a polis cleft

7/31/2019 A Polis Cleft

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A Polis Cleft:

The stateless and the masses as two sides of the rupture of the political in Arendt

Phillip Quintero

N00121290

GPHI6045 - Arendt

Fall 2009


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In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendts discussion of the advent of totalitarian

regimes in the 20th

century foreshadows her later philosophical analysis of the human condition.

Specifically, her interest in and her fear of totalitarianism lie in its necessary dehumanization of

its subjectsa process that culminates in what she calls total domination. One way she

approaches the effects of totalitarian regimes is the way it undermines the community dynamics

necessary for what she will later come to call political action. In this paper I hope to frame a

discussion that will use the complementary concepts of the stateless and the masses as a position

from which to view the effects of totalitarianism in its role as a destroyer of the political

character of the concept of humanity at play in Arendts work.

The Stateless

In the chapterThe Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man, Arendt

provides a detailed structural analysis of the role totalitarian regimes had in the 20th

century and

the chain reaction of military, political, and economic violence that followed1. I will focus on

her treatment of the human fallout of this violence: Once they had left their homeland they

1Arendt,Hannah.TheOriginsofTotalitarianism.(Orlando:Harcourt,1951)267


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remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been

deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth2.

Arendt suggests that, in a way, the rise of totalitarian regimes and destruction of inherited

political structures provide conditions for critiqueby revealing the sufferings of more and

more groups of people to whom suddenly the rules of the world around them had ceased to

apply3.

Arendts treatment of the condition of statelessness created by totalitarian regimes a)

examines inadequacies of the preexisting European nation-state model, b) presents a unique

phenomenon of totalitarianism and c) depicts a condition where political action is not possible.

By explaining these three aspects of Arendts analysis, I hope to provide a useful perspective for

understanding her later philosophical work.

a) Arendt deals with the hidden tensions at play in the very notion of a European nation-

state. That is, she frames the placement of administrative political institutions (state) on top of

preexisting culturally integrated groups (nations) as a kind of ill-fitting hat. The peace treaties

that followed WWI, by Arendts lights, placed some peoples in control of a state apparatus

granting them recognition in international politicswhich subsumed other people, usually

2Ibid.

3Ibid.


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national minorities. It would not be possible that every ethnically constituted group in Eastern

Europe, for instance, could establish its own sovereign nation-state. Nation-states require strict

geographical delimitation that does not exist so neatly between peoples (conceived as culturally

integrated groups, ornations) living together.

The first post-war situation was in this way created where peace treatieslargely

determined on the terms of the Western victorsinstitutionalized the political domination of

national minorities under the state structures of the national majorities. Thus the international

political agreements silently assumed that others [minorities] (such as the Slovaks in

Czechoslovakia, or the Croats and Slovenes in Yugoslavia) were equal partners in the

government, which of course they were not thereby adding to the many burdens of the new

states the trouble of observing special regulations for part of the population4

. The example of

post-WWI Eastern Europe illuminates the inherent possibilities of misfits between the nations

and states that comprise a nation-state. The transformation of the state from an instrument of the

law into an instrument of the nation had been completed; the nation had conquered the state,

national interest had priority over law long before Hitler5. This transformation contributes to

advent of political organization along lines that are prepolitical (ethnic, linguistic, etc.). The

4Ibid.,270

5Ibid.,275


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dominance of the cultural nation as the basis for managing the structural and legal components

of a global societyparticularly military componentis in fact an abrogation of the legal

political order. Where a legal state does not equally recognize the multiple and disparate groups

living within its borders the state does not function in the Arendtian political sense that we will

discuss in a later section.

b) The totalitarian regimes that came to power after WWI provided solutions to this tension

between nation and state. That solution wass the very imposition of a totalizing ideology. The

totalitarian process owes its success, in a way, to the option it provides for dealing with modern

political tensions under which the nation-state system (which, as described earlier, is perhaps a

misnomer) has struggled. The dissonance caused by multiple national interest groups vying for

legal representation within a nation-state is easily disabused by effectively silencing dissent. This

intolerance for opposing views is one defining characteristic of totalitarianism, although Arendt

mentions that this also applies to nontotalitarian autocracies.

