Eichmann in Jerusalem is a better guide to Trump Time than is Origins of Totalitarianism
I’ve argued many times that I think Eichmann in Jerusalem is a much better guide to fascism—and, to whatever extent that mode of politics is relevant today, to our times as well—than is Origins of Totalitarianism. There are many reasons I believe this, but three stand out.
First, Origins sees totalitarianism as essentially a mass phenomenon, by which Arendt means not only the rise of the mass but also the liquidation of all familiar institutions, established elites, and traditional hierarchies. Eichmann completely dispenses with that view, emphasizing instead how fascism is much more of an elite affair dependent upon long-standing social hierarchies.
Second, Origins sees totalitarianism as the liquidation of the individual agent and individual action; even the regime’s leaders, Arendt argues there, are unthinking automatons, having squandered their selfhood long ago. Eichmann emphasizes the persistence of the individual, personal agency and personal action—from the topmost perpetrator down to the most abject victim. The particular agent Arendt has most in mind is the collaborator, a self who stands somewhere in between the perpetrator and the victim (and thus unsettles all of our most cherished dichotomies), and how these collaborators make particular decisions—under conditions of great constraint, yes—and thereby perpetuate regimes of evil.
But the last reason why I think Eichmann is such a great book, and so helpful at this particular moment, is that it mounts a devastating critique of intentionality—the inner state of mind, the personal motive, that allegedly gives rise to an action—as the primary way of understanding political life. Against the focus on intentions and motives, Arendt insisted that we attend to actions, to what people do, and the institutional setting in which that action occurs.
I wrote about this in a long piece for The Nation a while back:
Even if Eichmann was a rabid anti-Semite, one had to be mindful of the gulf between his thoughts and his actions: ”extermination per se,” Arendt added in the letter to McCarthy, “is more important than anti-semitism or racism.” Attending to Eichmann’s motives risked a loss of focus. It threatened to drown him, with all his undetermined agency and criminal excess, in the stream of his intentions…
By erecting a wall between anti-Semitism as a motive and the execution of the Holocaust, however, Arendt was less interested in making a claim about Eichmann or even the Nazis than she was in mounting a philosophical argument about what Susan Neiman has called, in Evil in Modern Thought, “the impotence of intention.” Against centuries of moral teaching and jurisprudence, which assumed that the nature and extent of a wrongdoer’s guilt are determined by his intentions, Arendt suggested that inner states of mind—ideologies, beliefs, intentions, motives—could neither mitigate nor aggravate an offense. They simply didn’t matter. The body count of the Holocaust was so massive that it rendered any intention, no matter how malignant, moot. In Neiman’s words: “What counts is not what your road is paved with, but whether it leads to hell.”
That is why Arendt proved so willing to entertain Eichmann’s most outlandish claims about himself: that “he ‘personally’ never had anything whatever against Jews,” that “he had plenty of ‘private reasons’ for not being a Jew hater.” If Eichmann was lying, then he had failed to confront the reality of his deeds. Did he seriously think his role in the Shoah might be mitigated if he could show that he bore the Jews no ill will? If he wasn’t lying, then his honesty was a piece of almost comic lunacy—a self-confessed mass murderer insisting that he never meant anyone any harm—made all the more terrible by the fact that it was true.
In the literature of ancient Greece, a smallness, a blankness, can tear a hole in the world: Hector doesn’t slay Achilles, Paris does. There is a cold, almost cruel, accent on the disproportion between actors and actions, intentions and consequences. Arendt’s insistence on the blankness behind Eichmann’s actions—“except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement,” she wrote, Eichmann “had no motives at all”—issued from a similarly chilly outpost of antiquity….
Arendt’s account of Eichmann’s evil—with its leeriness of his inner state and ideology, its almost archaic attention to the fullness and finality of his deeds—was a natural extension of her return to the Greeks. “In every action the person is expressed as in no other human activity,” she told Günter Gaus in 1964; what a person does was all she—we—needed to know. Hence her contemptuous references to Eichmann’s “private reasons,” his “personally” not feeling any hatred for the Jews: Whatever Eichmann’s feelings or intentions, all his railroads led to hell. What further proof of his criminality, his evil, did one need?
So much of our discussion of Trump (and before that, of Obama) focuses on what are his true aims, what are Bannon’s real goals. The problem here is that in our probably fruitless quest to divine the ultimate truth of Trump’s inner self, we completely lose track of the political field, what actually happens, which often bears almost no resemblance to what we imagine might be animating Trump.
I noticed this last week in a panel discussion on Trump that I was a part of. There was a lot of discussion of the power of Trump’s tweets and communiques, what they revealed about his intentions. But as I pointed out, while Trump likes to make a big rhetorical to do of his antipathy to the courts, and likes to gin up his base and scare liberals with some terrifying plan to eliminate the autonomy of the judiciary, the actuality of his rule is that he has consistently been pushed back by the courts. And unlike FDR, who got so fed up with the judiciary’s challenges to his rule that he sought to completely restructure the Supreme Court, the most Trump has done is to threaten to appeal a court’s ruling. Which is exactly what most presidents do.
When Trump or Bannon is pushed back, the focus is not on their being pushed back but on what it is they wanted to do in the first place. (And again the same kind of discourse often dominated our discussions of Obama: not on the field of action in which he led, but on his deepest intentions and motives, what he really wanted or not.) That just seems like an extraordinarily unhelpful—and from an Arendtian view, entirely apolitical and antipolitical—way of viewing things.
In just a few passages in Eichmann, Arendt eviscerates that way of thinking: the point is not what one aims to do, it is what one does; the point is not the inner motive, but the field of action; not what your road is paved with, but whether it leads to hell.