it
destroys all possible political life in conquered territories. In the same vein, in
1947, she wrote to Jaspers: ‘What has been done in Palestine itself is
extraordinary: not merely colonization but a serious attempt at a new social
order’.

41

A new order consists in action, which ‘develops stabilizing forces

which stand in the way of constant transformation and expansion’.

42

The

stabilizing forces are the foundations of a common life, that is, a common law
(a tradition), whereas expansion does not care for the implementation of law
or justice because it is an economic process based on unlimited production
and accumulation of capital. Contrary to the ancient conquerors, European
imperialists never attempted to ‘govern’ conquered lands but dominated them
for economic purposes through bureaucratic reports and decrees.

43

Con-

quered lands became economic properties of European countries, never new
‘homelands’. The principle and tool of such bureaucratic rule was ‘power left
to itself’, that is, power whose end is not to serve and control political action
but to increase indefinitely.

Unlimited investment and trade combined with unlimited power meant

unlimited territorial conquest. Such a journey was a realization of what
Arendt calls the ‘progressive’ view of the 19th century, that is, a perversion of
the 18th century belief in emancipation, and ‘which not only did not want the
liberty and autonomy of man, but was ready to sacrifice everything and
everybody to supposedly superhuman laws of history’.

44

For Arendt,

therefore, imperialist progression had nothing to do with Kant’s conception
of universal history as ‘a regular progression among freely willed actions’.

45

Like Benjamin, and quoting his ninth ‘Thesis’ on the philosophy of history
and the denunciation of the pile of ruins created by progress, that is, the linear

Politics and Anarchy in the Thought of Hannah Arendt

27

march of imperialist conquerors,

46

Arendt establishes a correspondence

between the territorial and deterministic senses of progression.

However, imperialism does not consist only in progression but in a

regressive way of defining political identity. At the beginning of the
imperialist adventure, identity was still nationalist because what then seemed
relevant in expansion were the economic and security interests of the
homeland.

47

Soon, the seduction of ‘power left to itself’ became so strong that

the administrators of conquered territories resented the restraining power of
the nation-state. These ‘functionaries of violence’ proved to be indifferent to
political considerations on the submitted lands and alienated from their native
body politic. The consequence of such alienation, argues Arendt, was a
regressive nihilism that eventually destroyed the structures of the nation-state
itself, the last known form of the authoritarian itinerary: ‘The concept of
unlimited expansion… makes the foundation of new political bodies… well-
nigh impossible. In fact, its logical consequence is the destruction of all living
communities, those of the conquered peoples as well as of the people at
home’.

48

The imperialist disintegration of patriotic beliefs did not mean the

end of the search for a shared identity, but rather that the establishment of a
common ideology had replaced the reference to a common foundation. Here,
according to Arendt, appears the originality of the imperialist itinerary and, in
my opinion, the originality of her analysis. Arendt’s conceptualization of
ideology is to be found only in the last part of The Origins,

49

but, as I

understand it, the whole book reads like a genealogy of ideology seen as the
main characteristic of depolitization. As Bernstein emphasizes, Anti-
Semitism was already a form of political ideology,

50

and imperialism

crystallizes ideology as concrete policy. For Arendt, ideology is ‘the logic of
an idea’ not related to ‘something that is’ but to the development of the idea
itself. Accordingly, ‘ideological thinking becomes independent of all
experience from which it cannot learn anything new even if it is a question
of something that has just come to pass. Hence ideological thinking becomes
emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists
on a “truer” reality concealed behind all perceptible things’. Emancipating
itself from experience through ‘certain methods of demonstration’ that
replace the remembrance of real events, ideology pretends to explain the
entirety of history through the ‘logical’ development of its single idea.
Racism, for example, explains the whole of history as a ‘natural fight of
races’.

51

As a result, imperialist administrations became ideological from the

moment they stopped looking back to the nation and concentrated on race
theories, that is, when they tried to give themselves a ‘pure’ identity based on
pre-political ‘natural origins’:

52

‘The organic doctrine of a history for which

“every race is a separate, complete whole” was invented by men who needed
ideological definitions of national unity as a substitute for political
nationhood’.

