How to Think Politically

by James Bernard Murphy

  Arendt’s greatest public notoriety came in the early 1960s, with the publication of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which first appeared in The New Yorker magazine. She was the magazine’s reporter in 1961 at Adolf Eichmann’s war crimes trial in Israel for his role in the Nazi Holocaust. Arendt’s surprising portrait of him as a banal and thoughtless bureaucrat of genocide, someone ‘terrifyingly normal’ rather than a raving, fanatical Nazi ideologue, was highly controversial at the time (and is today hotly disputed), as were the questions she raised about the legality of the trial itself. She also provocatively accused some Zionists of holding outdated nationalist views that grew out of the same nineteenth-century völkisch soil as German nationalism. Worst of all, her harsh judgement of Jews who worked for the Nazi-authorized Jewish Councils during the war led to bitter accusations that she was ‘victim blaming’ by implying their complicity in the Holocaust. Having been a pariah among her fellow Germans before the war as a Jew, she found herself a pariah among many of her fellow Jews after it as well. And if not exactly a pariah in the United States, Arendt, an émigrée European intellectual and independent woman, remained a stranger to the mass consumer society of post-war middle America, where she spent the rest of her life.

  As a young woman in pre-war Germany, Arendt had studied philosophy and theology rather than politics, which was then of little interest to her. All of that changed when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and she was forced to flee for her life. Twenty years later, in the United States, her outlook had changed completely. Now Arendt viewed politics as having an independent value and vital importance little understood or appreciated in the modern world. She criticized the domination of politics by philosophy, a tendency she traced all the way back to Plato. Almost without exception since then, Arendt alleged, philosophers have shared this original anti-political bias at the origins of Western thought, which has deformed public life and impaired our capacity for judgement, often with disastrous consequences. Against this long tradition of thinking Arendt hoped to recover the original Greek understanding of politics, according to which participation in public life is essential to our humanity and not just a necessary evil, as Thomas Paine had described it. For her, Western philosophers since Plato have missed the vital existential importance of political action and denied its inherent dignity. This led some of her critics to accuse her of Hellenic nostalgia and an anti-intellectual hostility to philosophy.

  The clearest expression of this outlook appears in Arendt’s most important political book, The Human Condition, which is an account of the original Greek meaning of politics and why man is, essentially, a political animal, as Aristotle had claimed. The work distinguishes between three categories of activity: labour, work and action.

  Arendt argues that, for the ancient Greeks, labour is the lowest and most basic human activity, which we share with all animals. It is the closest to nature and aims to sustain life itself by satisfying our fundamental biological needs, such as eating. In contrast, work goes beyond mere physical survival by engaging in activities that produce a world of enduring objects such as technology, architecture and painting that are not merely consumed to keep us alive. This is something that animals never do. That is why the ancient Greeks rated work above labour, according to Arendt. Highest of all for them, by far, is action, the realm of politics, which they saw as the shared public space where free citizens meet and debate the common affairs of their city and, in doing so, exercise their powers of agency, disclose their individual identities and affirm a common public world. Nothing was more human for them, Arendt tells us, than this particular form of coming together, which she saw as the essence of politics in ancient Greece. The lesser activities of labour and work were strictly confined to the private sphere (the household, the farm, the workshop, the market-place), which is governed by necessity, whereas action occurs only in the public sphere, which is the realm of freedom. For Arendt, freedom is experienced only by active citizens participating in public affairs, not by private individuals left alone to do as they please, free from politics.

  In the classical world of the Greek city-states, as Arendt presents it, the political arena was where citizens transcended nature and human identity was formed through collective action. We need to act and speak together in a common public space in order to affirm our own shared reality. That is why the Greeks referred contemptuously to a citizen who concerned himself exclusively with his own private affairs as an idiṓtēs, an idiot, in contrast to a a citizen devoted above all to the public good. Philosophers who chose to neglect public duties to pursue philosophy and slaves who were excluded from politics as non-citizens were both idiots in the original Greek sense of the word because, in Arendt’s words, ‘to live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life’. This is an affirmation of Aristotle’s central claim that we cannot live a truly human life outside of politics, although she believed that politics is a human creation as far from nature as it is possible for us to get, whereas Aristotle asserted that we are political animals by nature. Hobbes and Locke were wrong to defend politics primarily as a means of preserving life: it exists primarily to give human life meaning, according to Arendt.

