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Home , Hannah Arendt, Mob rule, Tyrant

Hannah Arendt and the

Mob

Casper Verstegen 1 0 3 4 5 8 7 6 University of Amsterdam Supervisor: Dr. Stefan Niklas 2 - 8 - 2018

Cover Image: A L’aube (1875) Charles Hermans

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Table of Contents

1.Introduction……………………...... 4

2. The and world……………………...... 9

3. The mob and ……………………...... 20

4. The mob and action……………………...... 32

5. The mob and rule……………………...... 42

6. The mob and power……………………...... 51

7. The mob today……………………...... 62

Bibliography……………………...... 69

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Does this present not belong to the mob? Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra

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1. Introduction

That the present belongs to the mob does not only hold true for Nietzsche’s time.1 Indeed, our age of has proven to be fruitful ground for all kinds of mobs: from the mobilization of progressive groups to the rise of the alt-right, all these have in common that they rely heavily on the internet for both the recruitment of new members as well as the spread of their message. The online communities created by these movements, in turn, fuel mob mentality, since they are highly susceptible to informational problems such as filter bubbles, echo-chambers, and pluralistic ignorance.2 Under these circumstances, political discourse is made impossible; the mob mentality, which regards every differing opinion immediately as hostile, cuts short the deliberative potential of internet communities. In this sense, Andrew Anglin, avowed neo-Nazi and alt-right propagandist, was quite correct when he wrote about the alt-right that: “the mob is the movement.”3 What Anglin fails to notice, however, is that this, to some extent, also applies to the deafening cries for political correctness of some left leaning groups. The only is that these cries, more than anything, tend to harm the progressive cause; since the space for is filled to the brim with echoes of condemnation and reproach, no room is left for true political action and speech. The alt-right, on the hand, is empowered by its mob mentality, precisely because it leaves no room for politics proper; the political space is intentionally made impervious to rational , so that nothing is heard, except the shrillest cries. The result of this situation is that, as Hannah Arendt once put it: “the mob on both sides is just waiting for the chance to strike out.”4 Her concept of ‘the mob,’ as is often the case in Arendt’s work, has quite a specific ; “The mob,” in her view, “is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented.”5 As such, it plays a crucial role in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and runs, as a kind of red thread, through the book.6 However, in her major works after The Origins, it is scarcely mentioned. But if Nietzsche’s remark is also

1 It should be noted that this quote depends on the translation one consults. For example, the translation by Thomas Common reads “the populace,” whereas that of Thomas Wayne reads “the rabble.” I use the Graham Parkes translation. 2 For an account of these types of problems see: Hendricks and Hansen, 2016. 3 Quoted in Neiwert (2017): 257. 4 Arendt -Jaspers Correspondence L.331. 5 OT 107. 6 Cf. ‘A Reply to Eric Voegelin’ in: EU

4 true for our time, and if Arendt is correct about the connection between the mob and totalitarianism, it is essential to understand the mob, and its role in Arendt’s political theory. Before proceeding, however, some brief methodological remarks are necessary. First, Arendt often made use of Weberian types; that is, she uses a certain of historical facts and from it constructs a kind of consistent rule.7 An ideal type can be a very useful heuristic device; however, it is important to note that, according to Weber, “It is not a depiction of .”8 In a sense, Arendt’s theories are just that, abstract reflections based on a set of historical data; this means, however, that reality is always more complex than what is written down. I follow Arendt in this example, but this will inevitably mean that my analysis of the mob, too, will have what Weber idiosyncratically called a ‘utopian’ character.9 Second, concerning referencing, I follow most Arendt scholars, by using abbreviations in the references to designate certain works, a comprehensive list of their meanings is available in the bibliography. Furthermore, given that I chiefly draw on Arendt’s work, unless otherwise noted, all works cited are hers. The problem of the modern mob seems to be that it is, in Arendtian terms, politically sterile, although this is not to say that mob politics cannot be electorally successful––recent history has indeed proved quite the contrary––it simply means that it cannot create something politically, it lacks the capacity for a constituting act. Another troubling aspect of the mob is that it would be at least as unproductive to accuse the other side of mob mentality. Such reproaches not only stifle deliberation, they often have a polarizing function and are therefore liable to utterly destroy the political space, to the point where action is almost impossible. The reason that accusations of mob mentality stifle deliberation is that there are obvious negative connotations attached to the term ‘mob’. The term first appeared near the end of the seventeenth century, as an abbreviation of the mobile vulgus; meaning fickle crowd, or excitable populace.10 The mob soon designated the mobilized masses, but was always as a pejorative term. This is likely because excitability of crowds has been noticed as a threat to since antiquity. , for example, describes the decline of democratic government into ochlocracy (often translated as ), as rule by many

7 ‘Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt’ 466-7 in: TWB. 8 Weber (1904): 125. 9 Ibid. 10 Giner (1976): 138.

5 being “replaced by and government by main force.”11 The violent nature Polybius ascribes to the mob has remained predominant: it is the case for most modern-day uses of the term––such as lynch mobs or the mafia. However, recently there have been some attempts at a more positive designation––such as flash mobs or smart mobs––though these have done little to change the negative associations. The negative connotation attached to the term likely made Mary McCarthy hesitant to use the expression. She notes in a letter to Hannah Arendt: “possibly out of a kind of prudery or possibly because it sounds shrill, like a mob itself.”12 This comment was a response to Arendt’s use of the word. The responses to her controversial Eichmann in (1963) appeared to her as an undue smear campaign. Her account of the cooperation of the Jewish Counsels in territories occupied by the Nazi’s was portrayed as victim blaming, and her critique of the prosecution in the Eichmann case described anti- Semitic.13 About the backlash against her, Arendt wrote to McCarthy that “the mob–– intellectually or otherwise––has been successfully mobilized.”14 Although she obviously knew about the negative connotations, as is already evident from the quote, she replied to McCarthy that the expression was likely to hold a different meaning for her: “I use it as a term, so it doesn’t sound shrill to me.”15 Carol Brightman explains this exchange by referring to “mob” as a pejorative term used in Weimar Germany to designate “persons of influence, including intellectuals, who specialized in vilification campaigns against political or cultural dissidents, thus presumably aiding the rise of .”16 Although this is not altogether incorrect, it is a profound misunderstanding of Arendt’s idiosyncratic use of the concept; that is, the mob as a group in which the residue of all classes are represented.17 Because all classes are represented in it, the mob is often mistaken for the people or . As such, the mob is influential, but by no means is it made up solely out of persons of influence, nor does it aim its vilification only against dissidents––in fact, as we will see, the establishment is an especially grateful target of dissent. Moreover, Brightman’s explanation does not take the mob’s multitudinous

11 Polybius (2010): 377. 12 Between Friends 149. 13 Bernstein (2018): 58. 14 Between Friends 148. 15 Ibid. 153. 16 Ibid. 153n2. 17 OT 107.

6 nature into account, while it is precisely this nature that makes it similar to notions such as crowd, or mass. This similarity is crucial to Arendt, without it, the mob could not be the “caricature of the people” that it is.18 On the other hand, and just as crucial to her argument, she draws a conceptual distinction between the different multitudes; without the fictitious world created by the mob, totalitarian would not have its profound effect on the masses, in fact, there probably would not have been totalitarian propaganda at all. According to Salvador Giner, Arendt was the first political theorist to draw the conceptual distinction between mobs and masses.19 But the mob is quite different from another kind multitude as well: the crowd. The biggest difference between the two is that the crowd functions only when it is together, that is, when people join together and form a multitude in an actual place. In this sense, it is impossible for an to be alone and part of a crowd at the same time. Arendt’s mob, on the other hand, can subsist if all its elements are isolated; that is, the elements do not need to be present physically. Moreover, as we will see, it is actually dependent on the experience of feeling alone. Because of this, Arendt’s mob also differs from a lynch mob, which is, to be sure, constituted by mob elements––or at least for a major part––but the lynch mob is more like a crowd of mob elements that should be viewed as the physical expression of mob rage. As such, the lynch mob more closely resembles the traditional conceptions of mobs than Arendt’s concept does; in this conception, mobs and crowds are regarded as closely related. Generally speaking, whenever the two concepts are used together, the crowd is mostly harmless and passive, whereas the mob is the crowd turned violent.20 On this view, crowds are, in McClelland’s words, “[w]hat is to be ruled,” while the mob is that “what threatens the rule.”21 Clearly, this notion of violent crowds does not exactly correspond with the modern day online mob, which of course does not require a physical presence. And although there have been recent attempts to explain behavior online with notions of crowds, these attempts mainly focus on collective actions such as crowdfunding, or mass expressions of

18 OT 107. 19 Giner (1976): 139. 20 McClelland(2010): 7-8. It should be noted that not all crowd-theorists mention a mob. For some of the most important authors on crowds, like LeBon and Canetti, a crowd can simply take a violent form. 21 Ibid. 1.

7 sympathy or outrage.22 However, much like a crowd, these multitudes exhibit swarming behavior: they come together online for a certain goal and disperse as soon as that goal has been reached. In this sense, they are very different from the collective mob mentality of some online movements; of course, swarming behavior is exhibited here too, but the movement stays connected even when the swarm disperses and can easily be mobilized again. Thus the online movement does not have much in common with traditional notions of crowd and mob. Hannah Arendt’s concept, on the other hand, seems a perfect fit: this mob does not require a physical presence, it is quite influential, and it is easily mobilized. Unfortunately, Arendt’s term has not received much attention: usually it is treated with a few sentences in connection with her concept of the masses.23 This is likely because Arendt herself never really gave the mob a place in her work after Origins of Totalitarianism. While she mentions it in some essay’s and letters, its specificity hardly comes to the fore. The goal of this is to change this: I will demonstrate the usefulness of the mob concept by situating it in Arendt’s political thought. At the same time, this will portray the interconnectedness of the different themes in her work. This does not mean that it is an attempt to reveal an implicit philosophical system, but rather, following Canovan,24 an attempt to shed a light on the relation between Arendt’s different “trains of thought.”25 I will discuss the mob in connection with five major themes of Arendt’s work: (2) the world as a space for politics, and more specifically the idea of world-alienation and the formation of the mob; (3) the mob’s role in the rise of totalitarianism; (4) it’s connection to action, and the question of whether it is political or not; (5) the mob’s connection to different forms of rule; (6) its relation with different methods of conducting human affairs. In a sense, I take the mob concept as a prism and shine a light through it, which will portray Arendt’s theory in bright and distinct colors. In closing, (7) I will argue that the modern day online movements, the alt-right in particular, are modern-day mobs; and that––since the mob is one of the elements that crystalized into totalitarianism––they pose a major threat to our political life.

22 Cf. Russ, C. (2007), Stage, C. (2013), and Lee, R. L. M. (2017). 23 Margaret Canovan and are notable exceptions, see in particular Canovan (1992) and (2002) and Pitkin (1998). 24 See Canovan (1992): 6-7. 25 ‘Action and the “Pursuit of Happiness”’ 201 in: TWB.

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2. The mob and world

“[W]orldlessness, alas, is always a form of barbarism.”26

Arendt’s work can be seen as an attempt to make sense of the modern political experience: from the horrors of totalitarianism, to the foundation of freedom in ; from the potential of human action, to Eichmann’s failure to think; they are all accounts of modern political phenomena. If there is one element common among these phenomena, it is the experience of world-alienation; that is, “the twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self.”27 Thus, Arendt differentiates between the ‘earth’ and the ‘world’; the former designates a natural given on which biological creatures live a natural life,28 the latter, on the other hand, is simultaneously constructed and constituted by man. In this broad sense of the concept, it should be seen “[a]s space for politics.”29 Of course, this is an extremely general definition, and therefore does not appear very useful; however, since the ‘world’ is an extremely versatile concept, it is the best way to summarize it. According to Arendt, whenever people come together to discuss public affairs, “the world thrusts itself between them.”30 At the same time one can have a place in it, in this sense it is also an enveloping space in which one lives, more precisely: it is the space in which the ‘vita activa’ is lived, and as such, the space where the true freedom of men resides.31 This freedom manifests itself through action, which is itself world constituting.32 Thus, the world is both the space created by action as well as the space for it. And since action can only be taken because of the of plurality––“the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world”33––it is this notion that characterizes the world, and makes it both the stage and the central concern of politics.34 To be alienated from it means to be alienated from action, from politics, from your fellow men; thus the experience of world-

26 ‘On Humanity in Dark Times: thoughts about Lessing’ 13 in: MDT. 27 HC 6. 28 Canovan (1992): 106. 29 ‘Interview with Gauss’ 17 in: EU. 30 ‘Introduction into Politics’ 106 in: PP. 31 HC 9. NB. Richard Bernstein notes that “Arendt consistently used masculine nouns and pronouns to refer to human beings.” (Bernstein, 2018: 2n1) Like him, I follow Arendt in this for stylistic purposes. 32 ‘Freedom and Politics, a Lecture’ 220 in: TWB. NB. World-constituting action is different from world-fabricating work. I will come back to this in chapter 4. 33 HC 7. 34 ‘Introduction into Politics’ 106 in: PP.

9 alienation common to our era––which started, roughly, with the expropriation of the poor35––is the experience of .36 Loneliness, in Arendt’s work, should not be confused with isolation or , which are, both in their own right, extremely important. Solitude is a precondition for thought; that is, in order to think properly, one needs to be alone with oneself: “Solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company.”37 In this situation, one enters into a dialogue with oneself and becomes what Arendt calls a “two-in-one”. Because of this dialogic form, thinking is not a complete disconnect from the world, that is, the plurality which constitutes it remains manifest in thinking.38 However, the outside world can disturb the dialogue, making the two-in-one form simply the ‘One’ again. Hence, in Arendt’s view, it is impossible to be in solitude without being alone:39 a crowd will make it nearly impossible for the two-in-one to manifest, because the world constantly disturbs the prerequisite solitude, thereby interrupting thought. On the other hand, it is quite possible to be lonely when in a crowd, at least, when one already estranged from the world.40 Similarly, loneliness can arise from solitude; when one is worldless the two-in-one cannot form, since the world’s plurality is a precondition for this phenomenon.41 Thus, in the case of loneliness, there is a complete disconnect from the world because its plurality is lost, and this is what constitutes thoughtlessness.42 Still different is the case of isolation. This experience occurs when one is neither accompanied by the self, nor by others, but is still “concerned with the things of the world.”43 Isolation is the precondition for work that requires concentration, and, as such, cannot endure interruptions from the world; this can be productive work, but also something like simply reading a book. In a negative sense, isolation can also be

35 HC 61. It should be noted that according to Arendt: “Scientifically, the modern age […] came to an end at the beginning of the twentieth century; politically the modern world, in which we live today, was born with the first atomic explosions.”(HC 6) That is to say that, as soon as mankind gained the ability to utterly destroy, not only the world, but the earth as well, the political experience fundamentally changed. However, this does not mean that in our time the experience of world-alienation is alleviated. 36 ‘On the nature of totalitarianism’ 359 in: EU. 37 ‘Thinking’ 185 in: LoM. 38 ‘’ 22 in: PP. cf. LoM ‘Thinking’: 187. 39 OT 476. 40 ‘Some Questions of Moral ’ 98 in: RJ. 41 ‘Thinking’ 185 LoM. 42 Thoughtlessness is fundamentally connected to the problem of , according to Arendt. Unfortunately, this is beyond the scope of this paper. 43 Some Questions of Moral Philosophy 99 in: RJ.

