Civil Disobedience I-II | Crises of the Republic

Hello everyone and welcome, this is reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Birkowitz, the podcast of the Hannah Arendt Centre for Politics and Humanities at Bard College in New York. The Hannah Arendt Centre provides an intellectual space for passionate, unsensored, non-partisan thinking in the spirit of Hannah Arendt. Arendt published numerous books and in this podcast we read them with you. My name is Yada Mata and I'm the Director of Academic Programs here at the Arendt Centre. It's my pleasure to welcome Roger Birkowitz, founder and academic director of the Centre. Every Friday Roger Birkowitz hosts a virtual reading group for all of our members. Together we have been reading Arendt since 2014. This episode is based on what we are reading in our reading group. Stay on for more information at the end of today's episode. Our current book is 'Crisis of the Republic', first published in 1972. In this work Arendt examines moments of political moral breakdown in modern democracies, analysing how power, authority and responsibility are tested during times of war, deception, civil disobedience and constitutional crises. Make sure to subscribe and follow us to not miss an episode. In now I hand it over to Roger who's going to close read and analyse the next chapter for us. Welcome everybody. My name is Roger Birkowitz. I'm the founder and academic director here at the Arendt Centre at Bard College and thrilled to be with you today. We are continuing with the virtual reading group to read the 'Hot Off the Press' book 'Crisis of the Republic' which seems like it could be taken out of today's headlines. And this is a book that Arendt published in '72. This particular article, the second piece in it, 'Civil disobedience' was published in 1970 in the New Yorker. It appeared obviously during the height of the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement. And it was as Arendt tells you in the very beginning a response to in a sense a contest or a query made by Eugene Victor Debs Rostow, love that name, who is the Dean of the Yale Law School, a well-known Cold Warrior and State Department official. And amidst the crises of the Republic which at that time included the Vietnam War, the protests, the campus unrest, executive war powers, attacks on universities like Kent State. I mean, you know, again, everything we're talking about in 1970 seems quite relevant today. And the rising skepticism about courts as neutral guardians as well. And so Eugene Rostow, who was the Dean of the Yale Law School, you know, and also worked for the New York City Bar Association, asked people to write about the question of, is the law dead? Are we seeing the loss of authority? Is this the end of the Republic? These were the kind of questions that people were thinking about. And amidst the description of what he wanted people to write about, he included one idea which is what is the citizens moral relation to the law in a society of consent? Do citizens in a democracy in a society of consent have an obligation to obey the law? If the law, if the legally enacted authorities, the president and the Congress, pass a law that empowers quasi legal military force like the immigration and customs enforcement group to wear masks and run around cities and arrest people, right? I mean, we have to understand that these are legally empowered organizations by legally elected people. What is the citizens moral relation to the law in a society of consent? And that's the question Arent takes up. I don't think there are many more timely and relevant questions that we could be thinking or talking about today. Arent begins by saying that there's an oddity in the US and the United States and it's in the United States form of government which relates to this question because the United States has different legal regimes, right? It's a federalist system. And as a federalist system, you have the state legal regime, you have the federal legal regime and then you have both state constitutions and federal constitutions. And what this means, Arent says is that when you talk about the citizens moral relation to the law, there can be different laws, right? What's your moral relation to the state law? What's your moral relation to the federal law? How does that relate to the Constitution? And she says that what's unique about the United States and but there are other federalist systems in the world, but none she thinks that are as vibrantly, vibrantly created in which you have so many different legal regimes that claim your obedience and authority. She says that what this means is that in the United States you can break one law like a state law in the name of a federal law or you can break a federal law in the name of a state law or you can break a federal law in the name of a constitutional idea. And so she says, what this means is that there's this odd way in which civil disobedience is uniquely American. And she thinks that it really does, even though it has a long history, she thinks that it's modern instantiation is deeply tied to an American constitutional system. We'll get to that next week when we talk about the last part of this essay. One of the interesting aspects of this idea that their then civil disobedience is not about breaking one law in the name of conscience, but is actually about breaking a law in the name of another law, right? A law like the federal law or the state law or the Constitution is that she says, this means that the typical understanding of civil disobedience, which is that we break a law to test the law, you know, is not right. What she says is that jurists, lawyers make this case. They say that you justify civil disobedience on moral and legal grounds. They say that civil disobedience can be conscientious