  According to Arendt, there is a natural political affinity between philosophers and tyranny. Philosophers claim knowledge of the truth and are tempted to impose it on the rest of us, by force if necessary. That is why Plato opposed democracy in favour of rule by benevolent philosopher-kings. He saw governing as a science that an enlightened elite, with the right training, can learn and practise in the interests of everyone. Such paternalistic rule is really the opposite of the original Greek understanding of politics, as Arendt sees it, as a public sharing of words and deeds among a plurality of citizens who thereby create a common world rather than seek the truth. For Arendt, abandoning politics to an elite of philosopher-kings, ideologues, technocrats or enlightened despots is ruinous for humanity, which requires this shared public world to hold citizens together artificially. The historical tragedy of the Jews, she argued, is that they have been political pariahs who were shut out of the public sphere, which has deprived them of their humanity and sense of political reality. This was something she feared was becoming a general feature of the modern age, leaving it vulnerable to a range of political pathologies such as totalitarianism and tribal nationalism. The best defence against these malevolent tendencies is a recovery of the original Greek conception of politics and, as she sees it, a restoration of the institutions and attitudes that sustain it.

  In the modern age, Arendt believed, politics has been degraded by its subordination to economics, an inversion of the ancient Greek view of the proper relationship between action, work and labour. Politics has become increasingly devoted to promoting the wealth and physical wellbeing of citizens, rather than being the place where great words and immortal deeds are enacted. This is true of both capitalist and socialist systems, which are fundamentally anti-political in the classical sense, as Arendt defines it. Whereas the ancient Greeks relegated all matters of production and consumption to the lower sphere of private life, keeping the public sphere untainted by anything related to labour and work, the moderns are preoccupied with ‘political economy’, a contradiction in terms to the ancient mind as Arendt understands it, or misunderstands it, as the Athenians in fact often publicly debated the distribution of wealth and taxes. She criticized the French Revolution for concerning itself with issues of social justice, poverty and economic inequality, which lie outside the proper scope of politics, as she saw it. According to her pure, classical understanding of politics, compassion for the suffering of others should be kept out of the public realm, which should be devoted to creating a common world of words and deeds for citizens.

  The ideas of Karl Marx are a perfect example of this modern tendency, according to Arendt. She saw his exaltation of labour as yet another symptom of the same anti-political outlook that she had traced back to Plato. Indeed, Marx and Engels be
lieved that, under communism, the state would be unnecessary; it would eventually ‘wither away’ and be replaced by a self-regulating society of spontaneous co-operation and goodwill. In other words, politics itself would eventually disappear. For Marx, labour is ‘the expression of the very humanity of men’, whereas for the ancient Greeks it was the least human of activities, according to Arendt. On the capitalist side, John Locke defended the proposition that government has no other end but the preservation of property, consideration of which, for Arendt, should be completely excluded from politics.

  When questions of wealth and poverty enter public life, as Arendt argues they increasingly have done in the modern age, genuine politics eventually disappears, as Marx had predicted. In its place we have what she calls society, ‘that curious, somewhat hybrid realm between the political and the private’. Society has a herd-like conformity antithetical to the diversity and freedom found in the authentic public sphere. Arendt strongly resisted the intrusion, as she saw it, of social issues into politics and political issues into society – otherwise politics will lose its humanizing character. For example, she considered it no purpose of government to legislate against inequality and discrimination in society. Equality, the ‘innermost principle’ of the body politic, applies only at the political level, between citizens, and not to the social level, between groups and individuals. Discriminatory practices are legitimate at the level of society, but never at the political level. It was for this reason that Arendt controversially opposed attempts by the state to criminalize racial segregation in the post-war United States, a stance that gained her many enemies on the left. At the same time, she endorsed the American post-war repeal of laws enforcing racial segregation in society, which made her some enemies on the right. Both policies are examples of the inter-penetration of politics and society, which Arendt believed must be resisted if the true character of the political is to be preserved.

