Memory as the Guardian of Action

While memory has been recognized as a crucial part of Arendt's thought, its role and implications have not been sufficiently explored.Footnote ⁹ In one of the few sustained analyses of Arendt's writings on memory, Irene McMullin highlights the “evaluative quality” of Arendtian remembrance, which allows it to serve “a foundational role in the establishment and maintenance of the public arena.” Whereas McMullin addresses the role of technology, I focus on the dangers that occur when these evaluative standards are called into question by traumatic experiences of historical rupture. Regardless of the cause, the stakes are high. After all, “in the absence of shared public norms for evaluating what should count as excellent human lives, citizens turn to competing private visions that regularly conflict.”Footnote ¹⁰

In order to understand why remembrance is so important for Arendt, I start by outlining the role of memory in her theoretical architecture. Arendt's political thought is based on a tripartite division of fundamental human activities. The first is man's labor as the animal laborans. For Arendt, “To labor [is] to be enslaved by necessity.”Footnote ¹¹ It is characterized by futility, as labor never leaves anything behind; labor is unproductive by definition. Arendt ties labor to the household (οἶκος), where chores such as cleaning, washing, cooking, etc., have to be repeated endlessly.

Arendt argues that it is not labor but work—a separate activity—that produces artifacts such as factory goods, art, books, and other objects that fill space and allow us to orient ourselves on the earth. Work is the activity of homo faber, who fabricates tangible articles. Although the products of work do not last forever, they are durable and can outlive their maker.

Arendt's third category is action, defined as speech and deeds. Action is an interpersonal activity carried out in the public sphere. Arendt argues, “With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth in which we take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance.” Through action, humans freely reveal themselves as unique individuals: “This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity, like labor, and it is not prompted by utility, like work.” Action is irreversible—one can never take back what has been done or said. It is also unpredictable, since the consequences of actions can never reliably be foreseen.Footnote ¹²

According to Arendt words and deeds distinguish men from each other and from the rest of the world. Appearing in the world depends on plurality, since human beings cannot assert their individuality without others to identify themselves both with and against. Through words and deeds human beings cease to be defined by work or labor. They become a zōon politikon (ζῷον πολιτικόν)—a political being, living and defining itself with the help of others. In Arendt's understanding, “plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”Footnote ¹³

It is at this point that memory comes into play. Although individuals are able to distinguish themselves through action, this process is futile without memory. Speech and deeds leave nothing behind. The experience of action must be preserved through “the mind's power of having present what is irrevocably past and thus absent from the senses.” Even the everyday ways that individuals assert personal identities would have no lasting consequence in the absence of what Ronald Beiner calls “the saving power of remembrance.” Without memory neither individuals nor communities would have a past or a future: “the living activities of action, speech, and thought would lose their reality at the end of each process and disappear as though they never had been.”Footnote ¹⁴

Given its importance, the prospect of relying so heavily on a faculty as inconsistent as memory is both perilous and unsatisfactory. The continuity of the past and the possibility for action must be safeguarded in the more material ways associated with work. Arendt notes,

I argue that this “reification of remembrance” is mediated through two areas of collective life: the viewpoint of the storyteller, who crafts a narrative that can be passed on to others; and the political community, which preserves these stories over time and provides a space in which they can continue to be told. Understanding the importance of these two mechanisms for the transmission of memory demonstrates why Arendt saw totalitarianism as such a threat to the fabric of historical time.

Fabricating Memory through Storytelling and the Political Community

Storytelling is crucial because it preserves action. It is only after words and deeds have been situated within a plot that they can be passed on to future generations. Arendt's understanding of memory and the importance of storytelling is based on her reading of Benjamin. In an essay edited by Arendt after his death, Benjamin writes, “A story . . . does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.” The story is a form of remembrance that can lie dormant while maintaining its “germinative power.”Footnote ¹⁶

Arendt takes this insight further by linking storytelling to history. She goes back to Herodotus, “the Father of Western History,” who notes that his “purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of [their] important and remarkable achievements.” History takes great words and deeds out of the recurring cycle of the natural world and preserves them for posterity. It thus offers human beings the chance to gain immortality as individuals.Footnote ¹⁷

