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    Arendt, Camus and Postmodern Politics

    Arendt, Camus and Postmodern Politics

    by Jeffrey C. Isaac

    Source:

    PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 1+2 / 1989, pages: 48-71, on www.ceeol.com.

    http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=467d4faf-0559-446f-94e8-db67f71c7a00http://www.ceeol.com/
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    ARENDT, CAMUS, ANDPOSTMODERN POLITICS

    Jeffrey C. Isaac

    Political theory is beset by a growing dissatisfaction with prevailing modes ofthought. This is expressed in a variety of idioms post-structuralism, pragmatism,

    conventionalist philosophy of science and signals an abandonment of the Enlighten-ment project of the unity of human reason and human freedom, and of its attemptto ground freedom upon first principles, and universal truths about human nature.This disenchantment was aptly articulated by C. Wright Mills thirty years ago:Our major orientations liberalism and socialism have virtually collapsed asadequate explanations of the world and of ourselves. These two ideologies cameout of the Enlightenment, and they have had in common many assumptions andvalues. In both, increased rationality is held to be the prime condition of increasedfreedom. The liberating notion of progress by reason, the faith in science as anunmixed good, the demand for popular education and the faith in its political

    meaning for democracy all these ideals of The Enlightenment have rested uponthe happy assumption of the inherent relation of reason and freedom.1

    The current rejection of this happy assumption has largely been the workof philosophical movements. Richard Rortys critique of epistemology has calledinto question two ideas central to modern political thought: that we can havegrounded knowledge of ourselves, and that the institutions of modern politics arebased upon real progress in such knowledge.2 Conventionalist philosophies ofscience, rejecting the notions of scientific truth and progress in understanding reality,have reinforced this epistemological skepticism.3 Post-structuralism, with itsemphasis upon the discursive constitution of human identity, has gone even further,

    challenging the very notion of human nature as a possible object of knowledge.4These philosophical currents have converged into a theoretical tidal wave commonlyreferred to as postmodernism.5 Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition, hasoffered an influential statement of this view. As he writes:

    I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself withreference to a metadiscourse . . . making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative,such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of therational or working subject, or the creation of wealth . . . if a metanarrative implyinga philosophy of history is used to legitimate knowledge, questions are raised con-cerning the validity of the institutions governing the social bond: these must be

    legitimated as well. Thus justice is consigned to the grand narrative in the same wayas truth . . . Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towardmetanarratives.6

    This view rests upon a cogent critique of modern epistemology, and correctlylocates itself amidst a contemporary crisis of metaphysical philosophy and

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    intellectual disciplines. Furthermore, it voices a sound skepticism about the variousdiscourses of legitimation which have been articulated in the modern world.Yet the call to abandon such discourses to cease our inquiries into human nature,our attempts to articulate epistemological criteria, and, most importantly, our effortsto provide reasons for social and political obligation or rebellion is troubling.

    One reason is that it is hard to avoid the suspicion that such legitimations, howeverunderstood, are necessary to our theoretical discourse, and that postmodernist theoryequally rests upon a discourse of legitimation, however implicit or covert.7

    Another reason is its generally apolitical character. Let me be clear about whatI mean here. Clearly postmodernism is staking a claim vis a vis modern philosophicaland political discourse. In this sense it is, of course, political. But the nature ofthis claim, and of the critique it articulates, is often distressingly vague and abstract.The paradigmatic metaphors of postmodernism discourse, communication,conversation are disturbingly idealist, obscuring the practical involvements andstruggles, the material concerns and relations, which are equally constitutive ofsocial life.8 Related to this is the relative disinterest in the state which is exhibitedwhen thinkers like Rorty, Lyotard, or even Foucault write about discourse andpower.9 Finally, it is clear that postmodernism is premised upon the effacement,if not the abandonment, of critique as the guiding ideal of theoretical practice.This is most clearly expressed in Rortys philosophy of edification, but it is equallyexhibited in the generally playful way in which people like Feyerabend and Foucaultwrite about the world, and in their quite explicit efforts to subvert the notions of

    freedom and truth.10

    Perry Anderson has written about the exorbitation of language characteristicof postmodern theory, suggesting that this reflects the professionalization ofintellectual life and the hegemony of philosophical discourse within it. If truethe latter is particularly ironic, given the general suspicion of philosophy charac-teristic of postmodernism. To say that postmodernism insufficiently addressespolitical problems, however, is not to deny that it has been crucially influencedby politics. In a peculiar way, the reaction of many contemporary theorists ofpostmodernism to the shattering political events of the twentieth century is analogousto the behaviour of the individuals in Platos cave. Afraid to look into the light,

    they have instead turned away towards its reflections, addressing metaphysics ratherthan political reality.

    The political writings of Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus are interesting becausethey point the way towards a more satisfactory postmodernism. As Norman

    Jacobson has put it, they offer us a political theory without solace, without theguarantees which traditional political thought purported to provide.12 Like currentpostmodernists, both writers criticize the Enlightenment project and its founda-tionalist views of human reason and human freedom. However, for Arendt andCamus this critique is grounded in a deconstruction of concrete historical experienceas much as metaphysical philosophy. Further, their critique represents neither an

    abandonment of politics as a specific practice of effecting public power, nor aUtopian idealization of the status quo. In short, their theoretical and practical orien-tations, far from being edifying, were based upon an attempt to reappropriatehistorical themes of modernity and to reconstruct a revitalized public life. In whatfollows I will examine the theoretical perspectives Arendt and Camus offer us as

    aCEEOL NL Germany

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    inhabitants of a postmodern world, and the historical contexts which illuminatethem. My aim here is not to present these thinkers as saints or authorities, onlyas exemplary theorists and political actors, who point the way towards a politicaland critical postmodernism.

    1. The Abyss of the Twentieth Century

    Both Arendt and Camus experienced the traumas of the mid-twentieth centuryfirst hand. For Arendt, as a German Jewess, this meant exile, internment, andhomelessness.13 Politicized by the rise of Nazism, she became a Zionist andworked with the German Zionist Organization, helping to raise international con-sciousness about the plight of German Jews. In this capacity she was arrested andheld for eight days, prompting her to clandestinely leave Germany, making herway from Prague, to Geneva, to Paris. There she worked with various Zionistorganizations until 1940 when, after war broke out between France and Germany,she was interned as a German refugee. Of this she later wrote, sardonically:Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a newkind of human beings the kind that are put into concentration camps by theirfoes and in internment camps by their friends.14

    The experience of displacement was traumatic: We lost our home, which meansthe familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidencethat we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the

    naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression offeelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have beenkilled in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives ... wewere once somebodies about whom people cared, we were loved by friends, andeven known by landlords as paying our rent regularly.15 Arendt reflectedelsewhere on the more political situation of the Jewish refugee, foreshadowingher later interest in politics as the space of public appearances: Today the truthhas come home: there is no protection in heaven or earth against bare murder,and a man can be driven at any moment from the streets and broad places onceopen to all . . . 16 Homelessness and statelessness were bad enough but, as

    Elisabeth Young-Bruehl reports, Arendt was shattered by the knowledge of HitlersFinal Solution. As she recounted years later:

    At first we did not believe it . . . This was really as though the abyss had opened . . . Idont mean the number of victims, but the method, the fabrication of corpses Idont need to go further into that. This . . . was something that none of us could recon-cile ourselves to . . . That was completely different. Personally, one could deal witheverything else.17

    Camus experience was rather different, but no less intense or formative. Asa French-Algerian philosophy student he had joined the Communist Party in 1934,

    but he left shortly after in protest over the partys drastic move toward Frenchnationalism during the Popular Front period. Camus objected to the partys attitudetoward the native Algerians, as well as its authoritarianism and hypocrisy.18 Hisfirst political experience was thus grounded in the fateful developments of full-fledged Stalinism. After giving voice to the cause of oppressed native Algerians

