Taking Liberties

Roger Berkowitz
I read and teach Hannah Arendt because of the power and originality of her thinking. She makes me think and helps free me from cliches and simplistic understandings, while simultaneously pushing me to make judgments that recognize and help to affirm a shared common world. Her writing excites and provokes me and challenges my students. I appreciate that she is an original thinker, one who is impossible to categorize. Arendt has been called a liberal and a conservative; she is both a hard-nosed realist and  a romantic; and she warns us of impending totalitarianism while also warning us against seeing every act of authoritarianism as a proto-totalitarianism. She is called a Heideggerian, a Kantian, a Machiavellian, an Aristotelian, an Augustinian, and more. I love the fact that she is a sport of nature, uniquely herself, telling her stories and making her judgments in ways that inspire. I find in her work resources to thoughtfully engage in the public world. Her work is profound and meaningful, while also being deeply relevant to making sense of our world and ourselves. 

One of the perils of running the Hannah Arendt Center is that I am expected to respond to controversies that I would rather avoid. I strive to be ecumenical, to allow all sorts of readings of Arendt, not to impose my own or disqualify others. One recent essay, however, has caused quite the stir. It is the pugilistic and highly conceptual essay by Samuel Moyn that warns us to be wary of reading Arendt’s work because, he argues, she was a “Cold War liberal.” In “Hannah Arendt among the Cold War Liberals,  Moyn argues that Arendt’s thought is infected by the evils of Cold War liberalism alongside Zionism, nationalism, and racism, for which sins it is said to be “irretrievable in our time.” Moyn is an excellent and formidable scholar whose work on human rights has contributed greatly to our understanding of the loss of political ideals in the modern world. His words carry weight. Seyla Benhabib has written a response. 

Moyn admits that naming Arendt a Cold War liberal is tendentious. He concedes that her thinking was deeper than anything like the Cold War liberalism he is writing about, and he acknowledges that it  had different foundations than other Cold War liberals. He writes that she “verged on a “strange” kind of Cold War liberalism.” Nevertheless, Moyn insists she was a Cold War liberal, as if such an appellation were something meaningful and sinister. Benhabib sees that Moyn does precisely what Arendt would teach us to avoid: he labels her, implicates her by association, calls her a Cold War liberal as if that name itself means something about her thinking. To catch yourself up on the conflict it is helpful to read Benhabib’s response, published by The Journal of the History of Ideas. Benhabib writes:

 
Samuel Moyn is a provocative writer. He regards theoretical disagreements, differences of interpretation and scholarly contestations agonistically, as a fight in which it is existential that those who disagree with him be freed from their delusions and misunderstandings. Thus, a phrase in his article states that “Generations of instrumentalizing, opportunistic, or promotional readings have obscured the relationship that Arendt sustained with Cold War liberals.” Moyn is out to set them right.

Alas, Moyn’s central argument—that even if Arendt was not a liberal, “her very attempt to strike out on her own in developing a new account of freedom proves hostage to many of the intellectual and political premises of Cold War liberalism”—is vague and confused (my emphasis). “Proves hostage” is an interesting phrase: does Moyn mean that Arendt was simply influenced by Cold War liberals such as Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon, or Karl Popper? There is no evidence for this, and Moyn only cites that Arendt possessed a copy of Talmon’s book – Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. So, “proved hostage” seems to mean some kind of convergence of ideas and orientations, despite differences between Arendt and Cold War liberals, which Moyn himself acknowledges.

Moyn’s presumption of convergence centers on ‘totalitarianism’ to characterize both Nazism and Stalinism. Unlike classical Anglo-American liberalism, Arendt’s work had little to say about economics and markets, and furthermore, unlike Cold War liberals, she retained in Moyn’s words, “an early nineteenth-century commitment to creative perfectionism” (an aspect of liberal thought appreciated by Nancy Rosenblum). How then does Arendt’s critique of totalitarianism make her a Cold War liberal? In order to place Arendt in the procrustean bed he has created, Moyn radically neglects the milieu out of which Arendt’s critique of Stalinism and developments in the Soviet Union grew.