Abstract
By the end of World War II, Hannah Arendt recognized that the emergence of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia had introduced state-organized terror and mass murder on a scale that defied comprehension. The “actions” of these totalitarian regimes, she observed, “have clearly exploded our categories of political thought and our standards of moral judgment.”1 From his study of the twentieth century’s experience with such phenomena, the historian Eric Weitz has recently observed: “Genocides stand at the center of our contemporary crisis.”2 His work joins those by many others, including Zygmunt Bauman, Norman Naimark, and Omer Bartov, who have been exploring “the crucial relationship between war, genocide, and modern identity.”3 In the examples used to explore this relationship, the Holocaust remains the central point of reference. Philosophers, such as Susan Neiman and Richard Bernstein, have identified Auschwitz as the exemplar of “evil” in the modern era and one that has created a watershed in the history of western moral thought.4
Passionate interest in international affairs in which no risk and no responsibility are involved has often been a cloak to hide down-to-earth national interests; in politics, idealism is frequently no more than an excuse for not recognizing unpleasant realities. Idealism can be a form of evading reality altogether ...
Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic
In the intellectual sense as in the demographic sense, we are either a cosmopolitan nation, part of the world stream of thought and feeling, or we are nothing at all. Smaller nations, weaker nations, nations less exposed by the very proportion of their physical weight in the world, might be able to get away with exclusiveness and provincialism and an intellectual remoteness from the feelings and preoccupations of mankind generally. Americans cannot. It will never be forgiven if we attempt to do it.
George F. Kennan, Realities of American Foreign Policy
Institutions have the pathetic megalomania of the computer whose vision of the world is its own program. For us, the hope of intellectual independence is to resist, and the necessary first step in resistance is to discover how the institutional grip is laid upon our mind.
Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think
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Notes
Arendt, “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding),” in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994), 307–327 at 310.
Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 8.
Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6
Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
Richard J. Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Investigation (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002), 1
Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 1–9.
Christopher Browning, “The German Bureaucracy and the Holocaust,” in Alex Grobman and Daniel Landes (eds.), Genocide: Critical Issues of the Holocaust (Los Angeles: The Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1983), 145–149 at 148.
Hannah Arendt, “Preface to the First Edition (1950),” The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edn (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1979), viii.
Jack Donnelly, Realism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations since Machiavelli (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002)
Joel H. Rosenthal, Righteous Realists: Political Realism, Responsible Power, and American Culture in the Nuclear Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991)
Michael Joseph Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986)
and, Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002). One searches in vain for any record of the realist response to the Holocaust or genocide generally in the standard accounts of this tradition. Likewise, the voices of the American realists are notably absent in Power’s recent chronicle of the making of American policy toward genocide and ethnic cleansing in the twentieth century. Moreover, in his highly influential and erudite study, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954/59), the neorealist Kenneth N. Waltz also does not address the implications of totalitarianism and the Holocaust.
George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy: 1900–1950 (1951; repr., New York: Mentor Books, 1962), 82.
Hannah Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 22.
Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 15.
George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1967), 415.
Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th edn, rev. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 8.
Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Miffin Co., 2000), 1–2, 103–123; and, Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 250–251. In general, the specter of the Nazi death camps attracted little public comment throughout the first decades after the war. The Holocaust did not emerge as a potent public symbol of transcendental human suffering until the 1970s.
Leo Kuper, Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 161
and, George J. Andreopolous, ed., “Introduction: The Calculus of Genocide,” Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 1–28 at 18–19.
Kennan, Russia and the West, 47, 202; George F. Kennan, “The Price We Paid for War,” The Atlantic Monthly, 214, no. 4 (October 1964): 53.
Zigmunt Bauman, “Holocaust,” in David Goldberg and John Solomos (eds.), A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 46–63 at 47.
Hans J. Morgenthau, “The Evil of Politics and the Ethics of Evil,” Ethics, LVI (October 1945): 1–18.
Hannah Arendt, “Nightmare and Flight,” in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994), 133–135 at 134.
Hans J. Morgenthau, “The Intellectual and Political Functions of Theory,” in Hans J. Morgenthau, Truth and Power: Essays of A Decade, 1960–70 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 258–259.
Stanley Hoffmann, “An American Social Science: International Relations (1977),” in Stanley Hoffmann, Janus and Minerva: Essays in the Theory and Practice of International Politics (Boulder, CO: Westfield Press, 1987), 6
George Schultz, “Morality and Realism in American Foreign Policy,” Department of State Bulletin (December 1985).
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 81.
