*Lyndsey Stonebridge* # Progressive Summary In 2017, Krista Tippett interviewed the author after Hannah Arendt's On the Origins of Totalitarianism became a bestseller. Lyndsey Stonebridge turned that conversation into this book. By contrast to Arendt's writings, which I find quite hard to get into, I found this book very readable. It weaves together a narrative of Arendt's life, with quotations from her writings and letters in *italics*. It feels like we get to know her; her mind is always present with us. The theme of the book is the importance of thinking, and how this relates to politics and challenging the way things are. While the book was engaging, I didn't come away with any groundbreaking epiphanies. Most of her insights seem to be clichés by now. Perhaps this is a testament to her influence on later thinkers. I did come away with an appreciation of the extent to which she traced the roots of totalitarianism to Europe's colonial and imperialist past. I also liked her observation that the plight of refugees reveals the flimsiness of human rights, which is subservient to state political power. It makes me want to read more about refugees and migrants. I think the book does an admirable job of igniting an interest in Hannah Arendt's life and thought. How far that interest will last remains to be seen. # Definitions isonomia - Isonomia, from the ancient Greek "equal law," is a principle of equality before the law and equal distribution of political power. It signifies a foundational idea in Athenian democracy, ensuring equal participation in governance and preventing power concentration. # Chapter Notes Hannah Arendt was born in the same home town as Kant - Königsberg. After WW2, this became absorbed into the Soviet Union as Kaliningrad (named after a Soviet commander named Kalinin). Hannah Arendt spent 18 years as a refugee after WW2, her German citizenship stripped in 1938 as a result of the Nuremberg Laws. She eventually became a US citizen. In the 1940s, she was a senior editor at Schocken, where she helped to edit Kafka's books. She also had an affinity for WH Auden. ### 3 - How to think like a refugee > Protecting citizenship would remain a moral and political baseline for Hannah Arendt throughout her life. She was appalled when plans were proposed to strip Americans of their citizenship during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist purges in the 1950s. Deprivation of citizenship should be counted among the crimes against humanity, she urged, and argued hard for a constitutional amendment that would confirm citizenship as an inalienable right. > From 1933 onward, the history she told was always in a sense refugee history. What if, she asked, the idea of a political home was not necessarily to be found in European ideas of nations, nationalism, and sovereignty? What if refugees have something new to say about how to organize our politics? THE JEWISH WAR THAT ISN'T HAPPENING Articles from Aufbau, October 1941-November 1942 Active Patience, November 28, 1941 - "If it is true that politics can be compared to drilling very slowly into a very hard board (Max Weber), then patience in politics means to continue drilling steadily-and not apathetically waiting for a miracle. Miracles don't happen in this world, but even very hard boards can be drilled all the way through." - Sometimes a political setback "forces upon us a pause that we should patiently use for better and more fundamental preparation" - "When at the end of the last war the statesmen of Europe believed that their treaties dealing with minorities had solved the question of nationality for good and all, the first wave of refugees was already streaming across Europe, and since then it has dragged into its vortex the populations of all European nations. Stateless refugees of Russian origin were followed by stateless refugees from Hungary; then came those from Italy; after a short pause it was Germany's and Austria's turn; and today-except for Britain there is no European nation that has not robbed a larger or smaller number of its citizens of their citizenship, driving them into exile, leaving them to the goodwill or bad will of other countries, without consular or legal protection of any kind." - "Future historians will perhaps be able to note that the sovereignty of the nation-state ended in absurdity when it began to decide who was a citizen and who was not; when it no longer sent individual politicians into exile, but left hundreds of thousands of its citizens to the sovereign and arbitrary decisions of other nations. No international guidelines have been able to deal with the problem of stateless persons, a problem that is unsolvable in a world of sovereign nations. The treaties of 1920 dealing with minorities were already obsolete when they were enacted, because no provision was made for people without a homeland." - "Stateless people are the latest phenomenon in recent history. None of the categories, none of the legal arrangements that arose out of the spirit of the nineteenth century applies to them. They