The paradigmatic exemplar of this process is Achilles, who was able to gain “immortal fame” by his “great works and deeds.” Although his actions were as futile as any other man's, they were saved from oblivion and passed down through time by Homer. Arendt observes, “Even Achilles . . . remains dependent upon the storyteller, poet, or historian, without whom everything he did remains futile.” Spectators become the ultimate “guardians of the facts and the events of the world” by recording the acts of others and crafting them into stories.Footnote ¹⁸

Although Arendt appreciates the importance of primary sources, she notes that they are quickly subsumed within the meaning-giving narratives produced by the historian “who perceives and ‘makes’ the story.”Footnote ¹⁹ It is the outside observer who fuses accounts of individual events into meaningful stories. Arendt points out that despite his physical disability, Homer, “the blind bard,” was able to “see” with a “backward-directed glance.” Storytellers are able to overlook the “narrow aims” of the actors to concentrate on the “higher aims” and meanings that participants in the events themselves cannot comprehend.Footnote ²⁰

A powerful example of this process is Odysseus, who comes to the court of the Phaeacians as a dirty, unknown traveler. When he hears the court's bard sing of the Trojan War (book 8), Odysseus unites the roles of actor, listener, and sufferer. “Odysseus, listening, covers his face and weeps, though he never wept before, and certainly not when what he is now hearing actually happened. Only when he hears the story does he become fully aware of its meaning.” Arendt observes dryly that Odysseus “would have been bored rather than moved if history were only news and poetry only entertainment.”Footnote ²¹

While storytelling makes memory tangible, narrative is neither the only nor even the best way to achieve permanence in the world. The fragility of memory highlights the differences between “communicative and cultural memory.” Although both forms are socially mediated, communicative memory has a strictly limited temporal horizon. It depends on the difficult and sporadic traditions of oral retelling. In contrast, cultural memory “mak[es] something lasting out of remembrance.”Footnote ²²

The transition between communicative and cultural memory is a two-stage process. Arendt argues, “The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things.”Footnote ²³ Whereas communicative memory participates only in the first stage, cultural memory passes through both. It is no longer merely a product of the mind, but has been reified into an object in the world. Individuals “fabricate memory” to help define their collective identities through shared symbols, sites of remembrance, etc. The objects of cultural memory become a fixed point in the historical timeline of the group.

The power of cultural memory highlights the importance of the political community. Arendt notes, “Before men began to act, a definite space had to be secured and a structure built where all subsequent actions could take place, the space being the public realm of the polis.” The polity provides a safe haven from violence through laws that govern social organization. It serves the dual function of making remembrance possible in the present and reifying the memory of words and deeds into permanent structures for future generations. In this way, “the laws [of the polis] hedge in each new beginning and at the same time assure its freedom of movement, the potentiality of something entirely new and unpredictable.”Footnote ²⁴

By limiting liberty to ensure plurality, the mechanism of law ensures that individuals have the freedom to “act in concert” by creating “new beginnings.” Arendt notes that “the boundaries of positive laws are for the political existence of man what memory is for his historical existence; they guarantee the pre-existence of a common world.” By ensuring the safety of its members, the polity guarantees that witnesses will be present to testify to action. According to Patricia Owens, “The legitimate purpose of law . . . is to offer some stability and form to political words and actions that could otherwise seem so fleeting and transient.”Footnote ²⁵

In addition to providing the preconditions for action through law, the political community also reifies remembrance. It “fabricates a memory” for words and deeds that can outlive both the individual actor and the generation of original witnesses. The polity's institutions reify past acts and make them immortal. Arendt argues, “The organization of the polis, physically secured by the wall around the city and physiognomically guaranteed by its laws—lest the succeeding generations change its identity beyond recognition—is a kind of organized remembrance.” The polity also fabricates memory through archives, serials, and anthologies—i.e., through what Jeremy Waldron calls “the mundane apparatus of bibliographical structure.”Footnote ²⁶