  No modern thinker has painted a nobler portrait of politics than Arendt, or better understood the grave risks that leaving the care of the public world to others poses. Her idealized image of the ancient Greek city-state, as she saw it, reminds us that, at its best, the political world is a humanizing sphere where great things are possible. It can be a place of courage, inspiring speech, freedom and common action between citizens that elevates us above petty concerns and interests and provides a context for our shared activities and achievements. It is a very salutary lesson for an age that is so deeply and profoundly alienated from politics as ours. But there are so few examples in history where politics of this kind has been practised, or even approximated, that we are bound to wonder if it is intended for a race of heroes rather than ordinary citizens. Even ancient Athens fell short of the ideal, which may be literally utopian. The concrete examples of modern political action that Arendt gives are revolutions, which are exceptional and therefore not a suitable basis for a stable political order. And even modern revolutions have, as often as not, led to political disasters that even Arendt condemned. But having ideals to orient our actions and provide a standard of conduct against which to measure them is surely better than an aimless and empty politics of pure pragmatism.

  26

  Mao Zedong: The Chairman

  The world’s largest officially communist state was proclaimed in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing on 1 October 1949 by Mao Zedong, a Marxist peasant and former teacher and librarian from a small village in provincial China. Back in 1921 he had been one of just 13 delegates to attend the first National Congress of the Communist Party of China in a classroom of a girls’ school in Shanghai. From that very modest beginning Mao now stood at Beijing’s Gate of Heavenly Peace overlooking the packed central square, which thronged with wildly cheering people, as China’s new head of state. He had successfully led the country’s communists in a civil war that was fought, on and off, for over two decades and now stepped forth as the triumphant ruler of a nation of 500 million people, a quarter of humanity at the time.

  From that lofty height Mao would ascend even higher, to cult status, becoming a kind of secular god and the embodiment of the popular will of the Chinese people, at least officially. Millions trekked to Tiananmen Square to attend rallies in honour of ‘the Great Helmsman’ of the Chinese people, the ‘reddest sun in our hearts’, as many called him. ‘Long live Chairman Mao!’ they chanted. ‘A long, long life to Chairman Mao!’ As a schoolboy in imperial China, he had humbly bowed each morning before a portrait of the revered Confucius with his fellow students. After the revolution his fellow citizens would bow before Mao’s portrait every morning. A giant two-storey painting of him still hangs above Tiananmen Square, a short distance from the mausoleum where his embalmed body lies for all to see on the site of what was once the main entrance to the Imperial City.

  Ideologically, Mao Zedong was a Marxist–Leninist revolutionary. He read widely and deeply in the works of Karl Marx and his Russian disciple Vladimir Lenin, who had led his own country to socialism in 1917, just before Mao became a committed Marxist. But Mao substantially modified their ideas to suit the particular circumstances of twentieth-century China, thereby creating a distinct political ideology ‘produced in Chinese conditions’. Maoism, as it became known, was the official ideology of the Chinese state after 1949. Indeed, Mao’s opinions and policies shifted constantly, and he often adapted his ideas to changing circumstances. He prided himself on being a ‘dialectical’ thinker who openly embraced contradiction as a fundamental feature of both life and thought, making it difficult to specify what exactly is meant by ‘Maoism’. Some orthodox Marxists denounce it as a perversion of Marx’s ideas, while Mao saw himself as applying the ‘universal truths’ of Marxism–Leninism to specific Chinese historical conditions.

