Plurality and Populism

03-31-2019

In the New Statesman Lyndsey Stonebridge argues that Hannah Arendt’s commitment to plurality is not an invitation to nationalism. For the past few years, Hannah Arendt’s work has been selling in record numbers, as people try to understand the emergence of illiberalism and populism worldwide. This also extends to far right populists groups like Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) which has cribbed Arendt’s work in defense of its political platform arguing that power “becomes dangerous exactly where the public ends.” Stonebridge writes,

The AfD is not wrong to say that power becomes dangerous at the point where there seems to be no public accountability any more. But it is precisely at such moments, Arendt teaches, that we most need to think politically, to resist populism: “When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because… [thinking] becomes a kind of action.

Stonebridge argues that there are limits to Arendt’s embrace of plurality, which would exclude accepting that which is “evidently ruinous to politics itself.” Tracing the trials of Arendt’s life she writes,

Arendt’s mature political understanding was formed in those places that the AfD and their friends find troublesome: in migrant communities, along the refugee rat runs, among the rightless, the wretched, and the defiant. She was a self-proclaimed pariah, a term she borrowed from the radical Jewish thinker Bernard Lazare, who had learnt from France’s Dreyfus Affair that assimilation was no protection against racism. The refugee pariahs, she claimed, were the “vanguard” of their peoples, and Arendt was proud to be among them.

As today’s refugee activists will understand all too well, for Arendt’s generation it was a battle to get people to realise that what was happening was not merely bad luck for others, or a humanitarian problem to be managed, but world-changing. “Apparently, nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings – the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends,” she wrote in a bitterly beautiful essay, “We Refugees”, in 1943. By then, Arendt had escaped Europe for New York, and was beginning to claim her place in what would soon become one of the most significant intellectual groupings of the 20th century, including Hans Jonas, Irving Howe, Robert Lowell, and Randall Jarrell, Mary McCarthy and WH Auden.