By reifying memory into concrete, tangible objects ranging from monuments to words on a page, the storyteller and the polity give the zōon politikon a durability previously reserved for the work of homo faber. However, these two mechanisms are not equally important. Arendt argues that the political community reifies remembrance in more basic and fundamental ways than storytelling and history:

While those outside the polis depend on poets to gain immortality, the political community guarantees that actions will endure without relying solely on storytellers and the limited attention spans of their listeners. Although storytelling is a powerful human capacity, narrative and the memories it preserves do not have the stability the polis provides. The political community, Jerome Kohn concludes, is the ultimate “situs of memory.”Footnote ²⁸ Threats to the political community are direct assaults on the reliability of remembrance. Because totalitarianism undermined the legitimacy of the nation-state, the established form of political community in the early twentieth century, Arendt saw it as a fundamental threat to the continuity of memory.

Totalitarianism and the Destruction of Memory

Ruptures in historical narratives endanger memory's capacity to save action by weakening the communal structures within which storytelling takes place. While these events present the opportunity to tell new narratives, they also threaten the basic capacity for remembrance upon which action itself depends. For Arendt, the paradigmatic example of such a rupture is “evident in the total political breakdown we see in Totalitarianism.”Footnote ²⁹

The aspect of National Socialism that concerned Arendt most was its desire to destroy plurality and “the gift of memory so dangerous to totalitarian rule.” Arendt was wary of totalitarianism's embrace of the ideal of a unified body politic. She argued that unlike despotism and authoritarianism, “totalitarian domination is new, as new as the word itself and the claim to total, and not only political, domination.”Footnote ³⁰

Within the “novel form of government” created by the Third Reich, das Volk (“the people,” a singular noun) is reduced to a single person. The unique individual is lost in the body politic of the corporate state.Footnote ³¹ Totalitarianism rejects the zōon politikon; its ideal is man as homo faber, the producer of goods.Footnote ³² Arendt notes that total terror and control “substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between individual men a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality had disappeared into One man of gigantic dimensions.” Laws meant to safeguard men living together are unnecessary. “To abolish the fences of laws between men . . . means to take away man's liberties and destroy freedom as a living political reality; for the space between men as it is hedged in by laws, is the living space of freedom.”Footnote ³³

As human life is restricted and constrained, action and the public realm ceases. Under totalitarianism, “mere administration, in contrast to government, is the adequate form of men living together.” An impersonal bureaucracy that controls all aspects of life replaces great words and deeds. In this situation, “‘nobody’ can be held responsible” for what they say or do, since everything is part of the organic order of the corporate state.Footnote ³⁴

The antipolitical nature of totalitarianism changes humanity's relationship to memory. The past can no longer serve as a storehouse of exemplars, of “immortal words and deeds” bearing witness to man's capacity for action. On the contrary, the individuality of exemplary persons breaks the unity of das Volk, destroying the foundations of the totalitarian state. The spontaneity of human action is replaced by mechanistic conceptions of nature and history, that is, by an “iron law” where everything is predictable and preordained.Footnote ³⁵ In the totalitarian state, memory is not only unnecessary; it is a threat to its very structure.

This “disappearance of the individual” is more than just a metaphor. It is a fact. Since the individual has no place in totalitarianism, men can vanish without a trace. Individuals disappear as a result of deportation, denationalization, imprisonment in concentration camps, and slaughter in extermination camps. “The operation of the secret police . . . miraculously sees to it that the victim never existed at all.”Footnote ³⁶

The death camps, like all other aspects of the totalitarian state, are in the realm of work. They produce what Arendt's teacher, Martin Heidegger, called “human material” through the “manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers.”Footnote ³⁷ Instead of being killed as individuals, men are slaughtered as part of the undifferentiated Heideggerian “they” (das Man). The anonymous individual's “death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never really existed.” This process is part of an “organized oblivion that . . . extends even to the families and friends of the victim. Grief and remembrance are forbidden.”Footnote ³⁸ By destroying plurality and the possibility for action, the totalitarian state blocks remembrance at the individual level. If politics is “organized remembrance,” then totalitarianism is organized oblivion.

