Beyond strauss, lies, and the war in Iraq: Hannah Arendt's critique of neoconservatism

Review of International Studies

Volumn 33, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 265-283

  Owens, Patricia ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34249998629     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210507007504     Document Type: Review

References (136)

1. Hannah Arendt, 'On Hannah Arendt, in Melvyn Hill (ed.), Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York: St. Martin's Press), p. 308.
2. Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, The War over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2003);
3. Michael C. Williams, 'What, is the National Interest? The Neoconservative Challenge in IR Theory', European Journal of International Relations. 11:3 (2005), pp. 307 37.
4. There are differences in emphasis among neoconservative foreign policy thinkers. For example, Charles Krauthammer, a self-described 'democratic realist', differs from William Kristol and Robert Kagan who are more interventionist, more moralist, less classically 'realist'. Krauthammer, 'In Defense of Democratic Realism', The National Interest (Fall 2004).
5. President Bush's own religiosity should not be taken to assume that most neoconservative intellectuals are also Christian, or even especially religious. And it must not be confused with any idea that foreign policy neoconservatives are pursuing a specific religious agenda such as Zionism. There is more continuity than change in Bush's religious rhetoric. Every presidential inaugural address has evoked the guiding hand of a Christian God. T thank Dan Twining for this point.
6. Alexander Wendt, 'What is IR For?: Notes Toward a Post-Critical View', in Richard Wyn Jones (ed.), Critical Theory and World Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000), pp. 205-24.
7. 'Liberal idealism', in the words of Jeanne Kirkpatrick, 'need not be identical with masochism, and need not be incompatible with the defense of freedom and the national interest'. 'Dictatorships and Double Standards', Commentary, 68:5 (1979), p. 4.
8. Earl Shorris, 'Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush and the Philosophy of Mass Deception', Harpers Magazine, June 2004.
9. Hitchens, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (New York: Plume, 2003), p. 17.
10. Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, updated edn., new Introduction (New York: Palgrave, 2005):
11. Kenneth R. Weinstein, 'Philosophic Roots, the Role of Leo Strauss, and the War in Iraq', in Irwin Stelzer (ed.), The Neocon Reader (New York: Grove Press, 2004), pp. 201-12;
12. Larry George, 'Leo Strauss, Neoconservatism and US Foreign Policy: Esoteric Nihilism and the Bush Doctrine', International Politics, 42:2 (2005), pp. 174-202.
13. It is possible Lo argue that Strauss believed that those who possessed wisdom about the natural (hierarchical) order of social and political life must be cautious about the diffusion of this knowledge; for the sake of the people and for the sake of the philosopher's safety. He thus appeared to suggest that philosophers ought to conceal their doubts about religion and truth to sustain a number of functional myths. Through the concealment of dangerous truths both the philosopher and the political order are protected. To lie, therefore, may be moral; it. protects the wise and maintains social order. The morally and intellectually inferior must believe in 'noble lies', 'statements which, while being useful for the political community, are nevertheless lies'. Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 69, 66.
14. Thomas L. Pangle, 'Editor's Introduction', in Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, p. vii.
15. Jenny Strauss Clay, The Real Leo Strauss', New York Times, 7 June 2003.
16. Irving Kristol, 'The Neoconservative Persuasion' Weekly Standard, 47, 25 August. 2003.
17. We are focused less on individuals and more on ideas and ideology. There is already a large literature on the role of influential individuals and how they shaped the justification and conduct of the invasion of Iraq. See Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Men Who are Changing America's Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980);
18. John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs 1945-1994 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995);
19. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking Penguin, 2004).
20. This article does not rely on any claims about the direct influence of Strauss on specific men or their acceptance of the neoconservative label. See Robert Kagan, 'I Am Not a Straussian: At Least, I Don't Think I am', Weekly Standard, 20 November 2006.
21. Kenneth L. Deutsch and John A. Murley (eds.), Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999),
22. and Michael C. Desch, 'What Would Strauss Do?' The American Conservative, 17 January 2005.
23. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis. 1919 1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1939);
24. Hans J. Morgenthau, The Purpose of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1960)
25. and Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade (New York: Knopf, 1970).
26. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Wall, 'An Unnecessary War', Foreign Policy, 137 (January-February, 2003), pp. 51-62;
27. Philip Gold, Take Back the Right: How the Neocons and the Religious Right Have Hijacked the Conservative Movement (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), ch. 9;
28. Francis Fukuyarna, America at the Crossroads: Democracy. Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006):
29. Michael C. Williams, 'Morgenthau Now: Neoconservatism, National Greatness, and Realism', in Michael C. Williams (ed.), Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans Morgenthau in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
30. Robert Gilpin, 'War is Too Important to be Left to Ideological Amateurs', International Relations, 19:1 (2005), pp. 5-18;
31. Williams, 'What is the National Interest?'.
32. For an excellent account of the similarities and divergences between Arendt and classical realists such as Morgenthau and Kennan see Douglas Klusrneyer, 'Hannah Areridt's Critical Realism: Power, Justice, and Responsibility', in Anthony F. Lang Jr. and John Williams (eds.), Hannah Arendt and International Relations: Readings Across the Lines (London: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 113-78.
33. Arendt and Morgenthau were friends. According to a student of both, she considered 'heroic' his 'resignation from the National Security Council - ... the only member of Lyndon Johnson's administration to take such a step - in protest over the Vietnam War'. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 34.
34. Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1970), p. 225.
35. Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 39.
36. Ibid., p. 6.
37. Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 238.
38. Arendt rarely referred to neoconservatism and died before the full political force of its ideas were felt. In a 1956 essay she wrote, 'Neo-conservatism, which has won a surprisingly large following in recent years, is primarily cultural and educational, and not political or social in outlook: it appeals to a mood and concern which are direct results of the elimination of authority from the relationship between young and old, teacher and pupil, parents and children'. 'Authority in the Twentieth Century', Review of Politics, 18:4 (1956), p. 404.
39. The influence of neoconservatism in the Republican Party is obviously important. But we should not assume that neocoriservsitive foreign policy ideas are only attractive to those on the political right. See Oliver Kamm, Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy (foreword by Martin Bell) (London: Social Affairs Unit, 2005) and Thomas Cushman (ed.), A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005).
40. Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 24.
41. Irvirig Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. ix.
42. Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 55.
43. Peter Graf Kielmansegg, 'Introduction', in Kielmansegg, Horst Mewes, and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt (eds.), Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigrés and American Political Thought after World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 5.
44. Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative, p. 80;
45. William Pietz, 'The "Post Colonialism" of Cold War Discourse', Social Text, 19-20 (1988), pp. 55-75;
46. Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (New York: Free Press, 1999);
47. Giles Scott Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-War American Hegemony (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 43-4;
48. Williams, 'What is the National Interest?', p. 316.
49. One historian of neoconservatism has noted that Jeanne Kirkpatrick's 'views were crystallised when she heard Hannah Arendt speak .. . Arendt, who taught that the left was just as capable of mounting terror as the right, was one of the shaping forces of neoconservatism'. Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 154.
50. 'Here, as elsewhere one sees the affinities between the students of Strauss and the students of Arendt, for it is Arendt's understanding of totalitarianism that is at work'. Norton, Leo Strauss, p. 128.
51. In fact, Arendt was horrified that The Origins of Totalitarianism (new edition with added prefaces: New York: Harcourt Brace Jovariovich, 1966) became a staple of Cold War propaganda. She did not view post-World War II world politics as a struggle between the forces of freedom and a monolithic Communism.
52. Martin Jay, Force Field: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 168.
53. Some of Arendt's concerns about politics in the modern age also echo those of Irving Kristol. Arendt argued that the increasing identification of freedom with the ability to accumulate personal wealth, and the triumph of the archetypal liberal freedom from politics, deformed the political sphere.
54. Also see Ronald Beiner, 'Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: The Uncommenced Dialogue', Political Theory, 18:2 (1990), pp. 238-54.
55. Dana Villa, 'The Philosopher versus the Citizen: Arendt, Strauss, and Socrates', in Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1999), pp. 155-79
56. and 'Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: Citizenship versus Philosophy', in Socratic Citizenship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 246-98.
