Hannah Arendt and

the Redemptive
Power of
Narrative* BY SEYLA BENHABIB

1 HE QUESTION of Jewish identity and the fate of the Jewish

people in the twentieth century were the undeniable condi-
tions which inspired a rather unpolitical student of the
Existenzphilosophie of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger to
become one of the most illuminating, and certainly one of the
most controversial political thinkers of our century.' At the
center of Hannah Arendt's political thought is a tension and a
dilemma, indicating that these two formative forces of her
spiritual-political identity, German Existenzphilosophie of the late
1920s and her political experiences as a Jewish-German
intellectual, were not always in harmony. When Arendt reflects
on the political realities of the twentieth century and on the
fate of the Jewish people in particular, her thinking is
decidedly modernist and politically universalist. She looks for
political structures that will solve the nineteenth-century
conflict between the nation and the state. Although the
modern states established after the American and French
revolutions made the recognition of the individual as a
rights-bearing person the basis of their legitimacy, nationalist
developments in Europe revealed that one's right to be a

' See Arendt's letter to Jaspers, dated Nov. 18, 1945, explaining rather coyly that she
had become something between einem Historiker und einem politischen Publizisten ("a
historian and a political publicist"): Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel (Munchen,
1985), p. 59.

SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Spring 1990)

 I

168 SOGIAL RESEARGH

j

person was safeguarded only insofar as one was a member of a

specific nation: \

From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of

inalienahle human rights was that it reckoned with an "abstract"
human being who seemed to exist nowhere. . . . The whole
question of human rights, therefore, was quickly and inextrica-
bly blended with the question of national emancipation; only the
emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one's own people,
seemed to be able to insure them.2 i

On these matters Arendt was a political modernist who

pleaded for the realization of this basic principle of political
modernity, that is, the recognition of the right to have rights
simply because one is a member of the human species.
Arendt's major theoretical work, The Human Condition,
however, is usually, and not altogether unjustifiably, treated as
an antimodernist pohtical text. The same historical process
which brought forth the modern constitutional state also
brought forth "society," that realm of social interaction which
interposed itself between the household on the one hand and
the political state on the other. "The !rise of the social," as
Arendt names this process, primarily' meant that economic
processes, which had hitherto been con!fined to the "shadowy
realm of the household," emancipated] themselves from this
domain and entered the public realrn.^ A century before,
Hegel had described this process as the development in the
midst of ethical life of a "system of needs" (System der
Bediirfnisse), of a domain of economic activity governed by
commodity exchange and the pursuit of leconomic self-interest.
The emergence of this sphere meant the disappearance of the
"universal," of the common concern foir the political associa-
tion, for the res publica, from the hearts and minds of

^ H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New Yorkj 1979), p. 291.

' H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1973), pp. 38-50.
" See G. W. F. Hegel, Rechtsphilosophie (1821), #189ff! Hegel, The Philosophy of Right,
tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1973), pp. 126ff.
 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 169

Arendt sees in this process the occluding of the political by the

social and the transformation of the public space of politics
into a pseudospace of social interaction, in which individuals
no longer "act" but "merely behave" as economic producers,
consumers, and urban city dwellers.
This relentlessly negative account of the "rise of the social" and
the decline of the public realm has been identified as the core of
Arendt's political "antimodernism."^ Indeed, at one level Arendt's
text is a panegyric to the agonistic political space of the Greek
polis. What disturbs the contemporary reader is perhaps less the
high-minded and highly idealized picture of Greek political life
which Arendt draws, but more her neglect of the question: tf the
agonistic political space of the polis was possible only because
large groups of human beings like women, slaves, children, la-
borers, noncitizen residents, and all non-Greeks were excluded
from it and made possible through their "labor" for the daily
necessities of life that "leisure for politics" which the few enjoyed,
then is the critique of the rise of the social, which emancipates
these groups from the "shadowy interior of the household," also
a critique of political universalism as such?^ ts the "recovery of
the public space" under conditions of modernity necessarily an
elitist and antidemocratic project which can hardly be reconciled
with the demand for universal political emancipation and the
universal extension of citizenship rights?^ To put it somewhat
polemically: Arendt's own version of the predicament of the "Ger-
man-Jewish Mt. Parnassus," first identified by Moritz Goldstein
for his generation of German-Jewish intellectuals, namely, that
they "had to administer the intellectual property of a people
which denies us the rights and the abilities to do so,"^ may be

^ Cf. Christopher Lasch, "Introduction" to Special Hannah Arendt issue of

Salmagundi 60 (1983): vff.; Jurgen Habermas, "Hannah Arendt's Communications
Concept of Power," Social Research 44 (1977): 3-24.
"Cf. Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 212-220.
' For a sympathetic critique of Arendt along these lines, cf. Hannah Pitkin, "Justice:
On Relating Public and Private," Potiticat Theory 9 (1981): 327-252.
^ Moritz Goldstein, "Deutsch-Juedischer Parnass," as quoted in Hannah Arendt,
"Walter Benjamin," in Men in Dark Times (New York, 1968), pp. 183-194.
170 SOCIAL RESEARCH

her continuing adulation of Greek spiijitual and political life,

following the tradition of the German humanistic intelligentsia
from Holderlin over Hegel to Heidegger. This "antimodernist"
current of her work contrasts sharply with her experiences as a
persecuted Jew in the twentieth centtiry and her decidedly
modernist analyses and reflections on the political and social
conflicts of the West since the Enlightenment.
In this essay I will explore Arendt's "antimodernist
modernism" by beginning with her analysis of totalitarianism
as a new and unprecedented form of |human domination in
history. Particularly those sympathetic students of her thought
who discovered Arendt's work during the civil rights, student,
and antiwar movements in the United States in the 1960s have
tended to reject her theory of totalitarianism as a paradigmatic
instance of cold-war social science.^ My thesis is that the
historiography of National Socialist totialitarianism presented
Arendt with extremely difficult methodological dilemmas with
normative dimensions, and that while, reflecting upon these
dilemmas Arendt developed a conception of political theory as
"storytelling." In light of this conception, her analysis of the
decline of the public space cannot be considered a nostalgic

^ With the revolutionary transformations which hav^ taken place in 1989 in Eastern
Europe and the collapse of Soviet-backed communist regimes in these societies,
historically the cold war has come to an end. In light ofithese transformations, theories
of totalitarianism dating from the 1950s, and in partictilar those like Hannah Arendt's
which were formulated primarily with the National Socialist experience in view, will
have to be reconsidered. In this essay I am assuming that Arendt's theory of
totalitarianism was most illuminating with respect to National Socialism but that it had
severe limitations in explaining "Soviet-style" totalitarianisms. Cf. note 23 below on this
point. Ironically, even if her empirical and historidal model of totalitarianism is
inadequate in explaining these societies, in her political and philosophical reflections
on Rosa Luxemburg, on the Kronstadt rebellion, and on the Hungarian revolt of
1956, Arendt noted certain features of "revolutionary experience" in these societies
which, if anything, have been proven completely right by recent developments in
Poland, Hungary, Czechoslavakia, East Germany, and ^Romania. In these societies the
people appear to have discovered the "lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition" by
creating spontaneously and by "action in concert," a power strong enough to topple
tyrants like Ceausescu, and lasting enough to create a "public space" of action and
deliberation, be it in the squares of Prague, the uniori rooms of Solidarnozs, or the
streets and churches of Dresden and Leipzig.
 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 171