George F. Kennan, Realities of American Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), 93; Scott, Seeing Like a State, 92; and, Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 18, 70. Both Bauman and Scott point to the “metaphor of gardening” as “capturing much of the spirit” of this “high modernist” perspective. Kennan uses this same metaphor to explain his preferred approach to international relations. “If there is any great lesson we Americans need to learn with regard to the methodology of foreign policy,” he writes, “it is that we must be gardeners… in our approach to world affairs.”
George F. Kennan to wife, October 21, 1941, in Sketches from a Life (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000), 75
George F. Kennan, From Prague to Munich: Diplomatic Papers, 1938–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968). Kennan observed the growing campaign against the Jews from his diplomatic posts in Czechoslovakia and Berlin.
Michael N. Barnett, “The UN Security Council, Indifference, and Genocide in Rwanda,” Cultural Anthropology, 12, no. 4 (1997): 563.
Hans J. Morgenthau, “Germany: The Political Problem,” in Hans J. Morgenthau (ed.), Germany and the Future of Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), 77. When focusing on National Socialism itself, Morgenthau likewise did not address its genocidal policies. See, e.g., “Nazism (1946),” The Decline of Democratic Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962), 227–240.
Morgenthau, “The Problem of the National Interest,” Decline of Democratic Politics, 106; Hans J. Morgenthau, Human Rights and Foreign Policy (New York: Council on Religion and International Affairs, 1979), 4.
Hans J. Morgenthau, “Symposium,” in Human Rights and Foreign Policy (New York: Council on Religion and International Affairs, 1979), 9–43 at 10.
George F. Kennan, “Morality and Foreign Policy,” in George F. Kennan, At a Century’s Ending: Reflections, 1982–1995 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996), 271
George F. Kennan Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993), 51.
Smith, Realist Thought, 218–238; Daniel Warner, An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991), 37–48, 61–81; Donnelly, Realism and International Relations, 44–47, 164–166.
Morgenthau, “The Political Problems of Polyethnic States,” in Hans J. Morgenthau (ed.), The Restoration of American Politics, vol. 3, Politics in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962), 342–347. Morgenthau recognized the often destabilizing consequences of the nation-state model, but never applied this insight to refugees, and it remained at the margins of his analysis of international politics.
Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3–5
Claudena M. Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe: The Emergence of a Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 13–14, 31, 60–61
Aristide R. Zolberg, “The Formation of New States as a Refugee-Generating Process,” in Elizabeth G. Ferris (ed.), Refugees and World Politics (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1985), 26–42
Aristide R. Zolberg, “Global Movements, Global Walls: Responses to Migration, 1885–1925,” in Wang Gungwu (ed.), Global History and Migration, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 279–307.
George F. Kennan, “Foreign Policy and Christian Conscience,” The Atlantic Monthly, 203, no. 5 (1959): 46
George F. Kennan, Russia, The Atom and the West (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1958), 74–75. Here, without citing any supporting evidence for this conclusion, he simply dismisses the “claim… that colonialism invariably represented a massive and cruel exploitation of colonial peoples. I am sure that honest study would reveal this thesis to be quite fallacious. Advantages, injuries and sacrifices were incurred on both sides. Today these things are largely bygones. We will do no good by scratching around to discover whose descendents owe the most to the descendents of the other. If we are to help each [other] in this world, we must start with a clean slate.”
Arendt, “The Nation,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994), 206–211 at 210.
Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1946/57), 177–178.
Abbot Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 81–82.
Kennan, “Totalitarianism in the Modern World,” in Carl J. Friedrich (ed.), Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 17–31.
George F. Kennan, “Training for Statesmanship,” The Atlantic Monthly, 191, no. 5 (May 1953): 41.
George F. Kennan, “Foreign Policy and the Christian Conscience,” The Atlantic Monthly, 203, no. 5 (May 1959): 45.
Campbell Craig, Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 74–116.
George F. Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), xxviii.
Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” trans. Thomas McCarthy, Social Research, 44, no. 1 (1977): 3–23.
Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 17–48 at 46; Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 278–279.
George F. Kennan, Democracy and the Student Left (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 149.
Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?,” in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1983), 93.
Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press/Berg, 1993), 167.
George F. Kennan, “Training for Statesmanship,” The Atlantic Monthly, 191, no. 5 (May 1953): 41.
For my views on this problem in connection with the Bush policy toward terrorism, see Douglas Klusmeyer and Astri Suhrke, “Comprehending ‘Evil’: Challenges for Law and Policy,” Ethics and International Affairs, 16, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 27–42.
Morgenthau, “Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism and Democracy,” Social Research, XLIV (Spring 1977): 129, 131.
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© 2005 Anthony F. Lang, Jr. and John Williams
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Klusmeyer, D. (2005). Hannah Arendt’s Critical Realism: Power, Justice, and Responsibility. In: Lang, A.F., Williams, J. (eds) Hannah Arendt and International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981509_6
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