57. This has led to false accusations of nostalgia and Hellenism (even by Straussiansl) in Arendt's work. See Pangle, 'Editor's Introduction', p. xxiv.
58. Shadia B. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), p. 4.
59. Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 69.
60. Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1950), p. 251.
61. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 143, 155.
62. Weber, From Max Weber, p. 123.
63. Kristol, Two Cheers, p. xi.
64. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, p. 56.
65. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 12.
66. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, p. 53.
67. 4!l Ibid., p. 53. 'Bush's advocacy of "regime change" -which avoids the pitfalls of a wishful global universalism on the one hand, and a fatalistic cultural determinism on the other - is a riot altogether unworthy product of Strauss's rehabilitation of the notion of regime'. Steven Lenzner and William Kristol, 'What was Leo Strauss up to?', The Public Interest, 153 (2003), p. 38.
68. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, p. 64, 161.
69. Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1950), p. 124.
70. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, p. 54.
71. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 22.
72. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 220.
73. Of course, Arendt believed that thinking and acting were connected. However, she rejected the effort to ensure that the mentality of one enjoyed hegemony over the other.
74. Arendt, Origins, p. 472.
75. This particular critique of neoconservatism also applies to some critical international theory. According to Andrew Linklater, the 'fundamental conflict, in the world system' is not between states, but competing ideologies - emancipatory versus all others. Beyond Realism and Marxism: Critical Theory and International Relations (London: Macrnillari, 1990), p. 21.
76. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism (New York, Schocken, 2005), p. 302.
77. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 247.
78. Ibid., p. 241.
79. Ibid., p. 247.
80. Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 92-4.
81. "' Arendt, 'Philosophy and Politics', Social Research, 71:3 (2004), p. 428.
82. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror, p. 94.
83. Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968), p. 27.
84. Kristol, Two Cheers, p. 64.
85. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, pp. 59, 51.
86. See Heinrich Meier (ed.), Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialoge (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1995)
87. and Leo Strauss, 'Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political', in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 83-107.
88. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Sribner's Sons, 1976), p. 181.
89. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, p. 321. Arendt always associated the political promise of this form of freedom with the ability to create something new. This faculty of action was rooted in St Augustine's concept of natality; the fact of human birth suggests that, we are, in fact, new beginners. Each now life is a now beginning and through political action with a plurality of others it is possible to make new beginnings throughout our lives. That we may begin the world anew, however, does not mean that we have the power to control it. Political actors rarely gain what they set out to achieve. Their goals are always overrun by the nature of political action where, just as in war, the totally unexpected is normal.
90. See Origins, p. 478;
91. Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, p. 13.
92. Jean Bethke Elshtain has argued that Arendt's account of natality may point us in the direction of a more pacific form of politics, a 'pacific image that evokes love, not war'. Meditations on Modern Political Thought: Masculine/Feminine Themes from Luther to Arendt (New York: Praeger, 1986), p. 110.
93. This is a stretch, not least given Areridt's view of love as 'the most powerful of all antipolitical forces'. The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 242.
94. 6' Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, p. 29;
95. Canovan, Hannah Arendt, ch. 7.
96. Arendt, Crises of the Republic, p. 107. For a longer discussion of Arendt on these and other war-related themes,
97. see Patricia Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2007).
98. Arendt, Crises of the Republic, p. 151.
99. Arendt Was unimpressed by the efforts of military technicians to overcome the unexpected in war; 'nowhere does Fortuna, good or ill luck play a more fateful role in human affairs than on the battlefield', This element of the unexpected could not 'be eliminated by simulations, scenarios, game theories, and the like'. Arendt, Crises of the Republic, p. 106.
100. Mark Gerson, 'Reflections of a Neoconservative Disciple', in Christopher DeMuth and William Kristol (eds.), The Neoconservative Imagination: Essays in Honor of Irving Kristol (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1995), p. 169.
101. Arendt understood ideologies as powerful political weapons given their 'tremendous power of persuasion'. They appealed to 'immediate political needs' without which the specifics of the ideologies could not even have been imagined. Origins, pp. 159, 163.