The forgetfulness essential to totalitarianism at both the level of the individual and the community creates a gap in the narrative thread linking the past to the future. In the absence of a polity to fabricate remembrance into something durable, words and deeds cannot survive. Without memory “the monstrous forgeries in historiography of which all totalitarian regimes are guilty” become possible.Footnote ³⁹

Arendt's fear of forgetfulness and the dangers of oblivion come out most strongly in her condemnation of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who organized the transport of the Jews to the death camps. Arendt criticizes Eichmann repeatedly for the gaps in his memory: “More damning, however, than any objective fact was Eichmann's own faulty memory.” This defect is part of the general “thoughtlessness” that Arendt argued made Eichmann's crimes evil despite their bureaucratic banality.Footnote ⁴¹ From a certain perspective all Eichmann did was sit in an office, fill out forms, and follow orders. However, the true horror of these activities is found in his inability to think through and understand the outcome of his actions. It is as if he had lost the capacity of judgment, of the evaluative standards of memory.

Arendt argues that without memory individuals lose their ability to think, to understand the consequences of their actions. Evil becomes a part of everyday life. Human beings succumb to “the mindless peace of complacency.”Footnote ⁴² Men may try to recover their capacity for memory, but totalitarianism has forever changed the world. Although this past has had the greatest impact on the Federal Republic of Germany, memories of totalitarianism and its most heinous crime, the Holocaust, have led to “the formation of a cosmopolitan memory.” Despite the fact that its impact was centered on Europe, totalitarianism has affected—and continues to affect—politics around the globe. According to Seyla Benhabib, “The events of the twentieth century … have created a ‘gap’ between past and future of such magnitude that the past … can no longer be told as a unified narrative.”Footnote ⁴³ By exploring not only the dangers, but also the possibilities presented by the caesura of totalitarianism, I unearth the potential of memory and rupture to function as constructive resources for the rebuilding of a common world.

Memory and Rupture as Constructive Resources

Following the rupture of totalitarianism, Arendt argues that the “gap between past and future” must be bridged to reactivate man's capacity for action. The survivors must find a way to overcome the totalitarian experience without forgetting its brutal lessons. In order to do so, individuals need a new narrative that links the past and future firmly to the present by rejecting the unifying, memory-numbing structures of totalitarianism.Footnote ⁴⁴

Arendt struggled mightily with the contradictory need she felt both to preserve and to overcome totalitarianism. She had to make certain that totalitarianism was not seen as the end result of an “invisible process” driven by deterministic “iron laws.” She observes, “Thus my first problem was how to write historically about something—totalitarianism—which I did not want to conserve but on the contrary felt engaged to destroy.”Footnote ⁴⁵

The crucial theoretical step that allowed Arendt to bridge the temporal, emotional, and cognitive gap she felt had been opened by the experience of totalitarianism is the concept of rupture. Treating the events of 1914 through 1945—starting with the Great War, which led to the rise of the Soviet Union and Nazism, and concluding with the Second World War and the Holocaust—as part of a historical caesura allowed Arendt to distance herself from this experience, while maintaining her ability to learn from it.Footnote ⁴⁶

Arendt realized that totalitarianism presented an opportunity for individuals to rethink the foundations of their communal life. While the past usually places limits on the range of possible plotlines, memory can also create opportunities for “new beginnings.” By breaking the seemingly inevitable link between the backward-looking narratives and future possibilities, ruptures can rekindle a sense of hope. They offer individuals and communities the chance to free themselves from existing chains of cause and effect.

In developing her understanding of rupture, Arendt drew heavily on Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940). In these reflections, Benjamin seeks to understand how freedom can be saved from teleological conceptions of historical cause and effect. He argues that violent ruptures destroy existing narratives, leaving only fragments of the past behind. While this has the advantage of freeing human beings from teleological philosophies of history, it also breaks the “webs of narrative” that had previously supported the self-understandings of individuals and communities.

