Superfluous humanity: An Arendtian perspective on the political evil of global poverty

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 279-300

  Hayden, Patrick ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249812709     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298070350021001     Document Type: Article

References (108)

1. Nicholas Rengger and Renée Jeffery, 'Moral Evil and International Relations', SAIS Review 25, no. 1 (2005): 3-16;
2. Renée Jeffery, 'Review Article: Beyond Banality? Ethical Responses to Evil in Post-September 11 International Relations', International Affairs 81, no. 1 (2005): 175-86.
3. Hannah Arendt, 'Nightmare and Flight', Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 134.
4. Thomas Pogge, 'World Poverty and Human Rights', Ethics & International Affairs 19, no. 1 (2005): 2.
5. See Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, new edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
6. For applications of Arendt's work to the related issue of violence in international politics, see Iris Marion Young, 'Violence against Power: Critical Thoughts on Military Intervention', in Ethics and Foreign Intervention, ed. Deen K. Chatterjee and Don E. Scheid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 251-73, and Patricia Owens, 'Hannah Arendt, Violence, and the Inescapable Fact of Humanity, in Hannah Arendt and International Relations, ed. Anthony F. Lang, Jr. and John Williams (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 41-65.
7. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), 384 n. 54.
8. See Roy T. Tsao, 'The Three Phases of Arendt's Theory of Imperialism', Social Research 69, no. 2 (2002): 579-619.
9. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 167.
10. Ibid., 170-1.
11. Ibid., 185.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 210 ff.
14. Ibid., 200.
15. Ibid., 198-9.
16. Ibid., 193.
17. Ibid., 196.
18. Ibid., 568.
19. Ibid., 197.
20. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994), 58.
21. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 188.
22. Ibid., 186.
23. Ibid., 194.
24. Ibid., 209.
25. Ibid.
26. Hobbes, Leviathan, 76.
27. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 592.
28. Ibid., 612.
29. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (eds.), Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers: Correspondence 1926-1969 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 166.
30. Hannah Arendt, 'Thinking and Moral Considerations', Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 159.
31. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 188 and 292.
32. Phillip Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 131.
33. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), 218-19.
34. On this point see also Hannah Arendt, 'Eichmann in Jerusalem: An Exchange of Letters between Gershorn Scholem and Hannah Arendt, in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 245.
35. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 287; first emphasis added.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 288.
38. Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11 (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).
39. To avoid misunderstanding, it should be noted that I'm not claiming any kind of moral equivalence between genocidal politics and extreme global poverty; one is not 'as evil' as or simply analogous to the other. Rather they are different forms or orders of political evil imposed upon human beings treated as thoroughly superfluous, although they may overlap or be mutually reinforcing.
40. Carlos Santiago Nino, Radical Evil on Trial (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), vii.
41. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 24.
42. Ibid., 36-7.
43. Human Development Report 2005, 21-3.
44. Ibid., 24.
45. World Health Organization, World Health Report 2004 (Geneva: WHO, 2004).
46. UNAIDS/WHO, AIDS Epidemic Update 2005 (Geneva: UNAIDS/VVHO, 2005).
47. World Bank, Global Development Finance 2004 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004).
48. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 70-165.
49. Ibid., 165. The UN's Human Development Report 2005 remarks that more 'than 40% of the world's population constitute, in effect, a global underclass', 24.
50. UN-HABITAT, State of the World's Cities 2006/7 (June 2006) [http://www.unhabitat.org/mediacentre/sowckit2006_7.asp]; all data and quotations in the following paragraph are taken from this report.
51. For further discussion of the multifaceted (economic, environmental, cultural, social, and political) nature of vulnerability confronting poor societies and individuals therein, see Peadar Kirby, Vulnerability and Violence: The Impact of Globalisation (London: Pluto Press, 2006).
52. Zygmunt Bauman, Work, Consumerism, and the New Poor (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998), 27.
53. Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 5.
54. Ibid., 27.
55. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 341.
56. Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 12.
57. Pogge, 'World Poverty and Human Rights', 2.
58. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 198.
59. Thomas Pogge, 'A Global Resources Dividend', in Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship, ed. David A. Crocker and Toby Linden (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 531, n. 12; emphasis added.