objection to a law or it can be a legal attempt to test the constitutionality of a statute. But she says, the civil disobedience, that's really a misunderstanding, she thinks. And this is central to her reading. She thinks that civil disobedience and a civil disobedient, the actor of a civil disobedience is neither legal nor a moral actor. And this is, and this is going to be, you know, I think controversial, but interesting and important, right? The civil disobedience she says can only act and function and survive as a member of a group, not as an individual actor. The single civil disobedient is eccentric. He's someone who, you know, stands in the middle of the road and says, you know, the space aliens are coming. And, you know, he blocks traffic, but she says, you know, we don't take him very seriously. He's an eccentric. Civil disobedience she says only really works and only really functions when it's carried out by numbers of people who have a community of opinion and interest. She, she holds out in this regard the freedom writers of the civil rights movement as an example. She says, you know, what they did is they broke traffic laws in order to make their cases about the injustice of Jim Crow. She says this would make no sense as a single person standing in the street. You need numbers. You need a group. And so here she's just laying out her, her basic idea in this introduction that civil disobedience is not the same as conscientious objection. And it's not the sense of a legal individual testing a law. It's a political act. And it's an act of a organized minority of people who she says are bound together by common opinion. And she wants to separate common opinion from common interest. We'll come back to that when we talk about John Calhoun. Right? But in essence, what she's saying is we're not acting to break laws in civil disobedience because we want something, you know, as a policy. Right? It's not because we want a better, we want my immigration policy. want my policy about affirmative action. She says those are interests. They're not opinions. And what civil disobedience is a public organized minority of people bound together by opinions. Who stand against government policy even when the government policy is backed by a majority. Even when we recognize that the majority of people elected these people who made these laws. And we are willing to stand against the laws and disobey the laws because we agree with each other and we hold, we support each other. And we decide that our opinions, even though they may be minority opinions, are so important that we are willing to make the case that the majority was wrong and try and, in a sense, convince them that we're right through the power of our convictions as not as individuals but as a collective, as an organized minority. It's a really original reading of civil disobedience. Really reading it as a kind of political act of a minority saying the majority has gone crazy. And we believe so firmly as a group, even though we're a minority, that the majority has gone crazy, that we're willing to break the law in the name of making the majority see their mistake. It's not an act of conscience. It's an act of political acting together. It's an act of political communal organized resistance. And so this brings us to part one of that's the introduction as she expresses it. And in part one, she writes that against the political value of conscience, right, civil disobedience is actually about political action, not about conscience, right, that there's that conscience, it's not what is at stake. And here she has to clear the ground because the two most famous civil disobedience Socrates and Thoreau have been read by many people as conscientious actors. And so she has to somehow show that that's a mistake. She does it in different ways. With Socrates, she wants to say that actually Socrates was not a conscientious actor, right? He doesn't oppose the laws. He's not saying the laws were wrong. What he's saying is that the jury verdict against me was wrong. And I don't have a beef with the laws. I have a beef with the jurors. It was a personal misfortune. And so what she says is Socrates isn't saying, you know, I object to the laws. He's saying the jury was wrong. But I made a bet. And my bet was that I would convince the jury that I was right. And I lost. The jury convicted me. And there's a kind of debt of honor as a gentleman that I have to accept my death. And that if I were to flee as credo and and others want me to, I would be actually doing an injustice to the laws, which I respect. We can talk about whether she reads Plato and Socrates correctly, but that's how she does it there. The second is Thoreau. And Thoreau takes a different tack. She says, Thoreau does associate civil disobedience with conscientious action. He does, unlike Socrates, oppose the laws themselves. He's opposing the laws of slavery and the laws of supporting the war against Mexico. And that his opposition is based in conscience. So much so that he says is, you know, I can't, I can't be held responsibility for changing the policy of the government. That's not my job. And that's too much to ask of a citizen. Oh, I can, all you can ask me is that I wash my hands of the matter, right? He says, as a citizen of a democracy, I have the right to not resign my conscience to the majority. And he says, so as a result, I can simply disobey the law. And if I do, I put my conscience against the laws. And I have to be willing to pay the punishment and go to jail. All right, the reason I do it for Thoreau says is that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn, right? That's all that individual conscience requires and no more. And so she says that this is a really a, another version of Aristotle's idea of the difference between a good citizen