That isby embracing and amplifying the control one national group has over the legal

structures of a state, a regime can legally denationalize minorities, further eviscerating the notion

of a legal state. Arendt notes that the political movements we now characterize as totalitarian did

not only take this stance towards the minorities that were the supposed sources of domestic

conflict, but also towards the international community. Knowing that the rejected peoples will


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Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity

itself expels him from humanity7. Here we have a glimpse of the fundamental political character

of humanity under Arendts analysis. It is when a person cannot regain a place in the world from

which to claim rights that something essentially human has been taken away. To put it more

strongly, simply being human does not grant anyone any right to anything; having a place in a

political community is a precondition for the recognition of the claim to any right. The evil of

totalitarianism is that it creates a mode of existence where there is no recognition of the right to

have rights, the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has

been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people8.

This talk of the destruction of community is where I think the philosophical interest in

statelessness lies. Community is closely tied to the theme of plurality, central to so much of

Arendts work (condition for politics, action, democracy). It therefore opens up a rich point of

view from which to read Arendt. Such fundamental aspects of Arendts philosophy bear

examining further from the standpoint of community and its destruction through totalitarian

ideology.

7Ibid., 297

8Ibid.


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There is still the question of the populations that are left once the scum of the earth is

gonethe people who have enabled totalitarian regimes to execute their atrocities. These people

constitute the masses.

The Masses

If the stateless are the recalcitrant chaff that totalitarian movements must cut away, then

Arendts notion of the masses represents the kernel that will form the swelling white dough upon

which such regimes rise to power. The idea of the masses is complementary to that of the

stateless in the way it characterizes social groups that are, in Arendts assessment, lacking a

condition of being human.

Arendt describes the cultivation of mass societymuch like the ejection of those who are

unfit to be part of itin terms of the historical moment I mentioned previously. In the 19th

century and leading up to the World Wars, large groups of people were alienated from their

governments through the increasing entrenchment of class hierarchy and political party systems.

These tensions, as I see them presented in Arendts work, build up a charge over history that will

seek release through the path of least resistance.

The scenario in early 20th

century Europethe decline of the nation-statewas in

effect a political recession. As national identity reclaims legal standing over civic identity, public


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interest is increasingly congruous with select private interests, and the violent power and

legitimacy of the state apparatuses are ever more dominated by the wealthiest classes, the

presence of an actual political public is diminished. The notion of the masses represents the

theoretical end result of this process.

One of the biggest questions one needs to ask about Arendts notion of the masses is what

is the shared trait, the unifying characteristic that makes a group of people identifiable as a

mass? This is not as simple a question as it might soundArendt characterizes the masses

negatively rather than through definition. She tells us that the identity between mass members is

not based on class goals, political parties, or any other consciousness of common interest9.

Thus there is no mass community and no mass political public. Arendt writes of the masses, that

they are fickle, deluded, inconstant and forgetful10

. They are inactive on the political stage. As

such their participation consists of silent approbation and tolerance11. Conformism itself is the

unifying characteristic, and it does not smack of individual identity at all, not even of solidarity-

as-mass.

9Ibid.,311

10Ibid.,306

11Ibid.,312


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This image is certainly not the realization of the fullness of human activity. We can hear

Arendts diagnosis echoed later when she speaks of a different apolitical realmthe simple

private sphere; man existed in this sphere not as a truly human being but only as a specimen of

the animal species man-kind12

. We cannot, however, pin to Arendt the position that the kinds of

individuals who constitute a mass are intrinsically inferior, less capable, or dumb. Such

individuals have been relieved of their individuality, and thus their associated behavior has lost

its plurality. There is some process by which the human being ceases to be an actor and

succumbs to the forces of homogenization. How is it, then, can a humanwho ostensibly

possesses the potential to realize the vita activabecome such an automaton?