  In the first half of the twentieth century China was not yet a capitalist society; it was still an overwhelmingly poor, rural, semi-feudal peasant society with relatively little industry. As such, it did not meet the material conditions that Marx insisted were necessary for communism, which was only likely after the collapse of mature capitalist industrial economies such as those of France, Germany and Britain (the only ones Marx knew first-hand). For orthodox Marxists China was not yet ripe for communism, which could only rise from the ashes of capitalism after it had first destroyed feudalism and modernized society, unleashing the massive productive forces that would be needed to satisfy everyone’s essential needs under communism.

  Mao rejected this argument, believing instead that China’s relative ‘backwardness’ was no obstacle to socialism. Indeed, he thought that China would lead the way in building a future global revolutionary order. He argued that, by means of a popular peasant revolution arising in the countryside and guided by the Communist Party, a democratic dictatorship could be established that would use state power to radically transform semi-feudal Chinese society, culture and economics in a ‘Great Leap Forward’ to communism, something that Marx thought was historically impossible, since politics always follows economics.

  Marx also believed that the true bearer of socialist consciousness was the urban, industrial working class, what he called the proletariat. He thought peasants were now historically irrelevant and wrote contemptuously of the ‘idiocy of rural life’. Marx lived his whole adult life in large cities in the industrialized West, where capitalism had already substantially destroyed the agrarian peasant class of feudal society. But there was no significant Chinese proletariat in the first half of the twentieth century, which is why it was the last place Marx would have expected a revolution to occur. So Mao looked to the rural peasantry, not the urban workers, as the main revolutionary force in China, since they were 90 per cent of its population. He was himself a peasant’s son with a deep mistrust of city life and its sophisticated elite, having never shed the feeling of being a yokel from the provinces, something that he shared with Rousseau, whose Social Contract Mao had read as a young man. Both men were deeply suspicious of cities, which Rousseau saw as sources of vice and depravit
y and Mao considered centres of counter-revolutionary reaction. During China’s long civil war Mao led his peasant army from the countryside, and during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ that he initiated in the mid-1960s he sent urban dwellers out of the cities to learn ‘proletarian virtues’ from the peasants. His populist strategy was to unleash the vast repressed potential of China’s hundreds of millions of long-suffering and desperately poor peasants to overthrow the old regime that was still established in the cities. That is why Maoism has proved so popular with revolutionary socialist groups in the developing world, such as Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge and the Shining Path in Peru. For Mao, not all roads to communism will run through capitalism, as Marx and Lenin said they must.

  One reason that Mao was not committed to a single path to communism was his belief that history is often shaped by conscious human activity rather than being wholly determined by impersonal economic factors. Unlike Marx, Mao made space for ‘subjective factors’ such as will power, culture and ideas in the development of political and economic life. This belief provided the ideological underpinning of his two great attempts to transform China: the Great Leap Forward (1958–62) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Mao’s preoccupation with ‘correct ideological consciousness’ reflects his faith in the ability of dedicated revolutionaries to mould social reality in accordance with their ideas, something that orthodox Marxists tend to dismiss.

  Negatively, this involved the systematic destruction of traditional Chinese culture and values. ‘Destruction before construction’ was the slogan. So Mao unleashed a crusade to smash the ‘Four Olds’: old thought, old culture, old customs and old practices. For example, he modernized traditional customs about marriage, breaking, in his words, ‘the feudal shackles that have bound human beings, especially women, for thousands of years’. But that was just the beginning. As with the Protestant Reformation and the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France, a fury of destruction was unleashed during Mao’s Cultural Revolution that took even him by surprise. Believing that ‘the past oppresses the present’, statues and temples were demolished, tombs and monasteries vandalized and books and paintings destroyed on a vast scale by revolutionary zealots. This crusade included an anti-Confucius campaign in which young radicals of the Maoist Red Guards smashed statues of the ancient sage and destroyed the Confucius family cemetery in Qufu, even blowing up the Master’s final resting place, the ultimate symbol of traditional feudal China.