and a good man. And the good man, all right, the conscientious man looks out for his conscience, not for the world. And thus, the good man can be politically irresponsible. And she cites this Latin maxim that she uses in a number of her essays. Fiat Yustitsiets Peliapmundis, right? Let justice be done even if the world will perish. She says, this is Thoreau's maxim. Right? I will do justice. I will clean my hands. I will act conscientiously. I don't really care about the world. Now again, I'm not sure she gets through 100% right? Although there's, I think much of what she says is right. But the point is that a bit like Albert Camus as well, she thinks that Thoreau in highlighting conscience says with the reason you resist unjust laws is not for the sake of the world, but for your own sake, for the sake of your soul, for the sake of your health, for the sake of your welfare. And so she says this idea of conscientious civil disobedience has problems in the political world. The first is it can't be generalized, right? I say it's my conscience, but and if you say your conscience goes the other way, we're at a standstill. We have conscience stands against conscience. And as she says, Martin Luther King can say, my conscience says this and the whites in Birmingham can say, my conscience says this and it's conscience against conscience. So conscience can't really tell us anything about the world. And that's the first problem. The second is that conscience is concerned with myself. It's an interest in the care of my soul. Or as Camus says, you know, my own, my own health and welfare. But she says, you know, most people don't care about their soul. That's just not what they're interested in. In her in her terminology, most people don't talk to themselves, think with themselves, live with themselves. And so if if that's where civil disobedience comes from, most people she thinks I will have nothing to do with civil disobedience. And finally, of course, that with the loss of religion as a publicly central institution in modern societies, conscience has become secular. It's become simply an opinion. And as an opinion, it stands against other opinions, but there's no way to prove it. The only way to, to in a sense, assert that my conscience is right is to show that I'm willing to suffer for it. And I can, I can burn myself alive in the public square. I can say, I'm willing to accept my punishment. But she says, this is ridiculous. Because if you kill someone or rape someone and then you say, well, it's okay. And I'm willing to accept the punishment. Because I think I was right. She says, we're, you know, we think you're nuts. And so simply accepting your punishment doesn't make your conscience right. And so here's the danger that she's, that she sees in the idea that civil disobedience is connected to conscience, which is that individual conscience that simply want opinion. And in the end, we need numbers. The strength of opinion doesn't depend on conscience, but on numbers. And this brings us to section two of the essay. And here, she looks into this idea of civil disobedience more directly, right? The point is that for her, we have entered a world in which we have increasingly less respect for the law. She says, this is just around us. We see disobedience all around us. Crimes are not being punished, right? I mean, we see this in our world too. I mean, she was citing statistics from the 1960s, right? but we can look around us, right? People are evading, you know, subway fares in New York City, where I live. We've had for many years a widespread policy of looking the other way for businesses and other ways when people without legal entry and documentation have been living in the country. And what she says is this creates a kind of aura of illegality or an aura of criminality. We normalize criminality. And she says it shows us that when they're given a chance with lenient laws and lenient enforcement and social permissiveness, many, many people will act illegally and commit crimes. And if the acts, criminal acts have no consequences, they'll continue to do so. And she goes into how in the 1970s, 60s and 70s, this was happening. And what did government do in response? Well, it commissioned studies and did research. And she cites research from the Ford Foundation and others that come up with brilliant insights like the poorer you are, the more likely you are to suffer from serious malnutrition, right? Or that children in poor schools do not learn as well as children in rich schools, right? She says these are brilliant. You know, and you spend a lot of money on them, but nothing happens. Her point is that what she wants us to understand is that if we want to understand someone's obedience, we don't need to like do great big studies and probe deeply into, you know, questions of what is a criminal mind like or things like that. She goes, the civil disobedient is not a criminal. They're not a rebel, right? What's obvious and you don't need big studies to prove it, right? Is that civil disobedience is a collective act of political dissent. It is a group phenomenon where lots of people decide to get together and express a widely shared minority opinion, the extraordinary means to contest what they say is unjust acts by a ruling majority, right? And I mean, that definition, I think, if you look at what's going on in places like Minneapolis over the last month makes absolute sense, right? You have a collective political dissent. It's a group phenomenon where you have hundreds and thousands of people blowing whistles and photographing and trying to intervene, right? Where you're willing to break laws to publicize a widely shared minority opinion, the extraordinary means, right? Extraordinary, in the sense of, yeah, we're breaking the law to contest unjust acts by a ruling