On Totalitarianism and Democracy
The Revolution Against Legitimacy
in Public Seminar (2025)
We are living through a revolution, though not the kind we are used to. Most today think of revolutionaries as the proletariat, and a revolution is fought in the name of equality and justice. Unlike past revolutions fought in the name of equality, Trump’s revolution is against legitimacy itself—and against the very idea that legitimacy depends on equality.
Solidão Total: Hannah Arendt e Os Fundamentos Do Totalitarismo
in Cadernos Arendt (Universidade Federal do Piaui, 2021)
Hannah Arendt decidiu responder à pergunta “O que é o totalitarismo?” olhando para o nazismo e o bolchevismo, os dois movimentos totalitários que marcaram a primeira metade do século XX. Ela entendia que o totalitarismo pretendia a evisceração total da liberdade. O governo totalitário visa o “domínio total de toda a população da terra, a eliminação de toda realidade rival não-totalitária”3. Uma vez que uma pessoa que pode pensar e mudar de ideia romperia o controle totalitário da realidade, a dominação total deveria obliterar a espontaneidade e a liberdade. O esforço totalitário é por transformar a pluralidade de pessoas em uma unidade; é “fabricar algo que não existe, isto é, um tipo de espécie humana que se assemelhe a outras espécies animais, e cuja única ‘liberdade’ consista em ‘preservar a espécie’“4. A perda total da liberdade externa e interna é o motor da dominação total.
in Cahiers de L'Herne, Hannah Arendt (2021)
Longtemps tenue à l’écart du monde académique, l’œuvre de Hannah Arendt – désormais largement publiée et traduite – suscite aujourd’hui l’intérêt d’un nombre considérable de travaux, colloques et publications dans le monde entier. En revenant sur les principaux évènements de sa vie, ce Cahier dresse le portrait de cette « théoricienne de la politique » sans pour autant négliger les vives polémiques qui ont marqué sa carrière. Le volume rassemble des contributions qui évoquent notamment son travail majeur sur le totalitarisme, les catégories de sa pensée politique et la centralité de l’action, son insistance sur la responsabilité et le jugement ainsi que son analyse du monde moderne. Il revient sur son expérience historique et personnelle, les moments forts de sa vie et la réflexion qu’ils ont suscités en elle, en particulier sa judéité. Des extraits de correspondance (avec Judah Magnes, David Riesman, Hermann Broch, Hilde Frankel, Kurt et Helen Wolff) dévoilent par ailleurs des facettes moins connues de sa personnalité et de nombreux inédits, extraits de cours ou de conférences issus des archives de la bibliothèque du Congrès à Washington, viennent compléter l’ensemble.
in The Philosopher (2020)
Amidst the death of God, the loss of tradition, and the end of political ideals, we are left, Hannah Arendt argues in Between Past and Future, with "the ominous silence that still answers us whenever we dare to ask, not, 'What are we fighting against' but 'What are we fighting for?'" We all know what we oppose and fight against: totalitarianism, fascism, racism, sexism, loneliness, and meaninglessness. But we are silent in the face of the challenge: What are we fighting for?
The Failing Technocratic Prejudice and the Challenge to Liberal Democracy
in The Emergence of Illiberalism (2020)
The Four Prejudices Underlying Our Crises of Democracy
in HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center (2018)
It may be possible to mark the beginning of our democratic crisis. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave the commencement address at Yale University. The President told the graduates they were entering a very different world. Past graduates had found themselves in a world beset by great questions. When John C. Calhoun graduated in 1804, the nation was divided over the questions of a national bank and slavery. When William Howard Taft graduated Yale in 1878, the nation was grappling with questions of reconstruction, the "cross of gold," and the progressive movement. In the 1930s, at the end of Taft's career, the United States was again buffeted by forces of political and economic division surrounding economic liberalism and the New Deal. For nearly 200 years, politics in the United States had been riven by dramatic disagreements "on which the Nation was sharply and emotionally divided." Such ideological and political divisions, Kennedy optimistically proclaimed in 1962, were specters of a distant past. In spite of being so completely wrong, Kennedy's technocratic faith—his belief that "the kinds of problems" we face today are those "for which technical answers, not political answers, must be provided"—sounds eerily familiar. The idea that expert analysis should and would replace political contestation is bipartisan boilerplate. Tony Blair offered a new free-market Labor Party. Immanuel Macron, a former investment banker and founder of the Centrist En Marche, and Angela Merkel of the conservative Christian Democrats are beloved by educated elites because they elevate competence over ideology. Bill and Hillary Clinton built the former's presidency and the latter's campaigns on the promise of a third way that melded Blue Dog Democratic centrism with technocratic competence. George W. Bush, in the midst of a war, depoliticized major decisions in Iraq by saying that “our commanders on the ground will determine the size of the troop levels.” And President Barack Obama was deeply deferential to the "expertise of conventional authorities: generals and national-security professionals, political operatives like Rahm Emanuel, and, above all, mainstream economists and bankers such as Larry Summers and Tim Geithner." Relying on administrators, Obama regularly bypassed Congress and governed to an unprecedented extent through the administrative state. Jedediah Purdy writes that President Obama personifies the technocratic style of our anti-political times.
