Hannah Arendt

Intro: enjoys a rare designation of being a political philosopher in a male dominated discipline. She is regarded as a heterodox thinker in the sense that her political philosophy doesn’t belong to any systematic philosophy. Thus, it is often described as thinking without barriers.


Aristotle	Karl Jaspers	Martin Heidegger

Context: A German Jew during times of Hitler and hence had first hand experience of Hitler's totalitarianism.
theme of work- the importance of politics and necessity of participation in politics- scholar of civic Republicanism.

Describes her thinking as thinking without barriers
Her method as phenomenology (experience rather than observation/logic) to understand things.
she explains totalitarianism in her book- on origins of totalitarianism-
Totalitarianism arises when public sphere is lost and state has total control.
Use of terror + ideology +propaganda= totalitarian system
Ideology more important than terror becoz ideology legitimizes the use of terror
Ideology of totalitarianism is publicized as truths . It is nothing but “fabricated reality.” As there is no public sphere , people cant come together to find out the difference between truth and propaganda
Characteristics of totalitarian ideologies like Nazism and Stalinist:

Totalitarianism can survive only where superfluous masses exist. These are the masses that have lost their spirit of inquiry and creative imagination. She calls them “crackpots.”
How to end totalitarianism:

Reclaim public sphere
Go for civil disobedience
People will achieve freedom ,ie will gain capacity to do something new and establish a new democratic order.

Critic of modernity- says it has reduced man only to economic sphere and delegated our responsibility as citizens to politicians. It has given rise to "disappearance of public sphere and emergence of modern centralized bureaucratic state."
If people are enfranchised without sense of politics it turns into directionless democracy (ref of Mill on the need for democratic culture before introducing democracy). Unstable situations make people most vulnerable to totalitarian ideologies(fear of freedom; give ref of Ernst Nolte and Eric Fromm on the causes of totalitarianism)
“When people are atomized, a strongman arises and he offers a story or an ideology which claims to explain everything, why people are unhappy.”- Hannah Arendt
Conception of banality of evil from her book- Eichmann in Jerusalem: the banality of evil

For Arendt, Adolph Eichmann was not inherently evil. He only wanted to advance his career and indulged in genocide without any thoughts or ideological motive
evil becomes banal when it acquires an unthinking and systematic character. Ordinary people start justifying it in countless ways, no moral obligations. Evil does not look like evil, it becomes faceless.
She does not hold Eichmann responsible but the bureaucratic culture prevalent in the society that demands blind obedience to the order.
Acc to her Eichmann had lost his imaginative capabilities. He could not understand moral consequences of his actions. In words of Arendt: he was an innocuous man, operated w/o thinking, incapable of moral judgments.
Her fundamental thesis is that ghastly crimes are not necessarily committed by psychopaths and sadists or due to hatred ideology, but by normal human beings who lack critical reasoning under the influence of 'culture of obedience'.

Labour(man is called Animal laboran- action performed to fulfill basic necessities of life. Here man has no freedom.Even animals perform this)
Work( Homo Faber- actions in economic sphere. Here man has partial freedom, man acts as builder of the world. he makes the world fit for human use)
Action(most important in hierarchy. when man participate in political sphere, truly a human action, zoon politikon. This is what differentiates man from animal (differentia specifica)

Freedom acc to Arendt is capacity to do something new.
Human action is realized only in the state of plurality, that is when each and every one takes part in political sphere.
Diversity: every human though equal is different and unique and important. No one is replacable. Thus she recommends participation in politics to express oneself and realize our true human condition.
When we perform action, we attain freedom, i.e capacity to build a new democratic order.
Action is important because:

discloses identity of the agent: you are recognized based on what political action you are performing.
Actualize the capacity of freedom: this is the rightful use of your freedom, that you take part in politics
Reaffirm the reality of the world and also that you can help change it.

Thus she establishes superiority of “Action” out of the three actions and supremacy of civic participation over other actions.
Power: acting in concert. This gives freedom to people and freedom is capacity to do something new.

Acc to her protracted use of power has made it synonymous with violence.
Power is not strength as strength belongs to an individual
Power is not force as force is a phenomena of nature.
It is neither authority as authority requires external validation.
It is not violence as violence represents failure of state.
Only power with people is legitimate and Does not require external validation. the power of state is violence. This is opposite of what Hobbes says.
For Arendt, Power is the ability to agree upon a common cause of action in unconstrained communication
Power is Sui Generis and emerges on its own when people come in public sphere and disappears when they go back to private sphere.
Her view on power comes close to Gandhi’s view on power who talked about concentric circles of power with one human empowering the other with the absence of coercive power.
When writing about power also write how it is different from Marx's coercive view of power and Focoult’s micro view of power wherein not just state but people too exhert power on each other.

In India her ideas of participatory democracy have been enshrined in the form of Gram sabha, RTI, Citizen’s charter, social audits,etc.

she has overemphasized on political freedom. For her , Freedom from tyranny is more important than freedom to do what one wants to do in social and economic sphere.

recent protests across the world in Hongkong,Venezuela,West Asia,Catalonia clearly show the rising awareness among masses towards civic republicanism and participative democracy.

Class Notes 4 You