Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and the Tenor of Our Time

Yves here. The Hayekian fantasy, and Isaiah Berlin’s closely aligned belief, that the measure of freedom is the ability to take unfettered individual action, shows how Industrial-Revolution created infrastructure and material comforts have made us stupid. One of the most severe punishments in ancient Greece was exile. Citizens knew they could either not live at all outside their city, or would have a life not much living. Hannah Arendt is keenly aware of those realities and hence her notions of freedom explicitly rest on communities and well functioning institutions.

By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health

When trying to make sense of troubled eras, a perpetual state with ours certainly included, I have found that one way to understand the world is to through collective biographies.  I read my first of these near the beginning of my career as a scientist: The Visible College: A Collective Biography of British Scientists and Socialists of the 1930s (1978), by Gary Werskey.  Of course, that book fit my priors very well since I was already familiar with the work of Joseph Needham, J. D. Bernal, and J.B.S Haldane, and Lancelot Hogben (but not Hyman Levy) from my wanderings in the open stacks of the Science Library at my university. The idea of a “visible college” committed to science in the public interest was one reason I wanted to be a scientist in the first place, instead of the more familiar “invisible college” of academics who above all keep their heads down while tending to their laboratories, grants, and narrowly focused publications, with students as an afterthought.[1]  Joseph Needham et al. made a difference. 

A similar book is The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003) by Paul Elie, which interleaves the lives and work of four American Catholics of the 20^th century: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy.  Each of these writers is worthy of as much attention as we can give to them, with the Southerner in me gravitating to the Ms. O’Connor and Mr. Percy.

Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind (2018) by Michael Massing illuminates an essential conflict of early modern Europe, one that continues.  Aaron Sachs’s recent Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times (2022) sits on my table staring back at me, half-finished but well worth the time, not least because it rescues Lewis Mumford from, if not oblivion, something of an eclipse.

Technics and Civilization is one of the most important books of the 20^th century.  Mumford was still read when I was a student at a university with a bookstore worthy of the name; we would do well to pay him attention again as technics continues to threaten civilization, as described by Justin E.H. Smith in The Internet is Not What You Think It Is, for example; also sitting half-read on my table.  And, well, Melville remains Melville.

Two recent delightful and fascinating collective biographies of four women – Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Phillipa Foot, and Iris Murdoch – who helped rescue moral philosophy from a cul de sac are The Women are Up to Something (2021) by Benjamin J.B Lipscomb and Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (2022) by Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman.  Prior to reading these books, I was most familiar with the work of Mary Midgley, whose first book Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1978) was tour de force and an unintentional if much needed though not hostile counterpoint to Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by E.O. Wilson (1975)[2].  Mary Midgley (b. 1919) was 59 when Beast and Man was published and her final book, What is Philosophy For?, (2018) was published when she was 99 years old.  Most of her books are still in print and well repay the effort. The same is true of her other three friends from Oxford of the early 1940s.

These last two collective biographies bring me to the subject for today, a consideration of two essential historians, intellectuals, and philosophers of the 20^th century who remain important as we continue to act in and adapt to the world of technics and late capitalist neoliberalism, with civilization thrown somewhere into the mix: Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin through the lens of Hannah Arendt & Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity (2022), by Kei Hiruta of Aarhus University.  The contributions of Berlin and Arendt hold up well against those of our current honking gaggle of “public intellectuals,” whose names – left, right, muddled middle – I shall leave to the imagination.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was born in Hanover to a secular Jewish family and grew up in Königsberg, then the major city of East Prussia and now Kaliningrad.  She earned a PhD in philosophy at the University of Marburg with the title “The Concept of Love in Augustine” in 1929 while still in her early 20’s.  The Reichstag Fire (1933) served as her political awakening.  She was arrested and interrogated for eight days, after which she fled illegally to Paris.  She and her husband Heinrich Blücher were interned as enemy aliens at the start of World War II.  After their release they were reunited by chance and emigrated to New York in 1941.