Verfallsgeschichte (a history of decline). Rather, it must be

viewed as an "exercise" in thought, the chief task of which is to
dig under the rubble of history and to recover those "pearls" of
past experience, with their sedimented and hidden layers of
meaning, so as to cull from them a story that can orient the
mind in the future. Yet the tension between Arendt's
modernism and her antimodernism, which almost corresponds
to the Jewish and German legacies in her thought respectively,
is never resolved. It animates her vision of theory and politics
to the end.

Methodological Puzzles of Arendt's Analysis of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt did not engage in methodological reflec-

tions, and on those few occasions when she characterized her
own work she appeared to confuse matters further, as in the
case of her various prefaces to The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Here she distinguished between "comprehension" and "deduc-
ing the unprecedented from precedents,"'° and between
"totalitarianism" and "its elements and origins."" The "ori-
gins" of totalitarianism is actually a misnomer for this work,
which originally appeared in England under the title The
Burden of Our Times. In these prefaces Arendt makes clear that
she is not concerned to establish some inevitable continuity
between the past and the present of such a nature that one has
to view what happened as what had to happen. She objects to
this trap of historical understanding and maintains that the
future is radically underdetermined,'^ but that more signifi-

'" Arendt, 1950 preface to Origins of Totalitarianism, p. viii.

" Arendt, 1967 preface to Part One of Origins of Totalitarianism, p. xv.
'^ Arendt's claim that the future is radically underdetermined, and can never be
foretold on the basis of the past, is rooted in her ontological analysis of human
"spontaneity." This is the capacity to initiate the new and the unexpected. It
corresponds to the human fact of birth. Just as every birth signifies a new life story,
one which can never be foretold at birth, so the human capacity for action can always
initiate the new and the unexpected (see Human Condition, pp. 243ff.). This capacity
172 SOCIAL RESEARCH

candy to place the present in an inevitable line of continuity

with the past will lead to failure in appreciating the novelty of
what has taken place. T h e key terms which she uses to describe
her method in The Origins of Totalitarianism are "configuration"
and the "crystallization of elements." Arendt is searching for
the "elements" of totalitarianism; for those currents of
thought, political events and outlooks^ incidents and institu-
tions, which once the "imagination of history"'^ has gathered
them together in the present reveal an altogether different
meaning than what they stood for in the original context. All
historical writing is implicitly a history of the present, and it is
the particular constellation and crystallization of elements into
a whole at the present time that is the methodological guide to
their past meaniiig. In language that i resonates with Walter
Benjamin's introduction to The Origin of German Baroque
Drama,'"* Arendt explains: '
I
The book, therefore, does not really deal with the "origins" of
totalitarianism—as its title unfortunately claims—but gives a
historical account of the elements which crystallized into totalitari-
anism. This account is followed by an analysis of the elementary
structure of totalitarian movements and domination itself. The

for spontaneity is essential for political life, for the building of the city is due to such an
act of spontaneity, just as the continuity ofthe city is dependent upon the coordination
of human activities. Totalitarianism aims at destroying this capacity for a new
beginning, thus making political life impossible.
Arendt does not really explore how this thesis of the spontaneity of human action is
related to the perspective of the social sciences, which, by focusing on the enabling and
antecedent conditions of action, enhance our understanding of the course of action
while diminishing our sense for its spontaneity. Arenilt would appear to be claiming
that social science is only possible insofar as humans'do not "act" but "behave," i.e.,
insofar as they repeat socially established patterns. A more interesting account of the
impossibility of a social science of a nomological and predictive nature, which bases this
thesis on the narrative character of action rather than its spontaneity, is offered by
Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, 1981). I
" This is the phrase used by Merleau-Ponty in describing Max Weber's analysis of
the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism; cf. M., Merleau-Ponty, Les Aventures de
la dialedique (Paris, 1955), p. 29. [
'•* See Susan Buck Morss's exploration of the terms "configuration" and
"crystallization of elements" as methodological categories of Benjamin's work. The
Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York, 1977), pp. 96-111.
 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 173

elementary structure of totalitarianism is the hidden structure of

the book wbile its more apparent unity is provided by some
fundamental concepts which run like red threads through the
whole.'5

Indeed, from the standpoint of established disciplinary

methodologies, Arendt's work defies categorization while
violating a lot of rules. It is too systematically ambitious and
overinterpreted to be strictly a historical account; it is too
anecdotal, narrative, and ideographic to be considered social
science; and although it has the vivacity and the stylistic flair of
a work of political journalism, it is too philosophical to be
accessible to a broad public. The unity between the first part
on anti-Semitism, the second part on imperialism, and the last
part on totalitarianism is hard to discern. One of the first
reviewers of this work, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin,
maintained that the arrangement of the book was "roughly
chronological," and that is was "an attempt to make contempo-
rary phenomena intelligible by tracing their origin back to the
eighteenth century, thus establishing a time unit in which the
essence of totalitarianism unfolded to its fullness."'^ Voegelin's
interpretation of Arendt's method as one of traditional
Geschichtsphilosophie (philosophy of history) was undoubtedly
more indebted to the curious distortions caused by his own
hermeneutic lens; nonetheless, his question about the unity of

'^Arendt, "A Reply," Review of Politics 15 (January 1953): 78 to Eric Voegelin's

review of The Origins of Totalitarianism; my emphases. Cf. Benjamin's Addition to
Thesis 18 of the English edition of the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (which
Arendt edited in English): "Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal
connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is cause is for that
very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through the
events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this
as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary.
Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite
earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the "time fo the now"
which is shot through with chips of Messianic time" {Illuminations [New York, 1969]).
'^ See Eric Voegelin, review of The Origins of Totalitarianism, in Review of Politics 15
(January 1953): 69.
174 SOCIAL RESEARCH