majority. So for her civil disobedience, first one arises only with a significant number of citizens, right? You need numbers. It can't just be one or two or, you know, I don't know, ten. It's got to be significant. Two, these significant group, these numbers have to be convinced that the normal channels of change no longer function and grievances will not be heard or acted upon, right? Now, that's an interesting question and we can come back to it in the question and answer period or the discussion period, but I mean, obviously we could wait two or three years for an election, but I think what people, I think what she would say in this case and I think what people in Minneapolis and other places would say is it's that we have a procedure, right? We have procedures. You're supposed to be able to go to law enforcement. Well, the local law enforcement was kicked out of the investigation, right? The state law enforcement was repressed. The normal channels in which we would offer grievance are no longer functioning. Or she says there's another option, which is that the government is about to change in a way whose legality and constitutionally are open to grave doubt, right? This I think she has in mind something a little different when you're about to elect a dictator and you're trying to prevent the dictator from taking over. Or you think a dictator is about to take over and you're trying to prevent it. In any case, she lists a number of the things that she thinks are happening at the time, right? An undeclared war in Vietnam. I mean, obviously, we can make parallels to undeclared wars going on in Venezuela or potentially in Iran or Greenland, right? That secret agencies are acting without transparency and public and public accountability. Well, we certainly have that with ICE and DHS that there's veiled threats to the first amendment, she says. Well, we certainly are seeing that today. And that politicians like the vice president at the time are calling resistors, vultures and parasites. Just like today, we talk about how we're next we're going to go after the homegrown. So all of these ideas that she's talking about in the 60s, I think are present today, which is why I think this essay is so important today. She goes, okay, so if that's the case, what are the qualities of a civil disobedient? How does someone act civil disobedience? And this is, I think, essential for all of us who are interested in what's going on today because civil disobedience can act as civil disobedience, but they can also overstep. They can do things that are mistakes and thus lose their authority as civil disobedience. So she says there are five in a sense qualities of a good civil disobedience. The first is that unlike a law breaker or a common law breaker, the civil disobedient does not seek to hide from the law. They don't wear a mask. They don't hide from cameras. In fact, on the contrary, they announce their open defiance and they break the laws openly, right? And that's important. Two, the civil disobedient acts not for private interest or benefit. They enact in the name of a group and of opinions of the group. She says that civil disobedience act together. They breathe together, she says. And they breathe the spirit of the laws. And as an example, she will offer the freedom writers, again, during the during the civil rights movement. The point is that they're acting together not because they want money or or fame, but because they believe, right? They breathe together in the spirit of the laws. They believe that the laws are being violated by the laws, namely, in this sense, the constitution is being violated by the laws. The third is that the civil disobedient is not a criminal, but a political actor. Someone whose action springs in agreement with others that threatens credence and conviction to their opinion. And this is an important point because I still think most of us today, even those who support civil disobedience, believe that civil disobedience should be arrested because they're law breakers. And what she's saying is they're not. They're political actors. And they're breaking the law as an extraordinary emergency measure in an emergency time. And thus, because they're doing it openly and they're not trying to hide it and they're not trying to gain from it. And also importantly, the next one, they're not going to use violence, right? They should be seen not as criminals, but as political actors. And thus, they should not be punished for their civil disobedience. Fourth, she says that civil disobedience must be nonviolent. When civil disobedience resort to violence, they disqualify themselves as civil disobedience and justify the label rebels. And this is always one of the most important aspects of civil disobedience. And you see it today, whereas one side tries to say that civil disobedience are rebels, our violence, our terrorists, our trying to undo laws. And the other side says, no, we are civil disobedience. We're trying to document and yes, break laws, but doing so not as rebels, but in the name of a higher law, not conscience, but the constitution. And finally, she says that the civil disobedience does share with the revolutionary the wish to change the world, but they don't aim at revolution, right? They're not trying to undo the political system. In fact, they accept the very political system and the framework of authority, which the revolutionary would reject. So these five ideas or qualities of the civil disobedience are essential to her understanding. And the overarching point that she wants to make is that, again, civil disobedience are not acting out of conscience. They are political actors, and we're dealing with organized minorities. Okay, but well, then they lost in the election, though, right? Why should they. Then break the law and and she makes this