The Conditions of “Savages”
Michiel Bot
“The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Arendt argues in the final chapter of part 2 (“Imperialism”) of The Origins of Totalitarianism that the main problem of contemporary politics is not that existing political institutions may be insufficiently capable of accommodating people who do not belong to a nation-state that guarantees and protects their rights (stateless people, refugees, minorities). Instead, the problem is that the existing political institutions, i.e. a network of nation-states that covers the entire world without remainder, actively produce these people by excluding them. This is why people who are not citizens/members of a nation-state are not marginal to politics but are, as Arendt argues, “the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics.”
As a consequence, political thinking can begin neither by imagining a social contract among an already existing set of individuals nor by following Hobbes in considering political institutions exclusively as an antidote to violence and as a remedy to an anarchic state of nature. Instead, political thinking must take as its starting point the political production of the excluded. Theorists who have been inspired by this argument of Arendt’s include Seyla Benhabib, Étienne Balibar, and the contributors to the recent volume, The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement, edited by Nicholas de Genova and Nathalie Peutz.
A second reason why Part 2 of The Origins of Totalitarianism is so important for contemporary political thinking is its comparative approach. Like Aimé Césaire in his roughly contemporaneous Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Arendt analyzes the genocide of the European Jews as a “boomerang effect” of European imperialism, which, Arendt argues, pioneered such ideas as “race as a principle of the body politic” and such practices as bureaucratic power without political accountability. Michael Rothberg has developed a thoughtful comparison of Arendt and Césaire on the “boomerang effect” in his Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Mahmood Mamdani is critical of Arendt’s focus on South Africa, but his When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda is similar to Arendt’s project in that it focuses on the political production of racial groups by colonial states that set the stage for genocide. In addition, Arendt’s theoretical explorations of why “[t]he solution of the Jewish question [i.e. the creation of the state of Israel] merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs” (290), is an early attempt to think the deep structural similarities between the political positions of Jews and those of Palestinians in the contemporary world political system (a scholar worth mentioning here is Karim Mattar of the University of Colorado at Boulder).
While many scholars of race and imperialism have found inspiration in Arendt’s account, a major stumbling block for readers of Part 2 of The Origins of Totalitarianism is Arendt’s repeated use of the terms “barbarians” and “savages.” The terms feature prominently in the quote I cited above, which is the final sentence of Part 2, and first appear in Arendt’s reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness at the beginning of chapter 7 (“Race and Bureaucracy”). Arendt’s argument in this chapter is that two of the elements of “totalitarianism” — “race as a principle of the body politic” and “bureaucracy as a principle of foreign domination” — have their origin in the period of European imperialism that began with the Berlin Conference in 1884–85 and ended with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Arendt writes:
Both discoveries were actually made on the Dark Continent. Race was the emergency explanation of human beings whom no European or civilized man could understand and whose humanity so frightened and humiliated the immigrants that they no longer cared to belong to the same human species.
The first sentence in this quote raises the question of why Arendt refers to Africa as “the Dark Continent,” a cliché she keeps repeating in the pages that follow. In those pages, Arendt repeatedly uses metaphors of light and darkness. For instance, she refers to Heart of Darkness as “the most illuminating work on actual race experience in Africa,” and she writes that Leopold II of Belgium was “responsible for one of the blackest pages in the history of Africa.” (emphasis mine). (The cliché was probably even more common around the time Arendt was writing; for instance, Arendt’s personal library at Bard College includes a 1954 cheap paperback edition of a German translation of Out of Africa titled Afrika: Dunkel lockende Welt, “Africa, Darkly Alluring World.” And of course Hegel famously used the image in his Philosophy of History.) Given the general richness of Arendt’s literary style, as well as her argument in Eichmann in Jerusalem that the use of clichés is a symptom of “thoughtlessness,” how should we interpret Arendt’s strange, repeated use of this cliché here?
One possible answer is that what Arendt is trying to do in these pages is understand the minds of the Europeans in Africa in this period by engaging with a work of fiction in a particularly literary or rhetorically intricate way. Take the following passage as an example:
The world of native savages was a perfect setting for men who had escaped the reality of civilization. Under a merciless sun, surrounded by an entirely hostile nature, they were confronted with human beings who, living without the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment, were as incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse.
Indeed, this passage is immediately followed by a longer quote from Heart of Darkness. According to this interpretation, Arendt is using free indirect speech in order to try to understand a mindset that is by no means her own. In fact, as proponents of this interpretation might insist, her repeated use of the cliché “the Dark Continent” is ironic and signals the distance between her own position and the imperialist-racist discourse she is trying to understand.
The problem with this interpretation, however, is that the opposition between civilization (or rather, culture or “world”) and nature structures Arendt’s entire conception of politics. One page before the end of part 2, Arendt writes:
Our political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality through organization, because man can act in and change and build a common world, together with his equals and only with his equals. The dark background of mere givenness, the background formed by our unchangeable and unique nature, breaks into the political scene as the alien which in its all too obvious difference reminds us of the limitations of human activity — which are identical with the limitations of human equality.
According to Arendt, the “black tribes” that Europeans encountered in Africa had no political life: they were “without the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment,” that is, without history and without a “common world.” Arendt says the same thing of the Boers, whom she describes as fully divorced from the “human-built world.” The Boers, for Arendt, are a precursor of 20thcentury racism because they themselves became “savages” — “The Boers were the first European group to become completely alienated from the pride which Western man felt in living in a world created and fabricated by himself.” It is to these apolitical or pre-political conditions, the conditions of “savages,” Arendt suggests, that the millions of minorities, stateless people, and refugees produced by the nation-state system in the middle of the twentieth century are being reduced. They have the same ontological status: extra-political and therefore not recognizable as human.
It seems, however, that if the project is to think politics beginning from the political production of the excluded, this project would have to entail a fundamental rethinking of the oppositions citizen/barbarian, civilized/savage, culture/nature, territorial/nomadic, worldly/rootless, as well as European/African. Like the nomadic “savages” (black and also white) of the “Dark Continent,” the “barbarians” produced by the nation-state system are “rootless,” and rootlessness in The Origins of Totalitarianism leads to desertification that gives free reign to the “devastating sand storms” of totalitarian domination and genocide.
Indeed, The Origins of Totalitarianism itself contains passages that historicize and criticize the opposition of nature to culture as something threatening and fearful, echoing Heidegger and in terms similar to those of the Frankfurt School, as the product of modern alienation, for instance:
Ever since man learned to master [nature] to such an extent that the destruction of all organic life on earth with man-made instruments has become conceivable and technically possible, he has been alienated from nature. Ever since a deeper knowledge of natural processes instilled serious doubts about the existence of natural laws at all, nature itself has assumed a sinister aspect.
A critique of what I called a “stumbling block” in Origins, Arendt’s repeated use of words like “the Dark Continent,” “barbarians,” and “savages” (and such a critique could stay far from facile celebrations of rootlessness and messianic arguments that the excluded can redeem us all), could then become a crucial occasion for developing the project of political thinking that she outlines, rather than an embarrassment that would simply make us wish she had chosen some more “politically correct” images to “illustrate” her theory.
[1] Like the nomadic “savages” of the “Dark Continent,” the “barbarians” produced by the nation-state system are “rootless,” and rootlessness in The Origins of Totalitarianism leads to desertification that gives free reign to the “devastating sand storms” of totalitarian domination and genocide.
Michiel Bot was a Hannah Arendt Center Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Bard College. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University in 2013. He is now Assistant Professor at Tilburg Law School in the Department for Public Law, Jurisprudence and Legal History.
**(originally published on April 13, 2015)