53

28

Annabel Herzog

Echoing her claim that extermination camps were laboratories of

totalitarianism, Arendt argues that the case of the Boers should be observed
as a ‘laboratory’ of all European imperialist policies. Believing in (but not
founding) an identity made of faith in the divine chosenness of the Whites,
hence trying to escape all laws, that is, all limitations upon their land
possessions, the Boers voluntarily abandoned these lands and entered the
‘interior wilderness of the country… they had transformed themselves into a
tribe and had lost the European’s feeling for a territory, a patria of his own’

54

(note that the use of the word patria clearly refers to the authoritarian
itinerary). Like ‘all race organizations’ they had lost all roots. According to
Arendt, the focus on the ‘purity of the race’ leads to regression to a ‘horde’
existence without territorial boundaries, and, hence, no more based on
conquest but on the ‘horrible reality’ of wandering like ‘beasts’. Arendt notes
the similarity of the horde-like life of the Boers and the ‘tribalism’ of
continental (German, Russian, etc.) imperialism. Tribalism, she explains,
rejects the framing effect of territorial borders and, as such, it destroys all
political commitment. It articulates ‘metaphysical rootlessness’ with ‘the
territorial uprootedness of the nationalities it first seized’.

55

The imperialist itinerary described by Arendt articulates symbolic and

territorial progression and regression. In erasing borders, imperialists did not
enlarge the territories of their sovereignty but rather destroyed the idea of
territorial sovereignty. Moreover, the invention of a so-called superiority of
the ‘white race’ overrides all theories of human origins that have a political,
hence territorial, outcome. In boundless lands ruled by violence, there is
nowhere to ‘fall back upon’,

56

only an abstract ideology based on no common

experience – no founding event, no memories, no shared actions, and no
specific place to frame these actions. The outcome of imperialist policy is a
regressive world, where armed ‘hordes’ fight for supremacy and survival.

Arendt insists on a direct consequence of the imperialist itinerary, which,

as such, should be distinguished from totalitarianism (which, radicalizing the
regressive features of imperialism, is an unprecedented form of absolute
depolitization).

57

In annihilating territorial boundaries, imperialism necessa-

rily engenders the existence of stateless people and refugees. Certainly due to
her own status during and after the war, Arendt focuses solely, I have to
admit, on European refugees. It is somewhat disturbing that the consistent
parallel that she establishes between the different forms of imperialism
suddenly ends when she turns to the victims of imperialism, and refers only to
European stateless peoples.

58

Her silence on non-European refugees is partly

explained by her claim that the unique reaction aimed at protecting stateless
people against racist ideology was also a European ideology, namely, the
abstract ‘slogans’ of human rights. The notion of human rights was as
‘unfounded’, she says, as the idea of race struggle: ‘Since the Rights of Man
were proclaimed to be “inalienable”, irreducible to and undeducible from

Politics and Anarchy in the Thought of Hannah Arendt

29

other rights or laws, no authority was invoked for their establishment. …[I]t
turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and
had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect
them and no institution was willing to guarantee them’.

59

Arendt argues that

the condition of stateless people did not consist in a lack of the rights
formulated in the declarations of the 18th century, but was ‘manifested first
and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions
significant and actions effective’. Here again, against liberal views Arendt
emphasizes not the lack of rights of stateless people, but their total exclusion;
the fact that they had nowhere to be even as repressed people. They belonged
to nowhere whereas, in ancient times, ‘even slaves still belonged to some sort
of human community’.

60

As such, stateless people ‘appear as the first signs of

a possible regression from civilization’,

61

parallel to the horde-like regression

of imperialists. The regression of the conquerors and that of their victims
characterizes a depoliticized world.

III. Cosmopolitan Itineraries: Displaced Foundations

By ‘imperialism’ Arendt meant the ‘strictly European colonial imperialism
whose end came with the liquidation of British rule in India’.

62

However,

imperialism consists in the crystallization of two general processes of
modernity, the loss of tradition and the loss of action, which still shape our
attempts to overcome the boundaries of the world, claims Arendt, even when
the outcomes of such attempts are not successfully imperialist:

63

‘the word

“expansion” has disappeared from our political vocabulary, which now uses
the words “extension” or, critically, “overextension” to cover a very similar
meaning’.

64

The recent revival of nationalism in Europe may seem, at first

glance, to refute Arendt’s analysis, although it appears quickly that these
struggles for ‘independence’ are not exempt from imperialist ideologies. In
the following lines, I sketch Arendt’s attempt to respond to imperialism
leading to depolitization without coming back to authority leading to
despotism.

Arendt defines the political as an interrelation of actions and foundations.

Foundations are specific actions on which identities are built. New actions
emerge from these identities but also transform and transcend them. Arendt
calls identities, which connect people in a particular way, ‘in-between’s:
‘Most action and speech is concerned with this in-between, which varies with
each group of people, so that most words and deeds are about some worldly
objective reality in addition to being a disclosure of the acting and speaking
agent’.