They are swept up, fascinated by totalizing ideology. This is what I take Arendt to be

referring to when she says the masses can acquire the appetite for political organization13

. The

apparent contradiction between this and the point I have just been making is cleared up if we

distinguish between what we mean by the political. Here I take Arendt to mean that the masses

can be coaxed into taking part in general affairs of public interest, whereas when I earlier

described the masses as apolitical, I was referring to the stronger sense of the conceptthe

12Arendt,Hannah.TheHumanCondition,(TheUniversityofChicagoPress,1958)46

13OT311


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political as laid out in The Human Condition. Political action in the strong Arendtian sense

cannot take place in the masses.

On this note we can again borrow insights from later in Arendts intellectual

development. In The Life of the Mind, she uses the concept of thinking to represent something

more than simple rationality or knowledge. Thinking takes meaning and not truth to be its goal,

and the question could be asked of the masseswho know not the meaning of the activities

surrounding them, Could the activity of thinking as suchbe among the conditions that make

men abstain from evil-doing or even actually condition them against it?14

While it is true that the pseudo-political behavior of the masses shows a characteristic

lack of thinking, I do not think it fair to say that the phenomena itself is without reason. Much

like the interpretation I have made of totalizing ideology as providing a seemingly stable solution

to the historical tensions that lead to the instability of the prewar nation state, totalitarian

movements encourage mass society as an alternative to the status quo of political strife and

broken government.

The essential link between the masses and totalitarianism is one of bidirectional enabling.

That is, a totalitarian regime organizes the masses for a political goal, and it is this support that

14Arendt,Hannah.TheLifeoftheMind.(Orlando:Harcourt,1978)5.


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enables the regime to achieve those goals. Once the totalitarian impulse has carried out the

parasitic work of ridding a people of those groups or individuals unfit to conform to a mass (thus

alleviating political tension by producing the stateless), the resulting population works in

symbiosis with the machinery of that impulse. This is Arendts diagnosis for what continues to

be characterized as the most unbelievable aspect of the atrocities of the Nazis under Hitler and

Stalins post-revolution Bolsheviks: that a large majority went along complacently with the plans

of a few evil men15.

This is not to say that masses are strictly a phenomenon of totalitarianism. In fact, Arendt

tells us, Potentially, they exist in every country and form the majority of those large numbers of

neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls16

.

This sounds like an accurate depiction of contemporary democracies, and the implications are

chilling.

Arendt tells us that the role of the masses exposes two illusions of democracy. The first

illusion is that each individual can identify with some politically represented group in terms of

shared interests. The extreme example of the masses points out how individuals can fall through

15It is not irrelevant here that the word Bolshevik takes its origin from the Russian

meaningmajority.

16OT311


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the cracks of societal structures. Underrepresented groups cannot contribute to the plurality of

perspectives that make up a political sphere, and are then alienated from taking part in public

discourse.

The second illusion is that the majority party effectively determines the practices of

government, and to such functioning these politically indifferent masses did not matter, that

they were truly neutral and constituted no more than the inarticulate backward setting for

political life 17. The fact that large majorities can act more like a mass than a polity threatens

assumptions that underlie the argumentfor democracy.

So far I have argued for a reading of Arendts notion of the masses which represents the

theoretical end of the process of homogenization that can happen when a plurality of interests are

subsumed under political and social structures which do not reflect pluralistic perspectives. This

mass phenomena has seen its fullest realization with the rise of totalitarian movements in the 20th

century, and was a crucial part of the success of such movements. Finally, however, mass

mentality is something, however which lies latent in any polity. We must not proceed to compare

the masses and the stateless in order to understand how Arendts analysis in Origins of

Totalitarianism foreshadows her assessment in The Human Condition.

