by Tony Judt
In Arendt’s case the responsibility, as she felt it, was made heavier by a conscientious, and perhaps distinctively Jewish, refusal to condemn modernity completely or to pass a curse upon the Enlightenment and all its works. She certainly understood the temptation, but she also saw the danger. The tendency to treat Western liberal democracy as somehow “shallow,” already present in the appeal of “Eastern” solutions before 1914,28 has revived twice over in our own time. On the first occasion, in the sixties, Arendt’s response was unambiguous: The struggle against the deceptive charms of what we would now call cultural relativism was for her a matter of moral courage, of exercising what she called judgment. In a letter to Jaspers in December 1963 she reflected that “even good and, at bottom, worthy people have, in our time, the most extraordinary fear about making judgments. This confusion about judgment can go hand in hand with fine and strong intelligence, just as good judgment can be found in those not remarkable for their intelligence.”29 Hannah Arendt was not afraid to judge, and be counted.
For the recent resurfacing of the critical attitude toward the Enlightenment, notably in certain Central European circles seduced by the post-Heideggerian notion that the soulless, technological, “fabricating” society of our century is an outgrowth of the Godless hubris of the French Enlightenment and its successors, Arendt herself bears some indirect responsibility. It is the very woolliness of her thoughts on these matters that has lent them to just such interpretations, and her reluctance to distance herself definitively from her former lover and mentor did not help. But she would never have made the mistake of supposing that the end of Communism promised some sort of definitive success for its opponents, or that the responsibilities of various strands in Western thought for the woes of our time thereby disqualified the Western tradition as a whole. She made a good many little errors, for which her many critics will never forgive her. But she got the big things right, and for this she deserves to be remembered.
This essay first appeared in the New York Review of Books in 1995, reviewing a new collection of Hannah Arendt’s essays and her recently published correspondence with Mary McCarthy. It provoked an angry response from some readers still furious with Hannah Arendt for her comments thirty years previously in Eichmann in Jerusalem concerning the “banality of evil.” The ensuing exchanges were published in the New York Review of Books, vol. 42, no. viii, May 1995, and vol. 42, no. xiv, September 1995.
NOTES TO CHAPTER IV
1 The recent analysis by Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; 1994) has the unusual virtue of emphasizing this point, and is now the best general discussion of Arendt’s work. The new study by Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (New York: Routledge, 1993), is subtle and thorough but makes everything a bit tidy.
2 “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 10.
3 For perhaps related reasons, her work lacks the interpretive elegance of the work of Jacob Talmon, whose Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952) presents a more fully worked-out critical theory of the intellectual origins of Communism.
4 “It is precisely because the utilitarian core of ideologies was taken for granted that the antiutilitarian behavior of totalitarian governments, their complete indifference to mass interests, has been such a shock.” The Origins of Totalitarianism (first published by Harcourt Brace, 1951; all citations from the 1961 edition), p. 347.
5 E. J. Hobsbawm in History and Theory, vol. 4, no. 2 (1965), quoted by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 403.
6 She had a surer touch when dealing with intellectuals themselves. Of fin de siècle French essayists like Léon Daudet, Charles Maurras, and Maurice Barrès she wrote, “It was their philosophy of pessimism and their delight in doom that was the first sign of the imminent collapse of the European intelligentsia.” The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 112.
7 For a truly original account of Soviet Gleichschaltung at work, see Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).
8 See Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 466.
9 Hannah Arendt, “A Reply,” The Review of Politics, January 1953, vol. 15, no. i, pp. 76-84.
10 One is reminded of the admission by Hoess, the Auschwitz commandant: “We were all so trained to obey orders without even thinking that the thought of disobeying an order would never have occurred to anybody.” Quoted by Telford Taylor, Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1992), 363.
11 It, too, has since received impressive confirmation in studies of “ordinary” torturers, murderers, and genocidal criminals. See in particular Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
12 “Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940,” in Men in Dark Times, p. 184.
13 Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 219.
14 See William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (Garden City, NY: Anchor/ Doubleday, 1982), 99.
15 Rahel Varnhagen, p. 85.
16 “Rosa Luxemburg: 1871-1919,” in Men in Dark Times, p. 42.
17 E.g., “The whole truth is that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.” Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Penguin, 1963), 125.
18 See Henry Feingold’s remarks on “The Judenrat and the Jewish Response” in Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rotenstreich, eds., The Holocaust as Historical Experience (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), 223. I am grateful to Professor Steven Zipperstein for this and other references. The complexities of this subject, notably the very wide range of Jewish responses at the time, are well summarized in Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), notably in chapter 6, “The Victims.”
19 Quoted by Gordon Craig in his review of the Arendt-Jaspers Correspondence, in The New York Review of Books, May 13, 1993, p. 12.
