GEOG 5100
Here's a reading guide for Arendt. Because we haven't really gotten
to the discussion questions fully in class (which is no fault of
anyone but rather a sign of self-autonomy in our conversation), I'm
experimenting with a new format. The document posted to the google
group should be read as a guide for reading. Hopefully, it makes the
reading easier, so use it and let me know what you think. Was it
helpful? Did it make the reading easier? We can discuss that in
class on Monday. In the meantime, we'll wait to release discussion
questions until class after the presentation. Good luck with the
reading this week!
Kaitlin Fertaly
Kaitlin
Kaitlin Fertaly
Kaitlin Fertaly
GEOG 5100
Response to Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
In the second section of The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, she focuses on the role of ideologies and practices of imperialism, race-thinking, and the racism of pan-national movements which together paved the way for the totalitarian regimes of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia in the mid 20th century. Pulling together these various threads, Arendt ends the section with a discussion of the issue of minorities and stateless peoples that occurred in the wake of WWI. Here, Arendt makes a number of critical points but her most poignant one which she explores further is that once people were displaced from their homes and countries, they lost all of their rights, and even the “inalienable” human rights, bestowed by men for other men, could not exist for the stateless without a nation to uphold them. “Once they had left their homeland, they remained homeless; once they left their state, they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights, they were rightless, the scum of the earth” (267). In this response, I will review Arendt’s argument about the nature of human rights for the stateless and then will draw on Ranciere’s further development of this to explore the issue of rights and agency of individuals.
Couched in a very specific historical context, Arendt makes the point that states in Europe had no idea how to deal with stateless people who refused to assimilate and who could not be repatriated anywhere else. The consequent damage was that “entire hierarchies of value were reversed” in the sense that a stateless person was outside the jurisdiction of the law, an anamoly that made criminality a better position for the stateless to be in and that led states to create an increasingly powerful police force whose “strength and emancipation from law and government grew in direct proportion to the influx of refugees” (287). This created a contradictory situation where nation-states, built on the principal of equality, resulted in an “anarchy” of over- and underprivileged individuals. It is within this context that Arendt argues that the supposedly inalienable rights of man “proved to be unenforceable whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state” (292). This loss of rights, she argues is manifested in the loss of place to affectively express one’s opinions and actions because as stateless people they have not lost their right to think but their right to have their opinion matter (295).
It is here where Ranciere picks up her argument to show that her archipolitical position, her attempts to keep the political sphere separate, essentially “depopulates” it which can lead to a depoliticized reading, like that of Agamben’s whose argument devolves into a historical ontological destiny for the stateless. Ranciere, on the other hand, suggest that we ask a different kind of question in order to avoid denying the struggles of the stateless that exist outside the framework of the nation. He argues instead that rights “belong to those who can do something with them to construct a dissensus against the denial of rights” (305). However, he also points out that as a consequence of consensus, a process of depoliticization or the closing of the possibility of dissensus by “patching over the possible gaps between appearance and reality,” rights actually appear to be empty even though they are not.
What do these two arguments, then, have to say about the nature of agency for the stateless? Arendt’s argument essentially presents them as without agency because of the fact that they exists in a space of inbetweenness, outside any kind of state or structure which can or wants to give them rights through which they could act. Ranciere, on the other hand, argues that only when we “presuppose that rights belong to definite or permanent subjects” that we must conclude that the only real rights are those of the citizens. Using an example of women put forth by Olympe de Gouge, he argues that even the rightless could demonstrate that they were deprived of rights and therefore could show through public action that they actually had the rights constitutionally denied to them. I see this as a way of suggesting that agency enacted in the public sphere is not necessarily denied to the stateless, and that therefore stateless people can protest their denial of rights. However, he goes on to say that humanitarian interference in instances when those who are faced with repression cannot enact their rights, recreates consensus (or the erasure of any possibility for those groups to use dissensus to try to enact their rights) making human rights the rights for victims, a consequence he sees as problematic.
Eric Reiff
Eric Reiff
Discussion Paper 6
Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism – Pt 2, “Imperialism”
Jacques Rencière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”
21 October 2012
In the middle third of The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt traces the arc of private and political life in Europe from the emancipation of the bourgeoisie, though the rise of racism and bureaucracy as modes of governance during imperialism, to conclude with a discussion of how the rise and fall of the nation-state has taken with it the rights of man. Arendt argues that once the bourgeoisie obtain ruling power they finally realize Hobbes’ understanding of the relationship of man to sovereign. This stands as a fundamental change in which rights are no longer derived from God, but from within the laws of nature. Under Hobbes’ philosophy social contracts with sovereigns are forged and violently broken based on the success of the sovereign in providing appropriately for his/her subjects. The French Revolution demonstrates such a violent discontent, but instead of forming a new social contract with a soverign it attempted to set forth a republic and articulated a Rights of Man with rights derived from nature. These rights are meant to replace the rights derived from God and the all against all morality of Hobbes.
With the production of surplus capital and labor in the European states the bourgeoisie (as rulers) have to look abroad for outlets for their surplus capital and labor. As they move abroad as colonists (mob of the home country’s undesirables), investors and speculators, they encounter others whom the mob lord over through racism and bureaucracy. The bureaucracy to Arendt is a depoliticized nexus of power which exists solely for the purpose of bringing more people and territory under its purview. Its momentum was unchecked. Once continental imperialism got moving there was nothing left to offer them except “ideology and movement (225).” She shows us the rationalization of tribalism and the Pan movements in Continental Europe to demonstrate how the bourgeoisie mobilized the mob of the disenfranchised into identifying with an ideal. The mob no longer needed to achieve greatness or morality, but could have these things just by being of a particular “tribe” (249). They could now become the ideal incarnate. This both divides the mob into tribes of insiders and outsiders and unmoors society from external ideals like the Rights of Man. They no longer have to espouse to these ideals as they ARE the ideal simply by being “Germans” or “Americans” etc.