17Ibid.,312


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A Polis Cleft

Thus we have two distinct groups: those groups whose interests are not represented by

any legal representation and those whose interests are so atomized and confused that they can be

said not to form a group at all. The simultaneous creation of these two groupsthe stateless and

the massesis the cleaving action of totalitarianism. Like a boning knife, totalizing ideologies

wedge their way down the spine of a political societyremoving the unyielding skeleton to

expose the indulgent flesh.

The obvious connection between this cleaving and the later political theory of The

Human Condition is through the ways in which the stateless and the masses do notparticipate in

political action and do notexercise human freedom.

In The Human Condition the dominant positive theme is freedom. Political life is a

precondition for human freedom. The capacity for action is a condition of political life.

Liberation from necessity and plurality are conditions for action. The stateless and the masses are

diverted on the path to freedom at each step.

Arendt outlines a hierarchy of human activity: labor, work, and action. These three

together comprise the vita activa. Each of these three must be taken care of for a life to count as

human, for Arendt. Labor I necessary for life itself. Not human life, but biological life. Labor is


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against the necessity of nature, with the goal of sustaining our bodies. Work moves away from

nature into the artificial. This is where our world is created. Though it is a human activity, work

is mediated through matter or nature, and is not sufficient activity for a human life. For an

activity to be uniquely human, it must be unmediated activity between humans. Action is

Arendts name for such pure human activity.

I have already suggested that the conditions for action are lacking in the stateless and the

masses. Arendt tells us that, Human plurality, the basic condition for both action and speech,

has the twofold character of equality and distinction18

. Though the case can be made that the

conditions of the masses and stateless both lack equality and distinction, the case is more

paradigmatic in terms of the stateless as unequal and the masses as indistinct. I hope these

characterizations follow from the first two sections of this paper.

The stateless are denied representation, denied a voice, denied participation. They can be

rejected precisely because they are not seen as equalas in the case of ethnic minoritiesand

the inequality is amplified through their subsequent rejection. Indeed in the expulsion of minority

groups, their recognition as lesser becomes nonrecognition entirely.

18HC175


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The masses perceive equality of their status, and relish in the totality of it. They are

lacking distinction. Arendt attributes the appeal of mass society to the way homogeneity eases

political conflicts, especially in the framework of the nation-state. It is in this way that

totalitarian ideology eliminates plurality. Arendt identifies this goal herself when describing what

she calls total domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of

human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual the problem is to fabricate

something which does not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling other animal

species whose only freedom would consist in preserving the species19.

We have come around to this conclusion by comparing Arendts analysis of

totalitarianism to her political theory, but now that we are here it seems common sense. A

plurality is incompatible with a totality in the way we are using these terms, and indeed

totalitarian regimes cannot claim total power until the plurality has been squashed out of the

population. Historically, this has meant the extermination and deportation of distinct persons

combined with the indoctrination of those who are fit to fit in.

Action, then, is not a possibility for the stateless or the masses according to Arendts

theory. Without distinctness and equality, they cannot reveal actively their unique and personal

19OT438.ArendtisquotingHitlerhere.


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identities and thus make their appearance in the human world20

. As such they cannot lead fully

human lives.

The masses and the stateless, as theoretical concepts, provide an interesting perspective

form which to better understand Arendts use of notions like human freedom and the political.

As I implied earlier, however, the potential for mass society and its opposition to the stateless

represents a potentiality of human society in general. To the extent to which pluralityincluding

conflict and dissentis ejected from the horizon of our attentions, we are committing ourselves

to a worldview that is totalizing. There is a dehumanizing thread in every closed possibility for

creating something new, in every hindrance to openness and communication. This is the worry

Arendt (along with many others, including myself) has when looking at modern democracy. We

stand this perspective to gain from Arendt: that of seeing totalitarianism not only in the violence

of global society, but also as a trend in the everyday.

20HC179

a polis cleft

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