Much like Arendt, who sees the loss of the “right to have rights” of minorities within the nation-states of the interwar years as the start of Europe's historical caesura, Benjamin's writings are haunted by totalitarianism.Footnote ⁴⁷ In a particularly poignant image, he describes totalitarianism as an experience that ripped the future out of the fabric of historical time. Benjamin saw the angel of history in the image of Paul Klee's “Angelus Novus.” He wrote,

This image highlights two important characteristics of rupture. First, breaks in the narrative thread of the past are not caused by a single experience, but by “a chain of events.” A series of small rips gradually weaken the fabric of historical time before it is ultimately torn completely by the accumulated pressure of events. Second, ruptures force individuals and communities to question the important, unthematized background assumptions of the past. The angel's face is “turned towards the past,” unable to close his eyes or tear them away as he travels into the future “to which his back is turned.”

After Benjamin's suicide, Arendt sought to translate his theological reflections into political theory by giving the Angel of History a Janus face, from which he could look both into the past and the future from the Jetztzeit (“now-time”) of the present. Arendt sought to save the human capacity for spontaneous initiative—for natality—from mechanistic conceptions of causality, which link all actions to never-ending causal chains that leave no space for the human ability “to begin anew.”Footnote ⁴⁹ By creating a fragmentary historiography, Arendt argues that certain events have the power to tear tradition asunder, creating a gap between past and future that breaks the links within existing chains of cause and effect. This creates a hiatus between the “no-more” and the “not-yet,” where thinkers and actors have the opportunity to set the foundations for a new world (novus ordo seclorum).Footnote ⁵⁰ Within these moments of rupture, individuals are invited to act spontaneously and rethink the foundations of politics “in concert” with each other.

Arendt's narrative account of action, combined with her understanding of historical rupture, shows how communal crises of self-understanding can unleash the critical potential of memory. Freed from the narrative constraints of established institutions and traditions, the past becomes an important resource for social and political change. This not only involves the rearranging and reinterpreting of formative experiences. It is also a process of (re)discovery, as events that were previously forgotten are reinvigorated and given new meaning.

Historical ruptures affect not only existing traditions and social norms, but also institutions and the law. Following such caesurae, individuals can tear down the old walls of the polity (both physical and symbolic) and break the laws of their ancestors.Footnote ⁵¹ While Arendt believes that politics is all about “new beginnings,” change is more possible and more likely in the aftermath of historical ruptures. This rethinking seeks to reestablish the conditions of collective life necessary for individuals to reveal their unique identities in the world again—a capacity that the experience of rupture threatens. After 1945 Arendt was on the lookout for “new beginnings,” for projects that demonstrated man's continued capacity to “act in concert” after the historical rift created by totalitarianism.

Arendt's Unexpected Support for European Integration

Arendt found just such an initiative in the postwar project of European unification. As an attempt to overcome the legacy of National Socialism in Western Europe, the nascent European Union presented the “image of a peaceful, cooperative Europe, open toward other cultures and capable of dialogue.”Footnote ⁵² Arendt argued that after two World Wars and the experience of totalitarianism, it was clear that the nation had become “the cheapest and the most dangerous disguise . . . in the political realm.”Footnote ⁵³

Reflecting on the atrocities of the Second World War, Arendt was convinced that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The established methods of dealing with the past through punishment or forgiveness were completely inadequate to the task. Reflecting on the crimes of totalitarianism, Arendt notes, “men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish. . . . This is the true hallmark of those offenses which, since Kant, we call ‘radical evil.’” While the crimes committed by individuals in the name of totalitarianism are in the realm of forgiveness and punishment, she absolutely refuses to forgive or punish the crimes of National Socialism as a whole. Instead, she notes that human beings will remain “the victims of its consequences forever.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Arendt contends that the underlying elements of totalitarianism were brought about by the failure of the nation-state “to integrate diverse social groups into a single body politic, and to uphold the uniform rule of law for all.”Footnote ⁵⁶ She argues that the division of the state into classes made expansion into a constituent part of nationalism, since economic conquest alone “could deliver a common stake to the nation as a whole.” For Arendt, the principle of the nation-state “based upon the sovereignty of the people and its active consent to the government,” combined with the economic imperative to expand, meant that “wherever the nation appeared as conqueror, it aroused national consciousness as well as desire for sovereignty among the conquered peoples.” She argues that “the inner contradiction between the body politic of the nation and conquest as a political device” made the nation-state into a carrier of violence and war.Footnote ⁵⁷