10 enforced, when, for example, one is deserted by others with a shared concern for the world. This is bearable, according to Arendt, only when isolation is transformed into solitude.44 Although none of the modes of being alone is political, since politics is always an acting together, only loneliness is strictly worldless, that is, without any political ramifications. As such, loneliness, according to Arendt, “is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness.”45 To be uprooted means that one’s place in the world is not recognized, let alone guaranteed, by others; to be superfluous, on the other hand, means that one does not belong to the world at all. The dynamic between uprootedness and superfluity46 is similar to that between isolation and loneliness: uprootedness can be the preliminary condition for superfluity, but this is not necessarily the case.47 In a sense, the difference between superfluousness and uprootedness on the one hand, and loneliness and isolation on the other, is that the former designate a social experience, whereas the latter designate the experience of the individual. This is of course not to say that an individual cannot be uprooted, but that he will experience this as being isolated, similarly, the individual experience of not belonging to the world at all is loneliness, but in a social context Arendt calls this experience superfluousness.48 Arendt traces the rise of these experiences to the beginning of the industrial revolution, when the poor were first expropriated. Even before this expropriation caused such a vast growth and concentration of capital that wealth itself became superfluous,49 it caused the superfluity of working power, a certain “human debris” that follows every period of industrial growth.50 It may seem strange that, according to Arendt, the superfluity of men preceded the concentration of wealth, especially since the human debris is left only in the wake of industrial growth. Although she is not explicit about it, we may assume that it has something to do with the fact that raw manpower was made useless by new machinery, thus creating a class of men who were “permanently idle”51––or as Marx puts it: “machinery produces a surplus working population”52––and only after the transition to machinery can

44 Ibid. 45 OT 475. 46 Arendt uses the terms ‘superfluousness’ and ‘superfluity’ interchangeably. 47 Ibid. 48 This is not to say that cannot be deemed superfluous, indeed, this classification of individuals is a hallmark of totalitarian organization (cf. ‘Mankind and terror’ 304 in: EU). 49 OT 149. 50 Ibid. 150. 51 Ibid. 52 Marx, K. (1992): 531-2.

11 the accumulation of wealth occur on the unprecedented scale of the early industrial capitalist . Thus, first, idle workers are created by machinery, and only then does the resulting increase in production create and concentrate the stupendous amount of new capital. In Arendt’s view, the idle workers were the first to experience superfluousness, but they were soon joined by other groups of permanently idle men, such as the owners of superfluous capital, the , and even parts of the clergy; in all strata of society certain elements were pushed to the fringes. Because of the industrial revolution and capitalist organization these elements had lost their function, so that they were sometimes seen as “superfluous and parasitical”53 by their own class; their place in the world was no longer recognized, that is, they became uprooted. This was not yet the experience of utter worldlessness––“among the most radical and desperate experiences of man”54––but here we can see the formation of the mob take place for the first time.55 In the experience of uprootedness society’s fringe elements can still claim a place in the world, while in superfluity this possibility is only reserved for “the best of superfluous men.”56 The uprooted fringe elements, “who were threatened with superfluity,” could establish a kind of counter- society, through which they could find their way back to the world.57 In discussing this, Arendt appears to portray the workers’ movement as the only way out of this conundrum,58 but what she fails to recognize here, it seems, is that the mob is also searching for a place in the world, albeit in its own perverted way: it too creates a kind of counter-society, although in the form of a fictitious world, in which the mob is part of a chosen race, and world-history is controlled by vast––often Jewish––conspiracies. It is this fictitious world that attracts other fringe elements from all strata of society who have lost their place in the human world. This dynamic makes the mob a highly diverse multitude, and often causes it to be confused with the actual people, of which it is only a caricature.59 The conflation between the two multitudes is a fundamental error, according

53 OT 150. 54 Ibid. 475. In her later work, that is, after the (1961), Arendt realized that the word ‘radical’ is derived from the Latin radix, because of this realization she was very particular in her use of the world. Given the connection of worldlessness and rootlessness, it is unlikely that she would phrase this remark in the same way. 55 I will come back to this in chapter 4. 56 Ibid. 189. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. cf. Canovan (2002): 405. 59 OT 107.

12 to Arendt; yet it is a mistake that is easy to make, since both are comprised of all strata of society. Besides scale––the people are necessarily a bigger group, since it does not merely capture the fringes of society––the difference between the multitudes becomes evident in the pursuit of their goals. Both fight for a place in the political world, but only the people aim for true representation,60 the mob, on the other hand, will always call for a “strong man”61 who will be able to mold mass sentiments “into a unanimous public opinion.”62 And this is the true objective of the mob; on this view, it does not seek a way back to world, nor does it demand recognition or protection, rather, it aims to destroy society and reshape the world from which it is excluded.63 Naturally, the question now arises of whether the mob is consciously unified in its destructive aim. Although it might be the case that some mob elements come together to discuss the specifics of how to destroy respectable society, it is doubtful that this is true for the majority. Mob elements rather find each other in their shared in a fictitious world. What they share, and why they oftentimes––by no means always––get along, is that they find in other mob men similar sentiments, opinions, and mentality: sentiments such as the hatred of society; opinions such as that the are to blame for their misfortune; and a mentality which resembles that of the dominating class in a perverted form.64 On Arendt’s view, in order to mobilize the mob, these states of mind need to be invoked, for example by the use anti-Semitic slogans.65 The mobilized mob elements then discover that they are not alone in their world, which is only likely to make them more entrenched in it. Correspondingly, though Arendt never argues this explicitly, throughout The Origins of Totalitarianism the mob seems to grow ever more autonomous. Where it was first used as a political tool by noblemen and politicians––“to give their voice greater resonance”66––later it brought forth leaders of its own,67 who, later still, became the most talented mass leaders of our time.68

60 This praise of representation would be considerably revised in , where Arendt places the council system, the “organs of action”, against the party system, “organs of representation” clearly favouring the former over the latter. (OR 277) I will come back to this in chapter 5. 61 OT 107. 62 OR 231. 63 OT 333. The question of how will be discussed in the next chapter. 64 Ibid. 314. 65 Ibid. 38. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 112 68 Ibid. 317.

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History shows that it can be very rewarding to rely on the mob. However, as the anti- Dreyfusards learned, the mob switches sides unscrupulously; in Arendt’s words: “the fickleness of the mob is proverbial.”69 This is why Arendt can write to Jaspers about “the mob on both sides,”70 while there really only exists one mob; or more precisely, the refuse of all classes actually form only one multitude. But this is not one uniform multitude, it is rather a multitude that is ever changing in form; it can grow, it can shrink, and its dominant opinion is never stagnant. In this sense, the only true constant of the mob is its hatred for the society that has forsaken it. This is not to say that the mob does not retain certain characteristics over time. For the mob, according to Arendt, inherits and perverts the values and standards of the ruling class.71 At the time of the mob’s inception, at least in Germany, the aristocracy still had a claim to its last vestiges of power, and attempted to strengthen their position by mobilizing the mob with anti-Semitic rhetoric;72 successfully attacking the Jewish emancipation and its perceived privileges.73 This is, of course, not to say that the employment of this rhetoric was purely strategic, the aristocratic anti-Semitism was very real and, according to Arendt, stemmed from the fact that Jewish financiers empowered the ,74 making the aristocrats themselves superfluous. In this sense, the aristocracy already belonged to the mob. Interestingly, the fear of becoming superfluous also fueled the aristocracy’s hatred of the bourgeoisie. In fact, Arendt argues that most arguments used to attack the Jews were used earlier to attack the bourgeoisie; accusations such as materialism, egoism, deceitfulness and being unpatriotic, were increasingly used as Jewish stereotypes.75 This shift greatly increased the effectiveness of the attacks, since race doctrines “stir up the mob.”76 Eventually, with the help of the mob, “the aristocracy regained its influence on the and the more it once again set the tone for society, the more aggressive anti-Semitism reverted to the imponderable factors of social life.”77 The bourgeoisie, in turn, attempted to

69 Ibid. 108. 70 Arendt-Jaspers L.331. 71 OT 314. 72 Ibid 38. 73 ‘’ 100-11 in: JW. 74 Ibid. 103 75 Ibid. 107-8. 76 OT 157. 77 ‘Antisemitism’ 110 in: JW.

14 dissociate themselves from the Jews by taking over and sharpening aristocratic anti- Semitism; and these arguments only truly “turned out to be a terrible weapon—not when wielded by the aristocracy itself, but when once placed in the hands of a suppressed and self-doubting bourgeoisie.”78 That the bourgeoisie’s rise to power did little to stem its anti-Semitism, according to Arendt, had to do with the rootlessness and political naiveté of the wealthy court Jews, who financed European powers. The Jewish financiers, in part correctly, assumed that their proximity to power would offer them certain protections and privileges.79 As they allied themselves with and “ as such,”80 they appeared as a conservative and, more problematically, an anti-liberal force. What they failed to realize is that the traditional notion of authority––which rested on the founding act, and was inseparable from and tradition81––was becoming increasingly obsolete precisely because of the rising dominance of liberal theory––which placed authority opposite of freedom, and therefore opposite of progress82––and the concomitant decline in importance of religion and tradition.83 The bourgeois notion of authority was, rather, based on an idea of ; whether tacit as in Locke,84 or more explicit as in Hobbes,85 there can be no authority without the consent of the people. In this sense, the aristocracy’s classical notion of authority clashed with the bourgeoisie’s modern concept. This situation gave rise to the “growing tension between state and society,”86 to which, because of their proximity to power and affinity towards traditional authority, the Jews were completely blind.87 Thus, in Arendt’s view, the Jewish means of self-defense only provided fruitful grounds for the bourgeoisie’s anti-Semitism. Even with a change in the ruling class, then, the mob’s anti-Semitism would not wane, but the growing dominance of the bourgeoisie did bring about a shift in the mob’s mentality. Capitalist production had created the problem of a staggering increase of idle capital and superfluous men that now threatened to flood the markets and thus

78 Ibid. 109. 79 Ibid. 83. 80 OT 25. 81 ‘Authority in the Twentieth Century’ 87 In: TWB. 82 ‘What is Authority?’ 97 In: BPF. Cf. J.S. Mill. On . 83 Ibid. 128. 84 Locke, J. (1988): 329. 85 Hobbes, T. (1996): 112-13. 86 OT 25. 87 Ibid. 54.

15 endangered domestic economies. Moreover, the community became increasingly aware that the owners of superfluous capital were not “fulfilling some real social function”88 which made them an obvious target for possible uprisings that “no police could ever have saved from the wrath of the people.”89 Thus, partly out of self-protection and partly to grow their capital, the owners of superfluous wealth shipped their capital overseas. This ran counter to the traditional , since it, at first glance, did not benefit -state.90 However, the exporters of capital quickly discovered that they could employ the mob, the superfluous men, to protect their foreign investments. What ensued was an export of superfluous wealth and superfluous labor power on an unprecedented scale. This situation encouraged home governments to act, according to Arendt, for they feared the depopulation that seemed to be afoot––it is likely that this fear was mostly the result of a conflation of the mob and the people; since the governments saw citizens from all classes moving away, it naturally assumed that it was the actual people leaving. The solution to this conundrum was to accompany the export of wealth and labor with the export of government power and the annexation of territories that were invested in; this mode of expansion enabled the exported capital and populace to remain within the framework of the nation-state, and, as a by-product, worked to facilitate a return of nationalism to the mentality of the mob. Thus, was born out of the alliance between the mob and capital.91 Now that unfettered capitalism on a global scale was accompanied by the power of governments, the bourgeois goal of unlimited accumulation of capital became interconnected with the goal of unlimited accumulation of power.92 Where money went, power followed, and where power gained a foothold, capital flourished.93 The imperialist concept of power, which is taken over from the bourgeoisie, is always a means to an end. This is the reason why Arendt describes Hobbes as “the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim.”94 For Hobbes, power is the “present

88 Ibid. 150 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 149 91 Ibid 155 92 Ibid. 137. 93 It is important to note that the bourgeois notion of power is very far from Arendt’s conception of it.I will come back to Arendt’s concept in chapter 6. 94 Ibid. 139

16 means (…) to obtain some future apparent Good.”95 But since the desire for these goods are rational, so that they are pursued by many, and since they are scarce, or at least uncertain, the scramble for them results in a zero-sum game. This means that in order to ensure that one obtains future goods, one requires more power than the others. On this view, the rational desire to remain in power and to live well requires the “perpetual and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death.”96 And this was precisely the game of bourgeois imperialism: power for the sake of capital, capital for the sake of power, this endless chain of means and ends became so conflated that all was justified by the accumulation of both. The new bourgeois mentality, ruthless capitalism combined with Hobbesian philosophy, was easily taken over by the mob; its attraction to violence ensured that it had no problem accepting any justification of accumulation. But recall that, according to Arendt, the mob not only inherits the values and standards of the dominant class, it perverts them as well. The perversion of capitalism and Hobbesian philosophy is not hard to reach when one takes both to their logical extremes: the result was a strange mixture between a certain brand of rational , that came with a severe distrust of others; a strong faith in the supremacy of capitalism; as well as a fierce belief in the necessary and powers of the nation-state. Because of the rigorous distrust, inherent to this mob philosophy, the state was legitimate in every action perceived to grant it further security; every expansion was a show of power, which is a necessary means to deter aggression from the other side. At the same time, in the mind of the mob, those who were trampled by the state or by capitalism just could not keep up with the competition of the new world, they were weak and did not deserve to live in it anyway. On this view, the result of the perversion of unfettered capitalism and Hobbesian philosophy is . In the fictitious world of the mob, the nation-state never escapes the perpetual war between civilizations, which meant, in true Hobbesian fashion, a necessary distrust towards anything alien to the society, to which the mob had once belonged. This, of course, fed its anti-Semitism, since the Jews were still seen as alien. That society was not able to see the pernicious influence the Jews allegedly had, was, in the mob’s view, probably precisely due to this pernicious influence. Correspondingly, according to the mob’s social Darwinism, any

95 Hobbes (1996): 62 96 Ibid. p.70

17 conquered people were naturally inferior, which, in and of itself, was already enough justification for their subjugation and subsequent domination. It is easy to see how this kind of reasoning adopts a racial character. What the mob saw were the successes of imperialist powers over peoples with a different skin-color, which in their eyes could only mean the superiority of the European, that is white, powers. Race theories of the Western colonial powers relied heavily on the external characteristics of the other. According to , the “Western consciousness of Blackness” was based on a self-perspective, a central I that gave meaning to his world, and “[f]rom this perspective, anything that is not identical to that I is abnormal.”97 However, this does not only apply to Western consciousness of Blackness, in a different sense, it applies to the race doctrines of the European pan-movements. Here, too, there were abnormal others––for pan-Germanism, the Jews and the Slavs, for pan-Slavism, the Jews and Westerners––but the difference was that these were not easily distinguishable by skin-color alone. Instead, these movements focused on the central I, which, of course, quickly became a We. In a sense, the pan-movements turned the doctrine of otherness around, it was not the others who were abnormal, it was the own ‘race’ or Volk that was different from the rest. The German and Slavic pan-movements were able to invoke an “aura of holiness,” based on the Holy Roman and Holy Russia, respectively.98 From this could develop, not only a certain tribal consciousness,99 but more importantly, the idea that this tribe was chosen by God himself for some divine mission.100 Interestingly, according to Arendt, this idea of chosenness is directly taken over from the Jewish faith. And the tragic irony was that precisely this idea would place the Jews into the cross-hairs of the mob; for if the Jewish claim was correct, it would, according to the fictitious world of the mob, pose a direct threat to any other claim of chosenness.101 Connected to the claim to chosenness, is the responsibility to defend, not the nation, but the tribe; that is, this kind of tribal nationalism, according to Arendt, always insists that the tribe is surrounded by “a world of enemies,”102 as such, a member of the tribe has the God-

97 Mbembe, A. (2017): 46-7. 98 OT 226. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid. 242. 101 Ibid. 242-43. 102 Ibid. 227.

