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On Compassion: Hannah Arendt and the Political Virtues

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Abstract

This article examines Hannah Arendt’s persistent and unfashionable rejection of the usefulness of compassion in politics, a rejection that runs through her entire philosophical and political project. It relies on a close reading of On Revolution, paying particular attention to the fictional narratives she relied upon to make her case—Herman Melville’s Billy Budd and Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor,” along with her later interpretation of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed. Her controversial claim is that goodness and compassion in their purest forms are naturally subversive of the political realm, which must entertain a dialogue between various opinions. Compassion is impatient with mere talk and, she implies, will prefer instead the direct means of violence or coercion. Arendt’s overarching point is that those who love the good (and their own souls) may not care enough for the world proper. Her countervailing ideal is amor mundi, a concept buttressed by her reading of Machiavelli, and fleshed out in the example of Max Weber, who also displayed a preference for an “ethic of responsibility” for the world over an “ethic of absolute ends.”

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Notes

  1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Harcourt Inc., [1950] 1968), p. 303; henceforth cited as OT.

  2. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), p. 14; henceforth cited as MDT.

  3. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, (Middlesex: Penguin Books, [1962] 1973), p. 85; henceforth cited as OR.

  4. Ibid., p. 51.

  5. Ibid., p. 70.

  6. Ibid., p. 76.

  7. Ibid., p. 70.

  8. Ibid., p. 86.

  9. Ibid., p. 81.

  10. Ibid., p. 76.

  11. Arendt, MDT, op. cit., p. 12.

  12. Arendt, OR, op. cit., p. 117.

  13. Ibid., p. 76.

  14. Ibid., p. 81.

  15. Maximilien Robespierre, “Speech to the National Convention: February 6, 1794: The Terror Justified,” in Pageant of Europe, edited by Raymond P. Stearns, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1947) pp. 404–405.

  16. Arendt, OR, op. cit., p. 85.

  17. Ibid., p. 85.

  18. Ibid., p. 87.

  19. The phrase used here, identical to Robespierre’s, is from Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries, (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2003), p. ix.

  20. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (Minneapolis: First Avenue Editions, 2018), p. 610.

  21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, edited by Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1987), p. 2.

  22. Fyodor Dostoyevksy, The Brothers Karamazov, (Toronto: Bantam Books, [1880] 1981), p. 373.

  23. Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism” in Review of Politics, Vol. 15 (1), (January 1953), p. 84.

  24. Arendt, OR, op. cit., p. 112.

  25. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind Volume 1: Thinking, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 5.

  26. Hannah Arendt, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” in Social Research, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter 1994), p. 741.

  27. In response to an essay by Stan Spyros Draenos called “Thinking Without a Ground: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Situation of Understanding” Arendt introduced her equivalent metaphor “Denken ohne Geländer,” or “thinking without a banister.” This meant the effort to understand without unthinking reliance on the pillars of moral, religious and political absolutes customary to the Western tradition, which to her mind, simply no longer held. See the transcript from a 1972 symposium on her work, “Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt” in Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding 1953-75, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2018), p. 473.

  28. Arendt, OR, op. cit., p. 92.

  29. Herman Melville, Billy Budd, (New York: The New American Library, [1891] 1961), p. 7

  30. Arendt, OR, op. cit., p. 76.

  31. Ibid., p. 77.

  32. Ibid., p. 77.

  33. Melville, op. cit, p. 9.

  34. Ibid., p. 91.

  35. Ibid., pp. 23–4.

  36. Ibid., p. 26.

  37. Ibid., p. 26.

  38. Ibid., p. 61.

  39. Ibid., p. 9.

  40. Ibid., pp. 42, 43.

  41. Ibid., p. 37.

  42. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, (Toronto: Bantam Books, [1880] 1981), pp. 284, 315.

