Obedience and Political Affairs

“[T]here is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters.”

– Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship” (1964)

How could Arendt reject obedience as a factor in political and moral affairs? Was her basic point about totalitarianism not that it had reduced people to thoughtless puppets of the regime? Did she not describe Adolf Eichmann, chief organizer of transports to the Nazi death camps, as someone who had simply exchanged “one system of values for another” in order to serve his new masters? This was certainly how many people read Arendt. The individual, she seemed to be saying, had disappeared into a mass movement. But if this was not obedience, then what could possibly deserve the name?

[caption id="attachment_14345" align="alignleft" width="300"] A test subject from Stanley Milgram's experiments. (Source: Pacific Standard)[/caption]

In 1963, the year Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem appeared, the first reports on Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments were published. Milgram had found that a majority of ordinary Americans were willing to inflict what they thought were strong electric shocks on an innocent individual when ordered to do so by a scientific authority. Milgram believed he had scientifically proven Arendt’s philosophical argument about the Nazis. It “would be wrong,” he wrote, to think of the perpetrators’ defense that they had just done their duty “as a thin alibi concocted for the occasion.” Instead we should see it as a terrifying example of a more general psychology of obedience. Milgram linked his findings with Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann and warned that this particular perpetrator’s thoughtless compliance was indeed a potential in us all.

But then how could Arendt declare that there is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters? Is it possible that Milgram and his many followers have fundamentally misunderstood her position?

In a 1964 essay on “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” Arendt sought to clarify her argument about the “banality of evil” and to defend the concept of individual responsibility against the claim that Nazi perpetrators had simply followed orders. Arendt never explicitly mentioned Milgram’s work, yet her essay can be read as a critical engagement with his claims about obedience and its role in collective violence.

Arendt complained that the concept of “obedience to authority” depended on a “pernicious fallacy” that failed to see that the so-called obedient individual “actually supports the organization or the authority or the law that claims ‘obedience.’” In Arendt’s view, submission to authority is a political act of recognition, which expresses acceptance of the authority’s right to demand compliance. Arendt therefore thought that it would make “much more sense” to analyze the perpetrators’ actions in terms of their “overall support for a common enterprise than in our usual terms of obedience to superiors.”

This conceptual critique of obedience relied on Arendt’s particular understanding of political action. She argued that we “must cease to reduce public affairs to the business of dominion” and come to see “that obedience is not decided by the command-obedience relation but by opinion.” In Arendt’s vocabulary, political power was not power over, but power with others. She insisted that there is “no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters” because she thought that the very term “obedience” belied the extent to which individuals willfully acted in support of their governments.

[caption id="attachment_14840" align="aligncenter" width="550"] French Revolution: The National Assembly, Religion and a Constitutional Monarchy (1790-91) (Source: MGRTV.com)[/caption]

This was not to deny the sociological point that collective action requires the organization of power into hierarchies of authority and subordination, suppressing conflicting opinions which would otherwise paralyze the ability to act in concert. But Arendt averred that it would be a “serious mistake” to forget that even totalitarian regimes “command and rest upon mass support.” The Nazi regime’s right to prescribe behavior (i.e., its authority) and its ability to act in concert (its power) depended on the continued support of relevant sections of the population. In this perspective, mass atrocities became possible because large parts of the German population came to accept that the Nazis had a right to rule.

Arendt’s rejection of obedience was part of an attempt to defend the values of freedom and individuality against the encounter with totalitarian ideology and terror. One of the interesting—and complicating—aspects of Arendt’s analysis is that she combined a moral condemnation of the perpetrators with an explanatory account of their actions. As a result, her thought seems torn between a commitment to human freedom and personal responsibility on the one hand, and the recognition of a human tendency to yield to authority on the other. In response to the Nazi perpetrators, Arendt affirmed that we can and should expect more from human beings. Eichmann might have suspended his individual judgment and become “thoughtless,” but his submission to authority was first of all an act of political recognition for which he could and should be held responsible. The concept of obedience, Arendt concluded, obscures this responsibility and thereby threatens the very logic of justice itself.

-- Johannes Lang

(Featured Image: A depiction of the July 4th, 1819 Independence Day celebration in Centre Square, Philadelphia, as painted in 1819 by John Krimmel; Source: Themes in American History)