Arendt realizes (personally as well as intellectually) that the Rights of Man are not natural, but inherent to the state to which one is a citizen. If you are stateless, no one is there to care about your rights and therefore you have no rights. You are simply a bare human (zoë) without a political or civic life (bios). For Arendt, society (intra- and interstate) has chosen to ignore the problem of the stateless and bare life. The current system of rights based on citizenship will internally give rise to “barbarians” (those without bios that will further threaten politics. Rencière takes issue with Arendt’s division of life into the distinct realms of private and political. The political is never lost, but instead realized through consensus. The heterogeneity that we encounter as Other is not inherently bad. It is only bad when we impose human rights on them only to discover that the homogenous human rights we wish existed don’t exist. This gives us a motivation for intervention outside international law. Essentially we break the law to impose rights.
The intersection of Arendt’s final chapter in “Imperialism”, this piece by Rencière, and Agamben’s Homo Sacre are clearly the point of friction that we need to focus on for this class. While Arendt leaves us with almost a genealogy of the stateless and a general warning of the risk that disenfranchised “barbarians” pose to politics, Agamben imagines the threat is that the purpose of the state is now to make the state of exception the new normal—to take the political or bios from us all. He argues that we are all now only zoë, decoupled from our bios; or, at the very least this is the direction we are headed. Rencière tries to derail the inevitability of Agamben’s analysis. He instead, wants us to imagine that the problem is one of our own creation. The dichotomy of private and political life allows us to image a life in which one does not have political life, when for Rencière one always has access to politics. We have also imagined that rights are universal when they are not. We then create a solution to this absolute evil of an absence of human rights in “infinite justice”. This propels us all into a state of exception. It would appear, Rencière would have us simply embrace the heterogeneity of Otherness and let go of our dream of the universal rights of man. Thus, we could avoid the bare life of “infinite justice”. I sense Hobbes underneath Rencière’s position telling him that each must negotiate for their own so called rights with whichever sovereign that they choose. I’m really looking forward to the next two classes. Are we doomed to Hobbes’ or Agamben’s nightmare?
On Wednesday, October 17, 2012 11:39:07 AM UTC-6, GEOG 5100 wrote:
Chandler Griffith
Chandler Griffith
Reflection Paper
10/22/12
Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism – Pt 2, “Imperialism”
Jacques Rencière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”
In the section on “Imperialism” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt outlines the extent to which European notions of race, nationality, and humanness led to the dissolution of the Rights of Man. She shows how the underlying motor of European imperialism, namely expansions for expansion’s sake, is both antithetical and incompatible with the nation-state construct. Much like David Harvey’s subsequent arguments about the dangers of surplus capital, Arendt shows how capitalist production in late 19th and early 20th century Europe created another by-product of capitalism in the form of “human debris (Arendt 1973, 150).” The most pervasive form of this “debris,” otherwise known as the “stateless,” is not just deprived of the Rights of Man, but is rather left with no community in which to live, enjoy liberty throughout, and pursue happiness within (295). This deprivation, experienced by millions worldwide, has prompted a new breed of humanitarian sovereignty that favors internment and intervention at the expense of humanity and state sovereignty (Ranciere 2004).
As they inhabit spaces outside of the law, a space that is framed by Arendt as a lawless “state of exception,” humans without a polity lack a connection to civic responsibility and therefore civic protection. As a criterion for assessing the extent to which someone lives outside of the law, Arendt suggests that one must ask whether a given person can “benefit by committing a crime (Arendt 1973, 286).” In this sense, the act of criminality is seen as a way to maintain humanness and citizenship within the nation-state construct. By this logic, innocence, as a ”complete lack of responsibility,” was “the mark of rightlessness” and “the seal of the loss of political status (Arendt 1973, 295).”
In addition to government protection, Arendt posits the “loss of a home” as the primary denial to the stateless. The mere loss of a home, a deprivation associated with political and social movements for millennia, is not unprecedented. Instead, in the wake of imperial expansion, it is not the loss of the home that leads to rightlessness. Rather, it is the “the impossibility of finding a new one” that sets statelessness apart from general displacement (Arendt 1973, 293). It is not as simple as being expelled from the country of origin. By this logic, a displaced person is “thrown out of the family of nations altogether (Arendt 1973, 294).”
In musings that heavily influenced subsequent scholars such as Georgio Agamben, Jacque Ranciere, and George Steinmetz, Arendt is ultimately investigating ontologies of humanness and citizenship. This is clear in her comparison of slavery and statelessness. For Arendt, slaves still occupy a place in a society, even if that society denies them the Rights of Man afforded to non-slaves. The stateless, on the other hand, do not hold a place in society. Therefore, “only the loss of the polity itself” is enough to strip a human of his/her “human rights,” and expel him “from humanity (Arendt 1973, 297).” Arendt shows how race thinking and pan-nationalist movements were used in the German and Soviet contexts to dissolve the rights of man. Ranciere picks up the baton and illustrates how the tension between biophysical existence and political life has allowed, through the use of state and humanitarian intervention, for the dissolution of contemporary state sovereignty.