18 given responsibility to defend the tribe from the outside world. This was the narrative that enabled the mob leaders for the first time to organize the mob on a large scale. “These men,” in Arendt’s words, “began to tell the mob that each of its members could become such a lofty all-important walking embodiment of something ideal if he would only join the movement.”103 In this kind of continental imperialism, then, appears a far more autonomous mob than in overseas imperialism, where “the initiative lay mostly with the representatives of business.”104 The mob, organized in the pan-movements, was free to espouse its fictitious world of chosenness and enmity among the citizens of Europe, whereas the mob of overseas imperialism hardly ever got the chance to organize in European . It is in this sense that Arendt can argue that the totalitarian movements owe more to the pan- movements than to any other .105

103 Ibid. 249. 104 Ibid. 225. 105 Ibid. 222.

19

3. The mob and totalitarianism

“[T]he mob wanted […] access to history even at the price of destruction.” 106

Given the mob’s hatred for respectable society, it seems quite peculiar that it so readily takes over the values and standards of the dominating class. Since it is dismissed by this society, it would stand to reason if the mob would reject it completely, including its values and standards; “For the mob hates society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament where it is not represented.”107 This hatred, however, does not necessarily stem from exclusion alone; indeed, from the point of view of the mob’s social Darwinism, exclusion should really not be resented at all.108 What actually enrages the mob is hypocrisy. According to Arendt, both “hypocrisy and the passion for its unmasking” play a “momentous role”109 in the mobilization of a multitude, for this reason the mob takes the values and standards of the bourgeoisie to the extreme; it views every kind of nuance, any concession to the Christian tradition,110 and any tenet of simple decency as blatant hypocrisy.111 But hypocrisy does not enrage only the mob; throughout history, Arendt argues, hypocrisy is more “likely to transform engagés into enragés” than injustice.112 The problem, however, is that enragés––as opposed to engagés––are likely to mistake nuance for hypocrisy. This is especially evident in the later stages of the , when, strictly speaking, the mob had not yet formed.113 It was, what Arendt called, “Robespierre’s war on hypocrisy”114 that made possible the , since it justified the actions of the regime. For the French “the Revolution offered the opportunity of tearing down the mask of hypocrisy off the face of French society, exposing its rottenness, and, finally, of tearing the façade of corruption down and of exposing behind it the

106 OT 332. 107 Ibid. 107. 108 Of course, a feeling of resentment likely accompanies the mob’s break from society, however, as we will see, the mob’s fictitious world is the true forebear of that of totalitarianism, and here too: “Nothing matters but consistency” (OT 458). 109 OR 94. 110 OT 156. 111 Ibid. 330-1. 112 On Violence 162 in: CR. 113 We have seen how the mob, according to Arendt, rose out of capitalist organization and its tendency to create conditions of rootlessness, this was not yet a major problem during the French Revolution. It is likely that this is the reason that Arendt does not mention the mob in On Revolution. I will come back to this in chapter 4. 114 On Violence 162 in: CR. See also OR 95-6.

20 unspoiled, honest face of the peuple.”115 Such fanaticism cannot abide any nuance, anything that is not exemplary of a spirit, any kind of moderation. In this vein we might understand Danton’s remark, from Büchner’s Danton’s Death: “the Revolution is like Saturn, she devours her own children.”116 Still, since Arendt argues that hypocrisy inherently excludes the possibility of integrity, she does appear to agree with the French revolutionaries that it is “plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices.”117 On this view hypocrisy is, by its nature, “the vice through which corruption becomes manifest”118 and therefore the root-cause of the problems of eighteenth-century France. To see how this corruption actually manifests one has to consider what hypocrisy actually entails. In a recent paper Fritz and Miller argue that a person “R is hypocritical with respect to violations of [a norm] N iff R is blameworthy for a violation of N and R has a [differential blaming disposition] with respect to violations of N.”119 Thus, according to this definition to be hypocritical is to be disposed to making unjust exceptions for oneself. Such a disposition, Arendt notes in her Lectures on Kant’s , is that of the bad man.120 For example, Kant’s “nation of devils” is constituted by precisely this kind of men, each of whom is “secretly inclined to exempt himself.”121 Under such a disposition, integrity is impossible to exist, because exception-making takes priority over moral principles. And this is what sets hypocrisy apart from other vices; it is the only vice from which integrity is truly ruled out. It is in this sense that Arendt argues that: “Only crime and the criminal […] confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”122 In her later work, we find another reason for Arendt to decry hypocrisy. Recall that in thinking, a person becomes a two-in-one, meaning that one enters into a dialogue with the self. The key here is that this is a dialogue, not a discussion; the two are never adversaries, they never contradict each other; rather, they take part in a Socratic dialogue which aims to

115 OR 102. 116 Büchner, G. (1987): 32. 117 OR. 99. 118 Ibid. 100. 119 Fritz, K. G. and Miller, D. (2018): 122. NB. This definition does not seem to allow for a person to be hypocritical with respect to others. That is, if not R, but P was blameworthy of a violation of N. However, the point is the differential blaming disposition of R, not the person who is exempt from blame. What is at stake, according to the authors, is a rejection of the impartiality of morality (ibid. 132). 120 LKPP 17. 121 Kant, I. (1999): 335. 122 OR 99.

21 expand understanding. This means that, like the , thinking, proper, is guided by the principle of non-contradiction.123 Now, according to Arendt: “If you make yourself an exception, you have contradicted yourself.”124 The hypocrite, the one who is disposed to making exceptions for himself, then, is disposed to contradict himself, and is therefore unable to think properly, “and this means he will never be either able or willing to give an account of what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can be sure that it is forgotten the next moment.”125 On this view, then, hypocrisy is at its roots connected with thoughtlessness, and therefore, in Arendtian terms, with the problem of evil.126 This Kantian interpretation of hypocrisy allows us to make another observation: to make an exception for oneself requires a certain degree of autonomy; if one is not able to give the of practical reason to oneself, one does not have an exception to make. According to Arendt, “man,” who is autonomous, is very different from “men,” who are bound by a “community sense” and are therefore not autonomous.127 This means that a multitude, like the masses, the people, or the mob, cannot strictly be hypocritical. But if this is the case, how can respectable society wear the mask of hypocrisy? The answer is that, although respectable society is not autonomous in the Kantian moral sense, it is capable of laying down the ; not the ones of practical reason, but actual juridical laws. In this sense, respectable society is able to make exceptions. Although Arendt does not argue this explicitly, it seems to be epitomized by Benjamin Disraeli, whom she quotes saying: “What is a crime among the multitude is only a vice among the few.”128 According to Arendt, Disraeli’s comment is “perhaps the most profound insight into the very principle by which the slow and insidious decline of nineteenth-century society into the depth of mob and underworld morality took place.”129 This should not be taken as though the principle is mob morality itself, or even a part thereof, it means, rather, that respectable society’s hypocrisy allowed for the steady growth of mob morality. Mob morality provided an alternative to bourgeois values and standards, an alternative “cleansed of hypocrisy”;

123 ‘Thinking’ 186 in: LoM. 124 Ibid. 188. 125 ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’ 187 in: RJ. 126 EJ 288. 127 LKPP 27. 128 Quoted in OT 69. 129 Ibid.

22 and it was precisely this element of mob mentality that later made it so attractive to the elite and enabled its rise to prominence.130 The brutal subjugation of peoples under the guise of a ‘civilizing mission’; the neglect of the poverty-stricken masses while espousing Christian values; and imperial nationalism while at the same time collaborating with a perceived alien to, and therefore an enemy of, the nation––it can be said that it is this imperialist experience had made the mob something of an authority on bourgeois hypocrisy. On this view, it is no surprise that the mob became the new enragés at the end of the nineteenth century, where the peuple had been those of the eighteenth. , for example, argues that the mob actually replaces the peuple as “a new historical actor on the political scene.”131 However, it should be noted that these new enragés, although equally fanatical, were very different from those of the French Revolution. Where the latter aimed at “tearing down the façade” it focused on revealing the “honest face of the peuple,”132 the former, on the other hand, merely aimed to “destroy respectability” as such.133 Exemplary in this respect is the revolutionary nihilist Sergei Nechayev and his The Catechism of the Revolutionist,134 which for the most part reads more like an analysis of the mob man than as instruction manual for the anarchist. Moreover, it served as an inspiration for the Russian nihilist movement, that would be responsible for the assassination of Tsar Nicholas II in 1881; which is significant because, according to Arendt, “rebellious ” is part of mob mentality.135 In the Catechism, according to Max Nomad, Nechayev lays out a “system of complete disregard for any tenets of simple decency and fairness in his attitude towards other human beings.”136 Nechayev’s revolutionist is someone who “has broken every connection with the social order and with the whole educated world, with all the laws, appearances and generally accepted conventions and moralities of that world which he considers his ruthless foe.”137 The role the revolutionist plays is purely destructive for Nechayev. To be sure, a new kind of organization will “evolve” out of the revolutionary

130 OT 334. 131 Benhabib, S. (1996): 66. 132 OR 102. 133 OT 327. 134 It is subject to debate whether Nechayev was the sole author of the manuscript, or whether Bakunin co-authored it. For an account of this, see Leier, M. (2011): 208. 135 OT 317. 136 Nomad (1961): 226. 137 Nechayev (1869): 230 in: Nomad (1961).

23 movement, but according to Nechayev, “this is the business of future generations. Our business is destruction, terrible, complete, universal, and merciless.”138 What is especially striking about the Catechism is Nechayev’s insistence that the end justifies any means; that is, everything is in service to complete destruction. Social bonds, such as friendship, camaraderie, even love, all are “determined solely by the degree of his usefulness to the cause of the all-destructive revolution.”139 This means-end relationship is very different from that of bourgeois imperialism, where, as we have seen, power and capital as means and ends became conflated; in the ‘Catechism’ the end is clear: destruction. Still, this too can be interpreted as a perversion of common means-end relations, more specifically, it constitutes a reversal of the means and ends; where, ordinarily, destruction has to serve a purpose, the sole purpose for the revolutionist is the destruction itself, what happens afterwards is of no concern to him, but only to future generations. This kind of destructive nihilism was characteristic of the mob, according to Arendt, whether represented by the Russian nihilists or by the French elite at the end of the nineteenth century.140 Whatever form the mob takes, its destructive tendencies are rooted in a perversion of the means-end relation. This is exemplified by Arendt’s remark, in which she ironically quotes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: “It has always been true that the mob will greet “deeds of violence with the admiring remark: it may be mean but it is very clever.””141 The destruction of respectability, on this view, has always been a part of mob mentality. However, even though we have seen, in the pan-movements, a more influential and autonomous mob, the rootlessness that characterized the mob in the imperialist era remained mostly a fringe element.142 This changed after the First World War, which, according to Arendt, brought about the breakdown of the class system, and thereby caused an uprooting on a hitherto unknown scale.143 The breakdown of this system, congruent with the subsequent crises of capitalism, entailed the rise of the modern atomized masses, which had––even more than the mob before them––lost their place in the world, but were, unlike

138 Ibid. 234-35. 139 Ibid. 231. 140 OT 144. 141 Ibid. 307. 142 Canovan, M. (2002): 407. 143 OT 260-1.

24 the mob, not (yet) able to establish their own counter-society. Rather, in Arendt’s view, the masses were seduced by the fictitious world of the mob, which, by that time, had assumed the form of totalitarian movements.144 But before the masses could be seduced by totalitarian propaganda, mob mentality needed to be sufficiently accepted by respectable society. Of course, it is strange that this would ever be possible, since it could only mean that respectable society had accepted the call for its own destruction. However, as we have seen, Arendt argues that the decline into mob mentality was already occurring since the nineteenth century, and, partly because of this, the mob had been growing ever more influential.145 Moreover, because of the catastrophe of the First World War and its aftermath, when, according to Arendt, “the smugness of spurious respectability gave way to anarchic despair,”146 the hypocrisy of bourgeois society finally revealed itself in all its flagrancy. In this situation, the interbellum intellectual elite, who saw in the death and destruction of war a great equalizing force,147 adopted a philosophy that had long since been mainstay of mob mentality; according to Arendt: “Destruction without mitigation, chaos and ruin as such assumed the dignity of supreme values.”148 The shared values, and the common goal of destruction, allowed for a temporary alliance between the mob and the elite, which enabled the normalization of totalitarian . This alliance, according to Arendt, “rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability.”149 The elite, blinded by hatred of hypocrisy and respectability, paid no heed to the content of mob mentality, and indiscriminately adopted it.150 The elite, on this view, “were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content, and they elevated cruelty to a major because it contradicted society’s humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy.”151 The mob, on the other hand, saw in the elite the path towards the access to history which it desperately craved, since it would entail that its place in the world would finally have to be recognized again. The means towards this recognition were, in the true

144 Ibid. 353. 145 Ibid. 334. 146 Ibid. 327. 147 Ibid. 329. 148 Ibid. 328. 149 Ibid. 333. 150 Ibid. 334. 151 Ibid. 331.

25 spirit of mob mentality, of secondary importance. Access to history was the goal, and the mob would have it, according to Arendt, “even at the price of destruction.”152 Arendt argues that the destruction of respectability coincided with the unmasking of hypocrisy, and that the bourgeoisie, only too willingly, unburdened itself of this “uncomfortable mask.”153 As exemplary in this respect, Arendt points to the reception of Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper in 1920’s Germany. It is worth quoting her at length here:

“The theme song in the play, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral,” was greeted with frantic applause by exactly everybody, though for different reasons. The mob applauded because it took the statement literally; the bourgeoisie applauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long that it had grown tired of the tension and found deep wisdom in the expression of the banality by which it lived; the elite applauded because the unveiling of hypocrisy was such superior and wonderful fun. The effect of the work was exactly the opposite of what Brecht had sought by it. The bourgeoisie could no longer be shocked; it welcomed the exposure of its hidden philosophy whose popularity proved they had been right all along, so that the only political result of Brecht’s “revolution” was to encourage everyone to discard the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept openly the standards of the mob.”154

With this acceptance by the intellectual elite and the bourgeoisie, mob mentality entered the mainstream, and became, in a sense, normalized. However, the normalization of mob mentality did not entail its immediate adoption by the masses. The alliance between the mob and the elite had, in a way, enveloped the bourgeoisie and drawn it into the world of the mob. We get the sense from Arendt, that this was not particularly hard to do; the bourgeoisie was burdened by their mask of hypocrisy, and the world of the mob simply provided it with the opportunity to unburden itself. The masses, on the other hand, could not be unburdened in this way, for the simple reason that they did not wear a mask of hypocrisy. Moreover, they did not, in contrast to the mob, inherit the values and standards of the bourgeoisie.155 Rather, according to Arendt, the morality of the mass man was determined “by all-pervasive influences and convictions which were tacitly and inarticulately shared by all classes of society alike.”156 What these were, Arendt is hopelessly unclear about. It is safe to assume, however, that mass-mentality

152 Ibid. 332. 153 Ibid. 335. 154 Ibid. 155 Ibid. 314. 156 Ibid.

26 takes at face value the bourgeoisie’s hypocritical mask; that is, the mask that espouses the more traditional morality. In this vein, Arendt discusses Himmler’s “supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination.”157 Unlike other mass-leaders, Himmler did not assume that the people were “bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men.”158 In this sense, the masses did not share the mob’s rebellious nihilism, nor did they inherit the pan-movements’ tribal nationalism.159 The mass man, according to Arendt, shares with the mob (prior to its alliance with the elite), only that both stand “outside all social ramifications and normal political representation.”160 Unlike the mob man, he is not brutal, nor is he particularly wicked, yet, similar to the mob man, he is isolated and lacks “normal relationships.”161 Although, according to Arendt, there are many differences between the mob and the masses, which actually have only their worldlessness in common,162 the difference between the two seems to rest largely on the degrees to which they value individualism; for the mob inherits the Hobbesian individualism of the bourgeoisie,163 the masses, on the other hand, are characterized by a lack of self-interestedness.164 Unfortunately, Arendt neglects to explain where this lack of self-interest came from; however, she does note that a one of the main characteristics of the masses is that they are convinced by “the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”165 On this view, it is easy to see where the lack of self-interest originated; from the hypocritical, or more precisely, Christian morality of dominant classes. Because of this character, the mass man is not likely to readily adopt mob mentality as his own. According to Arendt, “the masses have to be won by propaganda.”166 The totalitarian movement, which in its early stages is a kind of incarnation of the mob,167 seduces the worldless masses with a fictitious new and, more importantly, consistent

157 Ibid. 338. 158 Ibid. Yet, according to Arendt, “the most gifted mass leaders of our time have risen from the mob rather than from the masses.” (ibid. 317). 159 Ibid. 317. 160 Ibid. 314. 161 Ibid. 317. 162 Ibid. 314. 163 Ibid. 313-14. 164 Ibid. 316. 165 Ibid. 351. 166 Ibid. 341. 167 Ibid. 318.