the work, which prompted one of Arendt's infrequent

attempts at methodological self-clarification, is a justified one.
If one interprets the unity of the work as Arendt herself
intended it to be read —"the elementary structure of totalitari-
anism is the hidden structure of the book"—one must not
begin where the book itself begins,! with Enlightenment
attitudes toward human nature and the social condition of the
Hoffjuden, but with the chapter entitled "Total Domination" on
the extermination and concentration camps. In the 1951
edition, this was the final chapter preceding the inconclusive
"Concluding Remarks"; in the 1966 edition Arendt expanded
these into a chapter on "Ideology and Terror." The chapter on
"Total Domination" is significant not because it brings fresh
empirical data into the discussion—it does not—but because of
Arendt's interpretive thesis that the calmps are the "guiding
social ideal of total domination in general" and that "these
camps are the true central institution of totalitarian organiza-
tional power."'^ The camps reveal elementary truths about the
totalitarian exercise of power and about the structure of
totalitarian ideology. Paradoxically, their darkness casts light
upon those moral, political, and psychological assumptions of
the Judeo-Christian tradition which, after the establishment of
the camps, are irrevocably placed in doubt.
Arendt is concerned to stress that the camps served no
"utilitarian" purpose in totalitarian regimes and hence could
not be explained in functionalist ternis: they were needed
neither to intimidate and subdue the opposition nor to provide
for "cheap and disposable" labor.'^ T h e camps are the living
laboratories revealing that "everything is possible," that
humans can create and inhabit a world] where the distinction
between life and death, truth and falsehood, appearance and
reality, body and soul, and even victiin and murderer are
I

" Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 438. |

'" Ibid., p. 443. Cf. also Arendt's review called "The History of the Great Crime" of
Leon Poliakov, Breviary of Hate: The Third Reich and the\Jews, in Commentary, Mar. 13,
1952, p. 304.
 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 175

constantly blurred. This totally fabricated universe reflects the

ideological impetus of totahtarian regimes to create a universe
of meaning which is wholly self-consistent and also curiously
devoid of reality and immune to proof by it.
As the crystalline structure through whose blinding foci the
totalitarian form of domination is revealed, the camps show
first that the belief in the juridical personality of humans had
to be shattered; second that the moral personality in humans
had to be destroyed; and finally that the individuality of the
self had to be crushed. Arendt's analysis in the preceding
sections of The Origins of Totalitarianism is designed to show
how certain "elements" were present in the political and moral
culture of European humanity in the preceding two centuries
which, in retrospect and in retrospect alone, could be viewed as
harbingers of a new form of political domination in human
history.
T h e death of the juridical subject, of the person qua bearer of
rights, is the story Arendt tells in the section on imperialism,
when she traces the paradoxes of the nation-state and of the
universal belief in the rights of man. She recounts the collapse
of Western moral standards through the confrontation with
Africa, both in the case of the Boer colonization of South
Africa and in the case of the later "scramble for Africa." These
experiences seem to say that mere humanity as such is no
guarantee of one's juridical status as subject of rights. The
death of the juridical subject is signed and made historical
testament when the minority treaties at the end of World War
I create millions of homeless, nationless, and displaced
persons. The juridical subject becomes a "superfluous" human
being.
The murder of the moral person in humanity, the death of the
moral self, accompanies the death of the juridical subject. The
specifically modern form of anti-Semitic prejudice plays a
special role in this process. Such anti-Semitism ascribes moral
guilt and blame in a way which defies traditional moral
categories. The traditional anti-Judaism of Christian doctrine
176 SOCIAL RESEARCH

and practice had blamed the Jews for a| crime they committed
against the Son of God. For one's crimes one can atone by
conversion, by penance, by denunciation of one's brethren.
But modern anti-Semitism, which erupts when Jews en masse
begin to enter "society," without fully becoming its members, is
morally more perverse. Enlightened dpinion distances itself
from traditional conceptions of the mur|der of the Son of God;
however, Jewishness now becomes an uhdefinable "essence," a
condition which is other and undeniable at once; Jewishness
becomes a "vice." Whereas a crime is an act, a vice is a
condition, a spiritual disposition, a trait of character; its
transformation is much harder since it is less easily identifiable.
T h e figure of the Jew increasingly becomes associated with
forces and powers that bear little qr no relation to the
empirical individual. She or he thus ceases to be a morally
accountable self and becomes instead a specimen of the species
!
The third element in the crystalline structure of totalitarian-
ism, as revealed via a retrospective analysis of the death camps,
is the disappearance of individuality. The emergence of the
mob and the universalization of the condition of worldlessness
as a result of war, political upheavals, and mass unemployment

'^ In Arendt's account of modern anti-Semitism, the historical-institutional role of

the Jews in modern bourgeois society plays a major role. Nonetheless, it is important to
recall that the peculiarities of modern anti-Semitism cannot simply be explained by the
identification of Jews with the sphere of circulation and exchange. These equations are
only meaningful because "enlightened" society has gotten rid of the figure of the Jew
as the murderer of the Son of God and has replaced him/her by the image of the Jew
as the potential carrier of an unreformable, unredeemable "vice," namely, the "fact" of
Jewishness as such. Modern anti-Semitism focuses on Jewishness not as an act but as a
condition, as a form of identity. For this reason, it is more insidiotis; it requires that
this identity be changed or that the fact be eliminated. Undoubtedly, the strange
visibility of the Jews in modern European society —from the bankers who financed the
absolutist kings, to the assimilated bourgeoisie who used its connections established
under the Old Regime to continue commercial relations in the new capitalist economy,
to the Jews who, like money itself, seemed to be the only trtily supra-European
community, members of the national state yet supranational in their historical ties,
family relations, and languages —this visibility made them the object of human
resentments.
 REDEMPTIVE POWER OE NARRATIVE 177

play a special role in rendering "autonomy" a historical

chimera. For Arendt, the mob is a new historical actor on the
political scene, replacing Ie peuple. The mob is the precursor of
the lonely masses of totalitarianism. It is composed of the
refuse of bourgeois society, of those individuals who fall out of
the cracks of the social system, who belong to no social class in
particular, who can be identified with no specific trade or
work, who have been made superfluous by the economic and
social changes brought about by industrialization, urbaniza-
tion, and commercialization. They are worldless in the sense
that they have lost a stable space of reference, identity, and
expectation which they share with others. Not having a
particular social perspective from which to view the world, they
are particularly open to ideological manipulation: they can
believe anything and everything for they have no definite
perspective which is tied to having a certain place in the world.
Their condition is one of loneliness. The destruction of the
individual in concentration camps by methods of torture,
terror, and behavior manipulation only shows that a humanity
that has become worldless, homeless, and superfluous is also
wholly eliminable. Arendt sums up:

Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of

totalitarian government . . . is closely connected with uprooted-
ness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern
masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have
become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last
century and the break-down of political institutions and social
traditions in our own time. To be uprooted means to have no
place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be
superfluous means not to belong to the world at all.^o

Even if it is possible to interpret the unity of Arendt's work

in light of the principles of a "crystalline structure" or the
"elements of a configuration," as I have suggested above.

Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 475.