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Austin Cowley
Austin Cowley
GEOG 5100: Introduction to Social Theory
The Refugee Question: Hannah Arendt’s Contribution to Critical Humanitarianism
Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and most specifically the “Decline of the Nation-State” is formative to an entire body of literature in humanitarianism because it so sharply frames the contemporary refugee question. Since the book was first published in 1951, the world numbers of displaced people, both international and internal, have exploded. Likewise, the new and variegated political, economic, and environmental circumstances under which people are forced to leave their homes have increasingly dramatic and interconnected impacts across the world. These new contexts, many of which have arisen from the post-Cold War, bring Arendt’s work into focus and call for new applications of it. In this paper, I wish to explore the decline of the nation-state as it was extends into a global phenomena. How have tenuous national independence movements coincided with more aggressive policies to keep refugees out of Europe and how has this produced a new global population of displaced people?
While the different crises of displacement are ostensibly the results of domestic violence, oppression, or disenfranchisement, they owe their genesis to European colonial and imperialist expansion. Imperialism, what Arendt calls “expansion for expansion’s sake, was initiated by a bourgeios class looking to accumulate greater wealth. Where the economy had grown to the point of crisis and collapse at home, capitalists began looking elsewhere to generate profit. Thus, what Harvey (date) calls “spatial fix” set in motion the “carving up of Africa” in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Race-thinking and it’s administrative manifestations in places like British-ruled India were both the product of a European political movement that set to establish nation-states and a process of painting the foreign colonial-imperial subject as “other”. In deeming this swath of humanity sub-human, European imperialists were able to justify what Arendt calls “administrative massacres” abroad. While the continental pan-movements in Central-Eastern Europe and Russia relied more explicitly on proto-nationalism, they all nonetheless used race-thinking to establish the nation-state. Ultimately, what brought about modern Europe was used to bring it down but not before it put forth the global standard of state-building through nationalist movements. The failed attempts of national emancipation and state-building are partly the source of the global refugee question today.
Two world wars and a countless number of regional conflicts have sharply ruptured what was an already tenuous status of living, occupation, and coexistence for many people around the world. In doing so, this violence has pushed many outside and to the margins of legal and political systems protecting their rights. Thus, the problems of statelessness, internment, and legal exceptionalism clearly challenge the common claim that human rights are inalienable to the individual: “No paradox of contemporary politics is filled with a more poignant irony than the discrepency between the efforts of of well-meaning idealist who stubbornly insist on regarding as ‘inalienable’ those human rights, which are enjoyed only by citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries (279).” Moreover, when those forced into exile from their home countries, their attempts to gain political asylum in Europe have been met with increasingly stiff resistance. So dire is the situation that Arendt argues committing crime would afford refugees more legal protection than they have. This brings about a central question to humanitarianism and refugee studies: who establishes these rights and enforces that they are carried out? If it’s a network of state governments then the dilemma of cooperation and consistency threaten its stability, and in the case of supernational bodies like the United Nations, effective jurisdiction becomes the central problem. Since the Cold War, the international community has sought to keep displaced people within their own borders, and this is reflected in the growing number of internally displaced people globally (cite here). While the question of statelessness no longer dominates contemporary debates about forced migration, Arendt’s claims towards legal exceptionalism are certainly still at the forefront of the discussion. Here, the work of Giorgio Agamben, which owes its conception greatly to Arendt among others, expands the question of legal exceptionalism and in doing so, changes discussion around displacement and forced migration drastically. This is a topic I will address in next week’s reaction to Homo Sacer.
Ian Rowen
Ian Rowen
GEOG 5100
October 20, 2012
Commentary on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism
and
Jacques Ranciere’s “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”
Arendt connects a wide web of historical events and political theory to argue that totalitarianism is not an aberration, but rather a traceable outcome of certain conditions of modernity. The European imperial project served as a sphere of experimentation for new technologies of power that were later brought home to devastating effect, and ultimately gave rise to totalitarianism, distinct from autocracy in that it takes over the private sphere and aims for world domination. Her two key empirical cases are Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
She argues that the imperialist project was instigated by the rising power of the bourgeoisie, and not central state policy. Essentially, the surplus capital of the bourgeoisie needed destinations for productive use. Moreover, the “surplus bodies” of Europe—the poor, the adventurous, those with little to lose—needed new destinations as well. Colonialism served both functions, and as new states entered the mix, it seemed inevitable for all of Europe to embark on the imperialist path.
One of her most striking observations, for me, are that two of the key technologies of 20th century European political power arose in the colony, not the metropole. These are racism, which she suggests had crystallized in South Africa, and bureaucracy, which evolved under British rule in Egypt and India. These technologies were tested and implemented in imperial holdings, and then brought “home” to devastating effect. To be sure, she notes that “race thinking” began in France, where the aristocracy claimed German heritage as opposed to the native bourgeois Celtic Gauls, but its flowering as an institutionalized form of control was achieved in South Africa. Her turns of phrase here—“new and exciting psychological toys” (175)—are remarkable in their bitter irony.
These ideologies of racism and bureaucracy were essential for colonialist imperialism, which aimed for unlimited expansion. When these ideologies returned to Europe, which was in a condition of fracture, crisis, and chaos following World War I—and where the territorial limits of the nation-state and the exclusive identification of nationality and ethnicity with territory was itself confused by the many ethnic overlaps and mixtures of continental Europe—conditions were ripe for intra and inter-state violence (as well as the takeover or even annihilation of the state by the mob) and what has come to be known as “ethnic cleansing”. Ultimately, refugees and stateless people were left with basic “human rights”, or rather, no rights at all. Rights, to Arendt, belong only to citizens backed by states.