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    as a writer for the socialist Alger Republicain, he enlisted in the struggle againstfascism. Turned down by the French army in 1939, and having moved to France,he involved himself in the Resistance, most notably as editor of the undergroundnewspaper Combat. In his Letters to a German Friend he reflected upon theOccupation: Death strikes everywhere and at random. In the war we are fighting,courage steps up and volunteers, and every day you are shooting down our purestspirits . . . for five years it was no longer possible to enjoy the call of birds in thecool of the evening . . . For five years the earth has not seen a single morning withoutdeath agonies, a single evening without prisons, a single noon withoutslaughters.19

    The Resistance was for Camus an experience of heroism and courage, but thisdid not overshadow the horrors or war and of occupation. His reflections on fascismin a later essay, Why Spain? sum up this experience. In response to the criticismof Gabriel Marcel, who had expressed surprise that a play about totalitarian tyrannywould be laid in Spain rather than Eastern Europe, Camus writes:

    May I confess that I am somewhat ashamed to ask the question for you? WhyGuernica, Gabriel Marcel? Why that event which for the first time, in the face ofa world still sunk in its comfort, gave Hitler, Mussolini and Franco a chance toshow even children the meaning of totalitarian technique? Yes, why that event, whichconcerned us too? For the first time men of my age came face to face with injusticetriumphing in history. At that time the blood of innocence flowed amid a chatterof pharisees, which, alas, is still going on. Because there are some of us who willnever wash their hands of that blood . . . I have stated as vigorously as I could whatI thought of the Russian concentration camps. But they will not make me forgetDachau, Buchenwald, and the nameless agony of millions, nor the dreadful repres-sion that decimated the Spanish Republic.20

    For Camus the mid-twentieth century was a terrible juncture in history, and hiswords certainly capture the spirit of the moment, one far removed from Enlighten-ment optimism: The world makes us feel sick, like this universal wave of cowar-dice, this mockery of courage, this parody of greatness, and this withering awayof honor.21

    The theoretical efforts of both writers dramatically bear the imprint of these

    terrible events. This is clear, for example, in Arendts first political work, TheOrigins of Totalitarianism, where she writes:

    Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of localwars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respitefor the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the tworemaining world powers . . . never have we depended so much on political forcesthat cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest forcesthat look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries . . . On thelevel of historical insight and political thought there prevails an ill-defined, generalagreement that the essential structure of all civilizations is at the breaking point.

    Although it may seem better preserved in some parts of the world than in others,it can nowhere provide the guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequateresponse to its horrors.22

    This sensibility pervades her work. As she goes on: Comprehension does notmean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or

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    explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalizations that the impact ofreality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examiningand bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us22 theburden of our self-knowledge, and of the task of reconstituting some decency outof chaos.

    As the title of another book expresses it, we are Between Past and Future, theheirs of totalitarianism and global destruction, which in its unprecedentednesscannot be comprehended through the usual categories of political thought, andwhose crimes cannot be judged by traditional moral standards or punished withinthe legal framework of our civilization.23 Perhaps this sense of the shatteringof tradition is most poignantly articulated in an early essay on the Nazis andorganized guilt:

    how great a burden is mankind for man . . . Perhaps those Jews, to whose forefatherswe owe the first conception of the idea of humanity, knew something about thatburden when each year they used to say Our Father and King, we have sinnedbefore you, taking not only the sins of their own community but all human offensesupon themselves. Those today who are ready to follow this road in a modern version[have] . . . in fear and trembling . . . finally realized of what man is capable and thisindeed is the precondition of any modern political thinking . . . upon them and onlythem, who are filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the human race,can there be any reliance when it comes to fighting fearlessly, uncompromisingly,against the incalculable evil that men are capable of bringing about.24

    This insight is a far cry from the happy assumption of the inherent relation ofreason and freedom of which Mills speaks, and it renders the notions of reasonand freedom as problematic as anything observed by our contemporarypostmodernists.

    This sense of a historical crisis of meaning is also at the heart of Camus thinking.It informs his notion of the absurd experience, that unspeakable penally in whichthe whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing, and his famousabsurdist wager on the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silenceof the universe.25 Camus articulated this sense most explicitly in a short defenseof existential philosophy, Pessimism and Courage:

    The coexistence, in certain minds, of a philosophy of negation and a positive moralityillustrates, in fact, the great problem that is painfully disturbing the whole epoch.In a word, it is the problem of civilization, and it is essential for us to know whetherman, without the help of either the eternal or rationalistic thought, can unaided createhis own values . . . the uneasiness that concerns us belongs to a whole epoch fromwhich we do not want to dissociate ourselves . . . No, everything is not summed upin negation and absurdity. But we must first posit negation and absurdity becausethey are what our generation has encountered and what we must take into account.26

    Camus identified this problem of nihilism in his Letters: For a long time

    we both thought that this world had no ultimate meaning and that consequentlywe were cheated. I still think so in a way. But I came to different conclusionsfrom the ones you used to talk about . . . You never believed in the meaning ofthis world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent andthat good and evil could be defined according to ones wishes. You supposed that

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    in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of ... therealism of conquests. As Camus noted, this moral crisis cannot be ignored; itmust be directly addressed, thought out, lived through. The commonplaces of thepast will no longer do. Thus he proceeds: What is truth, you used to ask? Tobe sure, but at least we know what falsehood is; that is just what you have taughtus. What is spirit? We know its contrary, which is murder. What is man? ThereI stop you, for we know. Man is that force which ultimately cancels all tyrantsand gods. He is the force of evidence.27

    This belief that political values must emerge from the eye of the historical stormanimates Camus most important political work, The Rebel. He begins in muchthe same tone as Arendt in The Origins:

    The purpose of this essay is . . . to understand the times in which we live. One might

    think that a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventymillion human beings should be condemned out of hand. But its culpability mustbe understood. In more ingenuous times, when the tyrant razed cities for his owngreater glory, when the slave chained to the conquerors chariot was dragged throughthe rejoicing streets, when enemies were thrown to wild beasts in front of theassembled people, the mind did not reel before such unabashed crimes, and judge-ment remained unclouded. But slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacresjustified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman, in one sense cripple judge-ment. On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence through a curioustransposition peculiar to our times it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself.

    Once again we are at the edge of an historical abyss. Our inherited categoriescannot serve us. Indeed these are themselves part of the problem. Therefore Camus,like Arendt, refuses to fall back upon an invidious essentialism, refuses to viewthe horrors of the century as an unfortunate aberration or accident, to be simplyput behind us. As he writes: The important thing, therefore, is not, as yet, togo to the root of things, but, the world being what it is, to know how to live init.28 A political theory which excavates, deconstructs, and then, crucially,reconstructs, the foundations of modern politics.

    2. Totalitarianism and the Intoxication of Power

    For both thinkers there was much that was shattering about the twentieth cen-tury the destruction wrought by the First World War, the dashing of revolu-tionary hopes, symbolized by the brutal assassinations of Luxemburg and Liebknechtand later the brutalities of Stalinism, the rise of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco,the fratricidal destruction of the Spanish Republic, World War Two and theHolocaust. And for both thinkers these happenings, savagely destructive of bothpeoples and Enlightenment dreams, pointed towards a novel political reality totalitarianism. In identifying this unprecedented reality through the concept oftotalitarianism, they were not alone. As Bernard Crick has pointed out the thinking

    of an entire generation of political writers Orwell, Silone, Borkeneau, Koestler converged upon this concept.29

    For Arendt and Camus totalitarianism, as it had emerged in both Stalinist Russiaand Nazi Germany, made it necessary to abandon certain foundational modernpolitical beliefs. The systematic and successful employment of deceit, and the

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    frightening gullibility and acceptance of the masses, flew in the face of Enlighten-ment notions of human reason. The seemingly unproblematic identification ofindividuals with totalitarian regimes, and their willing performance of genocidalacts, falsified any concept of a necessary human inclination toward freedom. Andthe perverse technologies of death, and the bureaucratic administration of theiruse, simply mocked the characteristically modern dictum of Bacon: Humanknowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known theeffect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and thatwhich in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.30 There is nomore apt description of the intellectual operations of the Nazi scientists, for whomcontemplation of the various causes of mass death was one with their murderousoperationalization. As Arendt put it: The concentration camps are the laboratorieswhere changes in human nature are tested. . . 31 If for Smith the paradigm ofhuman technique was the pin factory, and for Marx the textile mill, for Arendt,a witness to the true, terrible greatness the unity of theory and practice is capableof producing, it is the corpse factory.

