The modern world has withered public space and its virtues.
By Michael Knox Beran
In 1958, Hannah Arendt published The Human
Condition, her book—part panegyric, part lamentation—on what she called
“public space.” What she meant by public space wasn’t just the buildings and
gathering places that in a good town square or market piazza encourage people
to come together. It wasn’t even civic art viewed more broadly, the paintings
and poetry Arendt attributed to homo faber, the fabricating soul
who translates “intangible” civic ideals into “tangible” civic art. Public
space, for Arendt, was also a metaphysical arena in which people realized their
individual potential. They escaped necessity’s pinch—the arduous biological
round of life-sustaining labor—through a “sharing of words and deeds.” This was
the tradition of the Greek polis, from which Arendt drew much of her
inspiration, a place designed “to multiply the chances for everybody to
distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique
distinctness.”
But a new Leviathan was
gobbling up the old public spaces, Arendt believed. With the advent of the
modern nation-state, a social dispensation began to emerge, one whose
adepts—sociologists, psychologists, planners—were skilled in techniques derived
from the social sciences but whose motives were far from pure. The new social
technician, part schoolmarm, part bully, sought not merely to study behavior
but also, Arendt argued, to control it. The school of Pericles was giving way
to the school of Pavlov.
The social signori, Arendt
maintained, sought to impose behavioral norms on people through “innumerable
and various rules”—bureaucratic harnesses intended to “normalize” men and
women, to compel them to “behave,” and to punish their “spontaneous action or
outstanding achievement.” Refractory spirits who failed to conform were to be
stigmatized as “asocial or abnormal.” In her more perfervid visions, Arendt
foresaw a social apocalypse, a “leveling out of fluctuation” that would result
in the “most sterile passivity history has ever known.”
Arendt’s jeremiad had a good
deal in common with the warnings of other mid-twentieth-century prophets, among
them David Riesman and Friedrich Hayek. It resembles, too, the insights of
contemporary critics like Camille Paglia, who contends that too many Americans
have become “complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe
everything party leaders tell them.” But Arendt had her own idiosyncratic
understanding of the way public space could help block the road to serfdom. The
old forums, in liberating so much potential, foiled those who desired
“conformism, behaviorism, and automatism in human affairs.” The question that
haunts the reader of Arendt’s work is whether we can get the old places back.
Arendt was born in 1906 into a German-Jewish family
living in Linden, in what is now the city of Hanover. She passed much of her
childhood in Königsberg, in what was then East Prussia; at the outbreak of
World War I in 1914, she moved with her family to Berlin. She was still in her
teens when she first heard the name Martin Heidegger. It was “hardly more than
a name,” she said, but it “traveled all over Germany like the rumor of the
hidden king.” In 1924, she enrolled in the University of Marburg to study under
the master. He was 35, married, and working on Being and Time.
Arendt embraced him as teacher, mentor, and lover.
The traditional hostility of
the philosopher toward the polis was, Arendt believed, “only too apparent” in
Heidegger. The “most essential characteristic” of his pose, she said, was “its
absolute egoism.” Heidegger was a mountain prophet. He shunned the “gabble” of
the valley. He retired whenever practicable to his cottage in Todtnauberg in
the Black Forest, where he could live, he said, in the “solitude of the
mountains,” in the “elemental nearness of sun, storms, and heavens.” “It’s
marvelous up here,” he wrote in 1925. “Sometimes I no longer understand that
down there one can play such strange roles.”
Arendt soon left Marburg to
study under Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg. She continued, however, to see
Heidegger, briefly and furtively, on railway platforms and in provincial
hotels. But a breach would open between them. In January 1933, Hitler came to
power, and in May, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. “The Führer himself and he
alone,” he declared, “is German reality and law, today and for the future.” In
the same year, the police, suspicious of Arendt’s researches in the Prussian
State Library, where she was collecting material on anti-Semitism for the
German Zionist Organization, arrested and interrogated her. Upon her release,
she fled Germany and found refuge in Paris. After the German invasion of France
in 1940, the French authorities imprisoned her in the notorious internment camp
at Gurs. She escaped and made her way to the United States, which became her
home for the rest of her life.
Experience and reflection led
Arendt to question Heidegger’s contempt for public space. His “existential
solipsism” prevented him from making responsible political judgments. Yet one
should not exaggerate the break between the two: it occurred by degrees and was
never complete. Arendt would always regard Heidegger as the incarnation of the
philosopher-king, and their bond persisted until her death in 1975. She called
him “the last Romantic,” not without admiration. German Romanticism left its
print on her own spirit. She was contemptuous of mere biological existence, the
life of those “enslaved” by the necessity of getting their bread, imprisoned
“in the ever-recurring cycle of the life process.” She wanted, as the German
Romantics did, to soar into a higher, freer realm; she, too, was a Tochter
aus Elysium, a daughter of Elysium.
In the spring of 1961, 20 years after she came to the
United States, Arendt traveled to Israel to attend the trial of former SS
lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann. Her impressions were printed first in The
New Yorker and later in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A
Report on the Banality of Evil. By applying the theses of The Human
Condition to the Nazis’ mass murder of the Jews, she caused a
sensation—indeed, a scandal.