While such criticisms of the structure of the nation-state are controversial, they were widely held—becoming “a recurring post-war theme”—“in the wake of [the] mass death and catastrophic violence experienced in the Second World War.”Footnote ⁵⁸ For example, Arendt's dissertation advisor, Karl Jaspers, noted that the ever-increasing potential for destruction in war—most evident in the “novel situation [that] has been created by the atom bomb”—had made the traditional categories of politics obsolete. Faced with “the threat of total extinction,” the old politics of nation-states competing in the anarchic international system had to be replaced by a “new politics” of peace. Similarly, in 1945 Albert Camus argued that the new situation necessitated the creation of “a true international society” to replace individual sovereign states.Footnote ⁵⁹ Like many other postwar thinkers, Arendt “wrote out of a sense of crisis,” that led her to “oppose the restoration of the prewar European nation-state order and system of collective security because Nazism and the successful rise of ethnic nationalisms have proven its weakness and failure.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Arendt endorsed the postwar project of European integration as a possible solution to the “European crisis which made possible the German conquest of the continent.” The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) of 1951, created by Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, put the resources necessary for mechanical warfare under the oversight of shared institutions outside the constitutional architecture of the member-states. It was the first step toward the supranational governance of the continent. For Arendt, this represented an important move beyond “the dangerous disguise” of nationalism. As she had concluded as early as 1945, “A good peace is not conceivable unless the States surrender parts of their economic and political sovereignty to a higher European authority.”Footnote ⁶¹

Although Arendt was a great believer in the power and necessity of hope, she was anything but Panglossian. Her letters to her husband, Heinrich Blücher, during her postwar visits to the old continent make for rather depressing reading.Footnote ⁶² And yet, within the ruins of post–World War II Europe, Arendt saw reasons to be optimistic about the postnational project of integration. In a letter to Jaspers in May 1958, she referred to Europe as “a totally godforsaken place except for the presence of the Coal and Steel Community.”Footnote ⁶³

These are not words that we would expect from Arendt. To start with, she was generally skeptical of grand political gestures—after all, one could never be sure where action would lead once it was set in motion. The grandiose rhetoric surrounding the early stages of the project, such as French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman's declaration that European unification would make war on the continent “not only unthinkable, but materially impossible,” probably stirred Arendt's disgust at utopian projects that displayed a “contempt for reality.” Naïve liberals promoting “hubristic . . . programmes for political change” had made similar claims about the restraining power of economic ties both before and after the Great War.Footnote ⁶⁴

Arendt was also wary of a project so closely connected to conservative Christian Democratic politicians such as Schuman and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. She did not share their anachronistic visions of European integration as a reunification of Christendom that was shattered by the breakup of the Carolingian Empire and the onset of the Reformation. The idea of une Europe vaticane was no more appealing to her than it was to the Marxist and Protestant opponents of integration.Footnote ⁶⁵

Finally, Arendt can hardly have been enthusiastic about the technical, economistic approach to “sectoral integration” developed by French technocrat Jean Monnet, the main institutional architect of integration. Along with many of her contemporaries, she had a rather bleak, dystopian vision of an industrial future governed by bureaucrats. Her critique of industry and increased mechanization centered on the threat that technology and new forms of administration pose to political life.