65

In-betweens are ‘objective realities’ because they are founded on

actions that are real events, and they are thereafter transformed by other real
events. Based on such an in-between, a regime is not ideological, but it would

30

Annabel Herzog

be not authoritarian only if it were repeatedly transcended by actions, that is,
if the values of the foundation were not to eventually become a standard for
behavior and a justification for violence. Accordingly, a founded non-
authoritarian regime would consist of pure freedom and would produce pure
freedom. Put differently, freedom needs foundations that will not restrain it.
In Honig’s words, the problem is to establish foundations ‘without appealing
to gods, a foundationalist ground, or an absolute’ or, as Keenan puts it, to
establish a ‘lasting’ support for freedom.

66

This may seem quite abstract, or maybe even trivial. This could mean that a

free political community should constantly renew its foundation through
democratic activities. However, it is striking that Arendt never defines such
democratic practices or the institutions that would assure them. Canovan
recalls that Arendt had planned to write a systematic book on political
institutions but it never materialized.

67

She stresses elsewhere that Arendt

‘was much less interested than most of her predecessors… in the details of
institutions, and much more interested in free discussion’.

68

Unlike most

political philosophers or ‘political writers’ such as Montesquieu or
Tocqueville, whom she often recalls, Arendt does not provide us with any
normative analysis of political structures. My conclusion is that, for her, to
find lasting support for freedom does not mean to establish lasting
institutions. Arendt cares only for the lasting of the possibility ‘to call
something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not
even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly
speaking, could not be known’.

69

She argues even more radically that ‘Where

men wish to be sovereign, as individuals or as organized groups, they must
submit to the oppression of the will, be this the individual will with which I
force myself, or the “general will” of an organized group. If men wish to be
free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce’.

70

In other words, lasting

support for freedom cannot be identical to lasting institutions of sovereignty
because sovereignty is identical to rule and, hence, constrains freedom.

Arendt recalls that, for the Greeks of Theseus’ times and subsequently,

‘Freedom as a social phenomenon… was understood as a form of political
organization in which the citizens lived together under the condition of no-
rule. …This notion of no-rule was expressed by the word isonomy. …The
polis was supposed to be an isonomy, not a democracy’.

71

As I see it, when

Arendt speaks of lasting freedom, she always refers to such a freedom as ‘no-
rule’ or as ‘participation in public affairs’

72

not determined by an

a''rweõn or a

kratein. As a result, I cannot agree with Honig who argues that Arendt
searched for ‘a practice of authority for modernity’, although Honig
interestingly concludes that such practice ‘turns out to be, paradoxically
enough, a practice of deauthorization’.

73

The ‘augmentation’ and ‘amend-

ment’ of authoritarian constitutions

74

would necessarily be centered on an

absolute legal and territorial ground, that is, on an

a''rweõn. Sure enough,

˜

Politics and Anarchy in the Thought of Hannah Arendt

31

Arendt makes it consistently clear that founded authoritarianism is better than
unfounded modern imperialism, and she emphasizes the advantages of
authority in light of the catastrophes of dark times. However, it seems to me
that she would prefer to avoid all practices based on immutable

a''rweõn.

Freedom is pure anarchy, which is emphasized in a too-often forgotten
expression of Arendt (in her essay on Broch): ‘the political realm -- that is, the
inherently anarchic conglomeration of human beings…’

75

This sentence

suggests that freedom, ‘experienced in spontaneity’,

76

constitutes its own

foundation and that we are looking for a way to assure the continuation of
such auto-foundation. The act of foundation is a real event, albeit a real event
exclusively made of freedom.

A non-authoritarian and non-imperialist political life should, therefore,

consist of renewed foundations and of freedom as ‘no-rule’. Arendt did not
describe the structures of such life because, per definitio, a no-rules life has no
predetermined structures. We would not be surprised to discover that political
freedom has no territorial predetermination either, but a global meaning.
Action is part of the human condition, which is to say that in defining action,
Arendt not only depicts the political functioning of societies but also
processes that express and influence our being in the world.

77

Our actions in

the public realm transcend this realm and we are thrown into the world by our
actions. Paradoxically, when the specific and limited public sphere appears, it
is immediately dissolved into the world: ‘[T]he term “public” signifies the
world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our
privately owned place in it…’

78

In the context of this ‘elastic notion of the

public sphere’, as Curtis puts it,

79

freedom as ‘no-rule’ is freedom in the

world as freedom of movement: ‘Freedom of movement is […] the
indispensable condition for action, and it is in action that men primarily
experience freedom in the world’.