claim and and this is one of the most controversial moves in the essay Because she cites John Calhoun, right? John Calhoun obviously was a Southern pro-slavery politician and and later I think Vice-President of of the Confederacy. I have that right and he makes this argument What he calls concurrent majorities? He says that we live in a tradition in a constitutional tradition in which disobedient minorities Right are not rebels and traders Right are and wants to say and Largely basing it on Calhoun's argument That it's against the letter in spirit of the Constitution. She writes to think of disobedient minorities as rebels and traders Our constitutional system was designed To prevent unbridled majority rule That means that if there are large Constituent majorities. I mean large concurrent majorities where there's they're pretty close, right? Maybe 34% on one side or 30% on the other side If 30 40% on one side wins and then tries to impose itself on the 30 and 40% on the other side That she says is fundamentally against our constitutional tradition and What what civil disobedience does is it mobilizes Organizes it mobilizes organized minorities who are too important. She says not only in numbers But in quality of opinion to be safely disregarded Well, how do you know they're too important in numbers and quality of opinion? Well partly numbers and Partly the quality of opinion is showed by the numbers and what she thinks is that in such a situation to impose your absolute rule on The large numbers that the could stitch the concurrent majority is fundamentally at odds with a liberal free constitutional government and And she says that's the argument for civil disobedience as a political argument She ends this section with a meditation on change in stability Right that change is constant in human condition, but the velocity of change is not and What she wants to say here is that the law is really an object of stability and We think today laws are objects change we can pass a law and change things right we can pass a law and change Affirmative action or pass a law and change abortion or pass a law and change immigration And she says actually that's not the case right this is an old argument You know and and and it's an argument that I think she's on the right side of but it's complicated right when we change the argument about Brown v board of education about school desegregation the law changed But it took probably over a generation For the actual idea that segregated schools were bad to infuse itself throughout the country the same with abortion Roe v. Wade happened and Look what's happened. It's it's 70 years later and the country is still divided on it The 14th amendment was passed after the civil war and it wasn't really until The 1970s or 80s that it finally became enforced after the civil rights movement the 18th amendment Outlawed liquor through prohibition and it failed miserably Her point in all this is that law doesn't change The way people think and doesn't really change society, but civil disobedience in her mind where is it's a kind of social movement that can Fundamentally change society because when a concurrent majority is willing to risk Breaking the law willing to say we feel as that not just an individual, but as a group of people We feel so strongly that this is Unconstitutional or this is wrong That we're willing to stop society, stop traffic break laws in the name of that She says those are the kind of movements that can actually change society And she's points to the 14th amendment as the great example which she says 100 years was in power and it only really starts to become enforced With the civil rights movement which she says for the first time brought fully into the open The enormity of the American crime not just of slavery, but of chattel slavery and let us to take responsibility for it Okay, that's the those are the first two sections of of this essay is an incredibly rich essay One that as you maybe know I just published a book where I included it with Henry David Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience Obviously, I think it's one of the most important and relevant essays today The third part right which we will get to next week is about her idea of why this idea of civil disobedience is so important in the United States and It she defends it as the right of dissent in any Society of consent, but we'll get there next week and have time to develop it Hi, Burma, how are you? I'm fine. Thank you two points for trying to capture something of the originality of this essay First is it seems that for her civil obedience is not an exception is not a last resort like for instance for John Roles and so many other thinkers It seems that for her civil disobedience is a normal political democratic expression So can we say somehow that she normalizes that she integrates civil disobedience into the common all this common understanding of of citizenship and democratic politics that's one a second point trying to understand something of the grounding of her understanding of civil disobedience. I was struck struck by the fact that that she needs no appeal to justice or equality or something of a higher ethical or normative order so for her It seems other than Jürgen Habermas and so many others for her. It seems that she is detaching civil disobedience from individual or collective moral or ethical justifications that it is purely political and I am really surprised by these two points the first one somehow the normal normalization of civil disobedience in democratic as an expression of democratic society the second detaching civil disobedience from a grounding in some normative higher order and approaching it as a purely political expression. Do I see this? Well Roger Well, you know, it's a great there's both excellent points