Video Archives - Panel One of "The Burden of Our Times" (2009)

07-03-2014

A new weekly feature on the Blog, the Arendt Center uses its video archives to remember all of the exciting events it has hosted over the years. This week, it revisits the first panel of its second annual fall conference, "The Burden of Our Times."

Conference: “The Burden of Our Times”
at the Olin Theatre, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Panel One (Friday, October 16th, 2009): “Can Hannah Arendt's Discussion of Imperialism Help us to Understand the Current Financial Crisis?”

Chair: Marina van Zuylen, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Bard College

Participants:

--Antonia Grunenberg, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at the University of Oldenburg
--Jerome “Jerry” Kohn, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at the New School
--Tracy Strong, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego

Antonia Grunenberg, Jerry Kohn, and Tracy Strong each emphasize the important connection between imperialism and the global financial crisis. Separate from colonialism, Arendt argues that imperialism is the political unfolding of the economic principle of capitalism—the expansion of wealth for its own sake, as capital demands constant growth. When unlimited growth is adapted to the political realm, the state seeks to expand power toward the end of that power itself.

Professor Grunenberg, first to speak, asks two questions: “Could we not say that global financial actors destroy the national body politic?” and “Isn’t it true that for us globalization and the deregulated streams of real and symbolic money is an aim in itself?” She then wonders: “Aren’t our representatives convinced that there is no way out of that system of financial capitalism?” In her mind, our political system has become characterized by 1) a political class composed of “power groups”—such as the oil group; 2) vague and indistinct classes and 3) a political body that is now an appendix to the aforementioned power groups. She then suggests that theorists of politics 1. determine where power originates today; 2. analyze the structural changes in the body politic ; and 3. rethink the role and structure of representation. Most basically, Grunenberg advocates a citizen’s approach in response to the financial crisis.

Professor Kohn takes up the task of analyzing today’s power structure. Arendt, Kohn points out, is clear that she finds the origin of the encroachment of private interest into the public sphere in Hobbes. For Arendt, Hobbes and Leviathan restore the condition of perpetual war to the state by defining society/the Leviathan as less of a polity than an “overwhelming power which defies all opinion” so that its power must constantly increase. Kohn points out that today wealth borrows its indefiniteness, likewise, from the public realm. A person who dies can no longer enjoy their wealth, but a society that protects wealth can guarantee that the wealth itself will continue to exist and grow. In this way wealth ceases to be a private thing. Kohn’s talk hence follows after Arendt by rooting the financial crisis, like imperialism, in Hobbes.

Professor Strong, last to speak, asks a simple question: can we still have citizenship in a world where capitalist production is oriented towards a goalless future and where this orientation is now a political principle? “It seems doubtful…Everything now seems double-edged” remarks Strong. The main problem with the traditional concept of citizenship, as Strong sees it, is that exclusion is no longer possible. Anyone can claim to be a member of almost any group. Therefore, in order to re-activate a workable, livable conception of citizenship, we must overcome the aimless, surging charge into the future, an impulse which originates in capitalist production but which imperialism, and now today’s power structure, reiterates. “We must set limits on nature or it will impose them on us” says Strong.

The “burden of our times” for these scholars seems to be not the burdensome anxiety or economic hardship of the crisis so much as the burden of keeping up with a beast run amok—the Leviathan, or what it has become. All three suggest that political theory faces a double-challenge: to both understand the current situation and its stakes, and then also to propose a solution. Understand too slowly, and the situation has already changed; apply an old solution hastily, and one simply compounds the problems at hand. The political thinker can be neither tortoise nor hare. It is neither an optimistic nor pessimistic view, but it does present a daunting task for anyone willing to think about the crises of the current situation—or the crisis that is the current situation of social life—with an eye towards repairing the damage it causes.

Summary by Dan Perlman

Watch the entire panel discussion from our 2009 fall conference below.  You can also watch more videos of our videos on our website here or on our Vimeo here.

The Burden Of Our Times: Panel One - Antonia Grunenberg - Part 1 from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.

The Burden Of Our Times: Panel One - Jerome Kohn from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.

The Burden Of Our Times: Panel One - Tracy Strong from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.