27 world.168 As such, the masses, like nineteenth-century society, descended into the depths of mob mentality; however, the difference was that now the mob, or rather, the movement was in control. Through its propaganda, it was able to form the fictitious world, and therefore the masses at their discretion. Useful traits, such as lack of self-interest could be maintained and new ones, such as “absence of scruple […] could be taught in a relatively short time.”169 In a similar manner, the masses came to believe, with the mob, that the “truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption.”170 With this, the masses adopted another “outstanding characteristic of mob mentality” namely the curious “mixture of gullibility and cynicism.”171 This mixture brought about the normalization of conspiracy theories, which often appeared more consistent than actual explanations of events, and were thus easier to believe.172 Now, as soon as the totalitarian movement has successfully seduced the masses, it turns on both the mob and the elite, and for mostly the same reason; it is threatened by the enterprising spirit of both groups.173 In this respect, it is tempting to think about the fate of the Nazi’s Sturmabteilung (SA). In fact, Arendt explicitly mentions Ernst Röhm’s autobiography as “a veritable classic” of mob political philosophy.174 It is well known that Röhm posed a threat to Hitler’s authority, and his failed push for more influence for his militia, caused under the members of the SA a mood of “resentful radicalism.”175 In this sense, the Night of the Long Knives––during which the Nazis further solidified their hold on the government by liquidating both enemies and allies, like Röhm, who might pose a threat to Hitler’s rule––might be seen as Hitler’s attempt to quench the SA’s enterprising spirit.176 However, according to Arendt, these liquidations would not have been possible without the support of the masses.177 On this view, only after the partial adoption of mob mentality by the masses does the totalitarian movement no longer need its incubator, and discards it in the only way it knows how: violently. However, this interpretation mistakenly assumes that the mob was completely organized in the SA, and not in the other parts of the movement.

168 Ibid. 392. 169 Ibid. 337. 170 Ibid. 351. 171 Ibid. 382. 172 Ibid. 333. 173 Ibid. 339. 174 Ibid. 318n.26. 175 Overy, R. (2005): 144. 176 For an account of this, see Siemens, D. (2017). 177 OT 306.

28

But, as we will see, the pinioning of the SA should be seen as a destruction of a clique, rather than the destruction of the mob.178 Of course, Arendt’s account of the emergence and growth of totalitarian movements has not been without criticism. According to Robert Paxton, theories of fascism that are based on the notion of an ‘atomized ’ have been “convincingly refuted.”179 Empirical data shows that the Germans of the Weimar hardly spent their days in isolation, the , rather, was rife with clubs and associations. “As the saying went,” according to Paxton, “two Germans a discussion; three Germans, a club.”180 These clubs, he argues, were already becoming increasingly polarized, and the Nazi movement mobilized “entire organizations through carefully targeted appeals to specific interests.”181 But if this is the case, what does this mean for Arendt’s concept of the mob? Paxton, to his credit, notes the importance of the mob in his summary of Arendt’s theory. Arendt, he argues, works within the of an atomized society “in her analysis of how the new rootless mob, detached from all social, intellectual, or moral moorings and inebriated by anti-Semitic and imperialist passions, made possible the emergence of an unprecedented form of limitless mass-based plebiscitary .”182 Although it is, of course, not the case that the mob was detached from all intellectual and moral moorings, in Arendt’s view––since its values and standards are based on that of the dominant class–– Paxton’s picture is quite accurate. And since empirical evidence refutes her account of the atomized mass society, the concept of the mob might also be in trouble. Especially since, according to Arendt, the mob stands not only outside all normal political representation, but also all social ramifications.183 This remark is particularly hard to reconcile with today’s accepted historiography; how can there be no social ramifications, while at the same time a flourishing social life of clubs and associations? Indeed, if it is the case that mob men were welcome to take part in this social life, it would seem that they were not excluded from society at all. The mob men, in this sense, did not experience forced isolation; that is, they were not deserted by others with a shared concern for the world.

178 I return to this in chapter 7 179 Paxton, R. (2005): 302n21. 180 Ibid. 209. 181 Ibid. 209-10. 182 Ibid. 209. 183 OT 314.

29

On this view, the exclusion experienced by the mob might be viewed as part of its fictitious world; a myth propagated by mob elements themselves. The mob elements, then, were not deserted by others with a shared concern for the world, it was, rather, they themselves who did not share this concern with the others. This interpretation is attractive; it accounts for the rich social life of Weimar Germany and the steady growth of mob mentality. Furthermore, it fits nicely with the mob’s narratives of grand conspiracies. On the other hand, however, it fails to account for the reason that the mob men lose their concern for the world and are attracted to the fictitious world in the first place, and this is precisely the consequence of Paxton’s counter-argument. Indeed, without its forced isolation and threat of superfluity, the mob would have no reason to establish its counter-society, nor to reach out to other fringe elements from different classes; moreover, it might even be argued that it follows that the mob would never have emerged. However, Paxton’s argument pertains to the idea of mass society, and not the mob itself. In fact, his analysis is closer to Arendt’s mob than he seems to realize. He argues that the NSDAP was able to draw votes across class boundaries. The Nazi’s only did less well among those already “anchored in another community, such as Catholics or Marxists.”184 In this sense, culture was a more determining factor than class. This analysis is very much in line with Arendt’s concept of the mob; both transcend, or rather run through, class society. Moreover, the fact that those already anchored in a community were not susceptible to Nazi propaganda, can be seen as evidence that Germans lived in “parallel worlds,” to use Paxton’s phrase.185 In Arendtian terms, this anchoring might be viewed as rootedness, and those who were not rooted in this sense, experienced a kind of worldlessness. This is corroborated by the fact that these clubs were highly segregated and “deeply polarized.”186 On this view, because of their memberships in clubs and associations, the mob men certainly did not stand outside all social ramifications, but these ramifications simply ended with their own fictitious world. In this vein, the “techniques of duplication,” which aimed to replicate existing organizations and associations in the colors of the movement,187 might be interpreted as the mob establishing its counter-society. Individual mob elements, then, did not lack contact with others; but these other were, rather, also a part of the mob.

184 Paxton, R. (2005): 228. 185 Ibid. 302n24. 186 Ibid. 210 187 OT 371-72.

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Given the segregated and polarized nature of German social life, then, it can be said that the mob rootlessness was at least partially forced; that is, it is unlikely that the mob men were welcome to join any club or organization they wanted. Because of this they experienced a lack of shared concern for its fictitious world by others, and hence, did not have a place in society. At the same time, this dynamic could feed its own narrative of social exclusion.188

188 I will come back to this in the next chapter.

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4. The mob and action

“[T]o be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.”189

We have seen how the mob, made up from people who created a new fictitious world because they were threatened with superfluity, stands outside of society. Yet the mob has had a profound impact on society and the political landscape of early twentieth-century Europe, through its alliance with the elite, who had voluntarily left society.190 But even before the mob’s rise to power, in the form of totalitarianism, it was impacting European politics. Nechayev’s revolutionary nihilists, for example, although they were not anywhere near as popular as the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, shifted the policies of czarist Russia, albeit in the opposite direction as they were aiming for. The point is that the mob has the ability to influence both the social and the political realm; it has an impact on political decision making even without political representation, and it has an impact in society, even without being part of it. The question that arises, then, is what kind of phenomenon the mob is; political, social, something in between, or something else entirely. In any case, insofar as the mob’s existence is based upon a multitude of men, it cannot escape of plurality––even if this was the attempt of totalitarian domination.191 On this view, then, the mob must always exist in the public realm; there is no such thing as a private mob. To analyze the mob, then, it is necessary to grasp the experiences of human activities in the ; which are analyzed by Arendt in The Human Condition. This book is, according to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, “a primer on how to think about and evaluate the , the public things; how to protect them once they’ve been identified; and how to live a political life.”192 As such, even though the mob is not strictly mentioned in it, it ought to provide a clear picture of what Arendt views as social and political phenomena. The political life, according to Arendt, is made possible by three fundamental human activities which, in general, make up the vita activa: labor, work, and action.193 In her view,

189 HC 188. 190 OT 326. 191 Baehr, P., & Wells, G. C. (2012) 375n39. 192 Young-Bruehl (2006): 80. 193 HC 7. N.B. the vita activa is more than just the political life; it concerns all human activities, not just those involving others.

32 it is not possible to live the vita activa without others, as such, “in so far as it is actively engaged in doing something, is always rooted in a world of men and of man-made things which it never leaves or altogether transcends.”194 It should be emphasized that Arendt does not argue that the vita activa is always rooted only in the physical world; otherwise, both the mob and the masses would be excluded from it, since they are uprooted from the world by definition. On this view, although the mob likely shares the world of man-made things, it is uprooted from the world in the sense of the intangible in-between space of human relationships. However, it is rooted in a world, namely its own fictitious world, and therefore it is not inherently barred from the active life. This conditionality is necessary since Arendt argues that, “[n]o human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature's wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.”195 It is easy to see why this has to be the case: labor, “the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body,”196 is one of the fundamental activities of the vita activa; utter worldlessness, then, would seem to result in the loss of labor and therefore a loss of the means needed to stay alive. Although true worldlessness, then, seems strictly speaking impossible, this interpretation would explain why it is, according to Arendt, “among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”197 Yet, labor, insofar as it pertains to the individual body, is the least worldly, and therefore most private, activity of the vita activa.198 That is, of the three fundamental activities, it has the least to do with others, because man, insofar as he is an animal laborans, is concerned with the subsistence of the self, and not the other individuals.199 This is not to say that labor has no worldly ramifications at all; in Arendt’s words, it “assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species.”200 However, “the laboring activity itself,” according to Arendt, “is oblivious of the world to the point of worldlessness.” Because of these functions, the activity of labor is inescapable––to stop laboring is to quit subsisting––thus, it can be said,

194 Ibid. 22. 195 Ibid. 196 Ibid. 7. 197 OT 475. 198 HC 96. 199 Ibid. 115. 200 Ibid. 8.

33 that labor is bound to a cyclical necessity, which is inherent in nature.201 As such, labor is not only the least worldly, but also the most natural of all activities, according to Arendt.202 In contrast to naturalness and worldlessness of labor, the activity of work is the most unnatural experience of man, because it deals solely with the fabrication of artificial products, and, correspondingly, it is directly pertaining to the physical world.203 That is, according to Arendt, it fabricates the artificial space in which men reside, that is, homes, villages, towns, and so on. As such, Arendt argues that: “the human condition of work is worldliness.”204 At first glance, this seems a strange idea, since the world is political per definition, and the products of homo faber, according to Arendt, “are always produced in isolation,”205 which means that the fabricating man leaves “temporarily the realm of politics.”206 Moreover, as Canovan argues, “[t]o conceive of politics as making is to ignore human plurality in theory and to coerce individuals in practice.”207 However, the world- building capability of work does not necessarily mean that it itself would substitute political action; rather, it means that it provides the stage for the political act. In this sense, the world-building of homo faber creates, or more precisely, fabricates the world as the physical enveloping space for politics, it is not––as opposed to action––what happens whenever men come together to discuss public affairs. The world, in the Arendtian sense, then, is both “the result of human productivity and human action.”208 Neither labor nor work, insofar as they are activities of man, can completely disregard the world; labor, through its species sustaining character, and work, because it fabricates the physical space. However, according to Arendt, they are still possible activities outside the society of men; that is, they are possible to perform without a connection to others. This would not change the activity as such, but only its performer; a lone laboring man “would not be human but an animal laborans in the word's most literal significance.”209 Similarly, the worker who does not eventually leave his isolation and returns to the world, “would have lost his specifically human quality and, rather, be a god—not, to be sure, the Creator,

201 Ibid. 115. 202 Ibid. 96. 203 Ibid. 7. 204 Ibid. 205 Ibid. 161. 206 OT 475. 207 Canovan, M. (1998): xii in: HC. 208 ‘Introduction into Politics’ 107 in: PP. 209 HC 22.

34 but a divine demiurge as described him in one of his myths.”210 In this sense, only action is the exclusive activity of mankind, “and only action is entirely dependent on the constant presence of others.”211 This makes action the only purely political activity, and corresponds, as such, “to the human condition of plurality”; the conditio per quam, according to Arendt, “of all political life.”212 On this view, action is the only activity that takes place exclusively and necessarily in the world; it is the activity through which “we insert ourselves into the human world,”213 and by which we change it.214 This insertion, according to Arendt, is always a beginning, a something new.215 Not the creation of something physical, since this is the prerogative of work, but the constitution and disclosure of a new potential. In Arendt’s view, action has two “outstanding” characteristics. First, since action always pertains to others who are also capable of action, reaction of these others is always also action, which also acts upon other, and so on. “Thus,” according to Arendt, “action and reaction among men never move in a closed circle and can never be reliably confined to two partners.”216 As such, Arendt argues, action is boundless; it “has an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries.”217 The second outstanding characteristic of action is its unpredictability. This is of course closely connected with the characteristic of boundlessness; it is never certain which boundaries action will cut across. But the unpredictability of action also means that it can only fully reveal itself in retrospect, that is, from the point of view of the historian. The actor himself has, in the moment of action, no sense of the meaningfulness of the act, and of “the story that follows.”218 The reason for his senselessness is, according to Arendt, connected with the boundlessness, because of its chain-like nature, “action has no end.”219 These characteristics, too, point to the profound difference between action and the other activities. Labor, though it is an endless continuation of biological processes, is cyclical

210 Ibid. 211 Ibid. 23. 212 Ibid. 7. 213 Ibid.176. 214 ‘Truth and Politics’ 253 in: BPF. 215 HC 177. 216 Ibid. 190. 217 Ibid. 218 Ibid. 192. 219 Ibid. 233.

