If anything it is anti-political, since historically it has often been positioned against politics. It isn’t because lying in politics has suddenly become a source of moral outrage – it has always been that. Her works on topics such as totalitarianism, communism, the human condition and society brought her acclaim from all over the world. Current political circumstances, especially the rise of nationalist and populist movements across the globe, speak to the importance of robust public debate among citizens. Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Vol. : Episode 34 Ellen Bass, What Could Possibly Go Right? Her thoughts, writings and work have had a … In “Truth and Politics,” whenever Arendt talks about truth she always specifies what kind of truth she means: historical truth, trivial truth, some truth, psychological truth, paradoxical truth, real truth, philosophical truth, hidden truth, old truth, self-evident truth, relevant truth, rational truth, impotent truth, indifferent truth, mathematical truth, half-truth, absolute truth, and factual truth. Arendt’s well-known 1958 text The Human Condition contains some of her central insights about politics, especially her concept of human plurality. Translated by Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985). Their laughter reveals something about the state of affairs we’re living in. Being Jewish, Arendt was forced to flee the country, seeking refuge in France and eventually the United States. And the sad reality is, truth can’t save us. Hannah Arendt and the politics of truth We can shout truth to power and it will never be heard, because truth and politics don’t stand on common ground. When I’m lecturing on Hannah Arendt these days people usually laugh when I say that truth and politics have never been on good terms with one another, and that the lie has always been a justified tool in political dealings. Arendt understands “politics” as public debate by a community about meaningful aspects of their shared life together. Throughout her writings Arendt defended the importance of public debate. Human Status and Politics: Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust SHIRAZ DOSS A University Calgary of About nothing does public opinion everywhere seenr to be in happier agreement than that no one has the right to judge somebody else. Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience” in Crises of the Republic (New York: HBJ Publishing, 1970). However, their accounts of the public sphere (in the case of Habermas) or public reason (in the case of Rawls) belong to more idealist strains of political theory whereas Arendt’s political thinking has a different starting point. She argues that  “power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.”[1] So, when a group of human beings decides to act for a specific political purpose, power exists between them as they collaborate together to achieve a political aim: we might say that it is power that “holds them together” as a group and not just a collection of disparate individuals.[2]. ), Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, 1979 p. 317] Arendt circumscribes political topics in this manner in order to protect the unique political experience from those "'{ho would reduce politics to the realization of absolute truths, whether religious or secular. In her seminal 1961 essay “Truth & Politics”, Hannah Arendt distinguishes ‘factual’ from ‘rational’ truth, arguing that the former is susceptible to distortion in politics. When I’m lecturing on Hannah Arendt these days people usually laugh when I say that truth and politics have never been on good terms with one another, and that the lie has always been a justified tool in political dealings. Hannah Arendt (1972). She invoked, and then dismissed, the classical maxim “Let justice be done, though the world perish.” Instead, she asked a question that seemed to her more urgent: “Let truth be told though the world may perish?”. The power and originality of her thinking wasevident in works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism,The Human Condition, On Revolution and The Lifeof the Mind. Factual truth has always been in danger. In sum, the public space is preserved through power that “springs up” among citizens when they gather together. The third and final section critically compounds Marx and Luxemburg’s seminal arguments with recent co- John Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’ by Ben Davies, Introduction to Existentialism by Addison Ellis, Ethics and the Expected Consequences of Voting by Thomas Metcalf, David Antonini received his PhD from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2018. When we engage in political life, we seek to communicate how things look from our distinct perspectives, while others do the same. However, Hitler, the Nazi regime’s rise to power, and the bloody Holocaust forever changed her life. How does Arendt argue we preserve the public space? After living through the outbreak of WWII, Arendt devoted the rest of her life to writing about politics, although less in a traditional philosophical sense and more in the vein of a political observer, interpreting events of the twentieth century. She is especially known for her interpretation of the events that led to the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. (Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers.” When I’m lecturing on Hannah Arendt these days people usually laugh when I say that truth and politics have never been on good terms with one