I have several questions for Arendt: If bourgeois capitalism was the pre-condition for colonialist imperialism, which was itself sort of a precursor to totalitarianism, then how did the USSR, as a non-capitalist state, come to be totalitarian? And does she allow for the possibility of a colonialist imperialism that is not motivated by bourgeois economic interests? I am here thinking of Qing-era Chinese imperial expansion, or even the behavior of the contemporary PRC in places like Africa or Southeast Asia. Or, more contemporary with the South African case, German colonialism in Samoa—not particularly driven by economic or even geopolitical considerations— seems another counter-example (see Steinmetz’s The Devil’s Handwriting).
Ranciere critiques Arendt for setting up a false opposition between the political and the private, which leads to a “vicious circle” in which only those with rights (i.e. citizens) have rights (a tautology), or there are those with no rights (a void). His solution is to suggest that the subject of the Rights of Man is actually the “process of subjectivization” by which a subject with no rights attempts to enact such rights. In this way, he is able to propose the counter-intuitive, yet persuasive proposition that the “the Rights of Man are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not”. To illustrate this, he uses the case of the French revolutionary woman, Olympe de Gouges, who observed that if women may be executed by the state, then they should be able to participate in the political sphere of the state as well. That is to say, if a woman’s bare life may be taken by the state, then she should have the right to participate in its functions. Ranciere here seems focused on the process by which those without rights claim them, and allows for a kind of dynamism and “dissensus” that opens space for political action where Arendt insisted on its closure.
I can’t help but feel I would have gained more from this challenging piece after reading Homo Sacer next week, but for the time being, I find its conclusion profoundly unsettling. Even if it offers some way out of Arendt’s “deceptive trick” (302), it reduces all contemporary humanitarian intervention to a battle between “Good” and “Evil”, to a permanent state of exception that justifies “infinite justice” in the form of invasion. While this may not be an inaccurate assessment of the current state of global affairs, it seems to imply endless struggle and endless intervention in the absence of recourse to any greater force of law or God.
Lindsay Skog
In part 2 of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt is concerned with the Rights of Man, the right to have those rights, and the circumstances that lead to the non-recognition of those rights. Specifically, Arendt is interested in the ways in which German Jews were constructed as a group of people without human rights in the first half of the 20th century. Ultimately, she argues that the emergence of the “new global political situation” (297), or the modern “One World” (297), exposed the right to have rights. The right to have rights was not highlighted by an extraordinary event, but rather the ‘unity’ of nation-states that revealed the fault lines between and within those nation-states. Arendt traces the fault lines to the intertwined rise and fall of European nation-states with race-thinking.
Arendt begins her discussion of the formation of nation-states in Europe with the era of Imperialism. Arendt argues that Imperialism represented the attempt to overcome the national limits of capitalism through expansion to new markets. Moreover, Arendt argues that the expansion of the state through empire-building was shot through with power struggles between the bourgeoisie and the state. That is to say that, as the state failed to expand and provide new prospects for investment of capital, the bourgeoisie, as a mob acting outside the limits of the state, usurped the power of state. For Arendt, the bourgeoisie did not aspire to political rule, but came into it as their private interests were threatened and as they became involved in the expansions of capitalism through empire building. As a result, Arendt suggests that imperialism must be understood as the first stage of political rule for the bourgeoisie, not as the last stage of capitalism.
Arendt draws our attention to the race-thinking that lurked in the shadows of this reinvigorated form of the nation-state. For Arendt, race-thinking immediately undercut the formation of nation-states in Europe. As the nation-states of Europe developed together, race-thinking was ever-present. Indeed, for Arendt race-thinking persisted to undermine the collection of European nation-states and ultimately lead to their destruction. Arendt traces race-thinking to the descendants of the Dutch settlers in South Africa—the Boers. She argues that race was the explanation given to those peoples for whom European man had no historic knowledge—“prehistoric man” (192). Race explained those peoples who had not yet overcome, or dominated, nature, but rather took nature as their master. Ultimately, such explanations were used to justify slavery, murder, as well as numerous other human rights violations. Arendt’s key point here is that race-thinking in South Africa underpinned the realization that a class did not have to rise up through revolution, rather it only needed to construct itself as a superior class, or race, through the construction of an inferior one.
Like imperialism, Arendt is equally concerned with the pan-movements of continental imperialism. While she argues that the pan-movements differ from imperialist processes in several important ways (lack of economic motivation, driven by a mob of intellectuals, rather than the bourgeoisie and capital, etc), Arendt highlights that pan-movements are more closely tied to race-thinking than imperialism. For Arendt, the notion of tribal nationalism emerged from continental imperialism. In the end, tribal nationalism tied together national rights and human rights, and in doing so laid the foundation for the belief that without national rights man does not have human rights.
Returning to the formation of nation-states, Ardent argues that modern economic conditions challenged formation of the nation-state from the outside by resisting the limits and borders of the nation-state. However, the nation-state was also challenged from the inside when the post-WWI peace treaties seeking to protect minority populations illuminated the contradiction in the very notion of the nation-state. That is to say, that the notion of the nation-state is based on a homogenous population of people rooted to a specific place. The contradiction was exacerbated by the imposition of the nation-state model on newly formed territories of displaced, heterogeneous populations. Arendt argues that at the moment when the rights of all nationalities to self-determination were recognized, ironically, the relationship between the nation and the state started to dissolve.