35 in nature, and as such, it is highly predictable and inescapable.220 Work, on the other hand, is necessarily isolated, and can therefore never be boundless. Nor can it be unpredictable, since it is a materialization of a blueprint, according to Arendt.221 On this view, any unforeseen results would count as an error, either in the blueprint, or in the work itself. For these reasons, then, it is also clear why, according to Arendt, the substitution of action for any of these experiences is highly undesirable; although it is precisely what has happened in the tradition of political philosophy. The conflation of labor and action gave rise to the substitution of freedom for necessity. This, it can be said, was precisely the fault of the French Revolution and, later, Marxist theory, which, according to Arendt, focused too much on the social question and the alleviation of the suffering of the poor, so that it lost the true goal of any revolution: the constitution of freedom.222 Such necessity, in Arendt’s view, belongs to the realm of the family, or more precisely, the household, or the .223 It is characteristic of contemporary mass society that labor takes up a central position in the vita activa. “Whatever we do,” according to Arendt, “we are supposed to do for the sake of "making a living"; such is the verdict of society.”224 This entails that any activity which does not directly pertains to the necessities of life, is not deemed a serious activity, and is therefore regarded as a hobby.225 And since hobbies, in Arendt’s view, are “strictly private and essentially worldless activities,”226 and labor is the most worldless activity of the vita activa, the laboring society is, in a sense, the pinnacle of world-alienation. The conflation of action and work––which might be even more perilous, but is certainly pervasive in tradition of political thought since Plato227––can be seen, most clearly, in utopian projects. These projects aim to arrange society based on a fixed blueprint, and correspondingly they assume that anything that the blueprint does not take account is erroneous itself. Accordingly, in Arendt’s view, such blueprints for society are attempts to find a remedy for the unpredictability of action; however, since action is necessarily unpredictable and arises directly from the human condition of plurality, these blueprints

220 Ibid. 96. 221 Ibid. 140. 222 OR 59. 223 HC 30. 224 Ibid. 127. 225 Ibid. 128. 226 Ibid. 118. 227 Ibid. 227.

36 always come down to an attempt to renege the public realm completely.228 Moreover, inherent in the idea of work is the end-product, which, almost by necessity, serves to justify the means.229 Arendt goes so far as to argue that “to make a statement about ends that do not justify all means is to speak in paradoxes, the definition of an end being precisely the justification of the means.”230 The means-end relationship in work, proper, is already fraught with violence––“the wood justifies killing the tree and the table justifies destroying the wood”231––in the political sphere, then, this kind of destruction often, by no means always, manifests itself as simple murderousness. Given the prominence of labor in society, and the concomitant worldlessness of the masses, it easy to see which activity corresponds most closely to the mass man. Since the French Revolution first substituted its aim for freedom for the goal of abundance,232 the masses have been attracted to labor, rather than work, “because only laboring, with its inherent fertility, is likely to bring about abundance.”233 Because of the equation of freedom and abundance, action, too, has been subordinated by the mass man; or more precisely, on this view, since the mass man mistakes abundance for freedom, action does not occur to him as a productive activity. The mass man, then, has more in common with the animal laborans than with either homo faber or the man of action. The mob man, on the other hand, is not as easily characterized. In a sense, he is like the mass man, for he too has lost his sense of having a place in the world.234 However, insofar as the mass man is an animal laborans, Arendt portrays him as almost content with his worldlessness; that is, the contentedness of the animal laborans, on this view, stems from the substitution of the aim freedom for the goal of abundance, and as long as he remains able to consume, he has achieved this goal. It is only when this goal is made unattainable that the masses become discontented and rise up against society.235 That the mob man, on the other hand, is not at all contented with his exclusion from the world, is evident, in a sense, from the mob’s creation of a fictitious world. This attempt at a substitution for the world does not stem from the fact the mob grows hungry––since the mob is made up from

228 Ibid. 220. 229 Ibid. 229. 230 Ibid. 231 Ibid. 153. 232 OR 58. 233 HC 126. 234 Cf. Canovan, M. (2002): 407-8. 235 HC 134.

37 the refuse of all classes, according to Arendt, only a part of it would be poverty-stricken–– rather, it stems from the antipathy towards hypocrisy and the concomitant desire for consistency. In this sense, the mob is quite unlike the animal laborans, who would only notice his worldlessness if he grows hungry. Moreover, given the mob’s extreme Hobbesian philosophy, it views the resources of the earth as scarce by necessity; the goal of abundance, therefore, would already have to be deemed unachievable by the mob man. The mob man seems, prima facie, to have more in common with homo faber than animal laborans. For starters, because of the mob’s attraction to violence, work, with its inherently violent quality, should already have an appeal to the mob man. However, where homo faber uses violence for the fabrication of something physical, the mob man merely seems capable, or at least, merely interested in destruction. Secondly, in Arendt’s view, homo faber can think only in the means-end category;236 in this sense, he also seems to resemble the mob man, who, as we have seen, relies on the means-end category in the justification for his violence and destruction. Although for homo faber the chain of means and ends is unbreakable, since every end becomes a means as soon as it has been achieved,237 the relationship is not strictly perverted; this, in contrast the mob which perverts the relationship, either in the sense that it reverses the means and ends, or in that it conflates them entirely. Finally, homo faber’s isolation, that is, his withdrawal from the world, resembles that of the mob; the difference, however, is that in the case of homo faber isolation is a choice––the necessary condition for work––and as such, he can enter back into the world at will. The mob man, on the other hand, likely has no such opportunity, because of the dialectical nature of his isolation; in which, on the one hand, his exclusion is forced, while on the other, he perpetuates this narrative in his fictitious world. In this dialectic, the mob’s fictitious world, in a sense, serves as an escape from isolation; where homo faber in his isolation is necessarily alone,238 the mob man, in and through his fictitious world, because of his exclusion from the actual world, finds others in a similar situation, with a similar mentality. On this view, individual mob elements are not isolated at all; it is rather the mob in its entirety that is isolated, or more precisely, uprooted from the world.

236 HC 155. 237 Ibid. 154. It should be noted that it is possible to break this chain, according to Arendt, but only if something is regarded as an end in itself; and this is precisely what homo faber, since he thinks only in terms of usefulness, is unable to do. 238 Ibid. 161.

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The enforced isolation of mob men, which brings about their worldlessness, in a sense, appears to bar them from the political realm; that is, since the world in Arendtian terminology is the space for politics, an exclusion from this space should entail an exclusion from politics. However, given the mob’s necessarily plural nature, and the fact that, according to Arendt, plurality is the conditio per quam of politics, this is not so straightforward. In fact, Arendt argues that the mob, “excluded as it is from society and political representation, […] turns of necessity to extraparliamentary [sic] action.”239 And, since action, in Arendt’s view, corresponds to the human condition of plurality,240 this extra- parliamentary action seems to be political in nature; that is, it is pertaining to the world. However, because the mob is excluded from the world, or more precisely, from the intangible in-between241––the normal relationships which constitute politics242––this action can only pertain either to the physical world, from which it cannot be excluded,243 or to the fictitious world, which is its own creation. On this view, insofar as its extra-parliamentary action pertains to the fictitious world, the mob does not insert itself into the actual space for politics, and thus remains excluded from society. However, insofar as the mob man finds company and plurality in his fictitious world, it can be said that in acting he engages in the preservation of this world, thereby creating “the condition for remembrance, that is, for history.”244 On the other hand, as soon as the mob’s action pertains to the physical world, it imposes itself, onto society; more precisely, the mob’s action discloses its fictitious world to society as a new potential. That the mob is capable of action, gives it the semblance of a political phenomenon, especially since, according to Arendt “action is the political activity par excellence.”245 However, action in society is limited by laws; or more precisely, in Arendt’s words: “laws create a space in which they are valid, and this space is the world in which we can move about in freedom.”246 These laws are necessary to counter the inherent boundlessness and unpredictability of action;247 without these limitations there is a danger in “human

239 OT 108. 240 HC 7. 241 Ibid. 183. 242 ‘Introduction into Politics’ 95 in: PP. 243 Of course, this is strictly speaking not true; a society might opt for large scale imprisonment, banishment, or even mass murder, but this seems excessive and altogether contrary to democratic rule-of-law. 244 HC 9. 245 Ibid. 246 ‘Introduction into Politics’ 190 in: PP. 247 Ibid. 187.

39 initiative,” as Canovan also reminds us, of “raging out of control.”248 Arendt, however, often characterizes the mob in contrast to “law-abiding citizenship.”249 Indeed, at least one commentator even interprets the mob “not in the word's older sense of the merely uncouth and disorderly poor, but with the slang connotation of a specifically criminal underworld.”250 Although this interpretation is not quite correct, it does nicely serve to highlight the lawless nature of the mob, which is a recurring theme throughout Arendt’s work. It is lawless government, according to Arendt, following Kant, that is inherently tyrannical,251 and this is precisely what transforms into ochlocracy, or mob rule, democracy’s perverted form.252 In a similar sense, this type of governmental lawlessness is present in the colonies under imperialism––in which the mob, of course, played a monumental role––in the form of rule by decree.253 This type of rule, in Arendt’s view, is tantamount to government by bureaucracy,254 which is the “most social form of government”255 and entails a “rule by nobody.”256 The decree, according to Arendt, can be a necessary tool in times of emergency.257 In a sense, this implies that the decree is rooted in the means-end category; that is, its function is necessarily to serve a specific end. However, in bureaucratic government “there are no general principles which simple reason can understand behind the decree, but ever-changing circumstances which only an expert can know in detail.”258 It is this mysterious nature, connected with its inherent lawlessness, according to Arendt, makes the decree a favored tool of totalitarianism.259 Similarly, rule by decree was the form of governing during the Reign of Terror, in which Robespierre’s efforts to alleviate the sufferings of the poor “played havoc with and made light of the laws.”260 Here too, had the social taken over the public realm,261 and enabled the corresponding lawlessness of untempered action in the form of the Reign of

248 Canovan, M. (1998): xix in: HC. 249 ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ 202 in: RJ. The position she takes in this article regarding racial desegregation efforts in schools is problematic, and even caused some critics to label her as an anti-black racist. For an account of the controversy see: Young-Bruehl (1982): 313-8 and Bernstein (2018): 47-58. 250 Tsao, R. T. (2002): 584. 251 ‘ and the Tradition of Western Political Thought’ 31 in: TWB. 252 ‘The Great Tradition’ 43 in: TWB. 253 OT 244. 254 Ibid. 243. 255 HC 40. 256 ‘Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought’ 33 in: TWB. 257 OT 244. 258 Ibid. 259 Ibid. 393-4. 260 OR 86. 261 Arendt’s term “the social” is highly contentious, for an extensive critique see: Pitkin, H.F. (1998).

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Terror; and, here too, were the decrees motivated by means-end thinking, according to Arendt. To illustrate this, she quotes Louis Antoine Saint-Just: “Nothing resembles virtue so much as a great crime, […] all must be permitted to those who act in the revolutionary direction.”262 In this saying, Saint-Just is reminiscent of other prominent mob men, who all employ the means-end category, and fail to account for the plurality that constitutes the actual world and is the political conditio per quam. As such, it can be said, based on Arendt’s examples, that the mob’s lawless action seems to pertain to the social,263 rather than to the political realm; and this, in her view, corresponds precisely to the threat of mob rule: “where the main public realm is society.”264 In such a realm, “there is always the danger that, through a perverted form of “acting together”––by pull and pressure and the tricks of cliques––those are brought to the fore who know nothing and can do nothing.”265

262 OR 87. 263 One of the problems of the term “the social” is that Arendt is ambiguous in her use of it; here “the social” takes the form of “society.” 264 HC 203. 265 Ibid.

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5. The mob and rule

“Democracy now is seen as the perversion of this polity, an ochlocracy where the mob rules supreme.”266

When the mob rises to power, or more precisely, when it takes over government, it is characteristic that it institutes rule by decree, because of its attraction to lawlessness. In this sense, mob rule is akin to tyrannical forms of government, which according to Arendt, always “rule by order and decree.”267 We are, in a way, accustomed to think of tyranny as a “lawless rule where power is wielded by one man according to his arbitrary will.”268 It is especially tempting to think in terms of one-man rule when contemplating the tyranny of totalitarian governments; which is well characterized by the famous Nazi slogan: “the Führer’s words have the force of law.”269 In this “Leader principle” the Leader indeed seems, prima facie, the most important aspect; however, the actual force behind the principle is not only the Leader himself, but also the movement which he personifies; or more precisely, on Arendt’s view, it is the relation of interdependence between Leader and movement that is the source of rule in totalitarianism.270 This idea was epitomized by Hitler, who said in a speech to the SA: "All that you are, you are through me; all that I am, I am through you alone."271 On this view, then, rather than the himself, it is the idea of lawlessness, or arbitrariness of rule that is the true measure of tyranny. Of course, the idea that lawlessness constitutes tyranny has been present in the tradition of political thought at least since Plato; who, in a sense, ordered his five forms of government in terms of lawlessness: the most lawful being the philosopher king, the least lawful the tyrant.272 refined this idea by arguing that there are three types of rule– –rule by one, rule by few, and rule by many––each with a corresponding lawful ideal–– monarchy, aristocracy, and polity––and a perverted constitution of lawlessness––tyranny,

266 ‘The Great Tradition’ 56 in: TWB. 267 ‘Authority in the Twentieth Century’ 70 in: TWB. 268 ‘The Great Tradition’ 52 in: TWB. 269 ‘“The Formidable Dr. Robinson” A Reply by Hannah Arendt’ 502-3 in: JW. In the original German: “Führerworte haben Gesetzes Kraft.” 270 OT 374. 271 Quoted in OT 325. It is interesting to note, that this speech was given in 1936, when the SA had already lost its status in the Reich. In a sense, then, Hitler still seemed to rely on interrelation between the strong-man and the mob (OT 400n35). 272 Plato (2000): 230-1.

42 , and democracy (meaning ).273 This taxonomy of rule was taken over by Polybius. He, however, equated democracy and polity, and instead proposed ochlocracy as the perverted form of rule by many. Although Polybius, for the most part follows “philosophers such as Plato,”274 there are some key differences. First, he notes, besides the breaking of the law,275 also the violence inherent in mob rule.276 Moreover, where Aristotle’s democracy implies a , Polybius’ ochlocracy seems to have much more in common with Arendt’s notion of “perverted action”––action “by pull and pressure and the tricks of cliques.”277––in that, still strictly under democracy, “some people began to want to get ahead of everyone else.”278 And consequently, according to Polybius, these people began to bribe and corrupt the general populace. Another similarity between Polybius’ and Arendt’s mob rule, is the attraction of the mob to the strong-man. In Polybius, at the end of the cycle of constitutions,––“the natural way in which systems of government develop, metamorphose, and start all over again”279––a champion of the people will arise from ochlocracy, “a man of vision and daring,” who leads the people which “set about murdering, banishing, and redistributing land, until they were reduced to a bestial state and once more gained a monarchic master.”280 This is already reminiscent of Arendt’s notion of the strong-man, for whom the mob will always call, and who molds mass sentiments “into a unanimous public opinion.”281 But the most striking aspect of this similarity, is the idea that the people, led by a strong-man, are reduced to a bestial state; that is, in Arendtian terms, a pre-political state. Society in such a state, in Arendt’s view, resembles the Greek idea of the private realm as a household, in which a ruled supreme.282 The structure of this realm is based on necessity, and it is precisely this that finds its way into the public sphere, and how, according to Arendt, the social realm comes into being.283 Although both the social and the

273 Aristotle (1995): 1291b31-1292a38. 274 Polybius (2010): 373. 275 Ibid. In truth, he follows Aristotle more than Plato, however. 276 Ibid. 377. To be sure, Aristotle notes that it is possible for democracy (in his view the perverted form of rule by the many) to be founded on violence, but the element of necessity is absent in his theory. 277 HC 203. 278 Polybius (2010): 377. 279 Ibid. 378. 280 Ibid. It should be noted that Polybius differentiates between the monarchic master, the king, and the tyrant. The first is the start of the cycle of constitutions and evolves into kingship, which later degenerates into tyranny (ibid. 373). 281 OR 231. 282 HC 26-7. 283 Ibid. 38.