and great questions and you know, I would say you see it in a very uh, clear way whether you know, there's clarity is in her text or not is is unclear. So on your first point um, you said it's not a last resort and it's sort of normalized yes and no, right? On the one hand yes, she's going to argue at the very end of the essay where I haven't gotten there yet that civil disobedience should be seen should we should be seen as a fundamental constitutional right in the United States, one of the core constitutional rights and that because it's not actually listed there should be a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to civil disobedience. Secondly, uh, as you said, she she thinks that um uh, in the United States you're going to often have situations of concurrent minorities and concurrent majorities and And some of this audience may be something that happens periodically. On the other hand, she does call it extraordinary. She says it happens not only that a group of people believe that their common opinion is being trampled by a majority, an elected majority. But they have to believe that the normal avenues of recourse do not exist. It can't just be we lost the election and they've made abortion legal or illegal and we don't like it. We're going to start acts of civil disobedience. You actually have to believe that the legal system is not working or the electoral system is not working. Or there are ways in which the civil service or the people who are supposed to address these problems are not being responsive or not being able to be responsive. And so I think that if you take that seriously, Burma, I don't think you can say that it's simply normal. I don't think she's normalizing it. But I think you're right. She thinks that it's going to become and it has to be part of the American experience of freedom and free government because she expects that the American system of government will at times lead to the tyranny of the majority. There will be times in which the American form of government will lead to tyrannical majorities that oppose and impose their will on minorities in ways that are not only democratic but illegal and in those cases, civil disobedience is actually a constitutionally necessary response. So it's an extraordinary, normalized idea if I can put it in those terms. The second of your points, I think, is less problematic and more right on. I think you're absolutely right. She's arguably against people like Rawls and Habermas. That civil disobedience is not an appeal to justice. It's not an appeal to conscious. This is such a radical reading of civil disobedience that this seems a little outside the box. It is. She really does want to say it. By the way, in many ways, the companion essay to this is the essay truth and politics in between past and future because it's in that essay where she makes it very clear that politics is about opinions and that it's not about justice, right? She says in that essay, "Fiadja Stitsia, Peria and Mundus is a crazy idea." To simply say, "I'm going to act for justice even if the world will perish." She says, "It's completely irresponsible and makes no sense." We'd rather have the world continue even if there's injustice done and hope to do justice over time. That doesn't mean that we should just never act in an extraordinary way. There may be times in which we have to. She says the times when we have to are times when not only does the democratic majority tyranny is a minority, but it then takes away the normal modes of redress and address. The response is not moral, but it's political. It's based in the fundamental right to dissent in a government by consent, and that's what we'll talk about more in a week when we read the third and last part of the essay. You're absolutely right, Burma. She's arguing against Rawls and Habermas and other thinkers like that that think that some of the disobedience is tied to justice or morality, and she's tying it to politics. The grounding for her political understanding comes in the next section, section three, which she talks about the right to dissent and how it relates to a society of consent. Okay. As well as against Mary McCarthy and George K. Tapp and so many others. Yeah. I'd have to look at where you think McCarthy would disagree with her because I think that they-- In the letters, in the book with the letters. Okay, I'd have to look at that particular letter, and if you have it, maybe send it to me, and I'll talk about it next week, that would be great. John? I'm trying to understand Cal Hoon's notion of concurrent magic. It seems to me that there were two majorities, or the country was divided in half. There was a war fought over it, and laws were changed, and the side that lost resisted those changes for a hundred years, and as far as I can tell, they are still resisting it, although it's not so much regional as it is throughout the country, that is resisting the idea that all men are created equal, that that war was based on. So, it seems to me that Cal Hoon was making an argument with this concept of concurrent majorities, is making an argument for, in a situation of polarization, violence is the only solution. A violent solution, or a civil war, is the only way we can resolve this. And even with the civil war, it wasn't fully resolved because we're still dealing with it now. Yes, so, I can't tell if you understood this or not, but Cal Hoon's argument about concurrent majorities is from before the war, not after the war. And so, his argument is that the country is divided and is polarized, and at a moment of polarization, for one side to impose its will on the other side after an election goes against the spirit of the Constitution, which is to allow for the different states and different parts of the country to live freely differently, and that