60. Pogge argues for a cosmopolitan approach to redistribution by focusing on the extent to which individuals are interdependent within the global economy. One of the shortcomings of this argument is that it places too great an emphasis on some notion of reciprocal advantage. I would suggest instead that all individuals should be considered the proper subjects of distributive justice regardless of their contribution to the global political economy, given the large numbers of global poor that are made'redundant' by that very economic system. While a number of important questions about distributive justice connect with the overall discussion here, it is beyond the aim of this article to discuss them directly. Suffice it to say that charity cannot satisfy the demands of justice: 'Charity is an option, that is true, but charity does not touch the sources of evil. For that it would take political measures.' Rüdiger Bittner, 'Morality and World Hunger', in Global Justice, ed. Thomas Pogge (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 30.
61. Pogge, for instance, proposes a Global Resource Dividend, which taxes the extraction of resources for the benefit of developing countries. He calculates that it would take only 1.2 per cent of the high-income economies, or about $312 billion annually, to eliminate the aggregate shortfall of those living on less than $1 per day from the $2 threshold. See Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 7 and 196-215.
62. John Kekes, Facing Evil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 47.
63. George Kateb, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca, NY. Cornell University Press, 1992), 201.
64. Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 7.
65. For a thoughtful discussion of Arendt and the relation between political injustice and invisibility, see Danielle Allen,'Invisible Citizens: Political Exclusion and Domination in Arendt and Ellison', in Political Exclusion and Domination, ed. Melissa S. Williams and Stephen Macedo (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 29-76.
66. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 74.
67. Arendt, The Human Condition, 241. Bauman refers to this condition as the social nature of evil, in Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press, 1989), 166-8.
68. Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 26.
69. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 24.
70. Compare Arendt's claim: 'The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or to do either evil or good', The Life of the Mind (New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1971), 180.
71. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 198.
72. Pogge, 'World Poverty and Human Rights', 1.
73. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 48.
74. Ibid., 287.
75. Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 43-4.
76. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 257-8.
77. Hannah Arendt, 'Truth and Politics', Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 241-2.
78. This aspect of Arendt's thinking relates closely to her emphasis on plurality as a constitutive ground of human affairs; see, especially, The Human Condition.
79. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 258.
80. Hannah Arendt, 'Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship', Responsibility and Judgment, 18-27. For an excellent treatment of Arendt on this point see Jennifer Nedelsky, 'Judgment, Diversity, and Relational Autonomy', in Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, ed. Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky (Lanham, NID: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 103-20.
81. Hannah Arendt, 'Crisis in Culture', Between Past and Future, 220.
82. Ibid., 135-7 and 293.
83. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 106.
84. Michael Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2000), 19ff.
85. Edward Herman, 'Foreword', in David Chandler, From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention (London: Pluto Press, 2002), viii.
86. Thomas Pogge,'Recognized and Violated by International Law: The Human Rights of the Global Poor', Leiden Journal of International Law 18, no. 4 (2005): 718.
87. Hannah Arendt, 'The Image of Hell', Essays in Understanding, 203-4.
88. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 161.
89. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 289.
90. Ibid., 62.
91. Arendt, 'The Image of Hell', 204.
92. Hannah Arendt, 'On Violence', Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1972), 183.
93. Pogge, 'Recognized and Violated by International Law', 721.
94. Arendt, 'Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship', 24.
95. Ibid., 30.
96. Ibid., 31.
97. Hannah Arendt, 'Collective Responsibility', Responsibility and Judgment, 147. For a useful treatrnent of this issue see Andrew Schaap, 'Guilty Subjects and Political Responsibility: Arendt, Jaspers and the Resonance of the "German Question" in Politics of Reconciliation', Political Studies 49, no. 4 (2001): 749-66.
98. Ibid., 149.
99. Ibid., 157-8.
100. The Jew as Pariah, 233.
101. Kevin Bales, 'Slavery and the Human Right to Evil', Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 1 (2004): 64.
102. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 26.
103. Hannah Arendt, 'On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing', Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1968), 16. Arendt notes in this essay (14) that counteracting the 'worldlessness' that results from persecution and exploitation cannot be achieved simply by having compassion for 'the unfortunate' but by establishing 'justice for all'.
104. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 194.
105. Ibid., 372-6.
106. Jeffrey C. Isaac, 'A New Guarantee on Earth: Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity and the Politics of Human Rights', American Political Science Review 90, no. 1 (1996): 67;
107. see also Serena Parekh, 'A Meaningful Place in the World: Hannah Arendt on the Nature of Human Rights', Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 1 (2004): 41-53.
108. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 376. For more on the 'right to have rights' see Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 49-69.