  43. Arendt, OR, op. cit., p. 81.

  44. Melville, op. cit., p. 67.

  45. Ibid., p. 82.

  46. Ibid., pp. 36, 68.

  47. Arendt, OR, op. cit., p. 84.

  48. Melville, op. cit, p. 9.

  49. Arendt, OR, op. cit., p. 83.

  50. Ibid., p. 86.

  51. Ibid., p. 93.

  52. Ibid., p. 94.

  53. Ibid., p. 29.

  54. In Chapter 15 Machiavelli says: “If a ruler wants to survive, he’ll have to learn to stop being good, at least when the occasion demands.” The Prince, (London: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 81; for Arendt’s extrapolation see OR, p. 30.

  55. Arendt, OR, op. cit., p. 96.

  56. Ibid., p. 97.

  57. Ibid., p. 97.

  58. Ibid., p. 97.

  59. Ibid., p. 98.

  60. Ibid., p. 92.

  61. Ibid., p. 103; incidentally, the same terminology also found its place within the theoretical framework of Jungian psychology where the persona indicates the contrived, artificial and adaptable social personality in contradistinction to the depth of the true Self, the location of which is the object of therapy.

  62. Ibid., p. 103.

  63. Ibid., p. 109.

  64. Ibid., pp. 91, 92.

  65. Ibid., p. 91.

  66. Ibid., p. 92.

  67. Ibid., p. 92.

  68. Hannah Arendt, “The Possessed” in Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding 1953-75, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2018), p. 367.

  69. Ibid., p. 366.

  70. Ibid., p. 369.

  71. Ibid., p. 368.

  72. Ibid., p. 368.

  73. Georg Lukács, “Dostoevsky” in Wellek, Rene (ed.) Dostoyevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1962), p. 158.

  74. Arendt, “The Possessed,” op. cit., p. 362.

  75. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Possessed, translated by Andrew MacAndrew (London: Penguin, [1871] 1962), p. 305.

  76. Quoted in Arendt, “The Possessed,” op. cit., p. 363.

  77. Her discussion of the “moral passion” of “nihilism” is from an earlier essay written in response to a piece by Michael Polanyi called “Challenges to Traditional Ethics” in Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding 1953-75, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2018), p. 186.

  78. Arendt, “The Possessed,” op. cit., p. 367.

  79. Ibid., p. 367.

  80. Ibid., p. 367.

  81. Arendt, Hannah, OR, op. cit, p. 81.

  82. Ibid., p. 81.

  83. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), p. 7.

  84. Ibid., p. 27.

  85. The closeness of brotherhood even tends to obliterate the distinctions between individuals—see, for instance, the degree of impersonality notable amongst Buddhist monks, doubtless some of the purest exemplars of the compassionate life.

  86. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, op. cit., p. 27.

  87. Hannah Arendt, “Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt” in Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding 1953-75, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2018), p. 451.

  88. Ibid, p. 451.

  89. Ibid, p. 451.

  90. Ibid., p. 451.

  91. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, translated by Harry Zohn (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, [1926] 1988), p. 466.

  92. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated and edited by H.H Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), p. 9.

  93. Ibid., p. 123.

  94. Ibid., p. 124.

  95. Ibid., p. 123.

  96. Ibid., p. 123.

  97. Ibid., p. 127.

  98. Ibid., p. 116.

  99. Hannah Arendt, “Remembering Wystan H. Auden” in Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding 1953-75, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2018), p. 530.

  100. W.H. Auden, “1 September, 1939” in Selected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson, (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 80.

  101. Arendt, “Remembering Wystan H. Auden,” op. cit., p. 530.

  102. Arendt, OR, op. cit., p. 299.

  103. Ibid., p. 85.

  104. Arendt, OT, op. cit., p. 232.

  105. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, (London: Penguin Books, [1902] 1988), p. 32.

  106. Ibid., p. 97.

  107. Ibid., p. 107.

  108. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, [1958] 1998), p. 148.

  109. Arendt, MDT, op. cit., p. 14.

  110. Ibid., p. 11.

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  1. Department of Sociology, La Trobe University, Bundoora, VIC, 3086, Australia

    John Dickson

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Dickson, J. On Compassion: Hannah Arendt and the Political Virtues. Soc 60, 68–77 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-022-00796-8

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