the federal government is not designed to impose one view or one moral view on dissenting parts of the country. So, his argument, if you understand it correctly, he's arguing for the slave holding, is we slaveholders shouldn't impose our view on those who don't want to hold slaves, but until as long as large concurrent majorities disagree, they shouldn't impose their view on us. That was his view. Aron obviously doesn't support his view of slave holding or anything like that, but what she's saying is he actually expresses, and again, she likes to run close to the sun, as we say, fly close to the sun, or close to the hell, I don't know how you put it. But she's saying, look, I understand his arguments are not taken seriously because of the context in which he wrote them, but she thinks that there's something true about the general argument, if you care about not about slavery or not slavery, but tyranny or not tyranny. That's the argument she's making. I mean, I've just been teaching Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, which for her is the real foundation of the American constitutional spirit, and what's just so vivid in the Montesquieu, and in her reading of it, is that the fundamental drive of the American Constitution in her point of view is to prevent tyranny, to prevent absolute concentrations of power. And what she's saying is the greatest threat to that constitutional system designed to prevent tyranny is any one side believing that in the name of justice, they can impose their view of justice on everybody. That's a that's a country diverse review, right? It's saying that more important than justice is freedom and the prevention of tyranny. But that is central to her understanding of the American Constitution and having lived through totalitarianism and the Holocaust and Bolshevism in Russia. That's her deeply held view that justice, the people who think that they can, in a sense, impose their view of justice on others is actually one of the greatest dangers to a constitutional order that's designed to prevent tyranny and freedom, right? There's the old haggle line that, I don't know if she ever cites it, but she certainly refers to it, that the greatest evil always conceals itself in the greatest good, namely that it's the people who want to, that most people who do evil, do it in the name of good. And that's what she's here in a sense pointing to. And I think I have no doubt that this is a view that challenges so many of us, because it goes to the heart of her skepticism about justice, right? And this goes back to Bernie's point at the very beginning, right? She really doesn't believe, I mean, she believes in justice and she believes that justice is important, but she believes that justice is not political, and that especially in a world where everyone has different opinions and people have different views of justice, justice is just another opinion. And that in the name of justice to say that we're going to impose our opinion on everyone else, even if it's like 51% to 49%, she says, that's dangerous. And that's one of the things that I think makes Hannah rent so interesting and yet also unsettling for people today. And I think most people who don't find her unsettling just don't pay attention to that aspect of her work. Is that all right, John? Yeah, it's okay. It's just that what happened in the Civil War and what happened after the Civil War, that's another. It's a great point, right? And what is she saying? Is she saying, well, the North shouldn't have insisted on the end of slavery? She doesn't say one way or the other. She does think, right? She says very clearly, slavery was the greatest crime. She says it was the, and here she says again, that it was the greatest evil in America. But what she also says, right, is that slavery didn't really end with the Civil War or with the 14th Amendment. I mean, slavery ended but racism didn't. And she's saying that the attempt to impose legally the end of abortion through Roe v. Wade or segregation through Brown v. Board education, right? Generally doesn't work. She's making a much larger argument about the fact that law doesn't usually change the world. And the world won't change just because you pass a law. And so what she's saying is if you, if you try and change the world through laws, right? And you do it in a kind of tyrannical way, you're going to create concurrent majorities that oppose each other. And, and civil disobedience is a political response to that. That's, again, it's not a defensive slavery. It's a, in her mind, I think, a wide eyed, realistic look at the impossibility and failure of simply imposing tyrannically moral change. Heather. Hello. I feel, I do understand, I help understand what Owen is saying, but it seems the separation between conscience and political activism is too, too separated for her. In the UK at the moment, there's, it's been a very successful day in the UK today because we have the government, the tyrannical government, as we saw it, those people who opposed it, passed a law which would say that to oppose genocide and to support civil disobedience in the form of breaking into Israeli arms factories in this country so that, in fact, our own country could break the law by helping Israel commit genocide. That what we did in resisting that was, it was about conscience. It was about our, our conscientious objection to what the government was doing in our own name. So it's been a very moral rebellion as it were that we participated in. And, of course, if a single individual had just stood in this street and protested about what our government is doing, it would have been pointless because the government would have taken their notice. So clearly we had to act in solidarity. And in that sense, make ourselves a political movement, but the political