Much like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, who wrote of a “totally administered society” that flattens individuals into an interchangeable “one-dimensional man,” Arendt also feared the dominance of economic thinking in public life.Footnote ⁶⁶ She deplored the increasing encroachment of economics into politics, a phenomenon she described as “the rise of the social.”Footnote ⁶⁷ It is hard to see why Arendt would endorse Monnet's vision of a hyperproductive, economically efficient, technologically advanced, and integrated European “metallurgical state” (état métallurgique), where both workers and goods could move freely through a common market.Footnote ⁶⁸ In fact, based on her theoretical priors, it is easier to imagine that for Arendt this vision of Europe would have been more of a dystopia than a dream.

Despite these considerations, Lars Rensmann suggests that Arendt's support for the Coal and Steel Community as a “genuinely political [act] of foundation and cooperation” is rooted in her belief that the nascent EU represented a “political federation” based on “the idea of freedom and public deliberation.” Similarly, Owens argues that we can explain Arendt's support for integration by seeing the ECSC as part of “a modest cosmopolitanism of inter-republic law.” Both point to Arendt's general support for local councils that break down existing political boundaries within “a post-national democratic-republican model of interlinked polities” as evidence for this interpretation of Arendt's support for European integration.Footnote ⁶⁹

While such explanations provide some resources to help explain Arendt's support for European integration, they do not hold up under closer scrutiny. Arendt endorsed the council system that emerged from the Paris commune and the small “soviets” of the early Russian Revolution as “revolutionary organs of self-government” because they drew their authority directly from the people, instead of from representatives to which the people “surrendered their power.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Given her support of local, subnational political councils, where individuals who knew each other could “act in concert,” Arendt can hardly have been enthusiastic about supranational political structures like the High Authority of the ECSC, where technocrats could make decisions without being directly accountable to the peoples of the member states.Footnote ⁷¹

In addition to considerations of size, Arendt's views on the councils that flickered into existence during the French, American, and Hungarian revolutions is rooted in the fact that she saw these as attempts to “shake the state concept and its sovereignty.” So far so good: by inducing states to permanently cede sovereignty over certain decisions to structures outside their internal constitutional architecture, the ECSC did indeed question both of these ideas. However, Arendt also notes that “if men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.”Footnote ⁷² Far from bringing nations to renounce their sovereignty, freeing individuals from the stultifying constraints of sovereignty, the treaties founding the ECSC (1951) and the European Economic Community (1957) merely moved this basic principle up to a higher level. For Arendt, this meant one of two things: “supranational authority would either be ineffective or monopolized by the nation that happens to be the strongest.” These reflections make it hard to connect Arendt's support for the early phases of integration to the attention she drew to “the formation of councils and small-scale republics and popular bodies not always limited by national or state frontiers.”Footnote ⁷³

And yet, despite all this, Arendt was a strong supporter of the postwar European movement. Instead of rejecting the Schuman Declaration of 1950, with its lofty, idealistic rhetoric, bureaucratic approach, and economic nature, Arendt described it and the movement it spawned as “the pardon and the promise” of the postwar world.Footnote ⁷⁴ How can this be? Where does Arendt's support for the ECSC and the project of European integration more generally come from?

It is hard to come to definitive conclusions on the reasons for Arendt's views of European integration, since she “never clearly and systematically set out her thought in this area.” Despite the “fragmentary character of Arendt's writings on these themes,” I argue that this strong support is rooted in Arendt's interpretation of the supranational institutions created in postwar Europe as the first step in the foundation of a new “community of memory.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Although many aspects of the proposal went against her theoretical priors, Arendt recognized the Schuman Declaration and all that followed it as a form of action par excellence. I contend that Arendt saw early steps of European integration as a “new beginning,” i.e., as an attempt to found a new political community around the “pearls” brought forth from the depths of the shattered narrative of the nationalist past.

Given her background as “a theorist of the unprecedented, of political novelty,” I argue that Arendt supported integration because she saw it as an affirmation of the continued capacity of individuals to “create something anew” despite totalitarianism's attempts to destroy “action in concert.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Arendt never set out a concrete institutional design for the cosmopolitan future she imagined. In part this might have been because she was unsure of how to fit all of her reflections—the many pearls she had brought up from the past—into a coherent whole. Additionally, Arendt did not believe that political theory, or “the philosophy of mankind,” as she called it, could or should “prescribe any particular political action.”Footnote ⁷⁷ From this perspective, it is not the contents of the proposal for the ECSC that are crucial, but the mere fact that it sought to take up the past in a new way, giving birth to a form of politics that might prove better than the nation-state at preserving plurality and natality.