    The analyses of this new mode of production provided by Arendt and Camusare remarkably similar. For both, the most obvious characteristic of totalitarianismis its bureaucratization of murder. In The RebelCamus acknowledges the ubiquityof murder and oppression throughout history, and yet wishes to insist that thereis something horrifyingly novel in the current forms which these inhumanities havetaken: There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between

    them is not clearly defined. But the Penal Code makes the convenient distinctionof premeditation. We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfectcrime.32 For Arendt too it is the murderous logic of totalitarianism which marksits novelty: Suffering of which there has been always too much on earth, is notthe issue, nor is the number of victims. Human nature as such is at stake ... theseexperiments succeed not in changing man but only in destroying him, by creatinga society in which the nihilistic banality ofhomo homini lupus is consistentlyrealized. . . 33

    Perhaps the starkest portrayal of this machinery of death is Arendts Eichmannin Jerusalem. Eichmann, she reports, was chief officer of office IV-3-4 of the

    R.H.S.A., the Head Office for Reich Security of the Nazi S.S. Section IV, welearn, was the Gestapo; Subsection IV-A handled opponents accused ofCommunism, Sabotage, Liberalism, and Assassinations, and Section IV-B dealtwith sects, that is, Catholics, Protestants, Freemasons ... and Jews. Each of thecategories in these subsections received an office of its own, designated by an arabicnumeral, so that Eichmann eventually in 1941 was appointed to the desk ofIV-B-4 in the R.S.H.A. Arendt discusses the various bureaucratic languagerules governing the classification of Nazi operations: The prescribed code namesfor killing were final solution, evacuation . . . and special treatment . . . depor-tation unless it involved Jews directed to Theresienstadt, the old peoples ghetto

    for privileged Jews, in which case it was called change of residence receivedthe names of resettlement . . . and labor in the East . . . And she details thevarious cross-cutting authorities responsible for The Jewish Question (theirambition was always the same: to kill as many Jews as possible, she notessardonically), and the role Eichmann played in their activities:

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    Eichmanns position was that of the most important conveyor belt in the wholeoperation, because it was always up to him and his men how many Jews couldor should be transported from any given area, and it was through his office that

    the ultimate destination of the shipment was cleared, though that destination wasnot determined by him. But the difficulty in synchronizing the departures andarrivals, the endless worry over wrangling enough rolling stock from the railroadauthorities and the Ministry of Transport, over fixing timetables and directing trainsto centers with sufficient absorptive capacity, over having enough Jews on handat the proper time so that no trains would be wasted, over enlisting the help ofthe authorities in occupied or allied countries to carry out arrests, over followingthe rules and directives with respect to the various categories of Jews, winch werelaid down separately for each country and constantly changing - all this becamea routine . . . 34

    A daunting task, the handling of the Jewish Question, but certainly no crimeof passion and Arendt, through the brilliant understatement of her prose, conveysits unprecedented horribleness.

    In this light, possibly the most telling incident in Eichmanns career regardshis attitude towards the Rumanians, who had managed, within a matter of months,to kill close to three hundred thousand of their Jews with hardly any Germanhelp. Arendt reports that even the S.S. were taken aback, and occasionallyfrightened, by the horrors of old-fashioned, spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic

    scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killingcould be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way. What Camuscalled the calculated culpability involved here led Arendt to conclude that thecrime was unprecedented less because of its enormity than because of its modeof organization. In making this judgment she reproached the Jerusalem Court, forwhom the Nazi atrocities were simply an extreme form of the anti-Semitic persecu-tion Jews had experienced throughout history. This conclusion, she argued, wasbased on a failure to understand that the supreme crime it was confronted with,the physical extermination of the Jewish people, was a crime against humanity,perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people, and that only the choice of victims,

    not the nature of the crime, could be derived from the long history of Jew-hatredand anti-Semitism.35

    This leads us to a second key feature of totalitarianism its relentlessly ideologicalcharacter. For both writers, ideologies are totalistic world views based upon anecessitarian logic. For Camus, the murderous systems of Stalinism and Nazismare both rooted in a kind of cowardice typical of the ideological mentality: Assoon as man, through lack of character, takes refuge in a doctrine, as soon ascrime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspectsof the syllogism ... Ideology today is concerned only with the denial of other humanbeings, who alone bear the responsibility of deceit. It is then that we kill.36

    Camus calls the consequence of this totality: nothing other than the ancientdream of unity common to both believers and rebels, but projected horizontallyonto an earth deprived of God. Totality is a form of perfectionist politics premisedupon the suppression of any and all human difference, dedicated with a murderouslogic to the fabrication of uniformity. He writes:

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    [Totality] supposes a negation and a certainty: the certainty of the infinite malleabilityof man and the negation of human nature. Propaganda techniques serve to measurethe degree of this malleability and try to make reflection and conditioned reflex

    coincide . . . The experiment has not yet been brought to an end, but its principleis logical. If there is no human nature, then the malleability of man is, in fact, infinite.Political realism, on this level, is nothing but unbridled romanticism, a romanticismof expediency.

    Ideology, purporting to articulate cosmic necessity, whether of World History orAryan Destiny, demands the unequivocal submission of concrete human beings,who are hostile to it in so far as human nature, to date, has never been able tolive by history alone and has always escaped from it by some means. 37 Ideologyis thus both figuratively and literally terroristic, insofar as its claim to absoluteuniversality cannot tolerate the particularities which comprise the existing world.It is figuratively terroristic insofar as it entails a perpetual uncertainty regardingwhat precisely is necessary, an uncertainty affecting all but the sanctumsanctorum of the party elite, who alone can claim to speak for it with confidencein their objective innocence. And ideology is terroristic literally insofar as itlicenses systematic murder.

    Arendt highlights these same features in the concluding chapter of her Origins,Ideology and Terror: A New Form of Government. Here she argues that theessence of totalitarianism is the rejection of all legality. Denying all fixed standardsof right and orderly conduct, totalitarian policy claims to transform the human

    species into an active unfailing carrier of a law to which human beings otherwisewould only passively and reluctantly be subjected. Totalitarianism is premisedupon a refusal to view or accept anything as it is. Whether the driving forceof this development was called nature or history is relatively secondary, In theseideologies, the term law itself changed its meaning: from expressing the frameworkof stability within which human actions and motions can take place, it becamethe expression of the motion itself. For Arendt, too, insofar as there is no rest,no order on which to base ones expectations and ones conduct, totalitarianismis terroristic. Law, here, becomes but the execution of historical necessity, itselfunderstood as being disclosed only to those in power. Moreover, this law is

    executed with what Arendt calls a frightening stringent logicality:

    While the totalitarian regimes are thus resolutely and cynically emptying the worldof the only thing that makes sense to the utilitarian expectations of common sense,they impose upon it at the same time a kind of supersense which the ideologies actuallyalways meant when they pretended to have found the key to history or the solutionto the riddles of the universe ... The insanity of such systems lies not only in theirfirst premise but in the very logicality with which they are constructed. The curiouslogicality of all -isms, their simple minded trust in the salvation value of stubborndevotion without regard for specific, varying factors, already harbors the first germsof totalitarian contempt for reality and factuality.38

    Such contempt for the given is called by Camus an insensate passion fornothingness.39 For both writers totalitarian ideology licenses the performanceand rationalization of the most barbarous deeds, the denial of the most obviousexperiences. Orwells nightmare vision of Oceania, where historical events are

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    falsified and current events manufactured daily, and Koestlers reconstruction of thesupersense which leads the Bolshevik Rubashov to deny himself, are vivid fictionalaccounts of this perverse synthesis of worldly cynicism and eschatological idealism.

