The animosity between Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno is legendary. Yet this edited collection—the first systematic comparison of their thought in English—reveals their deep affinities. At its best, the comparison uncovers a new breadth and depth to their thinking. It provides valuable resources for revitalizing critical political theorizing in a global age, and dynamizes their respective contributions through a critical comparison with dominant paradigms of social and political philosophy—from Kantian universalism to liberalism and postmodernism.
The leitmotif may be that “the problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them” (Einstein). These problems are unprecedented—to wit: massive displacements and migrations that have fueled a generalized sense of “homelessness” (p. 238); a reification of cultural forms that has made meaningful communication less rather than more likely; a crisis of experience, which has made us lose touch with “what things mean” (p. 9); and an obsolescence of such traditional standards as nature and history, which have become intertwined in the chiasmus of a “natural history” (p. 253). The contributions assess the ways in which Arendt and Adorno responded to these problems, which were also the lived experiences that compelled them—and should compel us—to “think what we are doing.”
The volume consists of 11 chapters divided into three parts: i) “Political Modernity, Theory, and Philosophy,” ii) “Legacies of Totalitarianism,” and iii) “Political Theory in Exile.” As the editors explain, the central contribution of Arendt and Adorno may be their unique ways of defending particularity and plurality without sacrificing universality. What follows is an attempt to show why this matters through a selective reading of chapters that bear on four problems.
The first problem is the institutionalization of freedom in the modern world, with contrasting answers demonstrating the potential of an Arendtian critique of Adorno (Dana Villa) and an Adornian elucidation of Arendt (Jay Bernstein).
Arendt and Adorno sought to defend plurality against “identity philosophies” (p. 81). Politically, this meant for Arendt that “[i]f men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce” (“What is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future, 1993, p. 165). Similarly, for Adorno, an emancipated society would be one in which “people could be different without fear” (Minima Moralia, 2005, p. 103). Yet, as Villa argues, their “difference-affirming” utopias diverged on a key point. Arendt imagined a world in which “through acting and talking together, plural individuals articulate their perspectives on common things more precisely and more richly” (p. 96). In contrast to Arendt's political utopia, Adorno conceived of a world that would no longer stand “under the law of labor” (Minima Moralia, p. 112). In the Adornian utopia, moreover, what remains of alienated subjectivity would be restored from the memory of “a loving and protective bourgeois family” (p. 89). Villa traces Adorno's retreat from the political into the private to his (paradoxically) totalizing critique of the “total society,” which effaces key distinctions emphasized by Arendt among the state, the economy, the public realm, and the mass media.
Bernstein, in contrast, reads Arendt as fulfilling Adorno's modernist program. Arendt's political doctrine, he argues, is fulfilled in civil disobedience understood as an act of (re)founding and renewal. Acts of civil disobedience proceed in a way analogous to Adorno's “negative dialectics”: They show that “there is a claim by a range of particulars that existing social practices deny” (p. 59). They also show that the truth of founding is refounding. This means that foundations—and principles—in human affairs are always subject to interrogation. They rest on promises, notably, on a mutual “holding” of certain truths to be “self-evident” (p. 68). Like artworks, founding principles hold “exemplary validity”: They are particular beginnings that become authoritative universals. Thus, they also inspire and set standards for further creations or refoundings. Civil disobedience (if I understand Bernstein correctly) is precisely that—a refounding that keeps alive the promise of freedom through the “determinate negation of unfreedom” (p. 76).
Questions of subjectivity and sociality are a second problem area in which Arendt and Adorno sought to think the particular in critical relation to the universal. Dieter Thomä notes the strange absence in Arendt of a clear conception of human agency. That freedom seems to come “out of the blue”—or out of a fuzzy “natality”—suggests that Arendt remained beholden to the Kantian dualism between spontaneity and determinism (pp. 112 f.). Beyond this common critique, however, Thomä shows that her abstraction from sources of natural determinism in The Human Condition (1998) was not her last word. As her Denktagebuch (2002) shows, Arendt's list of “fundamental activities” included action, work, labor, and love. Though passions ultimately drop out of The Human Condition, they reemerge in The Life of the Mind (1981) in ways that compete with Adorno's views on subjectivity and sociality. Reading Arendt in light of Adorno allows Thomä to provide a more accurate phenomenology of natality as a form of remembrance and self-interpretation that ensures freedom by defying causality.
Chapters by Lars Rensmann and Robert Fine assess the contributions of Arendt and Adorno to a third problem—the need to theorize the conditions for global solidarity among world citizens. The difficulty of defending plurality and universality recurs in their fragmented contributions to global political theory. Arendt called for a qualified embrace of international law and institutions, but, more importantly, for political action from below, or localized struggles that “realize, and rectify, the universal”—in particular, the right of every individual to belong to humanity (p. 131). That this right could not be guaranteed by the nation-state was also Adorno's conviction. The challenge for him was to realize the possibility afforded by modern technologies for “a change in the form of society itself that enables cosmopolitan subjectivities grounded in dispersed, decentered ‘homelands without frontiers’” (p. 149).
A fourth common problem area was anti-Semitism. Both thinkers placed the “anti-Semitic question” at the center of their critiques of modernity. Julia Schulze and Rensmann point to a particularly striking complementarity between Adorno's diagnosis of the “manipulative character” and Arendt's assessment of Adolf Eichmann. Modern anti-Semitism appears to be a symptom of the modern “ideology of objectivity” (p. 218). The immunization from reality produced by ideologies (Arendt) or pathological projections (Adorno) renders thought incapable of reflective judgment. Thus, the challenge of redeeming the particular recurs in the wake of “the unreflective abstractions that are constitutive of modern thinking” (p. 11).
The final two chapters explain how the critical standpoints of Arendt and Adorno transcended particularism and universalism. For both, the experience of exile became integral to a standpoint that occupies a “third place” beyond contextualist criticism (e.g., Michael Walzer, Richard Rorty) or the stance of the “universal intellectual” (e.g., Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault) (p. 241). As symbolized by Arendt's “self-conscious pariah,” this space is epistemologically unique in that it affords the necessary remove from life in which alone the mental life—and perhaps the capacity to judge—can exist. It also allows the critic to “rectify the universal” by adopting the perspective of the “excluded, the marginalized, the different” (p. 240).
Exclusion has also been the burden of this short review of a collection that is brimming with insights. Suffice it to conclude that readers of Arendt will return to her work with fresh eyes to find a powerful confluence of critical theory, phenomenology, and modernism. Political theorists unfamiliar with Adorno will discover a thinker who was uniquely attuned to the possibilities and limits of the “philosophical discourse of modernity.” Beyond this, Arendt and Adorno will open new vistas into the crises and opportunities of global modernity as it was experienced by two of the twentieth century's greatest minds.