80

The emphasis on global freedom is developed in Arendt’s analysis of

Jaspers’ attitude in ‘Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?’

81

Arendt writes:

‘One could easily “prove” that Jaspers’ whole philosophical work… was
conceived with “intent toward world citizenship” ’, and she stresses the
resemblance between the cosmopolitanism of Kant and that of Jaspers, ‘the
only successor Kant has ever had’.

82

The similarity between Kant’s ‘right to

visit’ as opposed to conquest,

83

and Jaspers’ ‘world citizenship’ reacting to

imperialism and totalitarianism seems glaringly obvious. However, Arendt
immediately adds that to be a citizen of the world does not consist in
belonging to a world government.

84

In her last book, Democracy and the

Foreigner, Honig notes that political theorists, principally nationalist ones,
too often identify cosmopolitanism with world government. She advocates a
‘democratic cosmopolitanism’ seeking not to govern ‘but rather to widen the
resources, energies, and accountability of an emerging civil society that
contests or supports state actions in matter of transnational and local

32

Annabel Herzog

interests…’

85

In my mind, Arendt’s work enriches this discussion and

contributes to the elaboration of a new kind of cosmopolitanism independent
of the idea of rule, although, as I suggested above, Arendt’s thinking is
fundamentally more anarchic than institutionally democratic. Arendt points
out that ‘No matter what form a world government with centralized power
over the whole globe might assume, the very notion of one sovereign force
ruling the whole earth, holding the monopoly of all means of violence…is not
only a forbidding nightmare of tyranny, it would be the end of all political life
as we know it’.

86

In a lecture on Kant she similarly claims that ‘Kant knew

quite well that a world government would be the worst tyranny imaginable’.

87

As unique sovereignty – single rule over the earth – world government can be
nothing else but the outcome of an extended ontological conquest eventually
maintained through violence, thereby to constitute a strengthened authoritar-
ian power whose enlarged sovereignty makes freedom impossible.

88

As a

result, Jaspers’ idea of ‘world citizenship’ necessarily entails a rejection of all
possible forms of sovereignty, national and transnational, and would lead not
to a global power but to a federated world based on mutual understanding:

[J]ust as the prerequisite for world government in Jaspers’s opinion is the renunciation
of sovereignty for the sake of a world-wide federated political structure, so the
prerequisite for this mutual understanding would be the renunciation, not of one’s
own tradition and national past, but of the binding authority and universal validity
which tradition and past have always claimed. …The shell of traditional authority is
forced open and the great contents of the past are freely and ‘playfully’ placed in
communication with each other…

89

It appears to me here that Arendt uses her reading of Jaspers to reformulate
her own conception of the difference between a framework and the attempts
of this framework to rule. According to her, Jaspers’ rejection of sovereignty
is not the rejection of distinct traditions and past, but of their binding authority
as a claim of universal validity. We need traditions against ideology, but
traditions that appear ‘freely’ in our times, thereby to be renewed and
‘replayed’ in the here and now. World citizenship means a communication
between diverse traditions, that is, free passages between memories of distinct
national pasts. Cosmopolitan communication should be materialized through
a world federation. Such a federation would reproduce Arendt’s description
of a federation of councils on a larger scale and thus realize the relation
between foundations, identities, and freedom. Arendt indeed wrote:

[C]ouncils or soviets had sprung everywhere, completely independent of one another.
…The formation of a council in each of these disparate groups turned a more or less
accidental proximity into a political institution. The most striking aspect of these
spontaneous developments is that… it took these independent and highly disparate
organs no more than a few weeks, in the case of Russia, or a few days, in the case of
Hungary, to begin a process of co-ordination and integration through the formation of
higher councils… from which finally the delegates to an assembly representing the

Politics and Anarchy in the Thought of Hannah Arendt

33

whole country could be chosen. As in the case of the early covenants, ‘cosociations’,
and confederations in the colonial history of North America, we see how the federal
principle… arises out of the elementary conditions of action itself. …The common
object was the foundation of a new body politic…

90

Richard J. Bernstein refers to Arendt’s understanding of the councils’ system
as a ‘viable political alternative to the failures of the nineteenth-century
nation-state (and national sovereignty) and to the all too real successes of
twentieth-century totalitarianism’.

