Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Master's Theses Graduate School 2008 The aC se of Human Plurality: Hannah Arendt's Critique of Individualism in Enlightenment and Romantic Thinking Joshua Luke Yoder Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Yoder, Joshua Luke, "The asC e of Human Plurality: Hannah Arendt's Critique of Individualism in Enlightenment and Romantic Thinking" (2008). LSU Master's Theses. 3155. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/3155 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Master's Theses by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE CASE OF HUMAN PLURALITY: HANNAH ARENDT’S CRITIQUE OF INDIVIDUALISM IN ENLIGHTENMENT AND ROMANTIC THINKING A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in The Department of History By Joshua Luke Yoder B.A., Reinhardt College, 2005 August 2008 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………….…………….iii INTRODUCTION: INDIVIDUALISM, ENLIGHTENMENT, AND ROMANTICISM ………………………………………………....…1 CHAPTER 1. RAHEL VARNHAGEN AND THE BERLIN SALON…........................20 From Confession to Introspection…………………………...…....….......20 The Birth and Death of the Berlin Salon………………………..……….29 Parvenus and Pariahs………………………………………………..…...38 CHAPTER 2. SOCIETY AND POLITICS IN THE MODERN WORLD…...................51 High Society…………………………………………………….….….…51 A Social Response to a Political Question…………………….………....55 A New Kind of Society……………………………………….…….........65 CHAPTER 3. THE CASE OF HUMAN PLURALITY…………………….................74 The Human Condition……………………………………………............77 Between Past and Future…………………………………………….…...86 On Revolution……………………………………………………….…...91 CHAPTER 4. ARENDT, KANT, AND THE SEARCH FOR EICHMANN’S CONSCIENCE ………………………………………... 98 Thinking………………………………………………………………...104 Willing……………………………………………………………..…...114 Judging…………………………………………………………….…....121 CONCLUSION……….………………………………………………………………...133 REFERENCES...……………………………………………………………………….141 VITA……………………………………………………………………………………144 ii ABSTRACT The theme of this thesis is Hannah Arendt’s critique and ultimate rejection of the ideas of individualism developed during the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods. She rejects the Enlightenment notion of the “abstract man,” but equally rejects the notion of Romantic introspection that followed. Such a critique is important to Arendt because she makes human plurality the center for her entire system of thought. Using the French Revolution, Jewish history, and totalitarianism as her examples, Arendt explains the effects of such overtly individualistic thinking in both society and politics. The goal of this thesis is not a comprehensive look at the vast number of theories developed during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. That is far beyond its intended scope. The goal, instead, is to show how Arendt used her critique of a select number of ideas to further define and clarify her own thoughts. In the end it will be shown that while Arendt ranged all over in her thinking (from history to politics to philosophy) she engaged these topics in a systematic way as to explore the affinities and contradictions to human plurality in whatever she studied. She is drawn to the late 18th/early 19th centuries precisely because she envisions it as a watershed moment in Western conceptions of individuality, one that stamped out all thought of human plurality. Arendt wants to rescue the notion of human plurality and elevate it to a primal position in Western thought. iii INTRODUCTION: INDIVIDUALISM, ENLIGHTENEMENT, AND ROMANTICISM The subject of this thesis is Hannah Arendt’s critique and ultimate rejection of the ideas of individualism developed during the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods. She rejects the rational individualism of the Enlightenment and its notion of an abstract human being, who for Arendt “seems to exist nowhere,” except in thought; but she equally rejects the notion of an introspective self in romanticism, where reality is given meaning only through self-consciousness. For Arendt, these two concepts represent two sides of the same coin. By over-emphasizing the individual, rational on the one hand and subjective on the other, these ideas helped create an intellectual atmosphere that was, in Arendt’s eyes, detrimental to the very foundation of politics. With the rise of the totalitarian powers, Arendt saw that politics had indeed been shaken to its core. She turned to the eighteenth/earlier nineteenth centuries precisely to understand the problems of her own time. Arendt, however, was not the only one looking back in history to understand the death and destruction that seemed to characterize the twentieth century. There was an overwhelming drive among academics to find the origins of modern thought, modern society, and modern politics. The response among scholars was anything but unanimous. Some blamed the Enlightenment for using reason to justify total domination while others condemned Romanticism for its seemingly irrational elevation of the self. Along similar lines, some scholars criticized the liberal tradition of the “left” while others rebuked the conservative “right.” Representative of her eclectic style of thinking, Arendt drew from each of these criticisms, but did not feel the need to accept their arguments wholesale. Instead, she developed her own way of addressing the 1 problems of the twentieth century. It is Arendt’s unique response to the troubles of her time that forms the content of this thesis. At the center of modern political thought is the debate over the rights of individuals versus the authority of the state. Going all the way back to the Reformation, questions of individual freedom and political authority appear in virtually every major discussion on the nature of politics, society, and even man himself. Can the individual and the state coexist or are they naturally conflicted against one another? The answer to this questions depended on where and when in Europe it was being asked. According to Leonard Krieger, the concept of individual freedom, or “individual secular liberty,” characterized political thought in Western Europe as early as the seventeenth century. The freedom of the individual depended on maintaining some kind of distance from political authority. In Germany, however, “individualized freedom,” or Freiheit, had to contend with another notion of freedom already present: Libertaet, which referred to the rights of German princes within the Holy Roman Empire.1 After 1650, as German princes began to exercise more political control, they interpreted Libertaet as the freedom to rule without Imperial interference. The idea of Libertaet, along with centralized administration and growing bureaucracies, changed the German principalities into sovereign territorial states.2 Yet, within these states the individual, and individual rights, still occupied an ambiguous role. Krieger argues The German princes never ceased to feel themselves aristocrats as well as monarchs, not only personally because of their family origins and connections, not only socially because of their special dependence on the nobility worked by the peculiarities of the German economic and social structure, but even institutionally, because the social and constitutional 1 Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1972), 5-6. 2 Ibid., 19-20 2 structures were so integrally intertwined that the very development of the German princes toward absolute sovereignty in their own territory was at the same time a development of their aristocratic rights within the [Holy Roman] German Empire. It was this institutional connection between sovereign power and aristocratic liberties…that made this kind of Libertaet the representative expression of German political liberty in the old regime.3 From 1650-1750, as the more individualistic ideas of Freiheit spread into Germany from enlightened thinkers in Western Europe, they were transformed to fit the prevalent ideas of Libertaet, resulting in the notion of enlightened absolutism. German thinkers “adopted western assumptions which made individuals the primary units of society and individual rights the basis and the limitation of the state, but they interpreted these assumptions in a way compatible with the preservation of the peculiar German corporate rights and made the prince arbiter over all.”4 Using natural law, German thinkers were able to combine inalienable rights and political obligation in the form of an absolutist state.5 After 1750, political ideas in Western Europe continued to further reflect notions of “material individualism,” but in Germany “natural law absolutism” held sway in both theory and practice until the French Revolution.6 During the second half of the eighteenth century, as Berlin became a center for the Aufklärung, Frederick the Great helped make Prussia a shining example of enlightened absolutism. He firmly believed “the sovereign represents the state…he and his peoples form but one body.” He wanted a rational state based on enlightened