Protest and Democracy: Hannah Arendt and the Foundation of Freedom
in Stasis (2018)
The great political achievement of the modern era, stable representative democracies that legitimate power, are everywhere under attack. No thinker can better help understand our present democratic disillusionment than Hannah Arendt. Arendt argues that as bureaucracies and governments grow, individual action is evermore attenuated in its ability to make a difference in the world. The result is frustration that can lead to indignation and anger of citizens on both the left and the right. And a consequence of this increasing anger and frustration is the glorification of protest as a space of freedom in modern politics. In this paper I explore the works of a number of political theorists who have been writing in the last twenty to thirty years and who are all arguing that the place to look for freedom is not in government, but in protest. And I'm going to contrast them with Arendt's argument that freedom must be instituted and founded in political institutions. The three theorists of protest I have in mind are Simon Critchley, David Graeber, and Jacques Rancière.
Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting The Origins of Totalitarianism
in Los Angeles Review of Books (2017)
THE ASTONISHING STATEMENT Donald Trump made at a January 2016 campaign rally in Iowa seems like the essential moment in his unexpected rise to power: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” he said, “and I wouldn’t lose voters.” In saying that he could kill in broad daylight and remain popular, Trump did more than draw a logical conclusion from polls showing that his supporters demonstrated unprecedented loyalty. He understood that he was not running a political campaign but was the leader of a mass movement. Most importantly, he understood something that his critics still fail to understand: the essential nature of loyalty in mass movements.
Mass movements, writes Hannah Arendt in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, are one of the core elements of totalitarianism. Arendt does not say that all mass movements are totalitarian; to take seriously President Trump’s claim to be the mouthpiece of a movement is not to claim that he is a totalitarian leader or that he is leading a totalitarian movement. He has not mobilized terror, concentration camps, arbitrary arrests, a secret police, and a party apparatus that rises above the state — all of which were essential parts of Arendt’s description of totalitarianism in power. Mass deportation of undocumented immigrants — disgusting as it is — is not the same thing as de-naturalization, imprisonment, and deportation of citizens. Common sense insists that we not abandon reality and imagine that the United States is experiencing totalitarianism.
The Politics of Anti-Political Protest: What to Make of OWS
in Democracy Journal (2011)
This idea of a leaderless movement is often mentioned in connection with the Occupy Wall Street protesters’ lack of demands. What’s overlooked is the deep conviction that many in the movement have about the idea of consensus and the practice of direct and leaderless democracy.
Solitude and the Activity of Thinking
in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeff Katz, and Thomas Keenan (2009)
“The true predicaments of our time.” Hannah Arendt wrote, “will assume their authentic form only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past.” The totalitarianisms in Germany and the Soviet Union were only symptoms of these true predicaments, of what Arendt early on calls the mass society characterized by “organized loneliness.” Later, covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she would come to see that the bond between totalitarianism and loneliness is the phenomena of thoughtlessness.
Democratic Legitimacy and the Scientific Foundation of Modern Law
in Theoretical Inquiries in Law, v. 8.1 (2006)
This Article explores the unacknowledged impact of the scientific provenance of modern law. Justice, I argue, is threatened by social scientific thinking that subordinates justice to legitimacy, efficiency, and fairness. In doing so, I contest the conventional wisdom that positive law originates not with science but with democracy. In addition, I show that the power of the asserted connection between positive law and democracy depends upon a dangerous blurring of the distinction between justice and legitimacy. Finally, I offer an alternative genealogy of positive law that shows modern law to have been transformed into a science. My hope is that by pointing to the threatened loss of justice as an ideal, my work can help to hold open the possibility that law reclaim its foundation in the art of judgment instead of the science of law.