91

Although I would replace the term

‘totalitarianism’ with ‘imperialism’ (because Arendt saw totalitarianism as a
specific crystallization of general imperialist processes that destroyed
freedom and tradition), Arendt definitely considered federalism to be a good
solution to the risks of both authority and imperialist disappearance of
authority. That is why, in her mind, a Jewish ‘homeland’, distinct from a
sovereign Jewish state and imperialist Jewish expansion, could be realized
only as a confederation of Arabs and Jews. Moreover, as Crick notes, her
fervor for councils recalls Proudhon’s utopia, hence classical anarchism and
the rejection of a centralized state’s rules.

92

However, no matter how appealing Arendt’s enthusiasm and hopes, they

only partly match her general argument. Of course, a federation of councils is
built on spontaneous actions and connections between identities but Arendt
herself emphasizes that at the end of this process (and quite quickly in fact), a
unified representation of the global body politic is established and freedom
becomes ‘institutionalized’. In other words, general rules are determined.
This would not be a problem if we were only considering the spontaneous
freedom of the founding act. However, because freedom and newness are
identical, freedom should be able to renew itself. Arendt contends quite
emphatically that in federalism the ‘central power [does] not deprive the
constituent bodies of their original power to constitute’.

93

But this view is true

only up to a certain point. If we focus on her own examples of the Soviet
Union, Hungary, and the United States, we reach the unequivocal conclusion
that all post-foundation changes in constitutions were made under the
authority of these same constitutions, regardless of the clear differences
between them. Once the body politic is founded, and even if freely founded,
there can be no more free actions. As Bernstein notes, ‘public freedom existed
only for the revolutionary founders’.

94

Arendt is aware of this fact and she

pursues her description of federalism by the surprising statement: ‘Freedom,
whenever it existed as a tangible reality, has always been spatially limited’.

95

It seems, therefore, that the outcome of freedom as no-rule consists ultimately
in a kind of authoritarian ‘return’. If we follow Arendt’s own analysis of
federalism, we have to conclude, against her, that a federation and, a fortiori,
a world federation, will necessarily, in one way or another, become
sovereignty.

Let us bear in mind that Arendt’s purpose was not to define institutions that,

34

Annabel Herzog

de facto, eventually constitute a sovereignty limited by territorial borders
(even if, as she claims, many sovereignties are less tyrannical than one world
sovereignty), but to conceptualize action as freedom. We should, therefore,
set aside for a moment the risk of sovereignty and focus on the meaning of
such a freedom. As Villa shows, for Arendt, actions are expressions of the
free uniqueness of the agent, independent not only of rules but also of
personal motives.

96

Actions are inspired by principles such as glory or honor,

which appear during performed acts, ‘neither before nor after’,

97

and are

accomplished ‘even if there is nothing to be attained’.

98

However, a further

distinction should be made. Subjective actions are ‘depersonalized’ because
they do not realize personal motives, and undetermined because they are not
subsumed under specific rules. Still, they are founded. They are free if and
only if they are connected to a common past. Actions are depersonalized and
undetermined but, precisely through the principles that they express, they
continue a tradition, and thereby constitute individual developments of an in-
between. Put differently, actions express individually a plurality of agents
related by the in-between. But how can individual action manifest and renew
a plurality? Actions, says Arendt, consist of expressed opinions,

99

and an

opinion itself consists in taking into account other opinions, or other
standpoints:

I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making
present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them.
This process does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere
else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question
neither of empathy… nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and
thinking in my own identity where I actually am not…

100

As we know, Arendt explains that the capacity to form opinions by taking into
account the diverse opinions of a plurality is similar to the ‘enlarged
mentality’ based on imagination conceptualized by Kant in his Critique of
Judgment. In her lectures on Kant she writes:

Critical thinking is possible only where the standpoints of all others are open to
inspection… it makes the others present and thus moves in a space that is potentially
public, open to all sides; in other words, it adopts the position of Kant’s world citizen.
To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go
visiting. (Compare the right to visit in Perpetual Peace).

