The essay was pretty good, but it had its low points. Here is one:
[on The Origins of Totalitarianism]:
``Ideology and terror reinforced this grip. Racism and Marxism confined their adherents in a ;straitjacket of logic, lending the world a spurious consistency and relieving people of the freedom inherent in man's capacity to think. By reducing men and women to the barest animal life, terror ensured that no one would resist ideology's law of nature, in the case of Nazism, or history, in the case of Stalinism. Because ideology may decide that those who today eliminate races or classes are tomorrow those who must be sacrificed, terror must fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim. The purpose of totalitarianism, in short, was not political: it did not fulfil the requirements of rule; it served no constituency or belief; it had no utility. Its sole function was to create a fictitious world where anxious men could feel at home, even at the cost of their own lives.
Arendt's account dissolves conflicts of power, interest and ideas in a bath of psychological analysis, allowing her readers to evade difficult questions of politics and economics. We need not probe the content of a particular ideology-- what matters is not what it says but what it does-- or the interests it serves (they do not exist). We can ignore the distribution of power: in mass society, there is only a desert of anomie. We can disregard statements of grievance: they only conceal a deeper vein of psychic discontent. Strangest of all, we needn't worry about moral responsibility: terror makes everyone from Hitler to the Jews, Stalin to the kulaks an automaton, incapable of judgment or being judged.''
The point Arendt is making here is on the dehumanizing effects of living under an totalitarian regime. It is far from an apology or dodge. Rather these sorts of psychological passages illuminate in concrete terms what exactly constitute the crimes against humanity that totalitarian, authoritarian and militaristic regimes inflict on their thoroughly subjugated populations over and above the actual body counts.
Either Corey Robin misread these passages or perhaps he/she didn't realize that a fascination with Freud and pyschology in general pervaded the US intellectual circles of the period---popularly reflected in the weird twists of Cinema Noir where both heros and villians no longer act out of their material interest but from variously conceived darker psychological moments. This is what makes the violence a gratuity.
But there are some other points I'd like to make.
I was profoundly disappointed by the Young-Buehl biography because I realized that Buehl didn't really understand one whole component of Arendt's thought and its foundations in the German Enlightenment and its Romantic counterpart. You see this pretty clearly in Beuhl's chapters on the young Arendt where her thesis on Augustine, love affair with Hiedegger, her poetry especially, and her conflicts with the early German Zionist movements remain thin, opaque, and more or less unexplained and unexamined. There is a definite personal connection in these apparently desparate themes. Maybe I can't make those connections, but I sense them as a personal impulse from Arendt. I would characterize them as her more poetic side.
A similar or more evolved matrix of thought can be traced in her much later and rarely mentioned collection, Men in Dark Times. These are essays on Lessing, Luxemburg, Pope XXII, Jaspers, Dinesen, Broch, Benjamin, Brecht, Gurian and Jarrel.
Most of the Arendt industry it seems to me is devoted to reconstructing Arendt to suit the political and popular agenda of the Right in its various guises in the US and Israel. Thankfully her writing is completely accessible, unlike Strauss, and anybody who is interested can read her books and discover her ideas themselves without any interpretation required. What they will find is a rare combination of a completely modern humanism coupled with a long and deep personal search for antecedents and antagonists in religion, philosophy and history. Her scope and eridition in the history of ideas was enormous and was only matched by some of the historical figures she examined. She has joined her heros and herones in those realms and it is a position the rightwing will never succeed in dismantling.
I say this categorically because Arendt forms part of a US intellectual center piece aganist almost every idea, every period, and every political and intellectual theme or impulse the rightwing has posited as its own. She is simply the rightwing's eternal protagonist, par execellance. It was no accident that Arendt was Leo Strauss's life long intellectual enemy, a position he discovered when they were graduate students taking courses from Heidegger. It was an enimity that lasted fifty years.
But Arendt did make her mistakes and the later chapters of The Origins of Totalitarnism was one of them. It is easily seen when she tries to make the transition between the first two thirds of the book on Germany in order to set up parallels that don't fit her examination of Russia. I was immediately aware of it when I read it and realized that part of the failure or mistake was that she simply didn't know Russia and was writing from outside and beyond her experience. However, the same can not be said of her examination of Germany. That she knew inside out and had followed its evolution from her own youth in Weimar right up to Allied occupation during the post-war in late 40s--more than twenty years.
It is interesting, ironic and stupid that her poorly conceived rendition of the Soviet Union under Stalin became her most popular and famous passage. I suspect in large part this popularity was manufactured as such by the more reactionary intellectual elite of the cold war who used it as a buttress against any activist oriented slackers or progressives who might entertain ideas that Marxism might just have something to say about the US.
Well, she more than made up for that moment of weakness in her later work where Marxism is almost always taken seriously and applied in precise ways to illuminate her discussions. On Revolution and The Human Condition more than make up for whatever faults you can find in the later chapters of The Origins.
I was more than cheered up by the revelation that Arendt had actually written the later chapters of Origin several years later and tried to glue them in place so speak. It shows.
CG