The End of Authority and the Continuing Crisis of the University System
Michael Weinman
“Even though the student rebellion is a global phenomenon, the university systems themselves are by no means uniform and vary not only from country to country but often from institution to institution; all solutions of the problem must spring from, and correspond to, strictly local conditions. Thus, in some countries the university crisis may even broaden into a government crisis-as Der Spiegel (June 23, 1969) thought possible in discussing the German situation.”
– On Violence, p. 80
The quote upon which I hope to shed some light here is taken from On Violence, a text famous (or infamous) for many things, but largely not for what motivated Hannah Arendt to write this three-part work; namely, what she perceives as an attack on the authority of the university through “the student rebellion [that] is a global phenomenon.”1 This focus on authority, and its ever-growing absence in the post-war restoration of a liberal order, is both essential for understanding the main argumentative aim of On Violence as an Augustinian heritage. In this post, I want to show how the student rebellions of 1968 prompt Arendt’s analysis in the direction of the autonomy of the university as a crisis of authority in particular, helping to resurface the submerged Augustinian commitments that motivated Arendt in articulating the critique of the student protest movement. I then hope to say a few words about how and why this discussion of authority and what she figures as “the crises of the republic” in the Vietnam Era remains relevant today.
So, what, precisely, does this have to do with Augustine? Everything, actually. The Augustinian background is both very deep and very buried. It surfaces explicitly only in a footnote in the center of the first of the two quotes from Part II on which I will focus here. At the outset of a famous section of this text, where she presents what is widely known as her “idiosyncratic” theorization of power and violence as absolutely opposed to one another, Arendt bemoans “the present state of political science that our terminology does not distinguish among such key words ‘power,’ ‘strength,’ ‘force,’ ‘authority,’ and, finally, ‘violence’ — all of which refer to distinct, different phenomena and would hardly exist unless they did.”2 Following from this impetus to better understand the phenomena behind the conceptual jumble, Arendt argues that of all these crucial concepts that contemporary political science fails to understand in distinction from one another.
The difficulty of disentangling the personal from the institutional dimensions of authority is a familiar challenge: Arendt discusses it, dressed so to say in Augustinian garb, in a variety of contexts. In her doctoral dissertation on Augustine’s concept of love; in her discussion of Augustine as the first philosopher of the will in Willing, the second volume of The Life of the Mind; and in her analysis of appeals to ancient authorities in the modern democratic revolutions in On Revolution. In On Violence, examining the complex interaction of personal and institutional authority, we see Arendt turn to Augustine again — albeit obliquely, as a ramification of an offhand reminder of something she argues at length elsewhere: that neither the totalitarian form of government, nor the tyrannical and dictatorial forms it resembles and with which it is sometimes confused, have anything to do with authority, either personal or institutional. She does not have the time to address the issue but, in the explanatory explication of the claim quoted just above in a footnote, Arendt writes: “There is such a thing as authoritarian government, but it certainly has nothing in common with tyranny, dictatorship, or totalitarian rule.” Recognizing that this bald formulation is likely not going to suffice for itself, she continues: “For a discussion of the historical background and political significance of [authority], see my ‘What is Authority?’ and Part I of Karl-Heinz Lübke’s valuable study, Auctoritas bei Augustin (Stuttgart, 1968), with extensive bibliography.”3
Two points are worth stressing here: first, that as she continues to puzzle through the paradoxes of the question “what is authority?” — or, remembering the first sentence of her essay, what it was — Augustine continues to be a touchstone about whose works she continues to revise and sharpen her views. Second, that this ongoing working-out of her agreements and disagreements with Augustine can profoundly help us to understand the positions that Arendt took on matters of public concern in her “American” years. The confounding nature of Arendt’s appearance in public debates in America — as a “child of the German left” who is seen as a maverick or hidden (or not hidden) conservative — can perhaps best be understood as a sign of how hard it was, and is, for people to take to heart that and why Arendt is advocating for the restoration of authority in universities, for what we might call “academic governance” in contemporary higher education.
Part II of On Violence, with its critical and even outraged response offered to many aspects of the politicization of the university in the late 1960s, can be hard for her interlocutors to accept as her real line of thought, let alone something with which to agree. I would suggest that this is because when confronted with the judgments Arendt (1969: 45) advances here — such as: “The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter” — her readers think of this a good basis for handbook for a Selbstdenker (someone who thinks for themselves, unmoved by authorities either personal or institutional), whom Arendt should lionize, while Arendt — who surely loves a good laugh — is rather on the side this time around. But why is Arendt on the other side in this case?
With typical irony, we might say that Arendt’s readers struggle so greatly to come to terms with the position she stakes out in this text because she actually sees Augustine on both sides of the debate that she is staging between the protesting students and the universities that are failing to assert their authority and instead turning either to the state to supply violence or to other parts of civil society to supply power in order to keep the university system viable. While Augustine is figured as, as it were, the authority on that sort of authority that intellectual leadership in the university ought to have but does not, Arendt (1969: 56) also sees Augustine lurking in her contemporaries’ great trust in the redemptive power of violence against authority: “Hegel’s and Marx’s great trust in the dialectical ‘power of negation’ […] rests on a much older philosophical prejudice: that evil is no more than a privative modus of the good, that good can come out of evil; that, in short, evil is but a temporary manifestation of a still-hidden good. Such time-honored opinions have become dangerous.” In other words, even if Augustine rests beneath a decent and compelling sense of authority that can withstand the assaults of the contemptuous laughter and worse from the leaders of the student movements on the hand and the zero-sum calculations of thinktank culture and increasingly bureaucratized establishment, his Neoplatonic insistence that evil is just the privation of the good undergirds the radical anti-establishment politics of both the traditional Marxist-Hegelians and the increasingly non-Marxist new Left.
But what relevance does this analysis of an increasingly bleak political landscape written 50 years ago have today? A lot. For the disintegration from within of American higher education, both private and public, against which Arendt was so fiercely opposed in her critiques of the student protest movement and its increasing willingness to support both rhetorically and practically acts of violence as well as peaceful civil disobedience has now reached a critical phase. We see it in the large number of liberal arts colleges that are closing forever or merging into other institutions that share little of their values. We see it in the historic and likely bell-weather action by the West Virginia University to not quite close its School of World Languages, as originally planned, but rather to limit the instruction of languages to Spanish and Chinese — which are “marketable” — and to abolish the majors in those languages. And we see it in debates surrounding DEIJ initiatives in higher education, meant to diversify the ranks of the professoriate, surely an important goal, but which do more to increase the monopolization of power and investment of resources in higher administration than to increase representation of underrepresented groups among tenured faculty.
In all these ways, and more, we are reaping today the results of the seeds sewn in the 1960s when, as Arendt noted — to the great displeasure of her friends on the New Left and the defenders of elite privilege alike — that the attack on the authority of the better argument and the fierce independence of intellectual life from all political programs of every political persuasion could only end with the death of independent higher education altogether.
Footnotes:
1 On Violence, p. 80 n.109.
2 On Violence, p. 43.
3 On Violence, p. 45 n.66.
About the Author:
Michael Weinman is Senior Lecturer in Political Science and Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Associate Fellow of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. His current project, The Political Theology of Hannah Arendt, is under contract with Edinburgh University Press.