    This nihilistic contempt for reality brings us to the third key feature oftotalitarianism its radical subversion of language. For both thinkers languageis constitutive of facticity; it is a potential means of individual lucidity, publicdisclosure, and interpersonal understanding. Totalitarian nihilism would destroyall of these. As Camus writes: Dialogue and personal relations have been replacedby propaganda or polemic, which are two kinds of monologue. Abstraction, whichbelongs to the world of power and calculation, has replaced the real passions ... thegospel preached by totalitarian regimes in the form of a monologue [is] dictatedfrom the top of a lonely mountain. On stage, as in reality, the monologue precedesdeath.40

    Arendt too identifies the horrifying subversion of language which is central tototalitarianism. I have already noted her remarks about the Nazis bureaucraticlanguage rules. Eichmann, she argues, is symptomatic of these, the paradigmatictotalitarian individual. Officialese is my only language, she quotes him astestifying, observing of this that officialese became his language because he wasgenuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliche. Even forEichmann, she argues, slogans, code words, and cliches were not a completelyeffective insulation from the cold realities of Nazism. She recounts that he wassickened by some of the concentration camp murders that he witnessed; but only

    temporarily, and he never let it interfere with the performance of his duties asa law abiding citizen of the Third Reich. As Arendt observed of his conductduring his trial: The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it becamethat his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely,to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possiblewith him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliableof all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence againstreality as such.41

    Eichmann was completely bereft of what Arendt later called the power ofjudgment, which rests on an anticipated communication with others with whom

    I know I must finally come to some agreement.42

    And, so lacking, he could notbe considered an authentic agent. As Arendt writes in The Human Condition, withEichmann clearly in the back of her mind: The disclosure of who somebody is,is implicit in both his words and his deeds . . . Without the accompaniment of speech,at any rate, action would not only lose its revelatory character but, by the sametoken, it would lose its subject, as it were; not acting men but performing robotswould achieve what, humanly speaking, would remain incomprehensible. . . 43

    The totalitarian individual, a product of terror and the manipulation of language,is just such a nobody. He/she is not simply privatized but atomized, deprived,in the literal sense, of the means of any human solidarity. Even the realm of friend-

    ship must be negated, for its principles, selectivity and particularity, run counterto the general loyalties which totalitarian language prescribes and totalitarian powerdemands. Arendt calls this the experience of loneliness, the experience of notbelonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperateexperiences of man.44 Camus too reflects upon this experience:

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    Beyond the confines of the Empire there is no salvation. This is, or will be, theEmpire of friendship. But this friendship is the befriending of objects; for the friendcannot be preferred to the Empire. The friendship of people and there is no other

    definition of it is specific solidarity ... The friendship of objects is friendship ingeneral, friendship with everything, which supposes when it is a question of self-preservation mutual denunciation. He who loves his friend loves him in the present,and the revolution wants to love only a man who has not yet appeared ... In thekingdom of humanity, men are bound by ties of affection; in the Empire of objects,men are united by mutual accusation. The city that planned to be the city of fraternitybecomes an ant-heap of solitary men.45

    This loneliness and atomization would seem to bring us full circle. We are backto the beginnings of modern philosophy, to Descartes cogito, radical inward-ness, self-subsistent subjectivity. But it only seems this way. Because the totilitarianindividual, according to Arendt and Camus, lacks any firm anchoring, he or sheis virtually deprived of self altogether. Bereft of reason, autonomy, and conscience,ready and willing to destroy what exists, be it traditions or entire peoples, thetotalitarian individual would seem to give the lie to the Enlightenment, and leaveus, at the dawn of the twentieth century, adrift in the morass of a desperatenihilism.

    3. Deconstructing Totalitarianism

    Such a nihilism was inimical to the thinking of both writers, and so they under-

    took to understand the origins of the moral crisis in order to move beyond it. Forboth of them this meant a critical analysis of Enlightenment humanism and itsculmination in Marxism. Both thinkers agreed that Nazism, terrifying as it was,was the product of subterranean currents in Western politics. As Camus putit, the various fascisms chose to deify the irrational, and the irrational alone,instead of deifying reason. In this way they renounced their claim to universality.True, fascism was symptomatic of the crisis of European civilization. But, as Camusinsists: Despite appearances, the German revolution had no hope of a future.It was only a primitive impulse whose ravages have been greater than its realambitions. Russian communism, on the contrary, he continues, has appro-

    priated the metaphysical ambition that this book describes, the erection after thedeath of God, of a city of man finally deified.46 Hitlerism represented theethics of the gang. Communism, on the other hand, has behind it a respectabletradition; as Arendt put it, one cannot understand it without taking into accountthe whole tradition of political philosophy.47 Camus The Rebel and ArendtsThe Human Conditionand On Revolutionrepresent efforts to excavate this traditionand to understand how and why it went wrong.

    The astonishing history evoked here is the history of human pride.48 SoCamus concludes his introduction to The Rebel. For Camus rebellion is at the heartof the Western metaphysical experience. It is a demand on the part of man for

    recognition, a passionate affirmation of human value. Camus traces thisexperience of rebellion back to the ancient Greeks, particularly as expressed inthe myth of Prometheus, the most perfect myth of intelligence in revolt. However,he argues, rebellion was not central to the Greeks, who believed in physis, andfor whom rebellion against nature was like butting ones head against a wall.

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    The Greeks thus did not experience metaphysical alienation; they experienced theirworld as unproblematic, and they simply lived in it. As Camus tellingly puts it:The Greeks never made the human mind into an armed camp, and in this respectwe are inferior to them.49

    Authentic rebellion, Camus argues, does not appear, in coherent form in thehistory of ideas until the end of the eighteenth century when modern times beginto the accompaniment of the crash of falling ramparts.50 Modern politics isbased upon the ideology of humanism a belief in the inherent integrity and freedomof man, liberated from the constraints of Church and privilege to create his owndestiny. For Camus this is certainly a momentous development, and it poses thepossibility of a truly humanized world. But humanism is not without its problems,which center around its aspiration toward absolute universality, as Camus observesin a way which prefigures the more recent writing of Foucault on the modern subjectand its disciplines:

    this attempt indicates the highest point in a drama that began with the end of theancient world and of which the final words have not yet been spoken. From thismoment, man decides to exclude himself from grace and to live by his own means.Progress, from the time of Sade up to the present day, has consisted in graduallyenlarging the stronghold where, according to his own rules, man without God brutallywields power. In defiance of the divinity, the frontiers of this stronghold have beengradually extended, to the point of making the entire universe into a fortress erectedagainst the fallen and exiled deity. Man, at the culmination of his rebellion, incar-cerated himself; from Sades lurid castle to the concentration camps, mans greatest

    liberty consisted only in building the prison of his crimes ... To kill God and to builda Church are the constant and contradictory purposes of rebellion. Absolute freedomfinally becomes a prison of absolute duties, a collective asceticism, a story to bebe ought to an end.51

    Modern politics is thus founded upon what Lyotard has called a grand narrativeof Human Progress. Originating in an authentic effort to cast off the fetters ofoppression and affirm the dignity of concrete persons, humanism produced theprison of its own crimes. Seeking to destroy external forms of authority, man hasunintentionally created his own Church, complete with priests, dogma, rites of

    passage, and heavenly aspirations a universal will to power masking itself asthe Rights of Man or the Movement of History. Crucially, this is not all Camusdiscerns in humanism, something to which we will return below. To be precise,he calls it a contradiction. But he refuses to let us simply dismiss one ominouspole of this contradiction as an aberration. He insists that it is deeply ingrainedin modern political thinking.