Arendt established herself as one of the most consequential writers of the mid-20^th century with The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Between Past and Future (1961), the controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), which led to a “civil war” among the New York Intellectuals, and Men in Dark Times (1968).  She worked as an editor at Schocken Books and later taught and the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research through the early-1970s.  Her books are still in print, and appreciation of her work is undergoing a renascence.  She died in New York in 1975 at the age of 69.

Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) was born in Riga, then a provincial capital of the Russian Empire, to a wealthy Russian-speaking Jewish family that maintained their timber business through the October Revolution.  The Berlin family moved to London after the October Revolution.  Young Isaiah attended St. Paul’s School in London (1922-1928) and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he obtained Firsts in Greats (Philosophy and Ancient History) and PPE (Politics, Philosophy, and Economics) in 1932.

Immediately after graduation at the age of 23 Berlin became a lecturer in philosophy at New College and shortly thereafter was made a fellow at All Souls College (an academic Olympus).  His colleagues at Oxford included J.L. Austin, Stuart Hampshire, and A.J. Ayer, wrote Language, Truth, and Logic, a founding text of logical positivism, from which philosophy is still trying to recover (see Metaphysical Animals).

Berlin’s first book was Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (1938, the final edition of which was the first biography of Marx that I read).  During World War II he was a British diplomat in the US and served for a short time in the British Embassy in Moscow in 1946.  After the war he returned to Oxford, where until his death at age 88 he was a much sought after public intellectual and President of the British Academy, 1974-1978.  His works include “The Hedgehog and the Fox” (1953), “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), The Age of Enlightenment (1958), Four Essays on Liberty (1969), and several collections compiled and edited by Henry Hardy beginning in the 1970s plus a 4-volume collection of letters from 1928-1997 (Cambridge and Chatto & Windus, 2004-2015).  The Proper Study of Mankind, Henry Hardy and Robert Hausheer, eds. (1997) is perhaps the best one-volume collection of Berlin’s essays.  As Stefan Collini has written, Isaiah Berlin was “the equivalent of an academic saint.” (p. 13).

It has been said that Isaiah Berlin did not like Hannah Arendt.  This is certainly true based on his collected letters.  He constantly refers to her as “Miss Arendt” (I have all four volumes and could not resist this rabbit hole).  She has index entries in the final three covering the 1950s through 1997; the index entries in the final volume have a section called “Arendt, Johanna (‘Hannah’): IB’s contempt for.”  Well, OK then.

At first, I gave Berlin the benefit of the doubt because “Ms.” had not appeared yet as a neutral courtesy title for a woman equivalent to “Mr.”  No, actually.  In a list of people, the men are often identified by their last names plus “Miss Arendt.”  Mary McCarthy, who was  Arendt’s friend and defender, especially after Eichmann in Jerusalem was published in 1963, is referred to as “Mary McCarthy.”  From a 1985 letter: “I must admit that Miss Arendt is a bête noire of mine – I see nothing in her writings of the slightest value or interest and never have.”  Uncharitable, but charity from Mt. Olympus has often been in short supply.  In 1986 he refers to her as the “late, sainted Hannah Arendt.”  No matter.  If Hannah Arendt knew of the depth of his antipathy she did not care, much.  And in any case, their work was the important thing, and both are essential to understanding the 20^th century and our responses to the most destructive period in our history  Still, he could have called her “Dr. Arendt” because she did have the degree he lacked, and of course did not need in the prewar Oxford in 1932.  But that would probably have had a double meaning, too.  Something about German punctiliousness, perhaps.

