Abstract
The centenary of Hannah Arendt’s birth in 2006 has provided the catalyst for a body of literature grappling with the legacy of her thought, especially the question of its enduring political relevance. Yet this literature largely excludes from consideration a significant aspect of Arendt’s legacy, namely, her account of evil and its devastating political reality. This article contends that the neglect of Arendt’s understanding of the dynamic reality of evil unnecessarily delimits the opportunities her legacy affords to diagnose forms of evil today. In particular, I propose that Arendt’s notion of evil and her unique insight into its dynamic reality remain very much pertinent in light of a globalizing world where the conditions of extreme deprivation and exclusion have become thoroughly bound up with the structurally unequal conditions of the global political economy. The persistent global poverty knowingly reproduced in and through policies and practices of economic globalization effectively renders vast numbers of people superfluous and “rightless,” resulting in a distinctive form of political evil. I conclude that more attention should be paid to the deeper pertinence of Arendt’s concepts of evil, human superfluousness, and rightlessness for contemporary political life.
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Notes
See also Arendt (1970, 56): “Marx’s great trust in the dialectical “power of negation”... rests on a much older philosophical prejudice: that evil is no more than a privative modus of the good, that good can come out of evil; that, in short, evil is but a temporary manifestation of a still-hidden good.”
See Arendt’s discussion of Hermann Broch and the break between the pre- and post-totalitarian generations in Men in Dark Times (1968b, 125–27).
While Arendt employed the term “radical” (or “absolute”) evil in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she later came to the conclusion that to speak of evil as “radical” is misleading since it implies some unfathomable metaphysical depth or “roots” beneath evil as it appears in human action (see 1978b, 251). Yet the “banality” of evil is not merely a substitute for “radical” evil. This is because Arendt continues to refer to “extreme” evil as well as the banality of evil. For Arendt, extreme evil refers to the actual dehumanization of people that makes them superfluous, while the banality of evil refers to the condition of “thoughtlessness” that enables “ordinary” persons to participate in policies and practices that result in extreme evil. For more on thoughtlessness as a lack of critical judgment and “enlarged thought,” see Arendt (1992).
For an excellent discussion of postmetaphysical conceptions of evil see Lara (2007).
The distinction between direct and indirect or structural violence, with the latter defined as avoidable or preventable oppression and death attributable to institutions and systems of power legitimized by prevailing norms, was first made by Johan Galtung; see Galtung (1969).
This is a theme taken up recently by McCarthy (2009) in his analysis of neoracism and neoimperialism.
Lines points out that standards of living around the world were broadly similar until the imperial era, and that existing severe global disparities have been deliberately produced and extended only throughout the past two hundred years. Also see Arendt’s extensive analysis of imperialism and its legacy within the modern international system, notable for its melding of power politics with the interests of capital and its expansionistic logic “based on maldistribution,” in the second volume of The Origins of Totalitarianism (2004, 168–209).
For a trenchant critique of the way in which poverty is naturalized by the “market epistemology” of the global political economy, see Da Costa and McMichael (2007).
A notable exception is Larry May (1996).
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Hayden, P. The Relevance of Hannah Arendt’s Reflections on Evil: Globalization and Rightlessness. Hum Rights Rev 11, 451–467 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-010-0157-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-010-0157-8