178 SOCIAL RESEARCH

questions remain: Why did Arendt resort to such an indirect

manner of exposition and to an even; obscurer method of
explanation in her account of totalitarianism? Was this yet
another example of the idiosyncratic and at times bewildering
nature of her political thought? Discussions of Arendt's
intentions and methodology in The Origins of Totalitarianism
have focused primarily on the following: the concept of
totalitarianism,21 the usefulness or obsolescence of this concept
for "comparative studies of fascism" arid for understanding
the inner workings of totalitarian political movements,22 the
questionableness of treating Nazism and Stalinism as totalitar-
ian regimes of the same kind, and the unevenness of her
explanations in the case of the two regimes.^s

^' See Manfred Funke, ed., Totalitarismus: Ein Studien-Reader zur Herrschaftsanalyse
modemer Diktaturen (Dusseldorf, 1978).
^^ See Hans Mommsen, "The Concept of Totalitarian Dictatorship versus the
Comparative Theory of Fascism," in Ernest A. Menze, ed.. Totalitarianism Reconsidered
(Port Washington, N.Y., 1981), pp. 146-167. i
^^ Karl Buckheim, "Totalitarismus: Zu Hannah Arendt's Buch 'Elemente und
Ursprunge Totaler Herrschaft'," in Adalbert Reif, ed., Hannah Arendt: Materialien zu
Ihrem Werk (Wien, 1979), pp. 21 Iff. This last point is worth considering in more detail.
Particularly in the wake of the cold war, as research into totalitarianism itself
underwent a change and became "operationalized" throiigh the work of Carl Friedrich
and Z. Brzezinski to fit positivist understandings of social science, the concept of
totalitarianism came to be almost synonymous with Soviet-type societies. Cf. Carl
Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 2d ed.
(Cambridge, 1965). See in particular the preface to | the first edition, pp. xi-xiii.
Interestingly, in recent years East European intellectuals and dissidents have also
revived this concept (Heller, Feher, Havel); see in particular F. Feher and A. Heller,
Eastern Left, Western Left: Totalitarianism, Ereedom and Dernocracy (Cambridge, 1986). Yet
whatever the merits of this concept to help us understand the latter type of societies,
there is little doubt that Arendt's historical account does not illuminate Stalinism and
Nazism to the same extent and in the same way. I
Whereas it could be argued that there is more unity between the experiences of
imperialism, anti-Semitism, and the subsequent triumph of National Socialism, these
two phenomena, namely, imperialism and modern anti-Semitism, do not play the same
formative-hermeneutic role in the emergence of Stalinism. Arendt treats nineteenth-
century Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism as species of "continental imperialisms," but
this discussion is far too cursory, and the consequences of the latter movement for
future developments in the Soviet Union remain unexplained. Arendt cannot really
prove that the dislocations caused by World War I and the Russian Revolution amount
to the creation of "mass" society, in the same way that the war experience, coupled
with inflation and depression, come to cause it in Cermany in particular. Ironically,
 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 179

These empirical and historical problems of Arendt's

interpretation of totalitarianism still cannot distract from the
work's greatness. Bernard Crick, for example, has argued that:

If the book does seem unbalanced in the space it give to Germany,

perhaps this is a fault, but to see it as a gross fault would be to
misconceive the whole purpose and strategy of the book. It
would be rather like, having been able to grasp that Toc-
queville's Democracy in America is really meant to be about the
whole of Western European civilizations, to then say that he
should have given equal and explicit space to Erance and to
England.24

I am personally less sanguine that this intelligent defense of

Arendt's strategy can suffice to rectify the problems of her
parallel treatments of National Socialism and Stalinism. What
is more important in Crick's observation, and what might shed
further light on the puzzles of Arendt's analysis of totalitarian-
ism, is the affinity between Tocqueville's Democracy in America
and Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America because he saw
tendencies in the hfe of this nation, such as the rise of
social equality, the tyranny of the majority, the spread of
individualism, which he thought were exemplary of the
developmental trends of modern societies at large. Neverthe-
less, the political institutions and trends of nineteenth-century
America were not only exemplary but also unique, or better

mass society and the abolition of traditional classes, rather than preceding Stalinist
rule, are consequences of it. It is Stalin's war against the peasantry that finally dissolves
the fabric of traditional society on the land. See Robert C. Tucker, "Between Lenin
and Stalin: A Cultural Analysis" in Praxis Intemational 6 (January 1987); 470ff., and
Alvin Gouldner, "Stalinism: A Study of Internal Colonialism," Telos, no. 34 (Winter
1977_78): 5-48. Also, the absence of a racially based anti-Semitism as the centerpiece
of Stalinist ideology (of course, anti-Semitism was used by Stalin as the trial of the
Jewish doctors reveals, but one cannot claim that it was the center of the Stalinist
Weltanschauung) throws even greater doubt as to the sense in which the developments
outlined by Arendt in the first two sections of The Origins of Totalitarianism can be
"crystalline elements" of Stalinism and National Socialism alike.
^'' Bernard Crick, "On Rereading the Origins of Totalitarianism," Social Research 44
(Spring 1977): 113-114.
180 SOCIAL RESEARCH
- - ^ _
still, one could capture what was most exemplary about
them—the tendency of modern societies toward "equality of
conditions" and social leveling—by focusing on their unique-
ness—namely, democracy not just as a political form of
government but as a social condition of equahty. Repeatedly
Tocqueville emphasized that "A new political science is needed
for a world itself quite new,"25 unless tile "mind of men" were
left "to wander aimlessly," unable to extract meaning from the
present. '
Whereas for Tocqueville a new reality required a new
science to comprehend it and extract' meaning from it, for
Arendt totalitarianism required not so rhuch a new science as a
new "narrative." Totalitarianism could not really be the object
of a new "science of politics," even if Arendt believed that
there could ever be such a thing, for totalitarianism signified
the end of politics as a human activity.^ requiring freedom of
speech and association, and the universalization of domination.
Under these conditions one required a, story that would once
again reorient the mind in its aimlessi wanderings. For only
such a reorientation could reclaim the past so as to build the
future. The theorist of totahtarianism .as the narrator of the
story of totalitarianism was engaged iri a moral and political
task. Put more sharply: some of the perplexities of Arendt's
treatment of totalitarianism derive from her profound sense
that what had happened in Western civilization with the
existence of Auschwitz was so radicall)| new and unthinkable
that to tell its story one had first to reflect upon the moral and
political dimensions of the historiography of totalitarianism.
Although the politicization of memory was part of the destruction
of tradition in the twentieth century that Arendt lamented, the
politics of memory and the morality of historiography were at the
center of her analysis of totalitarianisni no less than of her
reflections on Eichmann. '

^^ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, tr. George Lawrence

(New York, 1969), p. 12.
 REDEMPTIVE POWER OE NARRATIVE 181

The Politics of Memory and the Morality of Historiography

For Hannah Arendt, writing about totalitarianism, but in

particular about the extermination and concentration camps,
which she saw as the most unprecedented form of human
domination, presented profound historiographical dilemmas.
Let me summarize these around four headings: historicization
and salvation; the exercise of empathy, imagination and
historical judgment; the pitfalls of analogical thinking; and the
moral resonance of narrative language.