The key to Kei Hiruta’s book is the subtitle: Freedom, Politics and Humanity, with emphasis on Freedom here.  Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt necessarily responded to the overwhelming “Inhumanity,” “Evil,” and “Judgment” of the 20^th century.  Their different perspectives on these issues are clearly the origin of much of Berlin’s antipathy to Arendt as a writer, scholar, and intellectual.[3]  Nevertheless, they shared their generation’s discontent with the “main rationalist current of Western political thought and its failure to do justice to the complexity of human life.  They further shared deep skepticism about what they both regarded as a recent manifestation of that rationalist tendency…the over-application of scientific methods to the study of human affairs” (p. 47).  Yes, scientism is a bane of our existence and something to return to.  Still, there was a fundamental difference in their concepts of what it means to be free.

“Two Concepts of Liberty” and “The Hedgehog and the Fox” are perhaps Isaiah Berlin’s most well-known essays.[4]  The title of the second is from a surviving fragment of the Greek poet Archilochus, which says: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”  The subtitle of the essay is “An Essay of Tolstoy’s View of History,” which perhaps telegraphs the lesson.  In any case, about some things it is better to be a hedgehog and others the fox; the key is to know which at the right time and place.

Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” are negative liberty and positive liberty.[5]  In the first, “One is negatively free if one is not prevented by others from doing what one could otherwise do” (p. 53).  True, and this resonates widely.  But despite what Berlin seems to mean, the conditions of the exercise of any freedom cannot be separated from the “conditions of its exercise.” Nevertheless, this is a default position of classical Liberals (uppercase “L,” valid for current conservatives and liberals, such as they identify themselves). “A sick and starving citizen who has no shoes of clothes to wear is unlikely to go to a voting booth until his or her basic needs are fulfilled.  This, however, does not mean that the citizen does not have the freedom to vote.  What he or she lacks is a set of conditions for exercising that freedom; the citizen…can exercise the freedom to vote that he or she already has…(when) basic needs, such as food, shelter, and security, are fulfilled.” (p. 55).

This is a distinction with a difference. Although Berlin is being analytic rather than social or political, the argument falls flat.  The right to vote without the means to exercise that right is no right at all.  This also applies to any other right.  One is reminded of Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”  Actually, where I live and all across the US, the law mostly ignores the first two but will enforce the third with vigor.  That people need to beg for their food or steal it and live under bridges seems to be a given.

In general, Isaiah Berlin has little to say about economic inequality or the destructive forces of Neoliberalism that has developed out of Liberalism, with its attendant austerity[6] as the default response to any and every economic crisis, real or imagined.  Neoliberalism is a protean concept that can nevertheless be summarized as: “The market is the true measure of all things, even those that cannot be measured.”

It is true that during most of Berlin’s professional life, neoliberalism was not yet a pressing concern.  But in 1986 he did lament, “What I’m accused of is always the same, which is some kind of dry, negative individualism.”  Well, if the Liberal shoe fits…

The critical reading of Hiruta shows Berlin to be “marginally left-wing version of Friedrich Hayek of Mont Pèlerin, whose seemingly rigorous analysis of liberty effectively disguises the denial of liberty to the economically disadvantaged.”  Indeed.

Isaiah Berlin’s conception of positive liberty, which he sees as inferior to negative liberty, is characterized by the answer to the question, “By whom and I governed?  The answer from an advocate of positive liberty is, of course, “By myself…through self-mastery.”  All well and good, and this comports with what we all like to think about ourselves and our lives.

But according to Berlin positive liberty can be susceptible to political abuse, by would-be interferers such as tyrants – in the broader sense that includes advertising, propaganda, politicians, and (all) governments that lie – who claim to be helping one realize true freedom but instead coerce one into doing something he or she would not otherwise do.  This also “allows interferers to claim that they are merely blocking the exercise of one’s false liberty when they in fact prevent one from doing what one actually and expressly wants to do…positive liberty can in this way be appropriated by external interferers to deprive one of negative liberty in the name of ‘true freedom’ (as) self-mastery gives way to mastery by others.”