Finally, Arendt argues that in the dissolution between the nation and the state the Rights of Man become both tenuous and exposed. Indeed, the right to have rights is based on the assumption of a state to guarantee those rights. Without such a guarantee, a group of people is created without rights and positioned as an inferior class, or race. Ultimately, Arendt is arguing that this is how the Nazi movement constructed the Jewish community as an inferior race. Moreover, Arendt is pointing to a series of mundane and, at times, innocuous circumstances and events that lead to the atrocities of holocaust. In so doing, Arendt is highlighting the possibility of such events repeating themselves.
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Hannah Arendt: Imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism
The overall project in The Origins of Totalitarianism (OT) is to trace the beginnings, as well as describe and analyze the two totalitarian regimes of German Nazism and Russian Stalinism in order to show that "human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity" (ix). Arendt is concerned with the guarantor of individual rights and in the second part of OT, Imperialism, she argues that imperial expansion, coupled with racism led to "tribal nationalism" which ultimately led to the deterioration of the nation-state and the invalidation of individual rights. While Imperialism as one third of the book serves the purpose of showing how 19th century imperialism paved the way for 20th century totalitarianism, as an standalone work it gives rise to questions regarding the individual rights of stateless persons.
Arendt claims that the period of Imperialism was from 1884 to 1914. For this reason, she was not concerned with empire building, conquest, or the act of colonialism (p. 130) but, rather, the ways in which the bourgeoisie began to rule politically. The bourgeoisie became interested in politics out of economic necessity; they needed new markets for their surplus capital. However, imperialism is not an economic phenomenon but a political one: "Imperialism must be considered the first stage in political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism" (p. 138). She looks at the different ways in which Imperialism took shape both abroad and locally. Two main political devices characterized imperialism abroad: race in South Africa, and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt, and India. She also connects racism to "continental imperialism" through the pan-movements. While racism, "denied the common origin of man and repudiated the common purpose of establishing humanity," nationalism, whether pan-German or pan-Slavism, "perverted the national concept of mankind as a family of nations…where difference of history and organization were misinterpreted as differences between men, residing in natural origin" (p. 234). The common denominator in both racism and pan-nationalism is idea that people are by nature different, and consequently, this difference negates any ideal of humanity. Instead of one ideal of common humanity, there are different "species" of people (e.g. Germans, Russians, Jews.)
This racialization of people is central to her argument in chapter 9 that only nation-states can be the guarantor of rights. After World War I, European nations were confronted with the problem of both the "nation of minorities" and stateless people. She argued that European nations recognized that minorities needed to be either assimilated or "liquated" (p. 273) and the stateless needed to be either naturalized or repatriated. However, these attempts failed. Instead, these groups became non-people welcomed nowhere and assimilated nowhere: “Once they had left their homeland, they remained homeless; once they left their state, they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights, they were rightless, the scum of the earth” (p. 267).
In the section, "The Perplexities of the Rights of Man" Arendt argues that human rights as put forth in the Declaration of the Rights of Man at the end of the 18th century failed to do what they were supposed to do: guarantee the protection human dignity. She goes on in this section to show multiple "perplexities" of the traditional understanding of human rights claiming that the natural Rights of Man should be accorded to any person who loses his political status. However, the opposite occurs: "it seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man" (p. 300). Only through political life can we obtain equality, "we are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights" (p. 301).
This separation of political and private life is flagged in Rancier's article, "Who is the subject of the Rights of Man" as something that is in keeping with Arendt's archipolitical position, a position that will be overturned into a depoliticizing approach by Agamben. For now, I am choosing not to explore Rancier and the connection between Agamben and Arendt, but I will next week after reading Agamben.
Lauren Gifford
Lauren Gifford
The Origins of Totaliatarianism (Hannah Arendt) and
Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man? (Jacques Ranciere)
21 October 2012
Arendt begins the section on imperialism with a basic history of how it grew from capitalism and capitalism’s need to reproduce, noting “the central political idea of imperialism” requires “expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics” (125). She then goes on to lay the framework for the social conceptions necessary to explain the plight of the Jews in the early 20th century and other stateless people who seemingly exist beyond the boundaries of human rights. Ultimately, she argues, the greatest act of power under totaliatarianism is to render a person stateless.
As imperialism spread, and exporting power became a conduit of expansion, the bourgeoisie needed a way to maintain power. Simultaneously, the middle class emerged, creating surplus labor and capital. This surplus fueled imperial expansion and the movement of people between states and regions. Though there were always outliers (people for whom killing others remained their way of exerting power, people who failed despite of, or lacked, state assistance, etc) most of the emerging middle-class and laborers needed something to hold them together as subjects, which would unite political nations like tribes (157). This is where race-thinking entered the discourse, though it came in several forms. The French, Arendt writes, used it “as a weapon for civil war and for splitting the nation” while the German’s “used it as an effort to unite the people against foreign domination” (165). Racism, and the developing bureaucracy, allowed the ruling class to maintain power and impose exclusionary notions on society.
Ultimately, all these factors lead to what Arendt calls the “atmosphere of disintegration,” where stateless people, who have no governments to protect them, lack even rights to the Rights of Man (268-9). This is where Ranciere comes in and accepts some of Arendt’s points and expounds upon others. Deconstructing the notion of the Rights of Man, he argues that they are the rights of the un-politicized person, but highlights a kink in Arendt’s argument, that the Rights of Man are the rights of people with rights (302). A person only has rights if he exists within the paradigm of nation-states. It has nothing to do with ones position in society, because even prisoners and the comatose have rights, as they are part of the system. Without the oversight of a governing system—a nation or tribe with a physical state to claim you—a person is ineligible for human rights. Human rights are not inherent. In order to have rights, one must exist within the dominant paradigm of a rights-granting system.