Historicization and Salvation. All "historiography is necessarily

salvation and frequently justification," notes Arendt.^^ Histori-
ography originates with the human desire to overcome
oblivion and nothingness; it is the attempt to save, in the face
of the fragility of human affairs and the inescapability of
death, something "which is even more than remembrance."
Proceeding from this Greek and even Homeric conception of
history, for Arendt the first dilemma posed by the historiogra-
phy of totalitarianism was the impulse to destroy rather than to
preserve. "Thus my first problem was how to write historically
about something—totalitarianism—which I did not want to
conserve but on the contrary felt engaged to destroy."^^
The very structure of traditional historical narration, couched
as it is in chronological sequence and the logic of precedence
and succession, serves to preserve what has happened by mak-
ing it seem inevitable, necessary, plausible, understandable, and
in short justifiable. Nothing seemed more abhorrent to Arendt
than the dictum that die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht
(world history is the court of the world). Her response to this
dilemma was the same as Walter Benjamin's: to break the chain
of narrative continuity, to shatter chronology as the natural
structure of narrative, to stress fragmentariness, historical dead

Arendt, "A Reply," p. 77.

Ibid., p. 79.
182 SOCIAL RESEARCH
j

ends, failures and ruptures. Not only does this method of frag-
mentary historiography do justice to the memory of the dead
by telling the story of history in terms of^ their failed hopes and
efforts, but it is also a way of preserving the past without being
enslaved by it, in particular without having one's moral and
political imagination stifled by argumerits of "historical neces-
sity." Arendt stumbled upon this historiographical dilemma when
reflecting upon totalitarianism, but there is little question that
this method of writing history in defiance of the traditional
canons of historical narrative guided her controversial account
of the action of the Judenrdte in the Eichmann book as well as
her account of the French and American revolutions in On
Revolution.

Empathy, Imagination, and Historical Jiidgment. Arendt main-

tained that there was a special relationship between historical
understanding (Verstehen) and what Kant; had called Einbildungs-
kraft (literally, the power of creating, producing images).^^ In
each case, one had to recreate from the evidence available a
new concept, a new narrative, a new perspective. For historical
understanding could never be the mere reproduction of the
standpoint of past historical actors; to pretend that historical
understanding amounted to complete empathy was an act of
bad faith which served to disguise tihe standpoint of the
narrator or the historian. In this context Arendt painstakingly
distinguished "judgment" from "empathy."^9 The historical
narrator no less than the moral actor had to engage in acts of
judgment, for Verstehen as well was a form of judging—
certainly not in the juridical or moralistic sense of the delivery
of a value perspective but in the sense of the recreation of

^* Ibid. Cf. also H. Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political
Significance," in Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York,
1961), p. 221. I
^^ Arendt, "Crisis in Culture," pp. 220-221; cf. also S. Benhabib, "Judgment and the
Moral Foundations of Politics in Hannah Arendt's Thought," Political Theory 16
(February 1988): 29-53. I
 REDEMPTIVE POWER OE NARRATIVE 183

shared reality from the standpoint of all involved and

concerned. Historical judgment revealed the perspectival
nature of the shared social world by representing its plurality
in narrative form. At stake in such representational narrative
was the ability "to take the standpoint of the other," and this
did not mean empathizing or even sympathizing with the
other, but rather the ability to recreate the world as it appeared
through the eyes of others.
In recreating this plural and perspectival quality of the
shared world, the historian could accomplish his or her task
only to the extent to which his or her faculty of imagination
was not limited to one of these viewpoints. Arendt here drew a
fine line between the practice of judgment by the historian on
tbe one hand and the moral dilemmas of objectivism and
relativism on the other. The commitment to represent in
narrative form every perspective, as the objectivist required, is
the equivalent of the God's-eye view of the universe. But
relativism is equally problematical, for the more pluralized and
fragmentary social and historical reality appears, the more can
one gain the conviction that there is no shared right or wrong
and that all our moral concepts are smoke screens for our
perspectives and preferences—a consequence which Nietzsche,
by whose perspectivalist epistemology Arendt was certainly
inspired, did not hesitate to draw.^o
As in moral philosophy so in historiography as well, Arendt
refused to deal with these problems via foundationalist
positions and insisted that the cultivation of historical and
moral judgment amounted to the ability to draw the "fine
distinctions" among the phenomena and to represent the
plural nature of the shared human world by recreating the

'" When Arendt discusses Nietzsche extensively in The Life ofthe Mind, vol. 2, Willing
(New York, 1978), pp. 158-172, she treats him first and foremost as a philosopher of
the will and not as an epistemologist. Nonetheless, Nietzsche's epistemic influence on
Arendt is hard to miss. On Nietzsche's perspectivalism, cf. A. Nehamas, Life as
Literature (Cambridge, 1985).
184 SOCIAL RESEARCH
I
I

standpoint of others.^^ According to' some commentators,

Arendt herself excelled in this art of representation to such an
extent that she was more successful in capturing the mind of
the anti-Semite than of the Jew, of the v^hite Boer settlers than
of African natives.^2

The Pitfalls of Analogical Thinking. One Of Arendt's chief quar-

rels with the social sciences of her day was that the dominant
positivist paradigm led to ahistorical mcides of thinking and to
hasty enthusiasm for analogies and generalizations. Since the
method of science was considered the inductive one of assem-
bling ever more instances of the same law, in social science as
well one searched for the generalizable and cross-culturally "sim-
ilar," thereby ending more often than not in banal generaliza-
tions.^s For Arendt, the problem with this approach was not
just methodological but also moral and political. This search for
nomological generalizations dulled one's appreciation for what
was new and unprecedented, and thus ifailed to confront one
with the task of thinking morally anew; in the face of the un-
precedented. Politically, this method als6 stultified one's capac-
ity for resistance by making it seem that nothing was new and
that everything had always already been.^*
Following this concern with the uHique rather than the
general, the unprecedented rather than the commonplace, in
the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt
employed the category of "radical evil'' to describe what had