Yes, of course it does, as described in the classic Land of Desire (1994) by William R. Leach.  This dovetails with the Neoliberalism described by many critics, my favorite of which is Wendy Brown in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution.  As a choice-making creature above all, human beings are said to have the liberty to open the doors they desire: “Positive liberty is one of the many open doors one many walk through if one chooses to, whereas negative liberty is the prior condition of having various open doors in the first place.  The life of a person who does not exercise positive liberty may be impoverished.  But the life of a person who does not have a measure of negative liberty is unbearable – in fact it is inhuman.” (p. 64).  Thus, negative liberty has primacy over positive liberty.

Yes.  But the apparent Liberal belief that these doors will be present, accessible, and unlocked is not supported by the actually existing human condition.  Which brings us to Hannah Arendt on freedom, for which her concept is derived from her philosophical predecessors; of course, the same is true for Isaiah Berlin.  For Arendt, negative liberties are inadequate.  “To be free is to exercise an opportunity for political participation…(in Berlin’s imagery) a free person is not somebody standing in front of numerous open doors (or doors that can be opened by that someone) but somebody actually walking through a door to politics…freedom is a “state of being manifest in action.” (p. 66)  And just as important, for Arendt freedom requires a set of preconditions, including:

• Biological needs
• Stable and durable communities and institutions
• Laws and customs regulating political conduct
• Means to institute democratically chosen choices

Moreover, men and women must enter into this societal network as citizens who are equal political actors, and laws must be compatible with a matching political culture.  Precisely!  And each of these attributes are sorely lacking under our late capitalist neoliberal dispensation.  Which is why the current hysteria about our “democracy being in mortal danger” from any particular or general threat is absurd.  What democracy would that be, in a world in which the ideal of a “citizen” has been replaced by that other c-word, “consumer”?  One citizen-one vote or one dollar-one vote.  Take your pick.  Only one is compatible with any reasonable concept of democracy.

Citizens who are “free require that ‘in-between,’ or the space that simultaneously relates and separates people…the space where women and men gather together, show the courage to speak and act in public, express the willingness to hear what others have to say and see what others have to do…human beings have the built-in potential to speak and act and in this way meet their potential for “human plurality,” which is the sine qua non of political life (p. 67).  This brings to mind Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam, but the better description of a healthy community may be found in The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community[7] by Ray Oldenburg, which is more human, less academic, and well, more earthy.  Unless and until we return to or make anew such places in which the human condition manifests itself, we as a society and a culture will continue on this neoliberal road to perdition.

Which brings us to Hannah Arendt’s theoretical masterpiece, The Human Condition.  I confess that have not finished my current re-reading, but I did read it along with The Origins of Totalitarianism long ago.  Isaiah Berlin most certainly did not appreciate The Human Condition when it was published: From a footnote to a letter of 6 February 1959: “In 1958 IB had written a relentlessly negative report for Faber and Faber, who were considering publishing the book in the UK…‘I could recommend no publisher to buy the UK rights to this book.  There are two objections to it: it will not sell and it is no good.’ A separate UK edition has never appeared.”  (Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960, Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes, eds., p. 676).  Well, we all miss the point sometimes.  The book has been in print since 1958.  It did sell and it is good.

It goes without saying that Arendt has little sympathy for those who refuse to act, in whatever way they can.  “A liberal society must…have many open doors of various kinds, including the bourgeois door to withdrawal from politics and enjoyment of privacy and family life.  However, there is only one door to choose…if a person is to be genuinely free and to lead a fulfilling life.  That is the door to ‘the political way of life.’”(p. 72).  To be politically active can take many forms, including paying close attention to politics, especially when it is not theatre.

This lack of effective political action, among the PMC in particular, is performative in and of itself and describes most of Liberal politics these days among both politicians and their erstwhile constituents.  By not acting as “man or woman, the political animal,” we grant the powers that be their fondest wish and allow them to take care of their true constituents, which are identified here, here, here, and here (apologies for the linkstorm, but this is a target-rich environment).  As I have said on many occasions to my scientific colleagues who dismiss something as “only politics” and therefore obviously beneath them (e.g., the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which has made a few rich but at great cost to science, scientists, and society): You may not be interested in politics but, believe it or not, politics is very interested in you (with apologies to the shade of Pericles).