    Camus sketches this intoxication with power in The Rebel. He locates it inRousseaus sacred body politic and in the French Revolutionary reign of terror.Echoing Hegel, he remarks that morality, when it is formal, devours. However,Hegels attempt to substitute concrete universal reason for the abstract reason of the

    Jacobins was, for Camus, simply a further instance of the reification of man: Truth,reason, and justice were abruptly incarnated in the progress of the world . . . Thesevalues have ceased to be guides in order to become goals . . . reason has embracedthe future and aspired to conquest . . . From this moment dates the idea (hostileto every concept of ancient thought. . . ) that man has not been endowed with a

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    definitive human nature, that he is not a finished creation but an experiment, ofwhich he can be partly the creator. With Napoleon and the Napoleonic philosopherHegel, the period of efficacy begins. Hegels philosophy of history inserts maninto a cosmic drama where freedom progressively, and necessarily, unfolds.Authentic value is thus to be found only at the end of history; until then thereis no suitable criterion on which to base a judgement of value. One must act andlive in terms of the future. All morality becomes provisional.52

    For Camus this historicism operates with a vengeance in the thought of Marx,which blended the most valid critical method with a Utopian Messianism of highlydubious value. This is marked by many dimensions of Marxs thought his refusalto articulate a constructive morality (Camus writes, only half facetiously, that Marxis only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date), his bourgeois optimismabout science and industrialism, and his utopian vision of communism as theriddle of history solved, a veritable New Jerusalem, delivered unto mankind bya missionary proletariat. Camus argues that the ethical vision of dignified workand creativity forms the basis of the Marxist dream and constitutes the realgreatness of Marx. But, he insists, the reduction of every value to historicalterms leads to the direst consequences. Marxs doctrine, however unintentionally,devalues the present in the interest of historical necessity. Thus the ground is laidfor Lenins justifications of revolutionary violence and proletarian dictatorship andfor Stalins dictatorship. In this sense Marxism represents the culmination of theEnglightenment, the highest form of expression of the modern rebellious experience.

    It aspires to reinstate the supreme being at the level of humanity . . . From thisangle socialism is therefore an enterprise for the deification of man. . . 53

    Arendts account of modernity is remarkably similar. Like Camus she identifiesthe (pre-Socratic) Greek world with unproblematic practical existence. For herthe first strains are introduced at the intellectual level by Socratic philosophy, whicharticulates the concept of the vita contemplativa, driving a wedge between worldlyexperience and truth, between experienced relationships and justice, and devaluingthe political realm, where men subsist and act uniquely as self-disclosing equals.This is further developed by Christianity, which replaces the Greek concept ofcyclical time with a concept of linear, albeit sacred, history. The central argument

    of The Human Condition is that the tradition of Western political thought, fromPlato to Marx, conceives of politics on the metaphors of subsistence and fabrica-tion rather than action in common with others.54 Even Plato and Aristotle, whoseek to restore thepolis, think of political life in terms of craft analogies. As Arendtwrites: By sheer force of conceptualization and philosophical clarification, thePlatonic identification of knowledge with command and rulership and of actionwith obedience and execution overruled all earlier experiences and articulationsin the political realm and became authoritative for the whole tradition of politicalthought . . . [substituting] making for acting in order to bestow upon the realm ofhuman affairs the solidity inherent in work and fabrication.55 Political

    philosophy is thus founded on a quest for worldly permanence, on a fear of instabilityand difference, and on an interest in control.

    Arendt argues that it is only in the modern world that political philosophy fullyarticulates this imperialistic urge to remake the world in its own image. With thedecline of the public realm, and the rise of what she calls the social, economic

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    conduct becomes the central activity of the modern world.56 Coincident with thisis the destruction of medieval cosmic certainties and the development of modernscience, heralded by Galileos discovery of the telescope. Modern man experiencedwhat Arendt calls world alienation: modern men were not thrown back uponthis world but upon themselves. One of the most persistent trends in modernphilosophy since Descartes ... has been an exclusive concern with the self. Theconsequence, she observes, was the following:

    Only the modern ages conviction that man can know only what he makes, and thathe therefore is primarily homo faber and not an animal rationale, brought forth themuch older implications of violence inherent in all interpretations of the realm ofhuman affairs as a sphere of making . . . Marxs dictum that violence is the mid-wife of every old society pregnant with a new one . . . only sums up the conviction

    of the whole modern age and draws the consequences of its innermost belief thathistory is made by men as nature is made by God. 57

    For Arendt, like Camus, modern politics is characterized by successive attemptsto replace God with Man as the master of the universe, constructing new churchesto replace the old. Hobbes Leviathan is clearly the most vivid illustration of this,but for Arendt not simply monarchical absolutisms, but all forms of modern state,are founded upon violence. As Weber wrote: one can define the modern statesociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every politicalassociation, namely, the use of physical force.58 In the Beginning, Man made

    History; this metaphor itself bespeaks of violence, of a working and acting uponothers as if they were natural objects. As Arendt remarks: As long as we believethat we deal with ends and means in the political realm, we shall not be able toprevent anybodys using all means to pursue recognized ends.59 But accordingto her, modern political philosophy is premised upon just such a view of politics;and it is therefore perpetually liable to the ethics of efficacy of which Camusspeaks. As she writes in On Violence: The very substance of violent actionis ruled by the means-end category, whose chief characteristic, if applied to humanaffairs, has always been that the end is in danger of being overwhelmed by themeans which it justifies and which are needed to reach it. Since the end of human

    action, as distinct from the end products of fabrication, can never be reliablypredicted, the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not ofgreater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.60

    Arendt discerns this authoritarian streak in modern theories of natural right.She writes of Kants Groundwork, for example, that the categorical imperativeis postulated as absolute and in its aboluteness introduces into the interhuman realm which by its nature consists of relationships something that runs counter toits fundamental relativity. The inhumanity which is bound up with the conceptof one single truth emerges with particular clarity in Kants work precisely becausehe attempted to found truth on practical reason; it is as though he who had so

    inexorably pointed out mans cognitive limits could not bear to think that in actiontoo, man cannot behave like a god [emphasis added].61 She sees this also in thedeification of Reason characteristic of the philosophies of history which attendedthe French Revolution. But for Arendt these philosophies, however consequential,were primarily backward-looking. For Vico, as later for Hegel, the importance

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    of the concept of history was primarily theoretical. It never occurred to either ofthem to apply this concept directly by using it as a principle of action. This lattermove was left to Marx, who viewed the end of history as an end of human action,a principle of conduct. In Arendts estimation this vision, tied as it was to a utilitarianconcern with the social questions of labor and wealth, was bound to result inthe end of politics as a collective, deliberative enterprise:

    In this version of deriving politics from history, or rather, political conscience fromhistorical consciousness by no means restricted to Marx in particular, or even topragmatism in general we can easily detect the age-old attempt to escape fromthe frustrations and fragility of human action by construing it in the image of making.What distinguishes Marxs own theory from all others in which the notion of makinghistory has found a place is only that he alone realized that if one takes history

    to be the object of a process of fabrication or making, there must come a momentwhen this object is completed, and that if one imagines that one can make history,one cannot escape the consequence that there will be an end to history. Wheneverwe hear of grandiose aims in politics, such as establishing a new society in whichjustice will be guaranteed forever, or fighting a war to end all wars or to make thewhole world safe for democracy, we are moving in the realm of this kind ofthinking.62

    Thus for both thinkers modern political thought deifies Man; in the interestsof universal reason and freedom it has licensed the suppression of difference and

    the denial of plurality; it is based upon an abstract, idyllic dream; its ultimate out-come is a philosophy of history which denies the present, postulates motion asthe essence of man, and leans toward totality as an ideal. Milan Kundera, in hisnovel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, captures this sense of a humanismintoxicated with itself in his ironic reflection on the seizure of power by the Czechcommunists in 1948:

    Say what you will the Communists were more intelligent. They had a grandioseprogram, a plan for a brand-new world in which everyone would find his place ... andlost no time in turning their dream into reality . . . an idyll, for all. People have always

    aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony wherethe world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men,where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lightingup the heavens is a fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a notein a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot,useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like aninsect.

