Hannah Arendt’s conception of Sovereignty
A CONVERSATION ON HANNAH ARENDT’S CONCEPTION OF
SOVEREIGNTY
The fear of violent death is the ground from which
Hobbes’s’ commonwealth arises. His commonwealth, which he calls Leviathan, is
an “artificial man,” a “mortal God,” that “overawes” its subjects, who
willingly forfeit what we call political rights, retaining only the “natural”
right to preserve their lives by any means available to them in cases of
prosecution and war. What Hobbes calls “mixed government” or “diversity of
opinions” – which Aristotle mentions favorably – can only weaken the “absolute
power” of Leviathan (Ibid., 29), an artifact forged from distinct individuals
who want and need its protection so they themselves can flourish and further
their private, chiefly economic, interests. It is in exchange for security that
they willingly forego the public expression of their opinions and forfeit their
ability to join in concerted action. The “absolute” or “sovereign” power of
Hobbes’s commonwealth means that justice and law are what it decrees them to be
– and not what any international body deems them to be. With his relentless logic,
Hobbes does not shy away from the fact that Leviathan is a tyranny, for
“tyranny, signifieth nothing more, nor less, than the name of sovereignty.” Read the full text:
http://elisabethyoung-bruehl.com/articles/hannah-arendt-conversations/sovereignty/
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Jerome Kohn
JK. A word about the backstory to the following
conversation may be in order. Elisabeth and I met in 1968 in Hannah Arendt’s seminar on
“Political Experiences in the Twentieth Century.” Studying under the guidance
of a woman who had lived through the worst of those experiences, and probably
better than anyone understood their unprecedentedness, was itself a remarkable
experience – one we’ve talked and written about before. In Arendt’s seminar we
also learned something no less remarkable about the art of thinking. If in its
purest form thinking is a world-withdrawn activity, a swift, silent dialogue
conducted by the thinking ego with itself, Arendt showed us by her own example
that thinking also can be active in a conversation between people who, while
not withdrawn from the world, find themselves in a space defined by a kind of
decorum. The space of Arendt’s seminar was strictly bounded by the political
narratives and testimonies she selected for us to read and discuss, where she,
as first among equals (primus inter pares), was somehow able to
establish equality as the common desideratum of everyone participating in the
seminar.
Which is to say that for a few hours each week we came together in a
sort of public space, or at least in an ambience of political
friendship, of philia politik , as Aristotle called
it. There the self did not divide into the two-in-one of the thinking ego, but
on the contrary, we strove to become each other’s other self, which, again
according to Aristotle, is the consummation, the telos, of
friendship. One could say, metaphorically, that the seminar was like the
rehearsal and occasionally the performance of a concerto, in which, under
Arendt’s direction, the solo parts were passed back and forth in a community of
friends. Elisabeth and I so much enjoyed this manner of speaking, which by no
means precluded contestation or debate, but was founded and depended on an
underlying harmony or agreement, that for forty years we’ve relished every
opportunity to revive it. Therefore, following Arendt as best we can, we will
attempt to engage not only each other but also you in the spirit of Aristotlean
friendship. Our topic is the controversial one of political sovereignty.
If Arendt had written a single essay on sovereignty rather
than writing about it in a number of different places, she might have given it
the title: “What Was Sovereignty?” So it seems consistent with
her mode of thinking, which was also Aristotle’s, to begin by briefly looking
back to the primary historical manifestation of national sovereignty in
sixteenth century France. There is an Italian background to its French
development, insofar as Niccolò Machiavelli at the beginning of the century,
around 1513, first used the word “state” (il stato) to refer to what
emerged – though in Italy
not before more than three hundred years had passed – as the modern
nation-state. In 1576 Jean Bodin’s Six livres de la république,
which was written during the divisive religious wars in France ,
called for both a fully sovereign monarchy and religious toleration. The two
appeals were interrelated: the need Bodin saw for sovereign political power to
put an end to the chaos of civil war in France
was likewise the condition under which Catholics and Protestants would come to
tolerate each other. Bodin’s theory came to life, so to speak, when in 1593
Henri of Navarre, who was raised a Huguenot, on his march to sovereign power
suddenly converted to Catholicism, saying “Paris vaut bien une messe”
(“Paris is well worth a mass”). But then in 1598, as Henri IV, the first
Bourbon king of France ,
he promulgated the Edict of Nantes, which granted Huguenots the freedom to
worship according to the dictates of their conscience. The sovereign power of
the state, a power above any other power, not excluding that of religious
institutions, brought to an end, at least for a time, the devastation of France
by Frenchmen. It is no wonder that Arendt always referred to France
as “the nation-state par excellence,” for France
was the first and foremost national state to emerge from medieval
feudalism.
There is much more, of course, to be said about the history
of the concept of sovereignty than can be gone into here. Already in the next
century the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius set forth a body of laws between single
nations – laws of nature, as he called them – whose scope, being international,
set limits to sovereign power. His laws of war, for example, respected the
lives and protected the property of private persons whose lands were invaded by
foreign armies. His theory of international law would be examined in later
centuries and today, after the twentieth century’s two disastrous World Wars,
is the subject of renewed interest; but in the seventeenth century neither
actual sovereigns or Thomas Hobbes, Grotius’s near contemporary, paid it much
heed.
Hobbes was the first modern political philosopher and the staunchest,
subtlest, and perhaps most prescient of all exponents of political sovereignty.
His basic insight is that the equality of men lies in the ability of the
weakest to kill the strongest, “either by secret machination, or by confederacy
with others, that are in the same danger with himself.” Since they live in
“continual fear, and danger of violent death,” men in their natural or
pre-political state “have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief,
in keeping company.” In Hobbes’s well known words, their lives are “solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan, 13), even if the word
“short” might seem to someone less fearful than Hobbes perhaps misplaced. Be
that as it may, it is their political organization into sovereign states that
alone removes men from their natural state and relieves or prevents them from
behaving like wolves to their fellow men (homo homini lupus). But in a
world that has witnessed political crimes exceeding anything Hobbes imagined in
the state of nature, some contemporary Hobbesians think he would admit the
right of an international body to intercede in the internal affairs of a
sovereign state that fosters genocide or the so-called “ethnic cleansing” of a
minority within its borders. Perhaps, but it is also possible that these
Hobbesians, in their effort to adapt the past to the future, have forgotten the
structure and even the delimited purpose of the commonwealth Hobbes constructs.
http://elisabethyoung-bruehl.com/articles/hannah-arendt-conversations/sovereignty/