another, and that the lie has always been a justified tool in political dealings. Hannah Arendt. We need this kind of truth in order to have a common ground to stand on, so that each individual can share their experiences and make meaning from them. https://davidantonini.wordpress.com. Hannah Arendt, the author of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” died in 1975.Her earliest reporting for The New Yorker became the 1963 book “Eichmann … Arendt sought to understand the rise of this unprecedented form of government, and to defend public debate against threats to its existence. Reclaiming the public space of debate is an effective mechanism for citizens when they believe a government has lost its legitimacy. Factual truth is in great danger of disappearance. People can be written out of history books. The cost has been the common fabric of reality, the sense from which we take our bearings in the world. Hannah Arendt, ‘Civil Disobedience’ in: Arendt, Crises of the Republic. But part of Arendt’s point in writing her essays on “Lying in Politics” and “Truth and Politics” which are cited so widely today was that we’ve never really been able to expect truth from politicians. They are outsiders, pariahs, and like Socrates subject to exile and death. At the same time, and as Arendt saw during the Nixon era, lying in politics also has the effect of destabilizing political institutions by destroying the ability of citizens to trust politicians and hold them accountable. But the side effect of the lies and the propaganda is the destruction of the sense by which we can orient ourselves in the world; it is the loss of both the commons and of common sense. His thought is that public debate can proceed through what he calls “the force of the better argument.” Habermas, as well as Rawls, is generally associated with a school of political thought known as deliberative democracy, where the emphasis upon public debate is essential. [Arendt, ‘On Hannah Arendt’ (roundtable discussion with H. Arendt) in: Melvyn A. Hill (red. In her works, she grappled with the dark events of that century, probing the nature of power, authority, and evil, and seeking to confront totalitarian horrors on their own terms. Thoreau was thrown in jail. This is Arendt’s argument. These facts and events constitute what Arendt calls “factual truth.” They become the artifacts of living together, and it is factual truth that should most concern us. Hannah Arendt was one of the seminal political thinkers of thetwentieth century. Or: How to Change Your Mind as a Philosopher March 13, Saturday, 12-3 PM. Hannah Arendt: Political Thoughts Introduction. For Arendt, plurality is an existential condition of human life: we are equal insofar as we are human beings but distinct because no human being is like any other. For Arendt, the activity of publicly addressing one another about how things appear from our distinct perspectives is the lifeblood of politics. Hannah Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, Dissent (1959) 45-56: 54. Why do we care about truth so much in this particular moment? The public action to protest unjust laws is a manifestation of the public space discussed above. Monuments can be torn down. Arendt’s political thought is unique among political thinkers because it does not lay out a theoretical program like a social contract or theory of justice. Arendt cautions that factual truth is in danger of “being maneuvered out of the world for a time, and possibly forever.” “Facts and events”, she writes, “are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries, theories, which are produced by the human mind.”, Facts can change because we live in the ever changing world of human affairs. Based on plurality, politics then is the place and activity of shared communication based on the distinct perspectives of equal human beings. Instead, Arendt’s political thought is. Truth-tellers have always stood outside the political realm as the object of collective scorn. When Arendt wrote those words she was responding to the lies that were told about the Vietnam War by President Nixon and revealed in the Pentagon Papers. Samantha Rose Hill Arendt studied under German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers and set out to pursue a path as an academic, writing a dissertation on St. Augustine. Hannah Arendt, ‘Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers’ in: Arendt, Crises of the Republic, 1-47: 5. Socrates was sentenced to death. "Fit to Enter the World": Hannah Arendt on Politics, Economics, and the Welfare State November 2014 for the administration of needs and material necessity, but as mediating institutions that transform such ne-cessity into the worldly interests and concerns that are. Resilience is a program of Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the world transition away from fossil fuels and build sustainable, resilient communities. 