20 Stuart Hampshire, review of The Life of the Mind, in The (London) Observer, July 30, 1978. Curious about why Arendt is taken seriously in the U.S. as a political theorist and public philosopher, Hampshire asks: “Is this difference merely a clash between analytical philosophy in the British manner and the post-Hegelian, German tradition of thought which has a foothold in the USA, is entrenched in France and has been rejected here?”
21 Judith Shklar, “Hannah Arendt as Pariah,” Partisan Review, vol. 50, no. 1 (1983): 67.
22 The letter is dated February 9, 1968, a week after the beginning of the Tet offensive, and should of course be understood in context. Arendt was deeply troubled by the Vietnam War and its destructive impact upon American public life, as well as by the domestic conflicts of the era; she was not the only contemporary intellectual to give vent to occasional feelings of frustration and helplessness in the face of these developments.
23 Discussing the emerging idea that exploitation, dictatorship, and corruption were somehow lesser evils, she writes: “Some anti-totalitarians have already started even to praise certain ‘lesser evils’ because the not-so-far-away time when these evils ruled in a world still ignorant of the worst of all evils looks like the good old days by comparison . . . The greatest danger of recognizing totalitarianism as the curse of the century would be an obsession with it to the extent of becoming blind to the numerous small and not so small evils with which the road to hell is paved.” Essays in Understanding, pp. 271-272.
24 Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975,
edited and with an introduction by Carol Brightman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1995). According to the editor, the only cuts concern actionable remarks, mostly by McCarthy.
25 Publishers’ copy editors get the usual incandescent authorial rebukes. Thus Arendt in 1971 on some minor dispute with the editors at Harcourt Brace: “This whole nonsense comes from their zeal to show how necessary they are, how well they worked and how much, etc; plus, of course, sheer undiluted stupidity with more than a bit of méchanceté. The outrage is that they make us work to undo what they did, and each time they put one of their idiotic queries in the margin one rushes back to reference and God knows what. If we were compensated by the hour by the publisher for unnecessary work they would begin to be a bit more careful. . . . These people are not ‘professionals,’ they are actually unemployable people who have succeeded in landing a job which hardly exists to begin with.”
26 See Mary McCarthy, “Saying Goodbye to Hannah,” in Occasional Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 37, quoted by Carol Brightman in her introduction to the letters, p. xvi.
27 For a suggestive interpretation of the underappreciated similarities of outlook between Camus and Arendt, see Jeffrey C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). The heading of the last chapter of Arendt’s On Revolution, “The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure,” could have been the title of any number of works by Camus.
28 See her remarks on this in Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 245.
29 Quoted by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl from a letter to Jaspers not included in the published Correspondence. See Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, p. 338.
Part Two
THE POLITICS OF INTELLECTUAL ENGAGEMENT
CHAPTER V
Albert Camus: “The best man in France”
Albert Camus died in a car accident in France, on January 4, 1960, at the age of forty-six. Despite the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded him just three years before, his reputation was in decline. At the time of the award, critics fell over one another to bury its recipient; from the right, Jacques Laurent announcing that in awarding the prize to Camus “le Nobel couronne une oeuvre terminée,” while in the left-leaning France-Observateur it was suggested that the Swedish Academy may have believed it was picking out a young writer, but it had in fact confirmed a “premature sclerosis.” Camus’s best work, it seemed, lay far behind him; it had been many years since he had published anything of real note.
For this decline in critical esteem, Camus himself was at least partly to blame. Responding to the fashions of the day, he had engaged in philosophical speculations of a kind to which he was ill-suited and for which he was only moderately gifted—The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) has not worn well, for all its resonating aphorisms. In L’Homme Révolté (1951) Camus offered some important observations about the dangers of lyrical revolutionary illusions; but Raymond Aron said much the same thing to vastly more devastating effect in L’Opium des intellectuels, while Camus’s naive, almost autodidactic philosophical speculations exposed him to a cruel and painful riposte from Sartre that severely damaged his credibility with the bien-pensant intellectual Left and permanently undermined his public self-confidence.