102. Arendt, Crises of the Republic, p. 110.
103. Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003);
104. Jennifer Welsh (ed.), Humanitarian Intervention and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
105. NATO's 1999 Kosovo intervention played an important role in the transformation of foreign policy views in the Republican Party in the United States, turning many into neoconservatives broadly defined. Many Republicans opposed the intervention on the grounds that it was counter to traditional (realist) national interests. But Republicans such as Senator John McCain, though ambivalent until NATO started dropping bombs, became much more interventionist. At the same time, influential neoconservative writers such as William Kristol were arguing for the moral imperative to intervene and supported McCain over George W. Bush in the Republican primaries of 2000 because he was potentially more 'neocon'.
106. According to Kaplan and Kristol, when Europeans complain about 'unilateral' military US actions in favour of some 'consensus of the "world community"' they are actually 'practicing a form of power politics dressed up as international morality'. The UN, a collection of nation-states, most of them corrupt, should not be considered a higher moral authority than the United States. This is to falsely assume that US interests and those of 'humanity are inherently incompatible'. The War Over Iraq, pp. 93, 92, 112.
107. Kaplan and Kristol, The War Over Iraq, pp. 87-8.
108. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948).
109. Kaplan and Kristol, The War Over Iraq, p. 46, second nmphasis added.
110. Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative, pp. xiv-xv.
111. Williams, 'What is the National Interest?'.
112. Robert Kagan and William Kristol (ods.), Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2000).
113. This practice is riot unique to neoconservatives. President Clinton pointed to the historical struggles over the place of multicultural diversity in the United States as part of the 'liberal' narrative of 'humanitarian war' over Kosovo in 1999.
114. Marvin Olasky, Compassionate Conservatism: What it is, What is Does, and How it can Transform America (foreword by George W. Bush) (New York; Free Press, 2000).
115. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 70.
116. Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 22.
117. 'President Addresses the Nation in Prime Time Press Conference', 13 April 2004. Available at: 〈http://www.whit.ehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/ 20040413-20.html〉 [accessed 20 June 2006].
118. Arendt, Origins, p. 349. Areridt's writing on the Vietnam War suggested that such beliefs went some of the way toward explaining how apparently intelligent individuals in the inner circles of government can be so badly mistaken in their understanding of political realities. In particular,
119. see 'Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers', in Crises of the Republic.
120. Arendt, Origins, p. 469.
121. She took total ideological explanations for world history to be destructive of political freedom. 'For respect for human dignity implies the recognition of my fellow-men or our fellow-nations as subjects, as builders of worlds or cobuilders of a common world. No ideology which aims at the explanation of all historical events of the past and at mapping out the course of events of the future can bear the unpredictability which springs from the fact that men are creative, that they can bring forward something so new that nobody ever foresaw it'. Origins, p. 458.
122. Arendt, Crises of the Republic, p. 110.
123. Ibid., p. 6.
124. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 236.
125. Arendt, Crises of the Republic, p. 6.
126. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 237.
127. Ibid, p. 5.
128. DeMuth and Kristol (eds.), The Neoconservative Imagination.
129. Arendt, Crises of the Republic, p. 6.
130. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement (Now York, Schocken, 2003), p. 264.
131. Arendt, Origins, p. 218.
132. In a footnote Arendt wrote: 'I hope no one will tell me any more that Plato was the inventor of the "noble lie". This belief rested on a misreading of a crucial passage (414C) in The Republic, where Plato speaks of one his myths ... as a ψ. Since the same Greek word signifies "fiction", "error", and "lie" according to context - when Plato wants to distinguish between error and lie, the Greek language forces him to speak of "involuntary" and "voluntary" ψ. ..; under no circumstances can it be understood as a recommendation of lying as we understand it. Plato, of course, was permissive about occasional lies to deceive the enemy or insane people . .. But contrary to the cave allegory, no principle is involved in these passages.' Between Past and Future, p. 298f.
133. See Owens, Between War and Politics, ch. 6.
134. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 239.
135. Arendt, Origins, p. 474.
136. Arendt, Crises of the Republic, p. 36.