For Arendt the idea that European unification could be the answer to “the German problem” grew directly from Europe's experience of totalitarianism. This built on the convictions of many of the individuals involved in the continental resistance during World War II:

Like many survivors of the war, Arendt saw Europe as the solution to the problem of violence on the old continent. Totalitarianism and the Second World War were the nadir; a sign that drastic change was needed. However, despite the traumatic nature of this experience, Arendt feared that if the memories of it faded from the lived experience of individuals, the imperative for change would also be lost. To prevent this from happening, she believed that these memories must be continually “refabricated,” actively and consciously remembered, recalled afresh for posterity. Despite the attempts of politicians to use memory as an instrument of short-term politics, she argued that totalitarianism must remain at the center of the modern historical consciousness. As a mode of preserving the memory of fascism and ensuring the possibility of political action, Arendt supported what she described as the “very healthy and necessary efforts to federate the European nations.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Arendt argued that the lessons of the past, including the plight of minorities within the national states of the interwar years and the destructive power of nationalism displayed in two World Wars, showed that the nation-state had become untenable as the basic unit of political organization on the continent. Arendt endorsed the project of European integration as a possible solution to the “European crisis which made possible the German conquest of the continent.” As early as 1942, she had become “a believer in European unity” by going back to “a tradition of political thinking which should be our particular concern today and which seemed almost lost in the nationalism of the 19th century.” Thus founding of the ECSC in 1951 can be seen as the kind of “non-violent, non-imperial, non-ideological political founding” Arendt sought.Footnote ⁸⁰

There are actually a number of aspects of the institutional infrastructure of the ECSC that fit within Arendt's general political framework. Although Arendt did fear administration, she also recognized it as an important aspect of “good governance,” i.e., of the political community that provides the space for memory and action through law and other forms of bureaucratic order.Footnote ⁸¹ Her deepest worries about supranational authorities in the abstract was that they would centralize power completely by destroying all forms of agonistic political plurality and opposition, resulting in “not only a forbidding nightmare of tyranny . . . [but] the end of all political life as we know it.”

Despite their supranational character, neither the ECSC nor the institutions created by the EU since then have ever had their own police force or other means of direct coercive enforcement. Instead, Europe has left the implementation of its directives to the member states, ensuring that power remained “strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities.” In delegating certain decisions up to the supranational level, the member states have continued to act as “elementary republics” controlling the apparatus of legitimate coercion.Footnote ⁸²

These considerations may have been enough to convince Arendt to abandon her preference for “inter-national authority” in favor of the supranational European institutions created in the 1950s. Despite her reservations about grand political gestures and international law, Owens notes that Arendt was never able to “completely separate herself from the Kantian legacy of strengthened institutionalization of laws above and below the nation-state.” Although it was limited to certain sectors within Europe, it is possible to chart a path from the initial steps of regional integration in one part of the world toward similar movements elsewhere, eventually leading to the “worldwide federated structure” that Arendt theorized.Footnote ⁸³

This is not to say that Arendt abandoned all caution or that she did not see the flaws of the European project. On the contrary, she worried that a European federation could turn into a vehicle for a new, pan-European nationalism.Footnote ⁸⁴ However, this possibility lay far in the future. It presumed that Europe would be able to homogenize differences, uniting its members as tightly as the nation-state had done. Subsequent events have shown that national identities are surprisingly resilient, despite the EU's efforts to encourage the creation of a truly European, nonnational understanding of the past.Footnote ⁸⁵ Arendt's endorsement of the European project is rooted in her conviction that a Europe founded on the legacy of the anti-Nazi resistance can become a new political federation guided by the ideas of freedom and public deliberation at a level beyond the nation-state.