43 political realm presuppose a certain form of equality, these forms of a radically different kind; for the latter, it is an equality of peers through which one is allowed into the public realm. In this realm, however, “everybody had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all.”284 Interestingly, the characteristic of this realm is individuality, according to Arendt, “it was the only place where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were.”285 In the social realm, on the other hand, equality is equated with sameness, and expressed in conformity;286 meaning that a certain kind of behavior is expected by the social realm, which is, in Arendt’s words, “imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to “normalize” its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.”287 In the social realm, then, individuality is discouraged.288 This might appear as an incongruity in our analysis of the mob. If the mob is more a social, than a political phenomenon, and the social realm is characterized by conformity, how does this relate to the mob’s individualism? This tension is merely apparent, however. Recall that the mob adopts and subsequently perverts the values and standards of the dominant class; for the mob during imperialism this was, according to Arendt, the individualism inherited from Hobbes.289 However, the mob’s values and standards, as we have seen, are never stagnant, but shift with the values and standards of the dominant class. On this view, if Arendt is correct about the pervasiveness of the social realm, it can be said that the mob, in a social public realm, takes over and perverts the idea of conformity. In a sense, this is exemplified by Robert Ley saying, in 1934: “The only person who is still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep.”290 The predominance of the social realm in the modern age, in Arendt’s view, is epitomized by new forms of rule; bureaucracy and totalitarianism. According to Jerome Kohn, Arendt’s concept of totalitarianism adds a fourth form to the traditional taxonomy of government.

284 HC 41. 285 Ibid. 286 Ibid. 214. 287 Ibid. 40. 288 It should be emphasized that the Human Condition was first published in 1958. In the meantime the tendency towards conformity has, in many respects, been considerably halted. More precisely, in recent years there has been a strong trend towards self-disclosure through, for example, gender identity; although Arendt might argue that such disclosures are not strictly social, because they are a form of action, they do beg the question whether conformism still occurs in the sense that Arendt forewarns. However, the implications of these developments for Arendt’s theory are beyond the scope of this paper. 289 For an account of Hobbes’ individualism, see Hampton, J. 6-11. 290 Quoted in OT 339.

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This form is obviously already perverted, that is, lawless; but in Kohn’s view it also has a positive counterpart: the council system. Although Arendt nowhere gave an extensive account of what this system would entail precisely291––according to Kohn, because “they would be new beginnings that cannot be fully grasped in advance,”292––it would be something like Jefferson’s ward system, or the original idea behind the Soviet system.293 According to Arendt, “the councils say: We want to participate, we want to debate, we want to make our voices heard in public, and we want to have a possibility to determine the political course of our country.”294 On this view, the council system would create public spaces in which people can act. For this reason, Arendt argues that it is the most political form of government; as opposed to totalitarianism and “by extension,” according to Kohn, “to all forms of totalism,”295 alluding to bureaucracy.296 Although Kohn’s remark is quite interesting, it should be noted that Arendt never argued along these lines. So, it is not at all evident that totalitarianism, or bureaucracy for that matter, are perversions of the council system. In order to demonstrate this, then, we will have to show that the council system, in a lawless form, would resemble totalitarianism, or bureaucracy. This is not easy, since totalitarianism and the council system are quite rare phenomena. Moreover, only time Arendt mentions the two systems in the same breath, in a piece published in The Meridian (fall 1958) which accompanied the second edition to The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958), the two forms of government do not seem to share any characteristic, except that they “can be understood as only against the bankrupt body politic of the nation-state.”297 But these remarks were scrapped from the 1966 edition, as was the epilogue about which they were made.298 The reason for this omission was that the Soviet Union was no longer strictly totalitarian under Khrushchev, in Arendt’s view; totalitarianism “came to no less an end in Russia with the death of Stalin than totalitarianism came to an end in Germany with the death of Hitler.”299

291 The most exhaustive accounts are in OR 264-285 and ‘The Hungarian Revolution and Totalitarian Imperialism’ 132-142 in TWB. 292 Kohn, J. (2018): xiii in: TWB (original italics). 293 ‘Action and the “Pursuit of Happiness”’ 209 in: TWB. 294 ‘Thoughts on Politics and Revolution’ 232 in: CR. 295 Kohn, J. (2018): xiii in: TWB 296 Jonathan Schell made a similar argument in his introduction to the 2006 Penguin edition of On Revolution. 297 ‘Totalitarianism’ 159 in: TWB. 298 Both, however, were republished in Thinking Without a Banister (2018). 299 OT xxxvii.

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According to Arendt, council system is as old as the party system and the two are always in odds after a revolution; as of yet, she argues, the party system has always prevailed.300 This is not to say that councils are antiparliamentary; but rather that they “suggest another form in which the people are represented.”301 In this sense they are not strictly democratic, or more precisely, in this system there would not be general suffrage.302 This would not necessarily mean that the councils would not be open to all; but rather that only those with a sincere interest in public life would join; and consequently an elite would emerge, according to Arendt, out of the grass roots.303 In Arendt’s account of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, councils emerged in the wake of the breakdown of rule, “to prevent chaos and criminal elements from gaining the upper hand.”304 These councils, according to Kohn, “are composed of men and women who have common interests in issues.”305 As such they appeared in many forms: as a Worker’s Council, a Student Council, a Council, and so on; all these councils could be described according to Arendt “as islands in a sea, or as oases in a desert.”306 In the ideal council system, and as actually happened during the Hungarian Revolution, all councils would coordinate with each other, and send representatives to higher councils, “up to the Supreme National Council, the counterpart of national government.”307 When the council system formed during the Hungarian Revolution, according to Arendt, “for the shortest historical moment, the voice of the people has been heard unaltered by the shouts of the mob or the bickering of the fanatics.”308 In Arendt’s view, the system’s relies on an elite, who, simply because their personal qualification, would not abuse their power or position,309 as such they unlikely succumb to “pull and pressure and the tricks of cliques.”310 She argues that this elite is self-chosen; that is, they are those “from all walks of life who have a taste for public freedom and cannot be “happy” without it.”311 Conversely,

300 ‘The Hungarian Revolution and Totalitarian Imperialism’ 136-37 in: TWB. 301 Ibid. 136. 302 OR 284. 303 Ibid. 282-3. 304 ‘The Hungarian Revolution and Totalitarian Imperialism’ 135 in: TWB. 305 Kohn, J. (2018): xiii in: TWB. 306 OR 279. 307 ‘The Hungarian Revolution and Totalitarian Imperialism’ 139 in: TWB. 308 Ibid. 309 Ibid. 138. 310 HC 203. 311 OR 283.

46 according to Arendt, those who do not enter into public life are self-excluded.312 In this sense, Arendt argues, that the system can be illustrated by the image of a pyramid.313 Such imagery is somewhat curious since Arendt also uses this picture to portray . However, where in the pyramid of authoritarian governments authority functions from the top down, in the council system it is generated on each layer of the pyramid.314 This is precisely the resemblance with totalitarianism; namely the interdependence of the layers. In Arendt’s view, “All the extraordinarily manifold parts of the [totalitarian] movement […] are related in such a way that each form the façade in one direction and the center in the other, that is plays the role of normal outside world for one layer and the role of radical extremism for another.”315 However, in this sense, according to Arendt, totalitarianism’s image is more like that of an onion; the closer to center, the more fanatical it becomes, and finally in the middle we find the Leader, who rules from within, but is dependent of this interplay between layers. Arendt reserves this image exclusively for totalitarian rule, but it would seem equally valid for the council system. Here, the councils coordinate with each other through the interplay between the layers. Moreover, to expand on the imagery, an onion seed adds layers to its inside, as it grows and expands into a bulb, similarly, the growth of the number of councils merit the addition of a more central council, and so on, until there are enough layers to incorporate the whole of society into the system––in this sense, the ‘Supreme Council’ would be more aptly named the ‘Central Council.’ Even though Arendt claims that she was not aware of a “utopian element” in her thought,316 the, in her own words, “romantic sympathy with the council system,”317 is of course ridiculously utopian, and has often been severely criticized as “naïveté,”318 and even as “something of an embarrassment.”319 These charges are understandable, and it seems Arendt knew this well enough, although she never lost her sympathy for the system; she

312 Ibid. 284. 313 ibid. 282. 314 Ibid. 315 ‘Authority in the Twentieth Century’ 78 in: TWB. 316 ‘Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt’ 464 in: TWB. 317 Ibid. 465. 318 Wellmer, A. (2000): 224. 319 Canovan, M. (1992): 237. For a defense of the council system see: Totschnig, W. (2014).

47 said, in contemplating what the chances are of it arising, “Very slight, if at all. And yet perhaps, after all––in the wake of the next revolution.”320 Still, apart from the elite who, supposedly, merely because of their talent would not give way to perverted action of cliques, there is no more of a guarantee against lawlessness than in any other form of rule. In fact, according to Arendt, factions will inevitably form, since people will hold the same opinions, however, she argues that the council will actually keep its factions at bay, since it will give most credence to “the number of trusted and trustworthy men in its ranks.”321 Yet, without a romantic sympathy, it is not difficult to imagine a faction which will be consistently overruled and will thereby feel deserted by others with a shared concern for the world; that is, isolated. In these conditions, based on our analysis, it seems likely that a mob will form. Since the council’s members are self-chosen, the mob cannot be excluded. Moreover, given its tendency to form cliques, it seems quite possible that it grows powerful enough to make a substantial impact on the government of its society, and perhaps even transform the council system into a lawless rule. Considering that the mob adopts and perverts the values and standards of the ruling class, and that all perversions of forms of government keep the same structure in place––democracy and ochlocracy are both rule by many, aristocracy and oligarchy are both rule by few, and monarchy and tyranny are both rule by one–– it would be fair to assume, at first glance, that it will espouse a kind of oligarchy; since, in the council system a form of aristocracy––rule by the best––is in place;322 and this might indeed be the case, if Arendt is right about the pyramid structure. On the other hand, if the structure of the system is more like an onion, this assumption may not be correct. However, even though the image of the onion is also the structure of totalitarianism, it seems that it would be going too far to argue, with Kohn, that totalitarianism is the perversion of the council system. In fact, the dispersal of power inherent to the council system seems a direct contradiction to the totalitarian leader principle. Under totalitarian rule the Leader has a “monopoly of responsibility,”323 that is, every act by the movement, or the totalitarian state, is carried out in the name of the Leader; or more precisely, every act is

320 ‘Thoughts on Politics and Revolution’ 233 in: CR. 321 ‘The Hungarian Revolution and Totalitarian Imperialism’ 138 in: TWB. 322 OR 284. 323 OT 374.

48 identified with the will of the Leader.324 In the council system, ideally, it should be easy enough to see where the responsibility ; that is, in envisioning the ideal council system, Arendt probably saw a well-organized and clearly structured system, this is likely why she chose for the pyramid metaphor, rather than the onion. However, it is not unthinkable, especially if the mob enters the system, that there will arise a myriad councils and convoluted structures. On this view, the perversion of the council system would rather entail something like a total bureaucracy, that is, a rule by nobody. In such a rule, according to Arendt, “There are many people […] who may demand an account, but nobody to give it because nobody cannot be held responsible.”325 On this view, rather than traditional oligarchy, it would be the experts to take charge, and institute rule by decree. In this sense, Kohn is mistaken to place the council system opposite of totalitarianism. To be sure, bureaucracy is a form of totalism, to which Kohn alludes, but Arendt is explicit that “bureaucracy should not be mistaken for totalitarian domination.”326 Even though totalitarian rule may also favor decree over law, the will of the Leader always protects the movement and enforces the decree.327 Moreover, according to Arendt, the totalitarian ruler needs “much more radical measures than the mere transformation of laws into decrees.”328 Most important for him is that the movement identifies with his will, not simply follows his orders.329 In a bureaucracy, on the other hand, “decrees […] remain anonymous,”330 there is no will behind them, only the opinions of the experts; and, because of this, no one to hold accountable.331 The true perversion of the council system, the most political form of government, then, is bureaucracy, the most social form of government. Even in the most political system Hannah Arendt could imagine, lawlessness in the form of rule by decree, would able to ensue because of a perverted form of action––“by pull and pressure and the tricks of cliques”332––that is so characteristic of the mob. What is striking about this kind of perversion of the council system, is that it demonstrates how influential the mob can be, even in a highly political form of rule; that is, a system in which world-alienation can be

324 Ibid. 400. 325 ‘Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought’ 33 in: TWB. 326 Ibid. 327 OT 374. 328 ‘Authority in the Twentieth Century’ 75 in: TWB. 329 OT 399-400. 330 Ibid 243. 331 ibid 244. 332 HC 203.

49 most effectively countered. Arendt’s highly specific, and unknown ideal of the council system warranted a more substantial examination than other well-known systems of rule. However, this does not mean that these are better equipped than the council system to fend off the mob. In fact, it is characteristic of the mob that it attempts to undermine all forms of rule; that is, curiously enough, all except totalitarianism.

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6. The mob and power

“What violence can never do is generate power.”333

Since in the previous analysis the focus was on the question “who rules whom?” the question of the methods of rule was neglected. However, according to Arendt, “it is only after one ceases to reduce public affairs to the business of that the original data in the realm of human affairs will appear, or, rather, reappear, in their authentic diversity.”334 On this view, then, we must not only examine the mob’s role in different systems of rule, but also the methods those systems employ and their relation to the mob. Arendt differentiates between five kinds of means of rule, or more precisely, methods of conducting human affairs: power, strength, force, authority, and violence. As with almost all of her terms, these distinctions should not be seen as “watertight compartments;” that is, these methods are often either conflated, genuinely overlapping, or flowing into each other. In this sense, it is safe to say that most governments rely on a mixture of all, or almost all of the methods; however, Arendt does provide us with more or less clear-cut definitions of the ideal forms of these methods, from which we may surmise which system employs which method the most. Power, in Arendt’s view, is closely related to action, but in a way precedes it; that is, power springs into existence whenever people come together, even before they have had the opportunity to act. In power, on this view, appears the boundless potentiality of action of a group. According to Arendt, “power is never the property of an individual;”335 to be sure a group can empower an individual, but as soon as the group disperses, this power disappears. In contradistinction to power, strength is always the quality of an individual or an object. It is a natural quality insofar as it is inherent in the entity; on this view, strength “cannot be shared with others.”336 A table, for example, is strong if it can carry a lot of weight, but it cannot share its strength with, say, a chair. Similarly, a person can be strong, but cannot share his strength; whether in the physical, or in the psychological sense. In this sense, if

333 ‘Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt’ 469 in: TWB. 334 ‘On Violence’ 142-3 in: CR. 335 Ibid. 143. 336 HC 203.