"' I have dealt with some of the dilemmas of Arendt's moral theory in my article
"Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics in Hinnah Arendt's Thought." The
obligation to take the standpoint of the other is part of a universalistic-egalitarian
morality which needs a stronger justification in moral philosophy than Arendt was
willing to offer. \
'^ See George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (New Jersey, 1983), pp.
61-63.
^' In light of post-Kuhnian developments in the social sciences in particular, some of
Arendt's observations on the topic of generalization have proved remarkably
prescient; cf., on the general topic, R. J. Bernstein, ^The Restructuring of Social and
Political Theory (Philadelphia, 1976).
="" Arendt, "A Reply," p. 83. '
 REDEMPTIVE POWER OE NARRATIVE 185

happened in the death camps. Subsequently, and largely as a

result of her analysis of Eichmann, she withdrew from this
position to the term "banality of evil." Her biographer,
Elisabeth Young-Breuhl, recounts that this change was a cura
posterior for Arendt. ^^ This cure meant, however, neither
forgiveness nor forgetting. (Arendt always insisted that
Eichmann had to be condemned for his deeds. The question
was on what principles and according to which justification?)^^
By this much maligned and much misunderstood phrase
Arendt raised a question which has remained unanswered till
today: namely, how "ordinary," dull, everyday human beings,
who are neither particularly evil, not particularly corrupt or
depraved, could be implicated in and acquiesce to the
commitment of such unprecedented atrocities?^'' A better
phrase than the "banality of evil" might have been the
"routinization of evil" or its Alltdglichung (everydayness).
Analogical thinking governs the logic of the everyday, where
we orient ourselves by expected and established patterns and
rules. For this reason, analogical thinking routinizes, normal-
izes, and renders familiar the unfamiliar. In doing so, it can
reinforce the "normal" and the "everyday" quality of the
unacceptable, of the unprecedented and the outrageous.

The Moral Resonance of Narrative Language. Arendt's first critics

had praised her work as passionate and had denounced it as
sentimental.3^ Arendt's response to this was that she had
parted quite consciously "with the tradition of sine ira et studio"
in her analysis of totalitarianism, for not to express moral
indignation or not to seek to arouse it in one's readers would

'^ E. Young-Breuhl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New York, 1982), pp. 331,
367.
'^ See the exchange with Karl Jaspers on this point, in Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers:
Briefwechsel, pp. 457ff.
" See Hans Mommsen, "Vorwort," in Eichmann in Jerusalem: Ein Bericht von der
Banalitdt des Bosen (Munchen, 1986), pp. xiv-xviii.
'* Cf. E. Voegelin, review of The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 71.
 186 SOCIAL RESEARCH

have been equivalent to moral complicity. "To describe the

concentration camps sine ira is not to; be 'objective,' but to
condone them; and such condoning cannot be changed by a
condemnation which the author may feel duty bound to add
but which remains unrelated to the description itself. "39 The
moral resonance of one's language does not primarily reside in
the explicit value judgments which an author may pass on the
subject matter; rather such resonance rriust be an aspect of the
narrative itself. The language of narration must match the
moral quahty of the narrated object. O^ course, such ability to
narrate makes the theorist into a storyteller, and it is not the
gift of every theorist to find the language of the true
storyteller. '

The Theorist as Storyteller

It may seem less perplexing now that in reflecting about

what she was doing, "storytelling" is on6 of the most frequent
answers Arendt gives.4° The vocation pf the theorist as the
storyteller is the unifying thread of Arendt's political and
philosophical analyses from the origins of totalitarianism to
her reflections on the French and the American revolutions to
her theory of the public space and to her final words to the
first volume of The Life of the Mind on Thinking,

I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now
have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy
with all its categories, as we have knciwn them from their
beginning in Greece until today. Such dismantling is possible
only on the assumption that the thread of tradition is broken
I
^^ Arendt, "A Reply," p. 79. j
•*" See Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 22; Between Past^and Future, p. 14. There is an
excellent essay by David Luban, which is one of the few discussions in the literature
dealing with Hannah Arendt's methodology of storytelling; cf. D. Luban, "Explaining
Dark Times: Hannah Arendt's Theory of Theory," Social Research 5Q (1983); 215-247;
see also E. Young-Bruehl, "Hannah Arendt als Geschichtenerzaehlerin," in Hannah
Arendt: Materialien zu Ihrem Werk (Munchen, 1979), pp. 319-327.
 REDEMPTIVE POWER OE NARRATIVE 187

and we shall not be ahle to renew it. Historically speaking, what

actually has broken down is the Roman trinity that for
thousands of years united religion, authority, and tradition. The
loss of this trinity does not destroy the past. . . .
What has been lost is the continuity of the past. . . . What you
then are left with is still the past, but defragmented past, which has
lost its certainty of evaluation.*'

The past that claims authority on us because it is the way

things were done is "tradition."''^ The events of the twentieth
century, however, have created a gap between past and future
of such a magnitude that the past, while still present, is
fragmented and can no longer be told as a unified narrative.
Under these conditions, we must rethink the gap between past
and future anew for each generation, we must develop our
own heuristic principles, we "must discover and ploddingly
pave anew the path of thought. ""^^
This recovery of the past must proceed and cannot but
proceed outside the framework of established tradition, for
tradition no longer reveals the meaning of the past. Yet to be
without a sense of the past is to lose one's self, one's identity,
for who we are is revealed in the narratives we tell of ourselves
and of our world shared with others. Even when tradition has
crumbled, narrativity is constitutive of identity. Actions, unlike
things and natural objects, only live in the narratives of those
who perform them and the narratives of those who under-
stand, interpret, and recall them. This narrative structure of
action also determines the identity of the self. The human self,
as opposed to things and objects, cannot be identified in terms
of what it is, but only by who one is. The self is the protagonist
of a story we tell, but not necessarily its author or producer.*'*
The narrative structure of action and of human identity means
that the continuing retelling of the past, its continued

^' Arendt, The Life ofthe Mind, vol. 1, Thinking (New York, 1978), p. 212.
••^ See her essays, "What Is Authority?" and "What Is Freedom," in Between Past and
Future.
'''Arendt, Thinking, p. 210.
'*' Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 181ff.
188 SOCIAL RESEARCH

reintegration into the story of the present, its reevaluation,

reassessment, and reconfiguration are bntological conditions
of the kinds of beings we are. If Dasein is in time, narrative is
the modality through which time is experienced. Even when
the thread of tradition is broken, everi when the past is no
longer authoritative simply because it has been, it lives within
us and we cannot avoid placing ourselves in relation to it. Who
we are at any point is defined by the narrative uniting past and
present. i
Narrative then, or, in Arendt's word, storytelling, is a
fundamental human activity. There is then a continuum
between the attempt of the theorist to uriderstand the past and
the need of the acting person to interpret the past as part of a
coherent and continuing life story. But what guides the activity
of the storyteller when tradition has ceased to orient our sense
of the past? What structures narrative modes when collective
forms of memory have broken down, have been obliterated, or
have been manipulated beyond recognidon? To elucidate the
activity of the storyteller, Arendt resorts 'to "a few lines" which,
according to her, say "better and more densely than I could"
what one does in the attempt to cull meaning of a fragmented
past. She quotes Shakespeare: '