Some questions: Ranciere, quoting Agamben, groups people in a coma together with a condemned person as people who are “beyond oppression.” Does this mean they have are not bare life, that they have rights because they are governed, even though they can not directly engage with that governance? If that’s the case, what is the difference between those positions and refugees, or prisoners at Guantanamo, who have international advocates working on their behalf?
And, is Arendt arguing that racism is a product of 19th and 20th century imperialism?
Joel
Joel Correia
GEOG. 5100
21 October 2012
Reading Response
The Origins of Totalitarianism and Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?
Arendt’s writing in “Part Two: Imperialism” of book The Origins of Totalitarianism elaborates a provocative argument on the ‘rights of man,’ but especially and specifically the notion of ‘human rights.’ Arendt and Rancier note that human rights were created to ‘protect’ undesirable peoples who literally have no home, no nation, and no property but their bodies. Arendt argues that human rights represent a fundamental condition of exception for those who are subject to its application. This is highly problematic for her and in this piece she develops a narrative to illustrate that the notion the aporia of human rights. Rancier (p. 307) states human rights are the ‘rights of man’ for those who cannot enact them. In this sense human rights are discursively intended to empower the powerless, but in reality and practice they exacerbate the marginalization of said peoples for those whom human rights are intended to protect have no avenue to enact their rights. Herein lies the aporia, rights for stateless, displaced, undesirable peoples to protect them in ways that deprive them of any agency and create a state of exception where they have no rights, no voice, no ability to act (Arendt, p. 298).
Rancier (p. 298) argues that ‘human rights’ are the subject of the rights of man. Prior to human rights the only real rights were the rights of the citizen, or a legal constituent of a nation. If, for some reason, a person were severed from her/his property and citizenship of a nation, then that person was considered stateless and seen to hold no rights, to be free of rights. Arendt discusses this state of freedom as critical to the aporia of human rights. In this state of freedom, on can do what s/he pleases, though has no voice and can make no actions. At the same time this ‘freedom’ denotes a lack of legal protection by any state. Therefore, said person falls into a category of exception—housed in spaces of exception and subject to exceptional law. In this instance the only option for recognition by law is to commit an act of crime for which the punishment will give agency to the stateless subject. It is the only exception where this person will be treated as equal with other citizens through due process of the law. If the stateless person is also stripped of nationality, s/he loses the guarantee of human rights for Arendt argues that nationality is fundamental to identity in modern times and without it one is equated with a savage, an abstracted human that belongs nowhere.
While reading these pieces a number of questions and observations came to mind that I would like to pose here for possible discussion in seminar:
· On page 138 Arendt alludes that imperialism is the “last stage of capitalism.” How is this so? Earlier she states that imperialism ended in 1914 and it is apparent at the time of her writing that capitalism is still strong. What is the implication and reason for this statement?
· In chapter six, Arendt elaborates notions of race-thinking and race. However, it seems that she seats the entire analysis in the European experience and overlooks the examples of slavery and civil war in the United States. Is this just a function of the scope of her analysis? Why did she opt not to incorporate these critical examples into her text? On page 177 she states that slavery “did not make the slave-holding peoples race-conscious before the nineteenth century.” Why is this and how could that be?
· Are ‘human rights’ a guise for rights of control or rather the rights of a super-sovereign to overrule a sovereign?
· I am unclear on where the line between private and political life lies. Where is it?
Elizabeth Wharton
Elizabeth Wharton
GEOG 5100: Social Theory
Commentary on Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism
October 22, 2012
I would like to take Arendt’s description of the police state as my entry point, as I see manifested in it many of the phenomenon discussed by her throughout Part II of The Origins of Totalitarianism. In the final chapter of this section, Arendt focuses on statelessness as both a tool and a cause of the emergence of totalitarian (police) states. With millions rendered stateless in the wake of World War I, the nation-state soon proved “incapable of providing a law for those who had lost the protection of a national government [and] transferred the whole matter to the police” (287). This fundamentally altered the role of the police from enforcers of the law to direct rulers. While this was most marked in totalitarian states, apparent democracies did not escape the phenomenon. Stateless persons, wherever they were, became subject to the rule of police in place of the rule of law. Arendt argues forcefully for the link between this relationship and broader totalitarian tendencies: “the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police” (290). This tendency was only made more pronounced by the of the vulnerability of the second class citizens produced by the Minority Treaties and the insistence, written into the laws of nearly every state, that sovereignty carried with it the power to withdraw citizenship at any moment.
Thus, the police state turns the notion of the nation-state, with “genuine consent at its base” (126) and as “an instrument of law” (275) on its head. Its emergence was foreshadowed in Arendt’s discussion of imperialism where in capitalism’s need for expansion overwhelmed “[t]he inner contradiction between the nation’s body politic and conquest” (128). Imperial conquest would require the organs of the nation-state instead “to assimilate rather than integrate, to enforce consent rather than justice, that is to degenerate into tyranny” (125). Or: to act more like a police state than a nation-state.
Imperialism’s imperatives produced techniques of rule that would boomerang back into Europe and be most fully realized in the totalitarian police state. Race as a political principal – indispensible for the justification of imperial conquest – found its European reflection in the Pan-German and Pan-Slavic movements that Arendt credits with laying the foundations of Nazism and Bolshevism. Moreover, without the racial thinking that underlay the triumph of the nation over the state, the production of the stateless millions that thrust the police into the role of rulers would have been far less likely. Imperialism’s development of bureaucratic rule likewise can be seen reflected in the operation of the police state: “bureaucracy as a form of government [with] its inherent replacement of law with temporary and changing decrees” (216).
