Abstract
After underlining the relevance to our gloomy period of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Men in Dark Times, this epilogue takes a more hopeful turn by examining different sites for miracles of action suggested by the authors in this volume. The essay also identifies contemporary acts of resistance to oppression that are difficult to see if we remain overly faithful to Arendtian theory. These include struggles to protect the “what already is” from destructive external blows, internet exposés of state tyranny by anonymous and isolated rebels in public and private bureaucracies, and movements to widen the scope of democracy, plurality, and solidarity to include non-human species and elements of the earth under environmental siege.
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Notes
- 1.
Kei Hiruta, “Hannah Arendt, Liberalism, and Freedom from Politics,” in this volume, 35–36.
- 2.
Ibid., 36–37.
- 3.
William Smith and Shiyu Zhang, “Resisting Injustice: Arendt of Civil Disobedience and the Social Contract,” in this volume, 127.
- 4.
Ibid., 128.
- 5.
Ibid., 127.
- 6.
See, for example, Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
- 7.
Patrick Hayden and Natasha Saunders, “Solidarity at the Margins: Arendt, Refugees, and the Inclusive Politics of World-Making,” in this volume, 196.
- 8.
James R. Martel, The Misinterpellated Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
- 9.
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, The Art of Revolt: Snowden, Assange,Manning (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017).
- 10.
Ibid., 95.
- 11.
Ibid., 93.
- 12.
Joan Cocks, “Disappearance,” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 3 (2016), http://www.politicalconcepts.org/disappearance-joan-cocks/.
- 13.
For Arendt’s ontological hierarchy, see, of course Hannah Arendt, TheHuman Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974 [1958]), which is also the source of most of the positive gems she can offer environmentalist philosophy. For her sensibilities on the subject of peoples who do not master nature but treat “nature as their undisputed master,” see Hannah Arendt, The Originsof Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973 [1951]), Part II Imperialism, Chapter 7, “Race and Bureaucracy.” Ibid., 192.
- 14.
To get some sense of how far from that ontology one would have to go to do justice to our planetary condition and plight, see, for example, William E. Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); and Paul Raskin, Journey to Earthland: The Great Transition to Planetary Civilization (Boston, MA: Tellus Institute, 2016). For an example of a political theorist who is making Arendtian arguments on behalf of environmentalism with the requisite depth and thoroughness that this epilogue is not designed to provide, see Laura Ephraim, Who Speaks for Nature: On the Politics of Science (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973.
———. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
Cocks, Joan. “Disappearance.” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 3 (2016). http://www.politicalconcepts.org/disappearance-joan-cocks/.
Connolly, William E. Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
de Lagasnerie, Geoffroy. The Art of Revolt: Snowden, Assange, Manning. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017.
Ephraim, Laura. Who Speaks for Nature: On the Politics of Science. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
Frank, Jason. Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Hayden, Patrick, and Natasha Saunders. “Solidarity at the Margins: Arendt, Refugees, and the Inclusive Politics of World-Making.” In Arendt on Freedom, Liberation, and Revolution, edited by Kei Hiruta, 171–199. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Hiruta, Kei. “Hannah Arendt, Liberalism, and Freedom from Politics.” In Arendt on Freedom, Liberation, and Revolution, edited by Kei Hiruta, 17–45. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
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Smith, William, and Shiyu Zhang. “Resisting Injustice: Arendt of Civil Disobedience and the Social Contract.” In Arendt on Freedom, Liberation, and Revolution, edited by Kei Hiruta, 115–138. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
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Cocks, J. (2019). An Epilogue—Or Epitaph?—For Freedom, Liberation, Revolution. In: Hiruta, K. (eds) Arendt on Freedom, Liberation, and Revolution. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11695-8_11
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