2) a nexus of doxa-judgment, Why are fact-checkers and fact-checking streams such a common feature of political debates? Any group of people that decide to achieve some common goal must work together and not be at cross purposes. Building a world of resilient communities, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers.”, Jason Kenney’s Government Denounces the Bigfoot Family, It’s not just Australia — Indonesia is Facing its own Climate Disaster, Climate Change Should be Political but not Partisan, There is an Antidote to Demagoguery – it’s Called Political Rewilding, Now What? We often hear the phrase that politicians are not concerned about their constituents but about “staying in power.”, Arendt, however, considers legitimate power as something that exists between citizens as they engage in political action together, whereas power wielded by rulers through the use of terror and violence is illegitimate. For a long time campaigns have been run by Madison Avenue aficionados, so it shouldn’t alarm us that the lies have become so abundant and transparent that we almost expect them. In 1956, she published an extremely controversial essay on the school desegregation in Little… Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). TERRIBLE TRUTHS : HANNAH ARENDT ON POLITICS, CONTINGENCY AND EVIL 177 diately qualify the first, for the text also seems to imply that reality in the future may not necessarily be as grim as most of the past. Hannah Arendt contributed enormously to the field of philosophy and politics. Enter your email address to follow this page and receive notifications of new essays by email. — Hannah Arendt* The decline of political philosophy is one of the salient facts of contemporary intellectual life. For Arendt, an exemplary moment of power preserving the public space is the act of civil disobedience, especially the various movements during the turbulent decades of the mid twentieth-century in the United States, on which Arendt wrote. The lie has always been instrumental to gaining political advantage and favor. Martin Luther King was assassinated. I think this is why people laugh when I repeat Arendt’s observation that truth and politics have never been on good terms. [1] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 200. Her many books and articles have had a lasting influence on political theory and philosophy. 29 See Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought, p. 23; Samantha Power, ‘The Lesson of Hannah Arendt’, New York Review of Books April 29, 2004, p. 34. After living through the outbreak of WWII, Arendt devoted the rest of her life to writing about politics, although less in a traditional philosophical sense and more in the vein of a political observer, interpreting events of the twentieth century. Edited by Johanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929). Word Count: 1000. We know that there’s truth in that observation, yet we still hope that truth will save us. Samantha Rose Hill is the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and The Humanities, visiting assistant professor of Politics at Bard College, and associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. For Arendt, an exemplary moment of power preserving the public space is the act of civil disobedience, especially the various movements during the turbulent decades of the mid twentieth-century in the United States, on which Arendt wrote. Aspects of Arendt’s thought can be considered to belong to this school of thought. [4] Twentieth-century German thinker Jurgen Habermas is close to Arendt in his thinking on the public space or public sphere, especially in his insistence upon undistorted forms of speech and communication. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. 30 See Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton “Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”, p.154, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 110 Copy quote He is author of Public Space and Political Experience: An Arendtian Interpretation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). In weakening our ability to rely on our own mental faculties we are forced to rely on the judgments of others. It is engaged in a battle with political power, and it is the vulnerability of factual truth that makes deception possible. She had witnessed with German citizens in the 1930’s and 40’s what could happen in its absence: the substitution of a fabricated reality based on a leader’s vision, accepted by seemingly well-intentioned citizens. Public debate competes with political leaders’ attempts to substitute fabricated truths in order to maintain power. And we need to be able to take some of these factual truths for granted so that we can share the world in common and move freely through our daily lives. Arendt’s well-known 1958 text The Human Condition contains some of her central insights about politics, especially her concept of human plurality. Hannah Arendt never wrote systematically on the subject of democracy. [3] See Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience” in Crises of the Republic (New York: HBJ Publishing, 1970). Robust public debate in many forms ensures that it is not merely the ruling regime that defines the parameters of public debate, especially if they attempt to drown out dissent as, for example, in the delegitimization of the media or press. Her foresight about the fragility of democratic life is relevant for the worst possible reasons: populism, white… Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a German political theorist who, over the course of many books, explored themes such as violence, revolution, and evil. Instead, Arendt’s political thought is existential in attempting to understand how a meaningful space for politics and public debate can be lost and how that space might be re-enlivened through political action. Arendt presents her defense of political freedom as a challenge to the liberal convention, which allegedly conceptualizes freedom as “freedom from politics.” But her comments on liberal theories of freedom are scattered and unsystematic, and they raise a series of questions.