Peg Birmingham

Arendt and Hobbes: Glory, Sacrificial Violence, and the Political Imagination

The dominant narrative today of modern political power, inspired by Foucault, is one that traces the move from the spectacle of the scaffold to the disciplining of bodies whereby the modern political subject, animated by a fundamental fear and the will to live, is promised security in exchange for obedience and productivity. In this essay, I call into question this narrative, arguing that that the modern political imagination, rooted in Hobbes, is animated not by fear but instead by the desire for glory and immortality, a desire that is spectacularly displayed in the violence of the modern battlefield. I go on to argue that Hannah Arendt, writing in the ruins of the Second World War, rethinks the modern legacy of political glory. I claim that Arendt’s reflections on violence and glory, which she rethinks from her earliest writings on violence in the 1940s to her later reflections on war in the 1960s, offer the possibility of a new political imagination wherein glory and the desire for immortality is now rooted in the responsibility of bearing an enduring world.

Can Political Authority be Founded on a Ruse? Derrida and Lefort on Machiavelli’s Use of Political Deception:

The institution of Hobbes’ Leviathan is marked by the transformation of cunning, equally shared by all in the state of nature, into a rational, sovereign politics. The question I take up here by way of Machiavelli and two of his contemporary readers, Derrida and Lefort, what if cunning was politicized rather than replaced by sovereign reason? In other words, what if cunning, a complex political deception, was not abandoned or given over to the sovereign? I argue that Lefort’s reading of Machiavelli, embracing as it does the central role of a shared cunning or ruse between the people and the prince, offers valuable resources for thinking the foundation of political authority for a secular democratic politics, while in contrast, Derrida’s critique of Machiavelli’s cunning illuminates why he is not able to escape a sovereign, theological foundation for political authority and the law.

A Lying World Order: Deception and the Rhetoric of Terror

It is not often noted that the problem of deception occupies a central place in Hannah Arendts analysis of totalitarianism. At the outset of Origins of Totalitarianism, prior to her analysis of anti-Semitism, imperialism, or radical evil, she raises the issue of deception, considering the difference between ancient and mod ern sophists and their relation to truth and reality:

Love’s Law? The Principle of Anarchy in a Weakened Communism

My essay looks at the status of love in Hermeneutic Communism. At the beginning of Chapter Three, Vattimo and Zabala refer to Rorty’s claim that the hermeneutical attitude is in the intellectual world what the democracy is in the political world and both can be viewed “as alternative appropriations of the Christian message that love is the only law.” They return to this notion of love further on, referring to a Nietzschean-Christian style, claiming: “Now that God is dead and the absolute truth is not credible anymore, love for the other is possible and necessary” (111-112). They go on to raise the question, “Can anyone continue to doubt that love for the other can coincide with a communist politics?” (112) I will explore their argument that love ought to be a replacement to the law, asking whether a politics of love allows for an alternative politics today. Is there not a long and bloody history of political love, a history of sacrificial violence in the name of love of god or love of country? The response could be, “yes, but this is not yet love of the other.” But are things any better when we love the other? First can we love the other? Secondly, does love replace the law or is the Christian imperative, “Love thy neighbor,” itself a form of law? Here I will recall Freud when he points to the ambivalence of human beings—love and hate--such that we need to be commanded to love? Finally, why the turn to political affections at all? If politics, as Arendt claims and whom the authors cite, is rooted in activity in concert with a plurality of others to create a public space,” then politically, would not a reflection on the kinds of political activities necessary for such a public space be more productive than for a hermeneutic communism? Taking up their reference to Arendt, my essay will conclude by finding resources within Hermeneutic Communism for an alternative to love, namely the notion of political action, which I claim is more productive for a communist politics. This last will raise the question of the status of political principles, specifically the status of the universal in this very important work.

Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Law Approach to International Criminal Law

My argument in this article is that Hannah Arendt has a coherent and well-developed, although not systematic, philosophy of law which she brings to the Eichmann trial specifically and to international criminal law generally. In Part One of the article, I lay out Arendt’s philosophy of law, focusing on her account of the difference between the Greek and Roman conceptions of the law, the status of the consensus iuris, and the status of legal principles. Part Two offers a comparison of Arendt’s and Dworkin’s legal and political principles that animate the law. Part Three takes up Arendt’s approach to international criminal law through an analysis of her report of the Eichmann trial, specifically her account of the unprecedented nature of crimes against humanity, the new type of criminal who commits administrative massacres, and the difference between the criminal and the political trial at the international level.

On Violence, Politics, and the Law

If each age has its particular point of entry to the central political problems of authority, power, and obligation, then the present age has its point of access in the relation among violence, politics, and the law. Ours is an age that has largely replaced its theological underpinnings with political revolutions, while at the same time it has grown skeptical of natural right and natural law claims. If the political order is no longer founded in the theological and is unable to appeal to natural right or natural law, is the political then inescapably rooted in violence? In other words, if founded through violence with no claim to right, is the political order rooted ultimately in the authority of the sword? If this is the case, then how is it possible to think legitimate political power as well as political obligation? Still further, in the face of what seems to be an inescapable “founding violence,” how is it possible to argue for a normative foundation of political authority and law? These questions reveal that it is not an accident that political thought today has turned once again to Thomas Hobbes as well as to Hobbes’s best reader, Carl Schmitt. Certainly the question of the relation among violence, power, and law occupies both thinkers. Thus, while this essay will be largely concerned with Hannah Arendt’s answer (vis-à-vis Walter Benjamin) to the question of the relation among violence, politics, and law, I want to begin by turning to Hobbes and Carl Schmitt, who, I submit, give us three