Studying Eichmann in the dock,
Arendt concluded that he was not an evil genius but a fool: “Despite all the
efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a
‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.” He
was “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché,”
Arendt wrote; in his aphasic helplessness, he could but repeat, in
“officialese” (“my only language,” he said), the formulas he had learned to
parrot. “The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his
inability to speak was closely connected to his inability to think.”
Such people exist in every
era, but not until the flowering of the social bureaucracies did they come into
their own. Eichmann shone in the sleek bureaucracy of the SS not despite his
banality but because of it. Under the social dispensation, Arendt wrote, a
“substitution” of “collective man-kind for individual men” takes place,
achieved mainly by means of the “social sciences which, as ‘behavioral
sciences,’ aim to reduce man as a whole, in all his activities, to the level of
a conditioned and behaving animal.” National Socialism was for Arendt an
extreme form of the social impulse to condition human beings. The concentration
camps, she wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism,
were themselves vast conditioning experiments, “laboratories” in which “each
and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so
that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random for any
other.”
Eichmann, a man as primitive
in his moral reflexes as one of Pavlov’s dogs, figures in Eichmann in
Jerusalem as the incarnation of the new social man and thus the ideal
Nazi administrator. A less dull creature would have either broken under the
strain or turned sadist and thus upset the smooth efficiency of the operation;
Eichmann plodded on, processing mass murder as though he were stamping
passports. Arendt thought that Eichmann deserved to hang, but her portrait
nevertheless stirred outrage because the mulish mental dormancy she attributed
to him seemed to mitigate his guilt. Carrying her theory to what many thought
an extravagant length, Arendt argued that Eichmann, caught up in the atmosphere
of National Socialism, was “perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong.”
If Eichmann figures in Arendt’s roman à thèse as the
embodiment of the banal social man, his Jewish victims make a prop for her
theory of the decline of public space. Probably nothing in Eichmann in
Jerusalem caused so much distress as the pages in which Arendt
described the assistance that the Jewish councils, the Judenräte,
gave the Nazis in implementing genocide. “Wherever Jews lived,” Arendt wrote,
“there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without
exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with
the Nazis.”
Arendt showed little feeling
for the agonizing predicament of the Jewish leaders, though she conceded that
their “submissive meekness” was understandable. No “non-Jewish group or people
had behaved differently,” she noted. To rebel, she knew, was to court a fate
worse than death. She described how Dutch Jews were “tortured to death” after
attacking a German police detachment in 1941. For “months on end they died a
thousand deaths, and every single one of them would have envied his brethren in
Auschwitz and even in Riga and Minsk.”
Still, if by 1941 it was too
late to rebel, why had Jews and Gentiles alike failed to stand up to the thugs
earlier? Arendt attributed the failure of civic nerve to the decay of public
space and, in particular, to the decline of the political traditions that flourished
in such space. In The Human Condition, she had defined the essence
of political activity as “jurisdiction, defense, and administration of public
affairs.” The crucial word is “defense.” Arendt admired the man of action who
had the “courage” to enter public space and defend himself against aggressors;
courage, she said, was “the political virtue par excellence.”
Arendt believed that some
peoples had more of this civic bone and muscle than others. The Danes, for
example, had an “authentically political sense, an inbred comprehension of the
requirements of citizenship and independence.” The Diaspora Jews, by contrast,
“had no political tradition or experience.” They figure in Arendt’s writings as
civic castrati whose lack of political experience left them vulnerable
to the pogrom. Had the Jews possessed a more adequate public space, Arendt
believed, they could have developed the civic machismo that she admired.
This part of her argument,
though, is at odds with her recognition that polis arts, however beautifully
developed, could not in fact have saved the Jews. Even if they had turned the
ghetto into a facsimile of Periclean Athens, they could not have effectually
resisted a gigantic nation-state determined to wipe them off the face of the
earth. They were helpless, Arendt wrote, because they “possessed no territory,
no government, and no army”—in other words, no nation-state.
Arendt’s analysis of the
plight of European Jewry lays bare the deeper tension in her thought. Public
space, small and polis-like, is for her the school of civic courage and
distinctive individuality. Yet no polis can withstand the might of a
nation-state. Build a nation-state to save yourself, however, and you sacrifice
the humanity and civic vigor of the agora, the forum, and the town square. The
nation-state, because of its size, requires a people to undertake the very
kinds of social administration that degrade the civic artistry that makes them
strong and self-reliant. “Large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an
almost irresistible inclination towards despotism, be this the despotism of a
person or of majority rule,” Arendt wrote, “and although statistics, that is,
the mathematical treatment of reality, was unknown prior to the modern age, the
social phenomena which make such treatment possible—great numbers, accounting
for conformism, behaviorism, and automatism in human affairs—were precisely
those traits which, in the Greek self-understanding, distinguished the Persian
civilization from their own.” It is the despairing crux of Arendt’s philosophy.
The social methods of the nation-state will always overwhelm the civic intimacy
of polis culture, yet without national forms to protect them, polis people are
perpetually at the mercy of their nation-state enemies.
Part of the difficulty is the fetish that Arendt makes
of politics. She thought politics essential to public space, yet in a world
dominated by national governments, she saw no way to preserve the political
tradition of the town square, the agora, and the piazza, which had been robbed
of their sovereignty by the bigwigs of the capital.