    From the start there were people who realized they lacked the proper tempera-ment for the idyll . . . [and] they went behind bars. They were soon joined by thousandsand tens of thousands more. . .

    And suddenly those young, intelligent radicals had the strange feeling of having

    sent something into the world, a deed of their own making, which had taken ona life of its own, lost all resemblance to the original idea, and totally ignored theoriginators of the idea. So these young, intelligent, radicals started shouting to theirdeed, calling it back, scolding it, chasing it, hunting it down. If I were to write anovel about that generation of talented radical thinkers, I would call it Stalking aLost Deed.63

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    For Arendt and Camus the political practices engendered by modern humanismrepresent just such a lost deed.

    In some respects this analysis of modernity seems itself historicist. Both thinkers,resolutely opposed to philosophies of history, which devalue contingency andconcrete human judgment, seem to subscribe to just such a mode of thinking,whereby modernity bears the seeds of twentieth century totalitarianism in muchthe same way as an acorn bears the seeds of an oak. But I think it makes moresense to read them as simply identifying an optimistic essentialism at the heartof modern political thought which severely underestimated the capability of humansto practice self-deception and logical crime, and a blindness about ends and meanswhich made possible, if it did not require, totalitarianism. Arendt herself deniedthat the emergence of totalitarianism was characterized by any inevitability, justas she insisted that it is even more dangerous than it is unjust to hold modernpolitical theorists responsible in any meaningful sense for the horrors of the twentiethcentury.64 And Camus too consistently rejected any kind of historicism. It is thus,I propose, more useful to interpret Arendt and Camus as stalking a lost deed thanas identifying some kind of historical necessity. There is, of course, independentevidence for this interpretation, for the historicist view is usually associated witha kind of Heideggerian or Straussian political conservatism and romantic nostalgiafor the pre-modern past. Nothing could be farther from the spirit of Arendt andCamus, for whom the reappropriation of modern humanism is the primary taskof political theory and practice.65

    4. The Reconstruction of Politics

    The pillars of the best known truths. . . today lie shattered; we need neithercriticism nor wise men to shake them anymore. We need only look around to seethat we are standing in the midst of a veritable rubble heap of such pillars. Nowin a certain sense this could be an advantage, promoting a new kind of thinking thatneeds no pillars or props ... [But] long ago it became apparent that the pillars ofthe truths have also been the pillars of the political order, and that the world . . . needssuch pillars in order to guarantee continuity and permanence, without which it cannotoffer mortal men the relatively secure, relatively imperishable home that theyneed.66

    It is essential for us to know whether man, without the help of either the eternalor rationalistic thought, can unaided create his own values.67

    We are without political foundations. Contemporary history has explodedthem.68 A deconstruction of modernity has laid bare their limits. We are, withRorty and Lyotard, suspicious of Grand Narratives, skeptical of the state, andindeed, of politics altogether. At its most political, postmodernist theory hasproposed what Lyotard calls an agonistics the celebration of the sheerheterogeneity of local political struggles, and a refusal to propose any overarching

    criteria of legitimacy: political sanspublic life. At its least political, as in the workof Rorty, it has suggested an edifying and complacent conversationalism, onepossibly suited to the armchair philosopher, but hardly up to the task of helpingus to livein the world.

    For Arendt and Camus, the moral impasse of contemporary politics is much

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    too serious to allow either of these options. For them new foundations are necessary.True, these foundations will eschew any form of essentialism, refusing to presumethat things have to be any particular way. They will be articulated as modestproposals rather than as god-like pronouncements. They will be grounded in arecognition of their own historicity. And they will be based upon the lessons ofthe past, on the need to respect difference and plurality, and in awareness of thedangerous consequences of a belief in the end of history. But they will be linkedto the revitalization of public life and to the necessity of political engagement inthe struggle for human dignity.

    In this sense I must issue a qualified dissent from Jacobson, for whom Arendtand Camus prescribe not glittering triumph, not even improvement, but the farmore modest, though indispensable, concern to prevent catastrophes . . . In ournakedness, and our shame, the only possibility for the political theorist is to givehimself wholeheartedly to the project of inventing a set of limits to politicalaction.69 It is certainly true that both thinkers abandon any notion of glitteringtriumphs or World Historical transformations, as it is true that for both the lessonof modernity is the importance of theoretical and practical limits. Man is not God.But neither does it make him less than man. In The RebelCamus warns that thisdichotomy, between utopian nihilism or political withdrawal, is only apparent,and that both poles of this contradiction lead to surrender:

    But these contradictions only exist in the absolute. They suppose a world and a methodof thought without mediation. There is, in fact, no conciliation possible betweena god who is totally separated from history and a history purged of all transcendence.Their representatives on earth are, indeed, the yogi and the commissar . . . The formerchooses only the ineffectiveness of abstention and the second the ineffectiveness ofdestruction. Because both reject the conciliatory value that rebellion, on the contrary,reveals, they offer us only two kinds of impotence, both equally removed from reality,that of good and that of evil.

    For both Arendt and Camus politics involves risks, opens up difficult paths, involvesthe possibility of doing good or harm. Limits are therefore crucial, but limits inand of themselves are only a token of desperate surrender. What is called for is

    not that we aspire toward limits but that we limit our aspirations. As Camus putsit: Rebellion itself only aspires to the relative and can only promise an assureddignity coupled with relative justice.70

    Richard Bernstein has recently argued that Arendts work is best understood againstthe backdrop of contemporary doubts about the project of grounding philosophy,knowledge, and language, and that it exhibits an overriding concern with thepractical task of furthering the type of solidarity, participation, and mutualrecognition that is founded in dialogical communities.71 This is attested to bymany facets of her thought her agreement with Aristotles notion that languageis the essential human capacity, her vision of politics as a realm ofpraxis, based

    on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in whichthe common world presents itself, and her later interest in Kants notion ofrepresentative thinking. A similar claim could be made about Camus, who concludesThe Rebel, for instance, by asserting that: The mutual understanding andcommunication discovered by rebellion can survive only in the free exchange of

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    conversation. Every ambiguity, every misunderstanding, leads to death; clearlanguage and simple words are the only salvation from his death.72 I fear,however, that Bernsteins formulation about dialogic community fails to givesufficient weight to the political principles, institutions and commitments whichmight give substance to such a community.

    The key problem of our civilization, Camus writes, is whether man withoutthe help of either the eternal or rationalistic thought, can unaided create his ownvalues. This is clear repudiation of any notion of normative foundations as givenby nature or history. We are out in the cold, bereft of the pillars of politicallife; we must think without bannisters, and can expect no doctrine or naturalforce to decide our fate. We must decide. But for both writers our decisions, ourdialogical communities, must be constrained. For, despite their common rejectionof any a priori or ideological view of human nature, they both insist that the we we humans are creatures of a certain definite sort, and that this carries certainnormative implications. In short, both are reconstructed humanists, and both aredemocrats.

    Camus, we may recall, insisted that Man is that force which ultimately cancelsall tyrants and gods. He is the force of evidence.73 He invokes some kind ofelementary reality about human being and human dignity as an obstacle to tyranny.Arendt accomplishes a similar move with her concept of natality: the freedomof man, which even totalitarian rulers cannot deny, for this freedom irrelevantand arbitrary as they may deem it is identical with the fact that men are being

    born and that therefore each of them is a new beginning, begins, in a sense, theworld anew.74 She relates this naturalistic concept of natality to the notion ofplurality, which she defines as the condition of human action because we areall the same, that is human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyoneelse who ever lived, lives, or will live.75 For both thinkers this elemental humanreality is not only an obstacle to tyranny; it is also the premise of authentic politicallife. Now, this itself sounds like a reversion to philosophical essentialism deepdown, beneath the surface of contemporary man and his murderous propensitiesand complicities, lies the true man, in whom we can find solace. Tyrants willbecancelled. Given everything that both of them have written, however, it is impossible

    to interpret their remarks in this way. Arendt is most explicit about this in a responseto Eric Voegelin, who questioned her observation that the concentration camp isa laboratory for experiments in changing human nature. Voegelin insisted thata nature cannot be changed or transformed. Arendt replied:

    The success of totalitarianism is identical with a much more radical liquidation offreedom as a political and as a human reality than anything we have ever witnessedbefore. Under these conditions, it will hardly be consoling to cling to an unchangeablenature of man . . . Historically we know of mans nature only insofar as it has existenceand no realm of eternal essences will ever console us if man loses his essentialcapabilities.76

    There no clearer contemporary statement of the necessity of abandoning essen-tialism in political theory. The capability of free action may not be an eternalcharacteristic of human beings. Man will not necessarily cancel tyranny. And yetArendt insists that historical reality evidences that freedom has been, and still is,

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    constitutive of human nature. One can go even further. Her concept of natalitysuggests that, while we cannot predict what transformations of human nature thefuture may bring, the mere fact of human difference, rooted in both biology andphenomenology, makes a complete identification of humans and their world highlyunlikely if not impossible. There is, then, some ground, some basis, for resistanceto totalitarianism and for the reconstruction of political life. It may not be much,a slender pebble rather than a pillar, but it is something, and it is something Arendtis unwilling to abandon.

