We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience

by Lyndsey Stonebridge

Evil can lay waste to the entire world like a fungus growing rampant on the surface. Only the good is always deep and radical (AGS 209).

Arendt was not alone in seeing in Eichmann’s vacuousness an aesthetic as well as a moral challenge.

I’ll tell you this: I read the transcript of his police investigation, thirty-six hundred pages, read it, and read it very carefully, and I do not know how many times I laughed—laughed out loud! People took this reaction in a bad way. I cannot do anything about that. But I know one thing: Three minutes before certain death, I probably still would laugh. And that, they say, is the tone of voice. That

the tone of voice is predominantly ironic is completely true. The tone of voice in this case is really the person. When people reproach me with accusing the Jewish people, that is a malignant lie and propaganda and nothing else. The tone of voice, however, is an objection against me personally. I cannot do anything about that.

One of the myths about Eichmann in Jerusalem is that Arendt exculpates Eichmann by presenting him as a mindless bureaucrat who was only following orders. But this really wasn’t the story. On the contrary, the book is a broadside against moral relativism and an early attack on the culture of ethical posturing.

Yet what was also now insidious was a culture that was very happy with sweeping concepts of collective guilt and innocence, of absolute badness and a virtue beyond signaling, but conspicuously resistant to the complex difficulties of real human experience.

She concluded that it was—that thoughtlessness created the conditions for evil.

I cannot live with myself if I go along with this, no matter what the cost. I simply cannot be. Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.

for Hannah Arendt, resistance always begins with those who cannot live with themselves and suffer violence toward others—whatever the circumstances and however powerless they are.

Impotence or complete powerlessness is, I think, a valid excuse, she said in a 1964 radio talk: Its validity is all the stronger as it seems to require a certain moral quality even to recognize powerlessness, the good faith to face realities and not to live in illusions. Moreover, it is precisely in this admission

of one’s own impotence that a last remnant of strength and even power can still be preserved even under desperate conditions.

We are free to change the world and to start something new in it. —Crises of the Republic

Arendt did not believe in violence, but she did very much believe in protest, dissent, and disobedience.

but most people prefer to shout Stupid! into the void of social media which is not especially dangerous at all and is the very opposite of courageous. Thinking is not action.

But this is also the problem with thinking: it requires that the thinker withdraw from the world.

J. Glenn Gray,

Hans Morgenthau

is precisely sovereignty they must renounce

The famous sovereignty of political institutions has always been an illusion, which, moreover, can be maintained only by instruments of violence, that is, with essentially nonpolitical ends

The empty power offered by authoritarians, fantasy nationalists, and

sovereignty fanatics, by contrast, can only be maintained by violence.

isonomia founded on the principle of equal freedom.

The isonomiac societies were pre-democratic and had briefly flourished in settler and migrant communities away from established centers of power in ancient Greece.

Richard Nixon and his cabal, a bunch of con men, rather untalented Mafiosi, had succeeded in appropriating to themselves, the government of the “mightiest power on earth.”

The civil disobedient, Arendt said, acts in the name and for the sake of a group; he defies the law and the established authorities on the ground of basic dissent

When Donald Trump audaciously invented the fiction that America’s 2020 election had been stolen from him, commentators evoked Arendt’s big lie to warn of how close America was to democratic meltdown. Certainly, the resemblances are there, not least in what Arendt described as the active, aggressive capability to believe in lies (as compared to passive gullibility) that distinguishes modern political lying (

The modern political lies deal efficiently with things that are not secrets at all but are known to practically everybody, she wrote, in another sentence that reverberates clearly today.

People are not duped.

If America really still wanted freedom, it had to renounce the fantasy of its own omnipotence. The country needed to reckon with its best and its worst.

For a German and a Jew under the Third Reich it would scarcely have been a sign of humanness for the friends to have said: Are we not both human beings? It would have been a mere evasion of reality and the world common to both at that time: they would not have been resisting the world as it was

Now pay attention and get on with the work of resisting the sorry reality that you find yourselves in.