Abstract
Several recent attempts to defend cosmopolitanism in international political theory have relied on the work of Hannah Arendt. Patrick Hayden argues that ‘cosmopolitan realism’ can be applied to Arendt’s position on responsibility for humanity. Robert Fine extracts a ‘worldly cosmopolitanism’ from Arendt’s insistence that we reconstruct the idea of humanity in the face of its eradication. Seyla Benhabib argues for a shift toward cosmopolitan norms, based on her interpretation of Arendt’s claim that an attempt to eradicate a group constitutes an offence against ‘the human status.’ Each of these theorists navigates the tension between Arendt’s call for a ‘new law on earth’ and her insistence on the bounded polity as the space for political action. I examine these attempts to extrapolate a cosmopolitan theory from Arendt’s writings, and I evaluate the possibilities they hold for an Arendtian cosmopolitan approach to crime against humanity.
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Notes
- 1.
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 297. Unless otherwise noted, references from Origins are taken from the 1973 edition.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
Ibid., ix.
- 4.
For an argument linking Arendt’s existentialism and the core features of her idea of the human condition, see Wayne F. Allen’s ‘Hannah Arendt: Existential Phenomenology and Political Freedom’ in Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1982). Allen writes, ‘In Jaspers’ Existenz we find not only the derivation of Arendt’s emphasis on speech and self-revelation but the ‘good’ that comes from it when the individual finds himself/herself in plurality. In a very important, but universally ignored passage, Arendt argues that Existenz ‘expresses the meaning that only in so far as Man moves in the freedom that rests upon his own spontaneity and is directed, in communication to the freedom of others, is there Reality for him.’ Thus the individual acts spontaneously, in communication with others, to ensure freedom, which is the good, and in so acting he/she creates his/her own Reality. It should be noted here, even if parenthetically, that Arendt wrote this simultaneously with her research on The Origins of Totalitarianism. This idea became the ‘mental’ counter to the phantasm and unreality she sees as the provenance for the totalitarian mentality.’ 177–178 (citing Arendt, ‘What Is Existenz Philosophy?’ Partisan Review (1946), p. 53).
- 5.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 9–10.
- 6.
Ibid., 7.
- 7.
Arendt, Origins, ix & 298.
- 8.
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 269.
- 9.
Arendt, Origins, 302.
- 10.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 184.
- 11.
Arendt, Origins, 301.
- 12.
Ibid., 297.
- 13.
Ibid., 299.
- 14.
Ibid., 300.
- 15.
Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 150.
- 16.
Arendt, Origins, 291–292.
- 17.
Ibid., 299.
- 18.
Ibid., 451–455.
- 19.
The original 1951 edition of Origins of Totalitarianism was published with a set of ‘Concluding Remarks’ which were replaced in the 1958 edition (and subsequent editions) with Arendt’s new concluding chapter, ‘Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government.’ The 2004 edition of Origins includes the original ‘Concluding Remarks,’ as well as a note Arendt wrote for The Meridian, the publishing newsletter, explaining the new concluding chapter in the 1958 edition. In this note, Arendt writes that the new ending is ‘much less suggestive and more theoretical,’ and provides a ‘proper conclusion’ to the book. She does not, however, distance herself from the ‘Concluding Remarks,’ and writes that the revisions do not alter the argument or the ‘nature’ of the book. Indeed, she suggests that ‘the very inconclusiveness of the original ending . . . was better attuned to the mood and style of the whole book.’ Many respected Arendt scholars cite the original ending to Origins and include it as a legitimate part of Arendt’s oeuvre. Examples include Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters (Yale UP, 2006, 209–210); Dana Villa, The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge UP, 2006, 33–34); and Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge UP, 1992, 60–61). Jerome Kohn’s ‘Introduction’ to Arendt’s The Promise of Politics discusses the ‘Concluding Remarks’ and indicates in a footnote that the 2004 edition of Origins (which contains the original ending) is ‘the most complete and readable of all existing editions’ (Schocken Books, 2005, xii). For these reasons, I consider the ‘Concluding Remarks’ to be a valid, supplementary part of Arendt’s argument in Origins.
- 20.
Arendt, Origins, 2004 edition, 629.
- 21.
Ibid., 632.
- 22.
Ibid., 627–628.
- 23.
Ibid., 628.
- 24.
Ibid., 631.
- 25.
Arendt, Origins, 296–297.
- 26.
Menke, 751–752.
- 27.
Ibid., quoting Arendt, Origins, 297.
- 28.
Ibid., 753.
- 29.
Ibid., 753.
- 30.
Ibid., 754.
- 31.
Ibid., 755.
- 32.
Arendt, Origins, 2004 edition, 628–629.
- 33.
Ibid., 631.
- 34.
Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 38, footnote 6.
- 35.
Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism, xxxii–xxxiii.
- 36.
Ibid., xxxiii.
- 37.
Ibid., 81–82.
- 38.
Ibid., 195.
- 39.
Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 17, 25–26.
- 40.
Ibid., 14.
- 41.
Ibid., 20.
- 42.
Ibid., 24–25.
- 43.
Ibid., 25–26.
- 44.
Ibid., 72.
- 45.
Ibid., 72–73.
- 46.
Hayden, Political Evil in a Global Age, 3.
- 47.
Ibid., 23, quoting Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 6.
- 48.
Ibid., 23.
- 49.
Ibid., 23–24, citing Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999) and quoting Beck, ‘The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited,’ Theory, Culture & Society (Vol. 19), 42.
- 50.
Ibid., 7.
- 51.
Ibid., 17, quoting Arendt, Origins, 2004 edition, 568–569.
- 52.
Ibid., 30–31, quoting Arendt, The Human Condition, 244.
- 53.
Ibid., 57.
- 54.
Ibid., 24–25.
- 55.
Fine & Cohen, 150, quoting Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 142.
- 56.
Ibid., 161.
- 57.
Ibid., 148.
- 58.
Fine, Political Investigations, 162.
- 59.
Ibid., 153.
- 60.
Fine & Cohen, 152.
- 61.
Fine, Cosmopolitanism, 111, quoting Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1992), 76.
- 62.
Fine, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights.’ 13–20.
- 63.
Arendt, Origins, 2004 edition, 631.
- 64.
Ibid., 627.
- 65.
Hayden, Political Evil in a Global Age, 57.
- 66.
Fine, Cosmopolitanism, 139–140.
- 67.
The question of what newly defined territorial entities would look like is beyond my scope, but it suggests a link with Arendt’s critique of the nation-state, based on the ethnos as opposed to the demos, and her support for the United States as a post-national republic.
- 68.
See, for example, Sallot.
- 69.
See, for example, Koring.
- 70.
Arendt, Origins, 2004 edition, 631.
- 71.
Ibid., 627.
- 72.
In her article, ‘Walking corpses: Arendt on the limits and possibilities of cosmopolitan politics,’ Patricia Owens also surveys a number of theorists who attempt to characterize Arendt’s relationship to cosmopolitan politics. Owens writes that Arendt’s ‘sense of our cosmopolitan existence’ leads her to theorize the contingent foundations of ‘a non-imperial but nonetheless worldwide federated structure’ building on her conceptions of political action, new beginnings, law and territorial boundaries (Owens, 75–76).
- 73.
Arendt, Origins, 2004 edition, 631.
- 74.
Hayden, Political Evil in a Global Age, 22.
- 75.
Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism, xxxiii.
- 76.
Fine, Cosmopolitanism, 96.
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Sutherland, L. (2018). The Divergent Cosmopolitanisms of Hannah Arendt. In: Giri, A. (eds) Beyond Cosmopolitanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5376-4_10
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