As noted above, the dominance of the police “achieved over the years in their unrestricted and arbitrary domination of stateless refugees” (289) had dramatic repercussions even in states that avoided becoming full-fledged police states. This, she says, explains the fact that the Nazis encountered “disgracefully little resistance from the police in the countries they occupied”.
Questions:
I have many, but my main one concerns how to understand and reconcile Arendt’s evaluation of the nation-state system. In chapter 9, she argues that the “right to have rights” should replace the prominence of the “Rights of Man”, the latter having proved itself entirely insufficient. The right to have rights seems here to be equated with the right to membership in a nation-state. However, she has also laid out a compelling argument that demonstrates the current nation-state system as perpetually creating more stateless persons. Do we simply regard these as two sides of the same coin? And where do we fit her argument that the undoing of the nation-state did not come from within the nation-state itself, but from the outside? Does her division of economic and political imperatives – whereby the former drove the development of imperialism to the detriment of the latter – hold up?
Ahn Lee
Ahn Lee
Geog 5100
Review: Imperialism
In Imperialism, Hannah Arendt explores the ironic, though seemingly inevitable, twists of history through which a state of exception was born out of the rights of man. Throughout Imperialism, Arendt traces back through the processes of capitalist expansion, continental imperialism and the pan-movements, which gave rise to weapons of race and nationalism as justifications for their deeds. One of the most disastrous consequences of this rise in nationalist sentiment in the pursuit of the nation-state, Arendt points out, was the creation of groups of people inherently dispossessed of both their homes and their governments. In other words, the establishment of the rights of man, through its inextricable tie to the notion of the nation-state, created a category of being (statelessness) for which rights cease to exist at all.
Arendt centers her explanation of this contemporary problem with birth of imperialism and what is essentially Harvey’s notion of the spatial fix. Indeed, she makes the connection explicitly, stating that, “this process of never-ending accumulation of power necessary for the protection of a never-ending accumulation of capital determined the ‘progressive’ ideology of the late nineteenth century and foreshadowed the rise of imperialism (143). In this sense, Africa represented a new space for the expansion investment of superfluous money and superfluous labor, allowing those who had historically operated outside the political realm (namely the bourgeoisie) to enter directly into it. Though racial thought existed prior to capitalist expansion, abroad it became central to the unification of imperial actors and justification for their actions. On the continent, similar processes of identification served the pan-movements, which in fact relied more heavily on racist ideologies and tribal nationalisms than did colonialism abroad.
The ultimate consequence of such reinvigorations of the nation-state or, in the case of continental imperialism, the preeminence of the nation itself over the state, manifested in the aftermath of the First World War. Unlike previous wars, those displaced from their homes were then also dispossessed of their governments. The nation as the basis of citizenship thus allowed for the establishment of permanent minorities within the reorganized states of post WWI Europe, codifying a new kind of marginalized person, entirely beyond the pale of the law (275). Such individuals, stripped of any particular rights of a citizen, including those maintained even for criminals, are relegated to life by “accident,” in which opinion and agency have no political outlet.
On Wednesday, October 17, 2012 11:39:07 AM UTC-6, GEOG 5100 wrote:
galenbmurton
Galen Murton
October 21, 2012
GEOG 5100
Arendt Response
Linking the psychological roots of European antisemitism with the depravity of totalitarianism and the abolition of the rights of man, Hannah Arendt’s “Imperialism” serves as the historiographical and ‘genealogical’ bridge for her grand triptych, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt demonstrates that Russian and German totalitarianism is a dubious legacy of European imperialism and illustrates how imperial technologies and mentalities converged on the Continent with devastating results in the wake of World War I. Specifically, the key elements of imperialism that gave rise to totalitarian systems include: surplus capital and bourgeois expansionism; bureaucracy (and military-police); and racism and mob mentalities (pan movements). The culmination of this convergence was nothing less than the decline of the European nation-state, the beginning of Continental statelessness, and the loss of the Rights of Man.
David Harvey’s theory on ‘spatial fixes’ and their utility for resolving capitalism’s crises resonates powerfully in “Imperialism.” Arendt herself argues that imperialism provided the ‘spatial fix’ that Western European capitalists required for their surplus capital in the latter half of the 19th century: “Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion” (126). This trend, of course, is one which continues today, as neo-imperialist designs are constantly at play in the globalized, liberalized marketplace, one where WTO ‘Most Favored Nation’ trading status is an ever coveted relation.
Vast bureaucratic systems – Foucauldian dispositifs – are a second legacy of imperialism that returned to the Continent for totalitarian use. The administrative networks developed to manage capital and subjects overseas – including both the earnest civil servant and the byzantine system within which he served some predetermined function – were easily transferred back to the ‘Motherland,’ and with heinous results. There, these technologies provided the means to control, marginalize, and oppress populations, whichever community had been identified as outcast, scapegoat, or sub-human (or just different and therefore ‘dangerous’): Jew; intellectual; homosexual; non-Aryan.