101

‘Critical’ is to be understood here in its etymological sense of ‘judgment’.
Arendt planned to argue in the third part of The Life of the Mind that political
judgment is a judgment without a rule; hence, she considered Kant’s
‘judgment of taste’ a model for political judgment. Put differently, critical
thinking or a judgment without a rule is, strictly speaking, anarchic. To form
an opinion is anarchic because it is determined by no standard at all.
However, it is elaborated during a ‘visiting’ process, which is founded on

Politics and Anarchy in the Thought of Hannah Arendt

35

specific identities: in ‘visiting’ I both stay in myself and I ‘try’ the standpoint
of other people. Visiting, therefore, ‘does not consist in an enormously
enlarged empathy’,

102

nor in abandoning my own identity. My opinion is

related to all kinds of people and groups that I consider although they have
nothing in common with me. Lisa Disch sums up this conception most
accurately when she concludes, ‘Visiting is contrary to parochialism, which
means simply to stay at home, contrary to “accidental” tourism, which means
to ensure that you will have all the comforts of home even as you travel, and
contrary to assimilationism, which means forcibly to make yourself at home
in a place that is not your home by appropriating its customs. …Both the
tourist and assimilationist erase plurality’.

103

What we should notice in this attitude is, first, that it is both individualist

and plural. Although ‘visiting’ is political par excellence, it does not reflect a
general policy but an individual behavior. However, this behavior takes into
account the whole community, and more: it is ‘open to all sides’. Second, it is
not accidental that in depicting critical political thinking manifested in
actions, Arendt uses the metaphor of spatial displacement and recalls Kant’s
right of travelers. The ‘visiting’ behavior establishes a link between political
activity, namely, forming opinions expressed in actions, and traveling in the
world, even if only in imagination. Nevertheless, Arendt contends
immediately that Kant’s position was that of a world-spectator and not that
of an actor because ‘To be a citizen means among other things to have
responsibilities, obligations, and rights, all of which make sense only if they
are territorially limited’.

104

As I see it therefore, to be political and not purely

philosophical in the manner of Kant, the ‘visiting’ process or cosmopolitan
itinerary of the actor has to be dialectical. On the one hand, the foundation of
identities inevitably provokes the need to maintain these identities; hence, the
emergence of institutions and borders. Arendt recalls that all foundations
need a limited place to develop and produce an in-between. On the other
hand, these limits should be constantly ‘criticized’; hence, crossed and de-
localized by taking into account other standpoints. At the same time,
identities should be strengthened and transgressed by worldwide movements.
Identities should be transformed by these transgressions, incorporating what
they learned during their ‘visit’, thereby changing the world and not
immobilizing it nostalgically; still, they refer to a delimited common past. A
citizen would be that person who, without rejecting his/her defined identity,
would be able to contest and de-localize its frame. He/she would not share a
common identity with all human beings but, in forming his/her own opinions,
in acting, he/she would take into account as many other specific identities as
possible.

Arendt’s dialectical but anarchic cosmopolitanism reveals the difference

between ‘sharing’ an identity and ‘taking into account’ identities. ‘Sharing’ is
limited symbolically and territorially and reduces plurality to sameness,

36

Annabel Herzog

whereas ‘taking into account’ crosses all borders and, hence, is inherently
plural. Un-ruled but founded (I hesitate to say ‘rooted’, as roots cannot move
whereas Arendt’s foundations have the ability to be displaced), this process is
both anti-authoritarian and anti-imperialist. It sketches an anarchic political
itinerary consisting in undetermined worldwide movements founded on
specific identities and territories. Based neither on subsumption nor on
destruction of borders but on transgression of necessary limits, this original
cosmopolitanism does not include conquest of any kind. ‘Visiting’ consists in
a continual confrontation between opinions and between identities; hence,
between territorial commitments, which may lead to disagreement but not to
war because war aims precisely at avoiding such confrontation in subsuming
or destroying. Contrary to Curtis, who suggests that Arendt’s actors excel ‘at
being together “with” others by being neither for nor against them’,

105

and,

hence, describes quite a static and indifferent togetherness, I think that Arendt
depicts moving actors crossing one another’s path and rethinking their own
itinerary according to that of neighbors and foreigners.

Arendt shows us that the delimitation and determination of lands and

identities are not the goal of political existence but only a part of it; a part of a
process that should de-localize no less than localize. Borders are necessary
and have no intrinsic value. As such, they should be criticized and reevaluated
but, at the same time, they should never be forgotten or rejected. Arendt does
not propose a new model of political regime but a new kind of political
itinerary resisting constraint and consolidating belongings. This moving
position is neither the most convenient nor the most stable. Like Theseus who
unified Attica but then offered civil rights to foreigners, and who welcomed
Oedipus although he was an outcast (see Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus), a
free citizen should both reinforce and transform his/her identity by examining
other standpoints. The risk of a hardening of identities and borders always
exists: Theseus was finally accused of being himself a foreigner, had to
renounce his leadership, and was replaced by a king. However, in times that
experience the ideological absence of foundations and, accordingly, the
desperate wanderings of refugees, anarchic cosmopolitanism could be the
political itinerary that articulates freedom as no-rule and concrete,
remembered, identities.