    So too Camus, who concludes The Rebel by appealing to an irrepressible demandof human nature, of which the Mediterranean, where intelligence is intimatelyrelated to the blinding light of the sun, guards the secret... hoping that a limit,under the sun, shall curb them all.77 Both thinkers, in short, refuse to com-pletely abandon the notion of human nature, however much they revise it. Theirdialogic communalism is thus grounded in a humanism with distinctly naturalistovertones. It is, to be sure, a humanism shorn of the self-righteous optimism andthe god-like pretensions which characterized much of the tradition of modernpolitical thought; but it is a humanism, a commitment to human dignity and freedom,nonetheless. Neither of them, it should be remarked, has provided a fully ade-quate account of this humanism. But both refuse to make this a condition of theircommitment. It is something almost taken on faith, but a faith itself grounded onthe untenability of its opposite, the barbarous consequences of abandoning italtogether, and leaving the historical field to the nihilists.78 Indeed, Camus would

    undoubtedly insist that only the cowardice of logic could lead us to deny humandignity simply because we cannot adequately demonstrate it. We might not fullyknow what man is, but he is the force of evidence, even if the evidence is, inOrwells words, the human face on which totalitarian boots stamp79 (although,as Arendt and Camus make clear, this is not the only evidence of man, as witnessthe various forms of resistance to totalitarianism). In any case, Camus has nothidden his own theoretical intentions: the important thing, therefore, is not, asyet, to go to the root of things, but, the world being what it is, to know how tolive in it.80

    This humanism has, for both thinkers, distinctly radical democratic implica-

    tions. This is more clearly recognized in the case of Camus. His advocacy of nativeAlgerian rights, his support of the Spanish republic, his identification with theEuropean labor movement, his criticism of the gallows socialism practiced inHungary after the suppression of the 1956 workers revolt, his advocacy of liber-tarian socialism, and his refusal to be blinded by Cold War ideology in his criticismsof East and West, all demonstrate the decidedly activist and political characterof his humanism.81

    This is also true for Arendt who, much more widely read and interpreted bypolitical theorists, is often taken to be a writer nostalgic for the ancient past andcondescending toward contemporary politics.82 Her philosophy of the human

    condition also involves a substantive critique of existing political institutions anda vision of a better way of organizing our political life. For her this was accom-plished through an immanent criticism of the republicanism she saw at the heartof the American political experience. But her republicanism involved neither emptytalk about community nor uncritical celebration of the status quo. She was an active

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    critic of McCarthyism and the liberal intellectual capitulation to it, a life-long ad-vocate of freedom of speech and a supporter of the American civil rights move-ment.83 Her collection Crises of the Republic includes stinging criticism ofAmerican official deceit during the Vietnam War, and of the war policy moregenerally a vigorous defense of collective civil disobedience as a constitutionalright essential to democratic government, and enthusiastic, if qualified, supportfor the student antiwar movement as a rediscovery of the republican spirit (shewrites of its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being ableto change things by ones own efforts).84 Her defense of the revolutionarytradition and its lost treasure is itself sometimes lost on those who see her assimply a died-in-the wool Aristotelian, but even more unremarked is the linkagebetween her support for the council system spontaneous, decentralized, andparticipatory and her advocacy of a form of global federalism.

    In short, her republicanism not only involved a defense of civil liberties anda call for more diverse forms of political participation; it also involved a critiqueof the state as an over-centralized and militarist institution. Few realize that thisis a subtext of her Origins of Totalitarianism, where she identifies imperialismas a major cause of the breakdown of Europe, and suggests that a new form ofinternational law might prevent its reoccurrence. It is also a subtext of Eichmaanin Jerusalem, where she bemoans the absence of authentic international legalinstitutions which alone could make juridical sense of Eichmanns novel crime performing the duties of a law-abiding citizen in a criminal state. Her support

    of socialist reform in Eastern Europe mirrors that of Camus, and her diagnosisof its chances of success is of telling relevance to contemporary peace movements:generally speaking, I would say that I grant a chance to all the small countriesthat want to experiment, whether they call themselves socialist or not, but I amvery skeptical about the great powers.85

    There are two major points of divergence in the writings of Arendt and Camus. Onboth of these points I believe Camus to have offered a more satisfactory analysis. Thefirst concerns what Arendt called the social question in politics. Arendt, everfearful about the dangers that a fabricating mentality posed to the body politic, con-sistently maintained that all questions having to do with labor, the economy and

    distribution be properly excluded from the public realm. As many commentatorshave observed, this entailed a narrowly utilitarian definition of the social, assomething determinable outside of the realm of human decision; and it also entaileda disturbingly rarified concept of politics, as a kind of mutual rhetorical self-disclosure devoid of material significance.86 Camus Bread and Freedom con-tains a powerful critique of such a view. Echoing one of Arendts heroes, RosaLuxemburg, he insists that the few democratic liberties we still enjoy are not un-important illusions that we can allow to be taken from us without protest. . . There isno ideal freedom that will someday be given us all at once, as pension comes at theend of ones life. But he continues in a vein at odds with Arendt. Between freedom

    and justice, he argues, we cannot choose one without the other. If someone takesaway your bread, he suppresses your freedom at the same time. But if someonetakes away your freedom, you may be sure your bread is threatened, for itno longer depends on you and your struggle but on the whim of the master. 87

    For Camus, human dignity requires some kind of democratic socialism. Arendt

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    never gives a satisfactory account of the connection of the property question toher advocacy of political freedom.

    This relates to the second issue the relationship of means to ends. Arendtsometimes writes as if the categories of ends and means have no proper place inpolitical life. As we have seen, she argues that: As long as we believe that wedeal with ends and means in the political realm, we shall not be able to preventanybodys using all means to pursue recognized ends.88 But, if this criticism istrue then what is politics to be about? Arendt herself writes about politics as aprocess of collective decision, and, as she well knows, decisions involve meansand ends. This once again is related to the rarified view of politics which isarticulated in some of her more theoretical works, one which, it is important tonote, is not rigorously maintained in her more substantive discussions. Camusformulation is, however, more satisfactory: When the end is absolute, historicallyspeaking, and when it is believed certain of realization, it is possible to go so faras to sacrifice others. When it is not, only oneself can be sacrificed, in the hazardsof a struggle for the common dignity of man. Does the end justify the means?That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historicalthought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means. Thus for Camus what wecall power, and what he, and Arendt, call violence the possession and exerciseof capacities to shape the world, ameansof achieving ends is inherent in politicallife. Our task is thus, without laying claim to an innocence that is impossible,to discover the principle of reasonable culpability.89

    Conclusion

    These are important issues, and they deserve more discussion. However mycentral point is that for both thinkers the task of political theory is to reappropriatethe themes of modern humanism and reconstruct the institutional forms of ourpolitical life. Both Arendt and Camus were professionally trained philosophers.It is useful to locate them in the context of contemporary academic debates aboutpostmodernism. But it is a mistake to ignore the highly politicized context of themid-twentieth century in which they wrote. Their own efforts to deconstruct modern

    political theory and practice are otherwise unintelligible, as is the profoundlyimportant political vision upon which they both converged, that of a revitalizedand democratized public life.