If his literary reputation, as the author of L’Étranger and La Peste, was thus unfairly diminished in contemporary opinion by Camus’s unsuccessful forays into philosophical debate, it was his role as France’s leading public intellectual, the moral voice of his era, that weighed most heavily upon him in his last decade. His editorials in the postwar paper Combat had given him, in Aron’s words, a singular prestige;1 it was Camus whose maxims set the moral tone of the Resistance generation as it faced the dilemmas and disappointments of the Fourth Republic. By the late fifties this burden became intolerable, a source of constant discomfort in Camus’s writing and speeches. In earlier years he had accepted the responsibility: “One must submit,” as he put it in 1950.2 But in the last interview he ever gave, in December 1959, his resentful frustration is audible: “I speak for no one: I have enough difficulty speaking for myself. I am no one’s guide. I don’t know, or I know only dimly, where I am headed (“Je ne sais pas, ou je sais mal, où je vais”).3
Worst of all, for Camus and his audience, was the dilemma posed by the tragedy of French Algeria. Like most intellectuals of his generation, Camus was bitterly critical of French policy; he condemned the use of torture and terror in the government’s “dirty war” against the Arab nationalists, and he had been a vocal and well-informed critic of colonial discrimination against the indigenous Arab population ever since the thirties (at a time when many of the Parisian intellectuals who would later distinguish themselves in the anticolonial struggle knew little and cared less about the condition and needs of France’s overseas subjects). But Camus was born in Algeria, the son of impoverished European immigrants. He grew up in Algiers and drew on his experiences there for much of his best work. Unable to imagine an Algeria without Europeans, or to imagine indigenous Europeans of his milieu torn from their roots, he struggled to describe a middle way; in his words, “Une grande, une éclatante réparation doit être faite . . . au peuple Arabe. Mais par la France toute entière et non avec le sang des Français d’Algérie.” 4 As France and Algeria alike grew ever more polarized over the issue, Camus’s search for a liberal compromise came to seem forlorn and irrelevant. He withdrew into silence.5
In the years following his death Camus’s standing continued to fall. Most people living in metropolitan France were unconcerned by the fate of Algeria and its various communities, Arab or European; as for the intellectuals, their interests in the sixties and seventies were so far from those which had moved Camus as to make him an object of scorn, condescension, and, finally, neglect. He was overtaken by the radical and increasingly intolerant politicization of a younger generation, by the self-lacerating tiers-mondisme of the later Sartre and his followers, by the “anti-humanist” vogue among scholars, by new fashions in literature, and, most of all, by a decline in the status of the writer. Looking back on his own time in the sixties as founder/editor of the Nouvel Observateur, Jean Daniel would recall “quickly discovering that it was among the human sciences—history, sociology, ethnology, philosophy—that one had to look for the equivalent of the littérateurs who, in my youth, had served as maîtres à pensér.”6 In the world of Barthes, Robbe-Grillet, Lévi-Strauss, and Foucault, Camus was dépassé. Not that he was unread: L’Étranger, La Peste, and Caligula were established texts of the lycée and university curricula, as they were (and are) on the reading lists of millions of students abroad. Albert Camus had become, in his own lifetime or very shortly thereafter, a worldwide “classic.” And this, too, was held against him.
It was thus at first sight rather curious to find him once again in the headlines, his last, unfinished novel a major publishing coup upon its belated appearance in 1994, thirty years after it was written.5 Over 200,000 copies of Le premier homme have now been sold. To be sure, this renewal of interest does not come out of the blue. In the seedy, corrupt public atmosphere of the dying Mitterrand era, a clear moral voice has been sorely lacking, as more than one French commentator has glumly observed. Moreover, the French have become grimly aware of the decayed and neglected condition of their literary heritage; Albert Camus was one of the last of an era of great French writers, a link to the world of Roger Martin du Gard, Jules Romains, Gide, Mauriac, and Malraux. One reviewer,musing on the success of Le premier homme, wondered whether the French weren’t “celebrating the myth of a brilliant life, transformed by accidental death into a destiny, a sign from beyond the grave, a reproach from the days when French literature counted for something....”7 There is truth in this view, but to appreciate the contemporary impact of Camus we need to look a little further.
Camus’s rejection of violence, of terror in all its forms, reduced him to impotent silence at the height of the Algerian civil war and rendered him inaccessible to the generation that foll
owed. But by the late seventies, with nothing but blood and ashes to show for their support of revolutionary repression in Europe, in China, in Cuba, and in Cambodia, French thinkers had swung around to a point of view remarkably close to that of Camus—though usually without acknowledgment: It was one thing to repeat Camus’s warning that “il est des moyens qui ne s’excusent pas,”8 quite another to admit he had been correct all along. The so-called New Philosophers, such as André Glucksmann or Bernard-Henri Lévy, did not rehabilitate Camus, but they contributed significantly to the process whereby those who once scorned him for his “moralizing” obsession with responsibility have themselves now lost all favor. They have been discredited by their casual resort to future history to justify present crimes, and by the ease with which they asserted that others must suffer for the sins of their own fathers. The lucidity and moral courage of Camus’s stand shine through today in a way that was not possible in the polarized world of 1958: “As for me, I find it disgusting to beat the other man’s breast, in the manner of our judge-penitents.”9