N O T E S

1 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 146.
2 I will use the word ‘anarchic’ in its etymological sense; never in its common connotation.
3 See Kimberley Curtis, Our Sense of the Real. Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics

(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 70.

4 Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, edited

by Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 64.

5 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 45.

Politics and Anarchy in the Thought of Hannah Arendt

37

6 Odyssey, Book XIII.
7 Arendt, Jew as Pariah, p. 63.
8 Arendt, Jew as Pariah, pp. 55, 62, 113; Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (San Diego,

New York, London: Harcourt Brace and Company: 1993), p. 17.

9 Arendt, Jew as Pariah, p. 65.

10 For instance Emmanuel Le´vinas writes, ‘The ideal of Socratic truth thus rests on the

essential self-sufficiency of the same, its identification in ipseity, its egoism… Ontology as
first philosophy is a philosophy of power. It issues in the State’. Totality and Infinity. An
Essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne
University Press, 1969), pp. 44, 46.

11 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, one-volume edition (San Diego, New York, London:

Harcourt Brace and Company, 1977–1978), p. 212 (Thinking). See also Arendt, Between
Past and Future, pp. 124–5. See Michael Denneny, ‘The Privilege of Ourselves: Hannah
Arendt on Judgment’, in Melvyn A. Hill (ed.), Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public
World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), p. 248.

12 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 17–18.
13 Patrick J. Deneen, The Odyssey of Political Philosophy. The Politics of Departure and

Return (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), p.
17.

14 Otherwise he would be killed…
15 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 112, 113; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), p. 226.

16 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 120–1.
17 However, authoritarian values are not necessarily transcendent: Plato’s recourse to

transcendental truth differs from the Roman use of laws. See Hannah Arendt, On
Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 187, 199.

18 Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca and London:

Cornell University Press: 1993), p. 96.

19 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 119.
20 Hannah Arendt, ‘Martin Heidegger at Eighty’, in Michael Murray (ed.), Heidegger and

Modern Philosophy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 303. See
also Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 139. See Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy,
Terror. Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1999), pp. 160–65.

21 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 92–3.
22 Hence Arendt tried to define the task of the thinker independently of the wish to rule, if only

by the standard of truth, the political realm that she sees as the domain of free and
contingent actions. See Lisa J. Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 1994); Dana R. Villa, Socratic Citizenship
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 246–98.

23 Robert C. Pirro, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy (Dekalb: Northern Illinois

University Press, 2001), pp. 53, 66.

24 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 160. See Honig, Political Theory, pp. 96–109.
25 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 210.
26 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt

Brace & Company, 1979), p. 208.

27 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 281.
28 On Arendt’s triple identification of action, newness and freedom, which stands at the basis

of her whole thought, see for instance ‘What is Authority?’ and ‘What is Freedom?’ in
Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 91–171 and Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 235. I
consider this point basically known by all readers.

29 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 198.
30 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 124.
31 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 28.
32 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 132–41.
33 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 138–9; Arendt, On Revolution, p. 39.
34 Arendt, The Origins, pp. 135, 138.

38

Annabel Herzog

35 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 6. See Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of

Hannah Arendt (A Thousand Oaks and London: Sage Publications, 1996), p. 76; Bernard
Crick, Crossing Borders. Political Essays (London, New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 155;
and Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press: 1996), p. 124.

36 Arendt, The Origins, p. 138.
37 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 28, 35.
38 See Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt. A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), see chapter 6, pp. 201–52. For a criticism
of Arendt based on this interpretation of her work, see Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack
of the Blob. Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 1998).

39 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 5.
40 Arendt, The Origins, p. 166. See Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 94.
41 Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969 (San Diego, New York, London:

Harcourt Brace & Company, 1992), p. 98. If we follow Arendt, what has been done in the
territories conquered by Israel in 1967 is closer to imperialism than to such ‘serious
attempt’.

42 Arendt, The Origins, pp. 137–8.
43 Arendt, The Origins, p. 186.
44 Arendt, The Origins, p. 143.
45 Immanuel Kant, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 41.

As Pagden writes, ‘Kant was not… in an obvious sense an imperialist. Indeed, in almost all
obvious respects he was an “anti-imperialist”. His belief in the possibility of a universal
cosmopolitan existence is explicitly not based on the conception of an expanding military
culture, however supposedly benign its intent’. Anthony Pagden, ‘Stoicism, Cosmopolitan-
ism, and the Legacy of European Imperialism’, Constellations 7 (2000), pp. 3–22, at p. 18.