So, where do we go from here?  Both Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin agree that freedom is essential.  Both are essential to understanding our politics and our history.  However, “they disagree on the most satisfactory meaning of this freedom.  Their views of the human condition differ significantly, and what lies beneath their dispute…is over…what it means to be human.  One proposes the vision of the human being as a political animal conditioned by natality[8] and plurality.  The other proposes an alternative vision of the human being as a choice-making creature” who must enjoy a large measure of negative liberty (p.80)  Both are certainly correct, but it is the actually existing human condition that Classical Liberals, both conservative and liberal, seem conditioned to ignore.  Perhaps because it confounding factor, because life is messy?  Hannah Arendt claimed that her aim in The Human Condition was “very simple: it is nothing more than think what we are doing.” (Hiruta, p. 85; The Human Condition, p. 5)

And on that note, perhaps we can pause to reflect that Liberalism, in the guise of its Neo-successor, is destroying Creation through the actions of Homo economicus, that imaginary cognate species of H. sapiens who nevertheless ignores the true human condition at every opportunity.  H. economicus has been described very well by many, Wendy Brown, for example. It will be our undoing if we let it be.  I wrote last month about Salvador Luria, who died in 1991, as a scientist for our time.  Perhaps another European who fled the European conflagration of the mid-20^th century and also made her way to New York can be a political and philosophical guide for our time, one who directs us away from the abyss we have created, an abyss from which the monster stares, whether we have the courage to meet its gaze, or not.

________

[1] The biologists among us may want to read the somewhat specialist The Life Organic; The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics (2016) by Erik L. Peterson, a history professor at the University of Alabama.  Another treatment of how scientists working together, while sometimes competing with one another at the margin, make progress on the most important subjects.  In this case the concerns of the Theoretical Biology Club led to some of the most important discoveries of biology in the past 90 years, although current “synthetic biologists,” who sometimes reflect the engineering ideal of biology espoused by Jacques Loeb in the early 20^th century, would do well to listen to them more closely.  A photograph of Joseph Needham, Dorothy Moyle Needham, and the Belgian molecular biologist Jean Brachet is on the dust jacket.

[2] For those interested in modern sociobiology and its quite interesting history, the sketchiness of E.O. Wilson’s primary argument, protestations to the contrary, during his mid-career interlude as a human sociobiologist may have been confirmed by recent evidence of Wilson’s solicitude for J. Philippe Rushton, who appeared here last month.  This stuff is a perennial, primarily because it reinforces the Liberal/Neoliberal/Professional Managerial Class (PMC) consensus in which a legitimate meritocracy reigns.  No one seems to realize that Michael Young’s novel by that name was dystopian fiction.

[3] The controversy over Eichmann in Jerusalem is addressed by Arendt in On Lying and Politics (2022), a “little book” from Library of America, which also contains her essay on The Pentagon Papers.

[4] Both essays are included in The Proper Study of Mankind (1997).

[5] Or freedom; the terms are interchangeable.

[6] I cannot resist noting that the blurb on the cover of my paperback edition of Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea is “Blyth writes in the style of Keynes…valid and compelling” from one Lawrence Summers.  Somewhere at OUP works an editor with a sense of humor.

[7] A heartfelt elegy and call to action from a genuine sociologist.

[8] In response to Heidegger, a contrast of natality with mortality: “Like Heidegger, Arendt considers human beings to be fundamentally conditioned…and she wants them to become appropriately responsive to human finitude.  But the responsiveness she wants them to cultivate is the responsiveness to natality, rather than mortality…though (humans) must die, (they) are not born in order to die but in order to begin.” (p. 74-75).  A good way to live!