movement was attached to conscience and it was attached to justice. And so people in the UK who are either Christian or not, Christian or whatever religion who are from the left or the right are united in seeing that what protestors have done have done in the name of justice, whether they agree with it or not. So justice can't be separated from the political act. So this brings me back to Hannah Arendt. I've read her work again and again about this. And there is something about it. There's something about the way that she wants to make it sort of clear-cut incision to separate conscience from political activity, which doesn't ring true to me. It doesn't feel right to me. Thanks Heather, yeah, no. I think your instinct is right that political movements often are attached to conscience and justice. I don't think she would disagree with that. But I think what she would probably say is that both sides can be attached to conscience and justice. Now this is actually, I'll make one caveat to that, which is, this is how she distinguishes Calhoun, right? If you look at the discussion of Calhoun, which is on page, I got so much right, 76, right? In the text, she says that John Calhoun's concurrent majority, that is sections of the population that are unanimous in their dissent, the term, unfortunately, is tainted by pro-slavery and racist arguments and in the disquysition on government where it occurs, it covers only interests, not opinions and convictions of minorities that feel threatened by dominant majorities. So what she says is that, and this is, this would go back to John's question as well. She says that civil disobedience is not about common interests, it's about common opinions. And she's saying that Calhoun's idea of concurrent majorities dealt not with common opinions, but with only interests. I think what she means, right? She doesn't say any more about it. So I'm just trying to interpret it is that at this point in the 1850s, the slave states were no longer making, they didn't make the, they didn't state the opinion that slavery was right and constitutional and good. They had an interest in it, an economic interest, a political interest in it, and they made the argument amount of interest. And what Arrent is saying is, civil disobedience can't come out of like interest because it brings it closer to self-interest and criminality. It makes it seem like it's about getting ahead. Whereas for her, civil disobedience has to be about a common, a common opinion about what's good and what's right. And so I think you're absolutely right, Heather. It is connected to claims of conscience and justice. But if it's made only in terms of conscience and justice, the problem is that the other side can also make their claim. terms of, of, of, of conscience and justice, right? Both sides think that justice is on their side. And so she says, um, civil disobedience is really can't, can't simply say it's because of justice, because if you say it's because of justice, then you think you have to impose it on other people without any limit, right? Even if the, even if the world will perish, you know, fiat, you steed, she had periote moondas. And, and she doesn't think that's the case. The background here is right? She no longer believes that there are absolute claims of justice in the world. She thinks there are different opinions. And, you know, to take the slavery example, right? It, it, it is possible to change people's view and convince most people in the country, right? That slavery is wrong and should be prohibited throughout the whole country. But it takes time and it's not going to be done, she thinks by telling people who you disagree with, you're bad people, you're wrong, and we're going to, you know, impose our way on you. She, she makes that very clear in a number of her texts that simply, um, telling people that they're wrong and telling people that you're going to impose your view on them doesn't generally work. And that's why she's saying it takes time to change the views of a society. And laws are not generally a good vehicle to change people's minds. You change the laws after people have changed their views, not as a way to change people's minds. And, and I think that's her point. And, you know, I think the opposing point, right, that people often make is laws are a moral signal. And it's important to change the laws, not because they'll actually, you know, change the people's minds right away. But because it signals to people are moral belief that this is right. And, and that's the, that's the argument of, of people who say, well, we should change the law even if it's not going to work right away. The problem with that, right, from an Arendtian perspective is that if you change the law with the knowledge that it's not going to actually change people's opinions, but it's a signal, you then have to enforce the law, which means you're enforcing the law on people who don't agree with it. And if you're forcing the law on large numbers of people who don't agree with it, well, she calls that tyranny. And it can be a tyranny in the name of justice, right? You can have a just tyranny. But she's, let's just say she's incredibly skeptical of just tyrannies. Give it her history. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure to follow to not miss an episode. And please read and review this podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. We'd love to hear what you think. If you would like to be part of our weekly virtual reading group, become a member of the Hanaharan Center. For more information, visit our website at hac.barth.edu and follow us on Instagram at Hanaharan Center at Barth or in LinkedIn via the Hanaharan Center for Politics and Humanities. This is Reading Hanaharan with Roger Birkowitz and we hope you'll be back next time. (gentle music)