    Albrecht Wellmer has recently suggested that the postmodernist deconstructionof modern political thought is a necessary but insufficient enterprise. Its properimplication, he insists, is not that we abandon the humanistic impulses of moder-nity: it means rather that we must think the moral-political universalism of theEnlightenment, the ideas of individual and collective self-determination, reasonand history, in a new fashion. In the attempt to do this I would see a genuinepostmodernist impulse towards a self-transcendence of reason.90 Wellmer is

    quite right. As Arendt saw, we can have no recourse to the received truths of thepast. Our contemporary political moment is one of uncertainty. But this is no causefor celebration, for conviviality, nor for agonistics. For the world Camus starklydescribed is still our world: Each day at dawn, assassins in judges robes slipinto some cell: murder is the problem today.91 The owl of Minerva can thus no

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    longer afford to rise at dusk, nor can it afford to indulge in fanciful play andidle daydreaming. It is obligated by its own commitment to truth and reason tohelp reconstitute a theory and practice of human freedom and dignity. Such a projectis postmodern, as it is based upon an awareness of the limits of modernity andof the need to grapple with them. Arendt and Camus have much to inform sucha genuine postmodernism, a postmodernism that foresakes the prideful solace ofshattered foundations, but refuses to surrender to the nihilistic temptations ofour age.

    NOTES

    * I would like to thank the following people for their helpful comments: Terence Ball, Seyla Benhabib,

    Peter Euben, Peter Manicas, Ian Shapiro, David Sprintzen, Svetzar Stojanovic, and Elizabeth Young-Bruehl.

    1. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959),p. 166.

    2. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1982).

    3. See Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

    4. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge(New York: Pantheon, 1980).5. On postmodernism, see Richard Rorty, Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity. Praxis

    International, vol. 4, no. 1 (April 1984); and Albrecht Wellmer, On the Dialectic of Modernismand Postmodernism. Praxis International, vol. 4, no. 4 (January 1985).

    6. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. xxiii-xxiv.

    7. On this point, see Ian Shapiro, Gross Concepts in Political Argument. Political Theoryv. 17, n. 1 (February 1989).

    8. See Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of CriticalTheory(London, 1987).

    9. Michael Walzer, The Politics of Michel Foucault, Dissent(Fall 1983).10. Rorty, Philosophy, pp. 366-94; Paul Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society (London, 1978).

    On Foucault and the effacement of critique, see Charles Taylor, Foucault on Truth and Freedom.Political Theory, vol. 12, no. 2 (May 1984).

    11. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism(Chicago, 1984).12. Norman Jacobson, Pride and Solace: The Functions and Limits of Political Theory. Berkeley,

    1978).13. This biographical sketch is drawn from Elisabeth Young-Bruehls Hannah Arendt For Love

    of the World(New Haven, 1982).14. Hannah Arendt, We Refugees, in Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New

    York, 1978), p. 56.15. Ibid., p. 56.16. Ibid., p. 90.17. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, pp. 184-85.18. See Herbert Lottman,Albert Camus: A Biography(New York, 1979).19. Albert Camus, Letters To A German Friend, in Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

    (New York, 1960), p. 29.20. Albert Camus, Why Spain? in Resistance, pp. 78-9.

    21. Albert Camus,Notebooks1935-1942 (New York, 1963), p. 142.22. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism(New York, 1973), p. vii-viii.23. Hannah Arendt, Tradition and the Modern Age, in Arendt, Between Past and Present

    (New York, 1977), p. 26.24. Hannah Arendt, Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility, in The Jew as Pariah,

    pp. 235-36.

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    25. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York, 1955), p. 91, and TheRebel(New York, 1956), p. 6.

    26. Albert Camus, Pessimism and Courage, inResistance, p. 58-9.

    27. Camus, Letters, pp. 27, 14.28. Camus, The Rebel, pp. 3-4.29. Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life(Boston, 1979), pp. 227-28.30. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Fulton H. Anderson (Indianapolis, 1960), p. 39.31. Young-Bruehl, p. 205.32. Camus, The Rebel, p. 3.33. Arendt, The Origins, pp. 458-59.34. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin,

    1977), pp. 70, 85, 153.35. Ibid., pp. 196-97, 269.36. Camus, The Rebel, p. 3-5.37. Ibid., p. 237.

    38. Arendt, The Origins, pp. 464-66, 457-58.39. Camus, The Rebel, p. 185.40. Camus, The Rebel, pp. 239-40, 284.41. Arendt, Eichmann, p. 49.42. Hannah Arendt, The Crisis in Culture in Arendt,Between, p. 220.43. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition(Chicago, 1958), p. 178.44. Arendt, The Origins, p. 475. See Arendts comments about friendship in her On Humanity

    in Dark Times, in Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York, 1968), pp. 12, 24-5, in particularher contrast between the French Revolutionary notion of fraternit and Lessings notion of friend-ship as a relationship which is as selective as compassion is egalitarian.

    45. Camus, The Rebel, p. 239.46. Ibid., pp. 175-87.

    47. Quoted in Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 279.48. Camus, The Rebel, p. 11.49. Ibid., p. 27-8.50. Ibid., p. 26.51. Ibid., pp. 102-3.52. Ibid., pp. 124, 133-4, 142.53. Ibid., pp. 188, 208-9, 192.54. See Melvyn A. Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York, 1979).55. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 225.56. Ibid., pp. 38-40; and Arendt, On Revolution(New York, 1977), pp. 59-114.57. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 254, 228.58. Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From

    Max Weber: Essays in Sociology(New York, 1946), pp. 77-8.59. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 229.60. Hannah Arendt, On Violence, in Arendt, Crises of the Republic(New York, 1972), p. 106.61. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 27.62. Hannah Arendt, The Concept of History, inBetween, p. 77.63. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting(New York, 1981) pp. 8-9.64. Arendt, Tradition and the Modern Age, p. 27.65. Young-Bruehl remarks on Arendts distaste for the reactionary romanticism of Heidegger

    and Strauss on pp. 69-70, 98.66. Arendt, On Humanity in Dark Times, pp. 10-11.67. Camus, Pessimism and Courage, p. 58.

    68. I use the metaphor of explosion here to suggest a process of combustion o bursting forth,intended to register the positive developments associated with the new social movements. Thesefigure importantly in contemporary postmodernism but, insofar as they did not concern Arendt andCamus, I have bracketed them in my discussion.

    69. Jacobson, pp. 139, 160.70. Camus, The Rebel, p. 288, 290.

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    71. Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism(Philadelphia, 1983), p. 231.72. Camus, The Rebel, p. 283.73. Camus. Letters, p. 14.

    74. Arendt. The Origins, p. 466.75. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 8.76. Cited in Young-Bruehl, pp. 253-4.77. Camus, The Rebel, pp. 300, 306.78. Camus: What is truth? ... To be sure, but at least we know what falsehood is; that is just

    what you have taught us, Letters, p. 14.79. George Orwell, 1984 (New York, 1961), p. 20.80. Camus, The Rebel, p. 4.81. See David Sprintzen, Camus: A Critical Examination(Philadelphia, 1988).82. John Gunnell, Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, 1979),

    pp. 102-3.83. See Young-Bruehl, chapter 9.

    84. Arendt, Thoughts on Politics and Revolution, in Crises, p. 202.85. Ibid, p. 218.86. See Richard J. Bernstein, Rethinking the Social and the Political, in his Philosophical

    Profiles(Philadelphia, 1986).87. Camus, Bread and Freedom, pp. 93-4.88. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 229.89. Camus, The Rebel, p. 292.90. Wellmer, On the Dialectic, p. 360.91. Camus, The Rebel, pp. 4-5.