have been excluded both from the national life of their countries and from the class struggle of their societies. They are neither minorities nor proletarians. They stand outside all law. No form of naturalization can any longer gloss over this fundamental lack of civil rights in Europe. There were always too many naturalized citizens, and no reasonable person could fail to see that the least change in government could suffice to undo naturalizations enacted by a previous government. Naturalized or not naturalized, concentration camps were always standing at the ready." - "Today all European peoples are without rights. That is why refugees from every nation, driven as they are from country to country, have become the avant-garde of their own people." This statement could be adapted to apply to our modern-day climate refugees. One might say that climate refugees are the avant-garde of all peoples. Connecting to the Rights of Nature, one might say that unless we figure out how to confer rights for all members of the world ecology, then we are all destined to become refugees. - She ends with a quote from Hillel the Elder, a rabbi who died around 10 CE -"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And being for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?" --- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. (https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights) Soon after, an essay by Arendt was re-published, pointing out the thin ground on which this declaration stood. She believed that there was no such thing as abstract human rights; they were really political or civil rights. This became Chapter 9 of Origins of Totalitarianism. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2019/07/12/hannah-arendt-right-to-have-rights/ --- Refugees challenge us to strive for a truly isonomic political system in which everyone has equal rights. In The Human Condition, she said that this would require us to have a politics of forgiveness and promises. It also requires us to face up to our vulnerability. There is strong support here for what Miki Kashtan calls the soft qualities. I can think of two other books that might be relevant to this discussion. [[Reference Notes/Books/Children of a Modest Star|Children of a Modest Star]] questions the nation state as the primary political structure that governs us. How would watersheds approach the issue of refugees and migrants? Also, how can we become more comfortable with vulnerability by thinking about disability? [[What Can a Body Do?]] # Quotes > For Hannah Arendt, miscegenation laws are a foremost mark of tyranny because they attempt to prevent even the possibility of a politics of plurality. Without love’s children, there can be no new beginnings. > For Arendt, if you don’t want people to die in camps or suffer in poverty, exile, and indignity, instead of loving them you would do better to engage directly with the drawn-out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise, which are the processes of law and politics: to act, in other words, and take political moral responsibility in a crooked world > The first modern superfluous people, Arendt argued, were created by the desire for superfluous wealth. If you want to understand the origins of totalitarianism, look to the origins of Empire. “I would annex the planets if I could,” the English vicar’s son, mining magnate and whiteness ideologue Cecil Rhodes declared at the height of his mission to turn Africa’s resources into pure wealth and its people into the pure labor necessary to produce it. > Statelessness was a new weapon in the modern armory of twentieth-century human cruelty. For Hannah Arendt, its harsh realities dealt a final death blow to the Enlightenment dream of universal human rights. Without the civic and political rights that come with citizenship, human rights were pretty much meaningless, she argued. Most refugees will ask for a national home before they ask for human rights, and for very good reason. In a homeland you have legal and political rights. Human rights were (and remain) far frailer things. The refugees of the 1930s made this frailty starkly visible. The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being…broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had lost everything except the quality of being human, she wrote in 1949. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human (OT 380). It still doesn’t. # References [Arendy undefined - We Refugees](zotero://select/items/1_EM2S9PIA) [Arendy undefined - What is Existential Philosophy](zotero://select/items/1_L7SGP2ZM) [Zreik 09/2016 - When Does a Settler Become a Native? (With Apologies to Mamdani)](zotero://select/items/1_CD96D5KP) [Woolf undefined - Three Guineas](zotero://select/items/1_UC7NMWWU) [Arendt undefined - THE JEW AS PARIAH: A HIDDEN TRADITION](zotero://select/items/1_FUAUWLSJ) [Césaire 2000 - Discourse on colonialism](zotero://select/items/1_2VQ2QEM7) [Arendt undefined - The Origins of Totalitarianism (New Edition)](zotero://select/items/1_YMTG6YIF)