46 Arendt, The Origins, p. 143.
47 Arendt, The Origins, p. 132.
48 Arendt, The Origins, p. 137.
49 Arendt, The Origins, p. 469–71.
50 Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, Ch. 2.
51 Arendt, The Origins, p. 159; see also p. 469.
52 See Joan Cocks, ‘On Nationalism: Frantz Fanon, 1925–1961; Rosa Luxemburg, 1871–

1919; and Hannah Arendt, 1906–1975’, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, edited
by Bonnie Honig (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press,
1995), p. 236.

53 Arendt, The Origins, p. 166.
54 Arendt, The Origins, p. 196.
55 Arendt, The Origins, p. 236.
56 Arendt, The Origins, p. 189.
57 Let us recall that the first chapter of Totalitarianism, which follows Arendt’s analysis of the

situation of stateless peoples at the end of Imperialism, is called ‘A classless society’. In it
Arendt shows that totalitarian control dealt with amorphous mobs made homogeneous.
Needless to say, Arendt does not miss the division of society into classes but the existence
of some kind of boundaries within the society related to the difference between opinions (I
come back to this point in the last part of this paper.) She makes this clear when she claims
that totalitarian movements organized masses and not classes or political parties. Arendt,
The Origins, p. 308. In contrast to despotism, which is a degeneration of founded authority
into violence, totalitarianism proved to be the total control of homeless hordes
indoctrinated by ideology. This does not mean that totalitarianism is a consequence of
imperialism, but that it may develop at the end of the imperialist journey when expansion
and ideology have completely destroyed all political boundaries. Therefore, totalitarianism
is absolutely a-political.

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58 On Arendt’s disregard for, or prejudices against, the fate of other continents, see Anne

Norton, ‘Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah
Arendt’, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, pp. 247–61. See also Benhabib’s
discussion on Norton’s view: Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism, p. 85.

59 Arendt, The Origins, pp. 291–2.
60 Arendt, The Origins, pp. 296–7.
61 Arendt, The Origins, p. 300, my emphasis.
62 Arendt, The Origins, p. xxi.
63 See for instance Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1972), pp. 3–47.

64 Arendt, The Origins, p. xix. See also p. xx.
65 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 182.
66 Honig, Political Theory, p. 97; Alan Keenan, ‘Promises, Promises. The Abyss of Freedom

and the Loss of the Political in the Work of Hannah Arendt’, Political Theory, 22 (1994),
pp. 297–322, at p. 298.

67 Margaret Canovan, ‘Introduction’ to Arendt, The Human Condition, p. ix.
68 Canovan, Hannah Arendt, p. 203.
69 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 151.
70 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 165.
71 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 30.
72 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 32. See also Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 32.
73 Honig, Political Theory, pp. 96, 115.
74 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 202.
75 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 149. My emphasis.
76 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 166.
77 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 177, 247, Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 156;

Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 5 etc.

78 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 52.
79 Curtis, Our Sense of the Real, p. 76.
80 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 9.
81 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. 81–94.
82 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 74.
83 Kant, Political Writings, p. 106.
84 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 84.
85 Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University

Press, 2001), p. 13. See also p. 104.

86 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 81.
87 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 1992), p. 44.

88 Such a regime would be despotic, but not necessarily totalitarian. Indeed, it would not

necessarily be established on ideology.

89 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 84.
90 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 267.
91 Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, p. 125.
92 Crick, Crossing Borders, p. 159.
93 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 267.
94 Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, p. 130.
95 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 275; see also Arendt, Lectures, p. 44.
96 Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror, pp. 139, 140.
97 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 152, 153.
98 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 147.
99 See Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy. Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship

(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 81.

100 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 141–2. See also Hannah Arendt, ‘Understanding and

Politics’, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 (New York, San Diego, London: Harcourt
Brace & Company, 1993), p. 323.

101 Arendt, Lectures, p. 43.

40

Annabel Herzog

102 Arendt, Lectures, p. 43; see Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 241; Hannah Arendt, ‘A

Reply’ (to Eric Voegelin’s review of The Origins of Totalitarianism), The Review of
Politics, 15 (1953), pp. 76–85, at p. 79.

103 Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, pp. 158–9.
104 Arendt, Lectures, p. 44.
105 Curtis, Our Sense of the Real, p. 147.

Received 27 April 2003

Annabel Herzog, Department of Political Science, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa
31905, Israel. E-mail: [e-mail]

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