Just as xenophobia and racism gave the unmoored (and insecure) imperialist-capitalist abroad a (false) sense of superiority, so pan-movements developed in Europe as a form of national tribalism in response to the disorientation caused by Continental shifts from monarchy and empire to republic and state. Concepts of ‘divine origin,’ or what Arendt would call “Pseudomystical nonsense” (226), were coupled with nationalist sentiments to create powerful, and delusional, mob mentalities. Out of this came contempt first for the law, and then for the state, resulting in a volatile and centripetal force that brought the desire for homogeneity and national purity in opposition to centrifugal diversity and rule of the state.
Fueled by racism and bureaucracy, and dependent on an “enlarged tribal consciousness” (238), totalitarian systems arose in Germany and Russia and citizenship unto the state came to an end. If you weren’t a national, you weren’t a citizen; and if you weren’t a citizen, you were nothing (or, less than nothing). With no citizenship and no state, “The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable” (293). Enter the age of statelessness and humanlessness.
This harsh reality, with which Arendt concludes “Imperialism,” is a crisis that continues today. It begs the question if a loss of national rights is equivalent to a loss of human rights (or, are there no inalienable human rights to begin with, because it necessarily requires a state to uphold and enforce them for the citizen that it recognizes and calls its own). Arendt argues that such stateless persons are ultimately worse off than slaves, and that criminality is even a preferable state (with the rights of the courts and jail). However, Ranciere critiques her “archipolitical” position as one that does not sufficiently attend to the private life nor calculates the value of that realm. Following Arendt’s historiography and Ranciere’s contemporary dialogue, I am eager to read Agamben to more deeply engage with this humanitarian crisis of statelessness.
On Wednesday, October 17, 2012 11:39:07 AM UTC-6, GEOG 5100 wrote:
Caitlin Ryan
Imperialism, the second part of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, is a detailed account of the rise of totalitarianism and statelessness from their origins in the modern nation-state system.
Arendt begins with a discussion of the expansionist tendencies of late 19th century capitalism. Superfluous capital circulates with nowhere to go, requiring protection through a “never-ending accumulation of power” (143) that culminates in expansion beyond national borders, e.g. capitalism begets imperialism. Leaving aside most of the earlier chapters, which focus on the European colonial experience in South Africa and Egypt, in the 8th chapter Arendt draws a distinction between continental and overseas imperialism, a distinction that is one crux of her argument. While the overseas imperialism of Western Europe was the expression of those nations’ expansionist needs, Eastern Europe was unable to expand over physical space. Instead, continental imperialism expanded in the imaginary space of irridentist claims characteristic of “tribal nationalism”.
Both types of imperialism, Arendt tells us, were responses to the “narrowness” and “antiquated institutions” of the nation-state (225, 223). This failing system, not even half a century old, was torn apart, “atomized” by the class relations and multi-party system on the European continent. (England’s two-party system was much more successful in holding itself together.) Europe’s state system was crumbling because of inherent contradictions in the nation-state—contradictions stemming from the combination of nation and state into a single theoretical and material entity. “Nations entered the scene of history and were emancipated when peoples had acquired a consciousness of themselves as cultural and historical entities, and of their territory as a permanent home (229).” In contrast, states were much older, rooted in the enlightened despotism of Europe’s kings, monarchs and feudal lords. The state’s supreme function was the, “protection of all inhabitants in its territory no matter what their nationality (230),” and it was able to do so by being the guarantor of the law. In other words, the monarch was subservient to the law.
But a tragedy ensued when national consciousness and the nation-state emerged on the scene. With the abolition of the king, who was the guarantor of everyone’s rights within a bounded territory and who ensured the common interest, the state became an instrument of the nation rather than an instrument of the law. The simultaneous demands for universal rights and national sovereignty clashed. In other words, “the same nation was at once declared to be subject to laws, which supposedly would flow from the Rights of Man, and sovereign, that is, bound by no universal law and acknowledging nothing superior to itself. The practical outcome of this contradiction was that from then on human rights were protected and enforced only as national rights (emphasis added, 230).” This key result of the nation-state system is taken up in the final chapter.
Imperialism culminates with a powerful chapter on the Rights of Man in the modern state system. Universal rights could not be enforced so long as someone was not part of any nation-state. In fact, Europe’s stateless people challenged the very basis on which the nation-state system was built—legal equality (which replaced a guarantee of rights through social status and relations). Arendt is emphatic that people are not by nature or birth equal; difference is a plain fact of life. It is only through a legal guarantee from the state that equality can be achieved. Yet the rise of the nation-state system is coterminous with a dramatic increase in stateless peoples, and in the process of being forced to deal with stateless persons, the state descends into a totalitarian police state.
Arendt’s discussion opens up almost infinite possibilities for understanding the plight of IDPs today, especially regarding my work with IDPs in Georgia. One question that immediately comes to mind is what happens to our concept of “IDPs” when the roots of this term are recovered. Arendt tells us that the term “displaced person” replaced “stateless” and thereby erased the fact that these people’s plight was intimately tied to the global nation-state system. What happens, then, if we recover the original term in thinking about IDPs? “Internally displaced” then becomes “internally stateless,” or “stateless within a state.” The concealment of the issue is a curious fact of humanitarianism, and one that renders the humanitarian subject a problem that can be solved through the interventions of the international humanitarian apparatus. “IDP” conceals the contradiction of someone being a member of a nation-state, but simultaneously stateless within its territorial boundaries. In other words, the term conceals the culpability and responsibility of the nation and instead references an international order that is expected to be a substitute guarantor of rights. In Georgian language, however, the term devnilebi is more accurately translated as “persecuted person,” a term which highlights the violence, trauma and suffering associated with the moment of displacement rather than the indefinite, undetermined inbetween status that “IDP” evokes.