It’s Political Power, Stupid

04-06-2025

Roger Berkowitz

Today’s populist revolts against globalization are not only economic in nature—they are fundamentally political. As Hannah Arendt warned, the elevation of economics over politics, especially under imperialism and globalization, leads to the collapse of political judgment and self-determination. Her historical analysis now reads like prophecy: we are witnessing the return of politics in its most raw and terrifying form.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that one core element of totalitarianism is the subordination of politics to economics that accompanies imperialism. Economics seeks endless growth. Politics imposes limits. Where economics expands, politics defines. And when one replaces the other, the result is not progress—it is a crisis. 

Politics, for Arendt, is necessarily limited. A polity is geographically delineated by borders that include a people that can determine how it wants to govern itself. We can define ourselves politically according to our shared ethical and core beliefs. As the human activity of deliberating collectively within a shared world, politics defines us. It is how we bind and define ourselves by activating our values. A polity can decide how high to tax its citizens, how to educate its children, how to care for its elderly, whether to subsidize its businesses, and who can be citizens. It can also decide to implement tariffs to protect domestic industries. The spirit and ethics of a people set limits to how high taxes can go, how we will care for the poor, and how we treat our neighbors. Within a politically defined border, a polity can define itself ethically, economically, and politically. Politics is limited in the sense that it is decided upon by geographically and politically defined people. 

Against politics, which is always limited by the will and spirit of its people, economics is governed by a law of unlimited growth. In any economy, gross domestic product can grow infinitely, especially if the extent of the territory, the number of citizens, and the access to resources are enlarged. In an international economic system, any attempt by one polity to impose ethical limits can be undermined by another polity that offers lower taxes, lower costs, and less regulation. In economics, the effort of a single polity to politically limit its growth will lead to a loss of economic and political power. While politics is grounded in a specific territory and limited by the ethical ideals of the people, economies can grow seemingly without limit. Economics allows for endless growth against politics, which imposes limits. 

Arendt saw one core root of imperialism to be the transfer of the economic principle of unlimited growth to politics. Imperialism, she argues, has its economic roots in the “realm of business speculation”—specifically the bursting of an investment bubble in the 1870s. As national entrepreneurs sought new markets, they enlisted state support to send armies into colonies to guarantee economic expansion. “Expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics is the central idea of imperialism.” The rise of imperialism means that politics becomes subservient to the principle of economic growth.

Arendt is rarely cited as an authority on economic affairs. Still, in 2010 I edited a book that brought Arendt's thinking to bear on The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis.  I argued there that Arendt offered an original and thoughtful roadmap to think through the 2009 financial crisis that led, in many ways, to our current political moment. It was the financial crisis that woke many of the populist movements around the world, including the Tea Party movement in the USA, which later became the precursor to the MAGA movement. 
 
At the core of these populist rebellions was a belief that globalization had failed, that it served the interests of the wealthy and financial classes, and that it promoted deindustrialization and free immigration to the detriment of the working classes. Globalization also meant the loss of national identity that gave meaning and pride to many people in the lower and middle classes. In short, the victory of economic growth principles over the ability of nation-states to politically determine their fates came to be seen by many in the working classes as a disaster. 

Arendt saw the rise of imperialism and the subsumption of politics by economics as an anti-political principle. In her telling, the seeds of the financial crisis are not in economics itself but the importation of economics into politics; the financial crisis and the rebellion against globalization represent an anger at the anti-political embrace of infinite growth at the expense of political self-determination. The problem comes from the adoption of an economic principle in the realm of politics, where it does not belong.

Arendt fears the confusion of economics and politics and especially the elevation of economics over politics. Since politics demands the imposition of limits and “stabilizing forces that stand in the way of constant transformation and expansion,” she argues that imperialist expansion brought with it a grave and destabilizing threat to the political order. When politics, under the sway of economic imperatives, is forced to expand on the world stage, political leaders must offer ideologies that give meaning to an ever-larger, undefined, disconnected, and homeless mass—a population that replaces a citizenry. Under the economic imperatives of growth, politics becomes world politics.

When I wrote my introduction to The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis over a decade ago, I asked the question, "whether politics can return to a political activity that sets moral, ethical, and economic limits on human action." It was, at the time, a rhetorical question. The global system of finance capital and economic dominance over politics seemed immovable. As I wrote then,

The question of whether our globalized world that sets economic growth over political limits as a non-political first principle of politics can be undone is no longer rhetorical. President Donald Trump has this week begun an experiment to see if globalization—the post-World War II variation on 19th-century imperialism—can be undone. The President's radical and massive tariffs announced last week are, as Sam Fleming and Delphine Strauss write, a bold or foolhardy effort to reverse the course of political and economic history. Quite simply, President Trump seems to want to restore, at least in part, a pre-globalized and pre-imperialist political world in which politics is prioritized over economics. Fleming and Strauss write: 
 Stephan Miran published a paper that seems to best explain the desires and goals of President Trump's tariff policy. He writes, The problem, Miran argues, is not simply that the globalized economy has hollowed out the US industrial base. It is also that the premise of globalization depends upon trust amongst states so that global supply chains could be counted upon. But with the rise of China and the alliance between China and Russia and the consummate loss of the United States' ability to guarantee the openness of the global economy, the specter of politics and great power competition has returned. With the end of the thesis of the "end of history," the liberal world order is crumbling. Trump has simply hastened its undoing. Economists, Miran writes, Trump's tariff cheerleaders like Batya Ungar Sargon celebrate that Trump is willing to use power politics to achieve America's political goals. She writes:Arendt warned that when economics overwhelms politics, we lose more than policy autonomy—we lose our capacity for judgment, for collective action, for freedom itself. She understood much of the history of political theory as the effort to replace politics with rule by experts. Plato feared the hoi polloi that killed Socrates, so he imagined a philosopher king who would rule according to the truth of the ideas. The modern version of Plato’s philosopher king is rule by technocratic experts. The liberal international system of free trade is an expert-led and anti-political world order that aims at global efficiency even if it means restricting national political power. Each state gives up its rights to govern itself fully in return for the benefits of global economic cooperation and growth. Today’s populist uprisings may be crude, even dangerous, but they also express a yearning to reclaim the political—to reassert the right of a people to decide their fate—even if such a politics is violent and disorderly. One way to understand Donald Trump’s fundamental attack on the liberal world order, as well as on the United States civil service, is that it is a return of the very kind of disorderly politics long suppressed by expert rule.

The return of politics, however, is not inherently redemptive. There is a reason to fear politics, especially when it takes populist or tyrannical forms. Politics can forge solidarity or stoke resentment; it can build shared worlds or violently implement the will of one man. What matters now is whether we can remember what politics is for—neither endless expansion or efficiency, nor simply the resentment-fueled pursuit of naked self-interest, but the shared project of living together within limits. If we fail to recover that ethical and bounded idea of politics, we risk descending not only into chaos, but into a world where politics exists only as spectacle and violence, stripped of its emancipatory power.