Full fathom five thy father lies,

Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.**
After the storm, the theorist as storyteller is like the pearl
diver, who converts the memory of the; dead into something
"rich and strange." Arendt first citds this passage from
Shakespeare in her 1968 essay on Walter Benjamin:

Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of
1
*^ Arendt, Thinking, p. 212, quoting The Tempest, act I, scene 2.
 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 189

authority which occurred in his life-time were irreparable, and

he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with
the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the
transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and
that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to
settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of "peace
of mind," the mindless peace of complacency.''^

In using the same Unes from Shakespeare to characterize

Benjamin's efforts and her own exercises in remembrance,
Arendt revealed the significant influence Benjamin's "Theses
on the Philosophy of History" exercised on her views of
historical narrative.'*'' Of course, Arendt herself did not
replace the transmissibility of the past by its citability, but
quotations for her, just as for Benjamin, became interesting
fragments, archaeological curiosities whose meaning lay "full
fathom five." In order to find those "pearls that were his eyes,"
one had to dive deep and excavate the original meaning of the
phenomena which lay covered by sedimented layers of
historical interpretation. Once one brought these pearls to the
surface, one could unsettle the present and deprive it of its
"peace of mind."
In Arendt's Benjamin essay the figure of the pearl diver is
accompanied by that of the collector:

The figure of the collector, as old-fashioned as that of the

flaneur, could assume such eminently modern features in
Benjamin because history itself—that is the break in tradition
which took place at the beginning of this century—had already
relieved him of this task of destruction and he only needed to
bend down, as it were, to select his precious fragments from the
pile of debris."*®

Arendt was well aware that by arguing that the activity of

••^ Arendt, "Walter Benjamin," p. 193.

•" I would like to thank Maurizio P. D'Entreves for first drawing my attention to this
link between Arendt and Benjamin in the first chapter of his doctoral dissertation,
"The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt: A Reconstruction and Critical
Evaluation," Boston University, 1989.
"* Arendt, "Walter Benjamin," p. 200.
190 SOCIAL RESEARCH

storyteller was like that of the pearl diver and of the collector,
she was consciously leaving out poetry; Although she praises
Benjamin for being ultimately a poet, between the poet who
sings to eternalize the city and to saye from oblivion those
deeds of human greatness and the modbrn storyteller who has
no identifiable human city, there is no inore kinship. The loss
of the Vaterstadt, as Brecht knew, was not the loss of a place or
an environment;'*^ the city meant home, tradition, and
generationally transmitted remembrance. If the loss of the city
dried up the sources of poetry, the storyteller, like the pearl
diver and the collector, but unhke the ppet, was still free to dig
under the rubble of history, and to bring to the surface
whatever pearls could be recovered from the debris.

The Unresolved Tension: "Agonistic" vs. "Discursive" Public Space

If one reads Arendt's account of the f'rise of the social" and

the decline of public space in the context of her historiograph-
ical considerations, we can no longer Jview her account as a
nostalgic Verfallsgechichte but must understand it as the attempt
to think through the human history sedimented in layers of
language and concepts. In this proceclure, we identify those
moments of rupture, displacement, and dislocation in history.
At such moments language is the witness to the more
profound transformations taking place; in human life. Such a
Begriffsgeschichte, a history of concepts, is an act of remember-
ing, in the sense of a creative act of rethinking which sets free
the lost potentials of the past. "The his,tory of revolutions . . .
could be told in a parable form as the tale of an age-old

''^ In her essay on Brecht, Arendt quotes "Of Poor B.B.": "We have sat, an easy
generation/In houses held to be indestructable./Thus we built those tall boxes on
the/island of Manhattan/ And those thin aerials that amuse the/Atlantic swell./Of those
cities will remain what passed/through them, the wind!/The house makes glad the
eater: he/clears it out./We know that we are only tenants, provisional ones/And after us
will come: nothing worth talking/about." See also B. Brecht, "Die Rlickkehr."
 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 191

treasure which, under the most varied circumstances, appears

abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears again, under different
mysterious conditions, as though it were a fata morgana."^^
Arendt's thought, however, is not free from aspects of an
Ursprungsphilosophie which posits an original state or temporal
point as the privileged one. As opposed to rupture, displace-
ment, and dislocation, this view emphasizes the continuity
between origin and the present and seeks to uncover at the
privileged origin the lost and concealed essence of the
phenomena. I would suggest that there are two strains in
Arendt's thought, one corresponding to the method of
fragmentary historiography and inspired by Walter Benjamin;
the other, inspired by the phenomenology of Husserl and
Heidegger, and according to which memory is viewed as the
mimetic recollection of the lost origins of phenomena as
contained in some fundamental human experience. Along this
second line of interpretation, reminders abound in The Human
Condition concerning "the original meaning of politics" or the
lost distinction between the "private" and the "public."^i
In this essay I have argued that in the final analysis it is the
Benjaminesque method of fragmentary historiography that
governs Arendt's activity as a political theorist. But the legacy
of Ursprungsphilosophie is never quite lost. A discussion of two
of her major theoretical concepts may illustrate this deep and
unresolved tension in her thought.
Arendt believed that Greek philosophy, more often than not,
distorted the experience of Greek politics. Plato, in particular,
with his exemplary hostility toward the fragility, indeterminacy,
and unpredictability of human affairs, introduced concepts from
the realm oi poiesis (making) to think about politics. A techne, a
craft, has rules that can be learned and taught; furthermore, it
is reasonable that those inexperienced in a particular techne
submit to the authority of those with knowledge and experi-

Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 5.

Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 23, 28, 38ff.
192 SOCIAL RESEARCiH

ence. As is well known, Socrates uses this techne analogy in the

Republic to justify the distinction between the various classes.
For Arendt, what is ominous for politics in this Platonic argu-
ment is the claim that political matters can be so thought of that
those who know dictate and those who i do not know obey the
rules. Arendt stumbles upon the moral problem implied by
statements such as "but we were just ol|)edient servants of the
higher-ups" in her reflections on personal responsibility under
dictatorship and the issue of collective guilt. Her thoughts on
this latter question are then inextricably linked with her Begriffs-
geschichte of concepts like politics, techne^ and rule:

The argument is always the same: Every lorganization demands

obedience to superiors as well as obedience to the laws of the
land. Obedience is a virtue; without it no body politic and no
other organization could survive. . . . What is wrong here is the
word "obedience." Only a child obeys; if an adult "obeys" he
actually supports the organization or the authority of the law
that claims "obedience."^2 i
t

Arendt then analyzes why obedience seems like such a natural

virtue in politics in light of the Platonic legacy that teaches that
the body politic consists of the rulers and the ruled. These
notions, however, have

supplanted earlier and, I think, more accurate^ notions of the relations

between men in the sphere of concerted action. These earlier
notions said that every action, accomplished by a plurality of
men, can be divided into two stages—the beginning, which is
initiated by a "leader," and the accomplishment, in which many
join in order to see through what then becomes a common en-
terprise.^^ I
I
As this passage indicates, again the langtlage of Ursprungsphilos-
ophie—the "earlier notions" which are also the more correct
ones—erupts in the midst of Arendt's search for the fractured