51 two or more people combine their strength, it ought to be called power. According to Arendt, strength can always be overpowered by the many.337 Moreover, in her view, “it is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.”338 This is not resentment, in the traditional Nietzschean sense, in her view; but rather a form corruption of power, that occurs naturally when the weak band together against the strong.339 In this sense, according to Arendt, the is sooner a vice of the weak, than “a characteristic of the strong.”340 Of all the methods of conducting human affairs, Arendt is the least clear about force. It is not to be mistaken for coercion, which belongs strictly in the realm of violence. Rather, it “should be reserved […] for the “forces of nature” or the “forces of circumstances” (la force des choses), that is, to indicate the energy released by physical or social movement.341 What this means exactly is not quite clear. Since the social movements, insofar as they exist out of people banding together, should strictly fall in the compartment of power. However, if we interpret force, not so much as a method of conducting human affairs, but rather as the energy released by these methods, then this would seem to make more sense. On this view, there is a force of power, force of strength, force of authority, and force of violence; no matter the methods employed, it is ultimately the force of the method that influences the conduct of others. This interpretation seems in line with Arendt saying, “Strength can actually be ruined only by power and is therefore always in danger from the combined force of many.”342 The functional element, then, is not power itself, it is rather the force of power that threatens strength. Authority is, according to Arendt, “the most elusive of these phenomena.”343 Although authority can be vested in persons or offices, it is neither inherent in them, nor a product of them; rather, it stems from an outside source.344 The traditional Roman notion of authority, as noted earlier, rested on the founding act of the ancestors, and was inseparable from religion and tradition.345 On this view, if one of these pillars would be taken out of the

337 Ibid. 338 ‘On Violence’ 143 in: CR. 339 HC 203. 340 Ibid. 341 ‘On Violence’ 143 in: CR. 342 HC 203 (my italics). 343 ‘On Violence’ 144 in: CR. 344 ‘What is Authority’ 97 in: BPF. 345 ‘Authority in the Twentieth Century’ 87 in: TWB.

52 equation, the whole structure would collapse; according to Arendt, this was precisely the fault of the modern age, in which thinkers would try to have one without the others.346 As we have seen, it was in this vein that early modern thinkers such as Locke and Hobbes built their ideas of authority on a notion of consent. Nonetheless, Arendt’s idea of authority is not too far removed from these thinkers; for her, “its hallmark is unquestioning recognition by those who are asked to obey; neither coercion nor is needed.”347 In this sense, it depends strongly on the consent of those over whom it is practiced; that is, although it is vested in the one who has it, is internalized by the one who recognizes it. Conversely, this means that if authority is not recognized, or rather, respected,348 the person who has it is helpless, and must turn to a different method of conducting human affairs; for instance, a father whose child will not listen can (should not but can) employ violence to coerce the child. Hence, Arendt argues that, “The greatest enemy of authority […] is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.”349 Violence, as we have seen, is closely connected to fabrication; for this reason, according to Arendt, it is “distinguished by its instrumental character.”350 In this sense, it is firmly rooted in the means-end category, and stands, as such, in contradistinction to power, which is “an end in itself.”351 Yet, these two methods have a curious relationship; although Arendt argues that they are opposites,352 “the two usually appear together.”353 Simply put, a rule of total violence would be impossible, there always has to be some power behind it; some group to enforce the directive.354 For example, recall that the Night of the Long Knives would not have been possible without the support of the masses. It is also interesting to note that violence is often the fallback of governments when power is waning; by the same token, however, according to Arendt, “violence can always destroy power.”355 The contrast between power and violence is maybe most clear in their extreme forms; where the extreme form of power is all “all against one,” the extreme form of violence is

346 ‘What is Authority?’ 128 in: BPF. 347 ‘On Violence’ 144 in: CR. 348 Ibid. 349 Ibid. 350 Ibid. 145. 351 Ibid 150. 352 Ibid. 155. 353 Ibid. 151. 354 Ibid. 149. 355 Ibid. 152.

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“one against all.”356 In this sense, it is easy to see why the tyrant relies so much on violence; any group that arises, by their power, threatens the tyrant’s strength, he will, then, rely on violence to destroy the opposition. On the other hand, violence does not so easily destroy strength;357 supposing that the opposition has a strong leader, or strong participants, then, power is likely return after it has been dispersed. But there are many different ways these methods interrelate; to name a few: strength often invokes authority (that is, in the modern notion of consent); violence enhances strength; and all rule requires some power. The point is that almost impossible for any government to rely on only one of these methods alone. The council system, for instance, relies heavily on power, but must also rely on the authority that the councils have over non-members. Even totalitarianism depends on the power of the movement––although, according to Arendt, it distinguishes itself from other tyrannies in that it fears all power, even that of its allies.358 Interestingly, of all methods, the only one which in theory can come close to absolute rule is authority. Although in a sense this also seems possible for power, however, if there is absolute power, then there is no “one” to exert it against; that is, in this case, power would not be a conducting force anymore. Absolute authority, on the other hand, is possible if all people have internalized it, and follow every command without question. In this sense, many forms of government may be able to rely on absolute authority; however, the reliance on authority seems to be the hallmark of bureaucratic rule. Indeed, no other method is more fitting to bureaucracy in its highest aspirations. To be sure, a bureaucracy can employ violence to counter the power of groups, as was of course common practice in the imperialist bureaucratic rule, but it is inherent to the nature of the decree that it demands obedience without question. At the same time, because of its reliance on authority, bureaucracy shares its vulnerabilities, which means that its greatest enemies, too, are contempt and laughter. In this sense, the group surest to undermine bureaucratic authority is the mob, since it has nothing but contempt for respectability, tradition, and society in general. As we have seen, it deems respectability hypocritical, and it resents society for its exclusion. But tradition does not seem to carry a lot of weight with the mob either, this is demonstrated by

356 ‘Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt’ 469 in: TWB. 357 HC 203. 358 ‘On Violence’ 154 in: CR.

54 its fickleness;359 by the “mixture between gullibility and cynicism,”360 which attempted to reveal “official history as a joke;”361 and, insofar as laws gain validity based on traditional authority,362 by its general attraction to lawlessness. The mob, then, has an ambiguous relation to bureaucracy; on the one hand, it is attracted to its lawlessness, in the form of its rule by decree, on the other, it shows nothing but contempt for its authority, thereby undermining precisely this rule. Of course, since it is in the nature of the mob to attempt to undermine all forms of rule, it has an ambiguous relationship with all methods of conducting human affairs. As Arendt argues, it relies on power, and as such it can destroy strength,363 yet it will always call for a strong man,364 and is attracted to violence,365 which can destroy, not only power, but also authority.366 This summary is, of course, quite lacking in depth, but it serves as a decent starting point for analyzing the mob’s relation with different forms of rule. Monarchy, since it is most often a product of tradition, relies on authority. However, insofar as it is a rule by one, it is also dependent on the strength of the ruler; more precisely, the strength of his personality. The mob’s contempt of authority is likely to cause an aversion towards the monarch; however, given the mob’s affinity to strong men, the monarch, by its strength, may be able to stem the mob’s antagonism. If the monarch does not prove strong enough, the mob is increasingly encouraged to act on its power, and take its perverted form of action, which more and more discloses its fictitious world to the masses. In Arendt’s view, the monarch can enhance his strength, while at the same time destroying the mob’s power, if he employ’s violence. This, in turn, as we have seen, will likely be greeted by the mob with the approving remark: “It may be mean, but is very clever.”367 In a sense, the use of violence is, of course, characteristic of tyranny, but it is not the case that any use of violence automatically turns a ruler into a tyrant. Still, violence is never legitimate, according to Arendt, but it may be justifiable by its end; for example, in case of self-defense.368 On this view, the ruler who is threatened by the mob, or any other

359 OT 108. 360 Ibid. 382. 361 Ibid. 333. 362 OR 183. 363 HC 203. 364 OT 107. 365 Ibid 352. 366 ‘On Violence’ 144 in: CR. 367 OT 307. 368 ‘On Violence’ 151 in: CR.

55 group for that matter, seems justified in their use of violence. However, Arendt argues, that this justification wanes the farther into the future its end lies.369 This is easy to see in the case of the violent ruler: if he employs violence for immediate self-defense, it is not necessarily tyrannical; however, if he continues his violent streak, under the guise of rooting out all conspirators, for example, the justification for his violence “loses plausibility,”370 and his rule becomes increasingly lawless, that is, increasingly tyrannical. Indeed, it might be said that this would necessarily be the case, since the use of violence constitutes a breakdown of authority;371 in this sense, if the ruler employs violence he loses authority. However, it would be more precise to say that if the question to employ violence would ever arise, the ruler’s authority has already vanished. However, since the tyrant has lost all his authority by his use of violence, and since it is impossible to rely on the force of violence alone, there would have to be a group that still empowers him. Curiously enough, the best candidate is the mob; its attraction to violence and lawlessness in general, seems to make it sympathetic to tyrannical rule; besides, the tyrant is likely to fit the calls for a strong man. Furthermore, because the mob, insofar as it is a group capable of action––albeit in a perverted form––relies on power, it is well equipped to empower the tyrant. This may seem strange; would the mob who tried to overthrow a legitimate ruler so easily switch sides? However, this fails to account for the “proverbial” fickleness of the mob. Furthermore, since its dominant opinion is never stagnant, it is not out of the question that it shifts allegiances. Moreover, the mob, as we have seen, is not necessarily a unified multitude; in this sense, it can be said that while a part of the mob can rise against the lawful ruler, a different part could stand with him when he turns into a tyrant. Aristocracy resembles the council system, in that it constitutes a rule by the “best”; however, where the council system relied on self-selection, this is not the case for aristocracy.372 On the one hand, this solves the problem of the mob perverting the councils; when there is no more self-selection, mob elements are likely to have a more difficult time becoming a part of the ruling few. On the other hand, because there is no self-selection in aristocracy, two problems arise: first, the problem of how to select the best; second, the

369 Ibid. 370 Ibid. 371 Ibid. 144. 372 ‘The Great Tradition’ 57 in: TWB.

56 problem of how to ensure that the best remain in power.373 The system will certainly degrade into its perverted form if it fails to address these issues; they are, however, beyond the scope of this paper. It can be said that aristocracy relies more on authority, than on any other method of conducting human affairs. To be sure, in an ideal aristocracy, the few who rule are empowered by the people, and they are likely to have quite some measure of strength; but they rule because they are the best, the most fit to govern, not because they are powerful, or strong. It is this fitness to rule that commands authority. Now, supposing that a full-proof way to ensure that the best are selected and remain in power has been devised. Authority, in this case, is vested in both the rulers and the system that chooses them. But the authority granted to the rulers, in a sense, seems different than that vested in the system. That is, the rulers are granted their position because they are the best, but they are able to remain in their position because the people will judge them to be the best. Only if the people internalize the authority of the rulers will they be able to keep it. This authority, then, seem to be predominantly based on consent. The system’s authority, on the other hand, although in the end certainly dependent on the approval of the people, is likely based primarily on the founding of the government; that is, on its heritage, its previous achievements, in short, its tradition. It should be noted that this kind of consent-based authority, since it relies on other people, resembles power. On this view, a person has authority because it is empowered by others. However, power cannot arise from mere consent, its force rather arises from people acting together, and it relies on covenants and mutual promises.374 Because of this, power is rooted in the present, but, in a sense, always seems to be forward looking. Authority, in contrast, even if it is largely based on consent, insofar it is based on the founding act, has its roots in the past;375 or more precisely, although consent occurs in the present, it is based on the past, on the founding act, whereas in power, covenants are struck in the present with a view towards the future. The consent in authority is not action, which is the hallmark of power, but only tacit approval of the actions of those with authority. The rulers, then, enjoy the consent of the people because of the tradition, not because of a promise aimed at the

373 Ibid. 374 OR 182. 375 ‘What is Authority?’ 122 in: BPF.

57 future. However, this consent might well turn to action, if the rulers in question, in a sense, turn to the people and renew the foundational covenant. On this view, since the system’s authority is predominantly tradition-based, it relies on the past, and is, as such, inherently conservative. Because of this, the system is likely to have a bias against change.376 And this might affect how it selects its rulers, and hence the policies of the governmental. However, on the other hand, consent-based authority, because of its democratic character, makes it more susceptible to mob style politics. Of course, the mob despises all forms of authority, whether consent or tradition-based, but it can be said that is more likely to influence the former than the latter. The mob does not necessarily have something to do with the transformation or perversion of the aristocracy into oligarchy. If by a failure of the selection system the wrong people are chosen, the mob can hardly be blamed––except in cases of sabotage, of course. Oligarchy, as the perversion of aristocracy, relies on different methods depending on its form. It can assume for instance, a rule by the rich, or by certain family ties. For the latter, the method employed is likely tradition-based authority. On the other hand, the methods of the former are not so straightforward, since Arendt notoriously neglects the role of capital in her theory.377 It can be said, however, that insofar as a currency has its roots in the tradition of the society, it commands a certain authority––both tradition and consent-based. On the other hand, it might be seen on par with, but at the same time different from, violence; first, because it shares violence’s instrumental nature; second, because it serves, in a political sense, as a means to enhance strength. The mob is not as likely to ally itself with the oligarchy as with the tyrant. To be sure, it will be attracted to the lawlessness of the system; and there may even be some mob elements in the ranks of the oligarchs. However, the continued reliance on authority is unlikely to sway the mob. Moreover, since it will always shout for a strong man, the mob might actually prove to be a threat to the oligarchy. On the other hand, they too, will require power behind their rule and the mob is suited to supply it. On this view, it is not unthinkable, that the mob and the oligarchy form a kind of strained alliance. The latter to remain in power, the former to eventually put in place its strong man.

376 This is not meant as a comment on today’s political landscape, which, especially in the , is riddled with misnomers and mischaracterizations of political theories. 377 The reason for this, is that the problem of capital should not strictly be an issue that belongs in the public sphere, according to Arendt.

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Of all forms of government, democracy is the one that relies by far the most on power. Insofar as democracy relies on people coming together to vote, it is based on “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.”378 This has always been the case, from early forms of to today’s parliamentary democracy. This is not to say that authority does not play a role; when a decision is made, for example, when a parliament is elected, it relies more on consent-based authority than power. However, every election might be seen as a renewal of the founding covenant; that is, a new agreement is struck, by which the government is empowered anew. But this is very different from the mere tacit approval in aristocracy, since it actually requires people to go out and vote. At the same time, authority and power are, in a sense, connected; the more people voted for a person, the more power that he enjoys, and, on the other hand, the longer he can expect tacit approval, that is, authority. The elections themselves, however, are based on promises; that is, candidates make promises to ensure votes, and hence empowerment. On this view, democracy is necessarily forward looking; even if the candidate promises to make things as they were before, it is still a promise about the future. False promises may be very effective in the empowering of a representative, but since power wanes as soon as the group disappears; more precisely, as soon as they no longer act in concert, the power of the representative also vanishes.379 Now he must rely on authority, which is likely to fade quickly, when he reneges on his promises. This is not to say that he will not be reelected, for he may be able to regain his power, if he is able to rally enough people to his side again. From democracy, all kinds of governments can arise, but strictly speaking it has two perversions in which it retains its form as a rule by many. First and most famous, there is the possibility of the tyranny of the majority, what Arendt simply called majority rule.380 This is different from majority decision, which is, according to Arendt, “inherent in the very process of decision-making and thus is present in all forms of government […] with the possible exception only of tyranny.”381 Only if after the decision is made, the majority attempts to eliminate the minority, does the majority-decision transform in majority rule. Of course,

378 ‘On Violence’ 143 in: CR. 379 Ibid. 144. 380 ‘Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt’ 470 in: TWB. It should be noted that Arendt sometimes differentiates between democracy, as lawless majority rule, and polity, which is its lawful form; cf. ‘Interview with Roger Errera’ 492 in: TWB. 381 OR 163.

59 such a rule is as lawless as any tyranny. It relies strictly on power, and if necessary, on violence to enforce decisions. Although strength might play a role for some individuals, it can be easily destroyed by the power of the majority. Interestingly, in this form of government, authority plays almost no role whatsoever. This is not simply because of the lawlessness of majority rule––after all, lawless forms of government often rely on decrees, which depend on authority––but because authority is completely drowned out by the power of the majority. Every action that is taken by the majority is the start of something unpredictable and boundless, and there is no authority to keep it in check. Ochlocracy, democracy’s other perversion, is similar in many ways to majority rule. It too relies exclusively on power and violence. However, instead of a majority of the population, which attempts to silence or even liquidate the minority, the mob pulls all the strings. Ochlocracy, on this view, influences the government by “pull and pressure and the tricks of cliques.”382 More importantly, however, is that it is, in a sense, inherent to ochlocracy that it abolishes itself; that is, since the mob, according to Arendt, always calls for a strong man, if it is in power, it will not be long before its champion will arise––as we saw in Polybius: “a man of vision and daring.”383 There appears to be a problem with this analysis, however; namely, that Arendt argues that ochlocracy is the exact counterpart of tyranny––meaning rule by one––and, as such, can be characterized as the “attempt to substitute power for strength.”384 In this sense, it appears as though the mob always stands against the strong; this contradicts the idea that the mob and the tyrant can have an elective affinity towards each other. As we have seen, however, this is not necessarily the case; because of the mob’s proverbial fickleness, it can indeed try to substitute power for strength, in the case of a monarchy, while at the same time calling for a strong man to replace him. That being said, however, given the mob’s attraction to violence and crime, Arendt is mistaken in her remark that violence can never generate power. Indeed, the mob shows exactly the opposite; in this sense, it can be said that, where violence disperses normal power, the mob’s power flocks towards it, or rather, swarms around it. The reason is that, in the fictitious world of the mob violence is always justified, since in this world the mob’s

382 HC 203. 383 Polybius (2010): 378. 384 HC 203.

60 claim to chosenness ensures that it is surrounded by enemies; on this view, every violent act is simply a case of self-defense, whether preemptive, or retaliatory. From the mob’s power, however, can only function the kind of perverted action which, through pull and pressure of cliques brings forth, according to Arendt, those who can know nothing, and can do nothing. These representatives of the mob seem harmless enough, they are likely strong men who, by their strength alone, are no match for a power of the people. On the other hand, in a certain historical situation, when world-alienation is rampant, it may happen, as it did before, that a mob leader rises who is strong enough to mold mass-sentiments, and at the same time internalize the mob’s violent acts, so that it is protected against all blame. It is this situation, when the mob is organized around a talented leader, that is truly dangerous.

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7. The mob today

“The mob is the movement.”385

Arendt was certainly aware of the threat that the mob can pose to lawful government; yet, in her writings there are but a few mentions of the mob, mostly as a side note in relation to ochlocracy, sometimes in letters, and only once as a stand-alone concept, in ‘Reflections on Little Rock’. As I have noted, however, the mob’s disappearance already takes place under totalitarian rule, since the ruler dismisses the mob because it is threatened by its enterprising spirit. On this view, Stalin and Hitler’s destruction of cliques was an attempt to forestall the perverted action of the mob.386 Another interpretation argues that just as the mob replaced le peuple, the mob was merely a precursor to the masses.387 Here, the collapse of class society and the rise of the masses, simply take over the mob; that is, the mob seems to dissolve into the masses with the destruction of the class system. This idea is supported by Arendt’s remarks about the interconnectedness of the mob and the bourgeoisie.388 There is something to be said for both these interpretations; however, both are not quite satisfactory. The latter interpretation, that the mob fades into the masses, or that it cannot exist without the bourgeoisie, runs counter to any of Arendt’s further uses of the term. That is, because this idea relies on the breakdown of the class-system after the First World War, the bourgeoisie in the pre-war sense no longer exists. Hence the mob which, on this view, is never separable from the bourgeoisie, can also no longer exist. The first interpretation, on the other hand, is more promising; however, it seems to contradict the idea that the mob is organized in the movement; that is, a large part of the movement, especially in early totalitarian rule, was made up of mob elements, if the mob was dismissed in its entirety, it would have certainly diminished the power-base of totalitarianism. To be sure, the Night of the Long Knives was a prime example of the destruction of a clique, but this does not mean that all mob elements which were organized in the movement, were dismissed; in fact, the SA, though effectively stripped of its significance,

385 Anglin, A. Quoted in Neiwert (2017): 257. 386 OT 407. 387 Benhabib, S. (1996): 66. In a sense, this idea is also present in Canovan, M. (2002) 388 OT 155, 314, 337.

62 remained an active organization until the end of the Nazi regime. Rather, Hitler and Stalin’s destruction of the cliques––which were by no means always violent389––ensured that the mob’s power stayed revolved around the Leader. Concurrently, the Leader principle enables the ruler to assume all responsibility for the acts of his movement, as all its ‘action’ are done in the ruler’s name. In a sense, then, totalitarianism seems able to pinion the mob’s power, while at the same time guiding it in a more or less structured way. On this view, it can be said that, like the aristocracy before, totalitarian rulers used the mob as a tool. However, rather than using this tool for a specific purpose, short term goal, they perfected its organization, and structured their rule around it. This interpretation is attractive because it can explain Arendt’s use of the term in later writings, as well as the mob’s organization in the totalitarian movements. For instance, in her view, had Khrushchev’s decree against ‘social parasites’ been successful, it would have not only reversed the detotalitarization of the Soviet Union,390 but also institute “a kind of highly organized and institutionalized mob rule.”391 Thus, it can be said, that the mob remained a part of Arendt’s social . In the previous analyses I have demonstrated how the mob can be situated in Arendt’s political thought. I have argued, with Arendt, that the world-alienation common to the modern age gave rise to the mob, and enabled its construction of a fictitious world, which was able to incorporate fringe elements of all social strata. The predominant narrative in this world is that of a constant struggle. Even though the mob adopts the values and standards of the ruling class, it perverts them with this idea of struggle. Because of this perversion the mob proved attractive the intellectual elite; which, according to Arendt, saw in the mob only the rejection of bourgeois hypocrisy. The open adoption of mob mentality by the intellectual elite served to normalize it, and hence paved the way for the totalitarian movements. Although the mob could be organized in totalitarian systems of rule, normally it stands outside all normal social ramifications. From this followed and analysis of the vita activa and its connection to the mob. The mob, it turns out, is capable of action, although, since it is isolated from the world, only in a perverted form that is rooted in means-ends thinking. This pointed to the mob’s attraction to lawlessness, and hence its relationship to rule and dominion. Finally, these relationships could be further analyzed by focusing on

389 Ibid. 407. 390 OT xxxvii. 391 ‘The Hungarian Revolution and Totalitarian Imperialim’ 113 in: TWB

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Arendt’s differentiation of the methods used to conduct human affairs, and this further revealed the mob’s distinct relation to different forms of rule, and its appeal and aversion to the different methods. It should be noted that, although I took into account most major themes in Arendt’s thought; one aspect, or rather, theme is conspicuously absent. Indeed, Arendt is perhaps best known for her work on the banality of evil, which, as noted earlier, stirred up a major controversy. Her account was often misrepresented; for instance, the phrase ‘banality of evil’ was often taken as though she was arguing that evil is commonplace. This, however, was utterly untrue. Nor was she claiming that there is an Eichmann in all of us.392 Evil rather occurs when people stop thinking, that is, when they no longer take into account the fundamental condition for human action: the fact of plurality. Evil, in Arendt’s view, has no depth, yet it “can lay waste to the entire world, like a fungus growing rampant on the surface.”393 This idea of evil could certainly be connected with the mob. It might even be said that Eichmann was a mob man, since he was “the déclassé son of a solid middle-class family.”394 However, insofar as evil and thoughtlessness are connected, it seems more a phenomenon pertaining to the individual, and not necessarily to politics. For this reason, and for the sake of brevity, I have chosen to omit this analysis. This is not to say, however, that might not be important to the detailed understanding of the mob. If I am correct that the mob should be viewed as an inescapable social fact––that is, a multitude which is present in every large scale human organization––we should be wary of any group that rises in prominence bearing the characteristics of mob mentality; characteristics as: emerging from a societal refuse, or consisting of fringe elements of different social strata; adopting and perverting the dominant values and standards; an affinity towards violence and strong men; and finally, a curious mixture between gullibility and cynicism. Throughout the last century, groups that bear these characteristics, at least in Western countries, have remained more or less in the background, or underworld of society. In this sense, it can be said that the isolation of these groups did not allow the mob to fully mobilize.

392 ‘”As If Speaking to a Brick Wall” a conversation with ’ 278 in: TWB. 393 The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gerschom Scholem 209. 394 EJ 31

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This situation slowly changed, however, when these groups started to use the internet as a platform for their ideas.395 Already early in the internet era, fringe groups were using it to connect with like-minded people through online forums and message boards. In recent years this connection has become increasingly accessible through social media. In fact, the business model of social media is based on the idea that it can customize advertising and content in general.396 This can increase the connectivity of the mob, and even help spread its fictitious world. It can be said that we are seeing a first iteration of this new mob organization in the alt- right movement. From its inception, the alt-right has been a curious mixture between all kinds of extreme right-wing thought; united in the idea that the movement has “no enemies to the right.”397 Broadly speaking there can be two major strands of thought discerned here––which prima facie appear as complete opposites–– and neo-. It is interesting to note that these currents find common ground in the idea of Social Darwinism.398 More importantly, however, is that they first encountered each other because of a shared distrust of mainstream media outlets while concurrently portraying a naïve faith in crackpot conspiracy theories. For example, the idea that central banks are scams controlled by a “shadowy cabal of elites” is commonplace among the more hardline libertarians, at the same time, this idea is completely accepted by the neo-Nazi’s, with the addition that this cabal consists of Jews.399 It should be noted that the alt-right is more diverse than this, and because of this, it is not easy to characterize. Perhaps, in this sense, Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopolous are correct in claiming that the “movement is best defined by what it stands against rather than what it stands for.”400 This is nearly everything they consider mainstream culture: multiculturalism, equality movements, political correctness and traditional media to name a few things. The alt-right considers some of these elements hypocritical, others naïve, and still others partisan tools. But what connects these elements overall, in the view of the alt- right, is that they pose a threat to western culture. For the alt-right they are merely

395 Neiwert, D. (2017): 216 396 For an account of this, see Turow, J. (2012) 397 Bokhari, A. and Yiannopolous, M. (2016) 398 I thank Jason Stanley for this point. 399 Golumbia, D. (2016) 400 Bokhari, A. and Yiannopolous, M. (2016)

65 symptoms of a deeper, more pernicious illness in Western culture: the so-called cultural . Unfortunately, there is no room to properly expand on this, but it can be said that the theory of cultural Marxism is based in large part on Andrew Breitbart’s dictum that “politics is downstream from culture.”401 Proponents of this theory argues that since Marxism failed politically, its champions aimed to subvert mainstream culture in such a way that slowly but surely the politics would follow. But what is especially interesting here is that in the world of the alt-right, the movement is all that stands between the West and the rising tides of cultural Marxism. Here, of course, echoes of the narrative of chosenness come to the fore. At the same time, however, the alt-right tries to combat its enemy in the same manner it perceives the attack: by influencing the culture, that is, by shifting the political mainstream to the right.402 It’s interesting to note that a split occurred between the hard-line alt-right and a less extreme wing. The latter, rather than attempt to salvage the reputation of the alt-right, adopted the moniker of the ‘alt-lite.’ In contrast to the former, the latter is not outspokenly racist and misogynist, and many of its proponents have denounced the hardliners. But it would be a mistake to think that the beliefs of the alt-lite do not share with the alt-right the same intellectual schools of thought. Since the alt-lite shows itself politically savvy enough to not revert to overt and misogyny, it is rather more successful than its hard-line counterpart in shifting the political mainstream.403 The last years of alt-right and alt-lite prominence have done a lot to draw the mainstream to the right. However, in a recent talk George Hawley argued that the alt-right is actually collapsing.404 The reason for this, is likely that it has had little success in organizing real life demonstrations and marches. Where the movement does succeed, their rallies are usually drowned out by counter-. This also happened at its “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, which, in a sense, was both its greatest success and its greatest failure: the rally was the biggest the movement has ever seen, yet it ended in tragedy, when neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into counter- protesters killing one and injuring nineteen others. Hawley argues that this event negatively

401 Quoted in: Nagle (2017): 40. 402 Ibid. 403 Hawley, G. (2017): 157. 404 Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (2018).

66 impacted the public perception of the movement, and that it has had much more difficulty recruiting new members ever since. This is also evident by the “Unite the Right Anniversary” rally, which, by the most generous counts, no more than forty people attended.405 However, the alt-right, as a modern day mob, is not only an American phenomenon. In Europe, the renewed popularity of loosely connected identitarian and nativist movements proves that the mob can again become a political force to be reckoned with. But in the US, too, the alt-right’s “troll army” remains active on the internet. Its ranks range from trolls who make nasty comments on certain message boards, to actual hackers who have been known to post a target’s personal information online or worse. This troll army is only possible because the internet provides these trolls with the shelter of anonymity. It is safe to say that the troll army would not be able to operate if its identities could be revealed. In a sense, in Arendtian terms, the internet seems to allow for collective action and world- disclosure without the typical concomitant disclosure of the self.406 Furthermore, I already noted the importance of the internet for the inception of the movement. The internet is a safe place for “crackpot conspiracists” to meet and discuss their views. Now, two related phenomena take place. On the one hand, they are likely to get caught in a kind of filter bubble, which is likely to intensify their beliefs. On the other hand, their beliefs are likely to be intensified since deliberation within the group causes echo- chambers. As Sunstein and Hastie show in their book Wiser: “[a]s a general rule, deliberating groups tend to end up adopting a more extreme position in line with their inclinations before they started to talk, and a major effect of deliberation is to squelch internal diversity– and thus to push different groups apart.”407 On this view, the internet provides the alt-right with a safe space for their radical ideas, which are then strengthened because of the online group dynamics. Finally, the internet also makes it possible to rapidly spread the movement’s ideas. The danger is that if ordinary internet users are anything like Arendt’s atomized individuals, they might well be susceptible to them; and if the alt-right succeeds in seducing the online masses with its fictitious reality, the results may be disastrous. Even though the true champion of the alt-right has yet to arise––the current US president briefly appeared to take

405 Heim, J. et al. (2018) 406 HC 176. 407 Sunstein and Hastie (2015): 83.

67 on this role, but he soon gave way to more conventional conservative politics––its newfound power and anonymity on the internet does not bode well for the future. For us, however, the goal is to ensure that this present does not fall prey to the mob.

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Articles cited

‘Action and the “Pursuit of Happiness”’ (1960) in: TWB. 201-19

‘Antisemitism’ (2007) in: JW 46-121

‘”As If Speaking to a Brick Wall” a conversation with Joachim Fest’ (1964) in: TWB 274-90

‘Authority in the Twentieth Century’ (1956) In: TWB. 69-91

‘“The Formidable Dr. Robinson” A Reply by Hannah Arendt’ (1966) in: JW 496-511

‘Freedom and Politics, a Lecture’ (1960) in: TWB 220-44

‘The Great Tradition’ (1953) in: TWB 43-68

‘Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt’ (1972) in: TWB. 443-75

‘On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing’ (1959) in: MDT 3-31

‘The Hungarian Revolution and Totalitarian Imperialism’ (1958) in TWB.105-55

‘Interview with Roger Errera’ (1973) in: TWB. 489-505

‘Introduction into Politics’ (2005) in: PP. 93-200

‘Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought’ (2018) in: TWB 3-42

‘Mankind and terror’ (1953) in: EU 297-306

‘On the nature of totalitarianism’ (1954) in: EU 328-60

‘Reflections on Little Rock’ (1959) in: RJ 193-213

‘A Reply to Eric Voegelin’ (1953) in: EU 401-9

‘Socrates’ (2005) in: PP. 5-39

‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’ (1965-66) in: RJ 49-146

‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’ (1971) in: RJ 159-89

‘Thoughts on Politics and Revolution’ (1969) in: CR.199-233

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‘On Violence’ (1970) in: CR 103-98

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