^^ H. Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," The Listener 72 (August

1964): 200. '
^^ Ibid.; my emphases.
 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 193

and forgotten meanings of terms—politics as the experience of

coordinated action or of "action in concert."
The second example that would illustrate Arendt's equivo-
cation between fragmentary history and Ursprungsphilosophie is
the very concept of public space. This topographical figure of
speech is suggested at the end of The Origins of Totalitarianism to
compare various forms of political rule. Constitutional govern-
ment is likened to moving within a space where the law is like
the hedges erected between the buildings and one orients one-
self upon known territory; tyranny is like a desert. Under con-
ditions of tyranny one moves in an unknown, vast and open
space, where the will of the tyrant occasionally befalls one like
the sandstorm overtaking the desert traveler. Totalitarianism
has no spatial topology: it is hke an iron band, compressing
people increasingly together until they are formed into one.^*
Indeed, if one reads Arendt's concept of the public space in
the context of her theory of totalitarianism, the word acquires a
rather different focus than what appears to be more dominant in
the context of The Human Condition. I would like to use the terms
"agonistic" versus "discursive" space to capture this contrast. Ac-
cording to the first reading, the public realm represents that
space of appearance in which moral and political qualities are
revealed, displayed, shared with others. This is a competitive
space, in which one competes for recognition, precedence, and
acclaim; ultimately it is the space in which one seeks a guarantee
against the futility and the passage of all things human: "For the
polis was for the Greeks, as the res publica was for the Romans,
first of all their guarantee against the futility of individual life,
the space protected against this futility and reserved for the rel-
ative permanence, if not immortality, of mortals.''^^
By contrast, the discursive view of public space suggests that
such a space emerges whenever and wherever men^^ act

^'' Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 466.

^^ Arendt, Human Condition, p. 56.
^^ Hannah Arendt's persistent denial of the "women's issue," and her refusal to link
together the exclusion of women from politics and this agonistic and predominantly
194 SOCIAL RESEARCH

together in concert. Public space is the space "where freedom

can appear."^^ It is a space not necessarily in any topographical
or institutional sense: a town hall or a city square where people
do not "act in concert" is not a public space; likewise, a private
dining room in which people gather to hear a samizdat or in
which dissidents meet with foreigners can become a public
space; a field or a forest can also become public spaces if they
are the object and the location of an "action in concert." What
constitutes these diverse topographies into public spaces is the
presence of common action coordinated through speech and
persuasion. Violence can occur in private and in public, but its
language is essentially private because it is the language of
pain. Force, like violence, can be located in both realms. In a
way, it has no language, and nature reinains its quintessential
source. It moves without having to persiiade or to hurt. Power,
however, is the only force that emanates from action, and it
comes from the mutual action of a group of human beings:
once in action, one can make things happen, thus becoming a
source of "force."
The distinction between the agonistic and discursive public
spaces is to some extent an artificial distinction, for in every
public space something of who one is, one's strengths and
weaknesses, is revealed; and even a dramaturgical space exists
because people care to talk and act together. Nonetheless, this
distinction corresponds to the tension between the Greek and
the modern experiences of politics. For the moderns, the
public space is essentially porous: the distinction between the
social and the political makes no sensei in the modern world,
not because all politics has become administration and because
the economy has become the quintessential public in modern

male conception of public space, is astounding. The "absence" of women as collective

political actors in Arendt's theory—individuals like Rosa Luxemburg are present—is a
difficult question, but to begin thinking about this means first challenging the
private-public split in her thought as this corresponds to the traditional separation of
spheres between the sexes (men = public life; womeni = private sphere).
^' Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 4. \
 REDEMPTIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE 195
I
societies, but primarily because the struggle to make something
public is a struggle for justice. With the entry of every new
group into the public space of politics after the French and
American revolutions, the scope of the public gets extended.
The emancipation of workers made property relations into a
political issue, the emancipation of wpmen has meant that the
family and the so-called private sphere become political issues;
the attainment of rights by nonvi^hite and non-Christian
peoples has meant that cultural questions of collective self- and
other-representations have become "public" issues. Not only is
it the "lost treasure" of revolutions that eventually all can
partake in them, but equally, when freedom emerges from
action in concert, there can be no agenda to predefine the topic
of public conversation. The very clefinition of this agenda
entails a struggle for justice and for f^reedom.
Perhaps the episode which best illustrates this blind spot in
Hannah Arendt's thought is that ofj school desegregation in
Little Rock, Arkansas. Arendt interpreted the demands of the
black parents, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, to have
their children admitted into previously all-white schools, as
being like the desire of the social payvenu to gain recognition
in a society that did not care to admit him. This time around
Arendt failed to make the "fine distinction" and confused an
issue of public justice—equality of educational access—with an
issue of social preference—who my friends are or whom I
invite to dinner. It is to her credit,] however, that after the
intervention of the black novelist Ralph Ellison, she had the
grace to reverse her position.^^ '
There is little question that Arendt[s thinking on this matter
was clouded less by her polis-inspired vision of public space
than by her historical memory of Jewish emancipation and the
paradoxes it entailed, creating parvenus, pariahs, or total social

^^ See H. Arendt, "Reflections on Little Rock," Dissent 6 (Winter 1959): 45-56; Ralph
Ellison in R.P. Warren, ed., Who Speaks for the Negro^f (New York, 1965), pp. 342-344;
and Arendt to Ralph Ellison in a letter of July 29, 1965, cited in Young-Breuhl,
Hannah Arendt, p. 316.
196 SOCIAL RESEARCH

conformists. Undoubtedly, though, the tensions between

Arendt, the modernist, the storyteller of revolutions, and the
sad witness of totalitarianism; Arendt, the brilliant student of
Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, the philosopher of the
polis and of its lost glory; Arendt, the German-Jew who did not
cease defending the Muttersprache and the legacy of Goethe,
Kant, and Schiller to those Anglo-American liberals who saw in
National Socialism the bankruptcy of classical German culture,
these tensions remain. And it is these tensions which inspire
the method of political theory as storytelling, a form of
storytelling which, in Arendt's hands, is transformed into a
redemptive narrative, redeeming the memory of the dead, the
defeated and the vanquished by making present to us once
more their failed hopes, their untrodden paths, and unful-
filled dreams.

* This article is a revised and shortened version of the German original, which
appeared as "Hannah Arendt und die erloesende Kraft des Erzaehlens," in Dan Diner,
ed., Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1988), pp.
150-175. I would like to thank Jerome Kohn for his encouragement and suggestions
in preparing this version.