Karl Marx and the tradition of Western political thought

by Hannah Arendt

The following excerpts from Hannah Arendt's manuscripts on Karl Marx are published here for the first time. When Arendt refers to the present--for instance, when she says "now"--it is important to be aware that she refers to the early 1950s, the period during which the excerpts were composed. Arendt always wrote in great haste, but never more so than here. Consequently, these writings have required rather extensive "Englishing," a process to which Arendt always submitted whatever she wrote in English prior to publication. In this case the "Englishing" has consisted primarily in breaking overly long sentences and paragraphs into several shorter ones, and in correcting what are clearly errors in English grammar and syntax. But at the same time every effort has been made to retain the raw, racing quality of Arendt's thought, as well as the immediacy of her voice, both of which are nowhere more abundantly manifest than in her writings on Marx. The reader is referred to the first part of the preceding Introduction for more detailed information. J.K.

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The Broken Thread of Tradition

IT has never been easy to think and write about Karl Marx. His impact on the already existing parties of the workers, who had only recently won full legal equality and political franchise in the nation states, was immediate and far-reaching. His neglect, moreover, by the academic, scholarly world hardly lasted more than two decades after his death, and since then his influence has risen, spreading from strict Marxism, which already by the 1920s had become somewhat outmoded, to the entire field of social and historical sciences. More recently, his influence has been frequently denied. That is not, however, because Marx's thought and the methods he introduced have been abandoned, but rather because they have become so axiomatic that their origin is no longer remembered. The difficulties that previously prevailed in dealing with Marx, however, were of an academic nature compared with the difficulties that confront us now. To a certain extent they were similar to those that arose in the treatment of Nietzsche and, to a lesser extent, Kierkegaard: struggles pro and contra were so fierce, the misunderstandings that developed within them so tremendous, that it was difficult to say exactly what or who one was thinking and talking about. In the case of Marx, the difficulties were obviously even greater because they concerned politics: from the very beginning positions pro and contra fell into the conventional lines of party politics, so that to his partisans, whoever spoke for Marx was deemed "progressive," and whoever spoke against him "reactionary."

This situation changed for the worse when, with the rise of one Marxian party, Marxism became (or appeared to become) the ruling ideology of a great power. It now seemed that the discussion of Marx was bound up not only with party but also with power politics, and not only with domestic but also with world political concerns. And while the figure of Marx himself, now even more so than before, was dragged into the arena of politics, his influence on modern intellectuals rose to new heights: the chief fact for them, and not wrongly so, was that for the first time a thinker, rather than a practical statesman or politician, had inspired the policies of a great nation, thereby making the weight of thought felt in the entire realm of political activity. Since Marx's idea of right government, outlined first as the dictatorship of the proletariat, which was to be followed by a classless and stateless society, had become the official aim of one country and of political movements throughout the world, then, certainly, Plato's dream of subjecting political action to the strict tenets of philosophic thought had become a reality. Marx attained, albeit posthumously, what Plato in vain had attempted at the court of Dionysios in Sicily. (1) Marxism and its influence in the modern world became what it is today because of this twofold influence and representation, first by the political parties of the working classes, and, second, by the admiration of the intellectuals, not of Soviet Russia per se, but for the fact that Bolshevism is, or pretends to be, Marxist.

To be sure, Marxism in this sense has done as much to hide and obliterate the actual teachings of Marx as it has to propagate them. If we want to find out who Marx was, what he thought, and how he stands in the tradition of political thought, Marxism all too easily appears mainly as a nuisance--more so than, but not essentially different from, Hegelianism or any other "ism" based on the writings of a single author. Through Marxism Marx himself has been praised or blamed for many things of which he was entirely innocent; for instance, for decades he was highly esteemed, or deeply resented, as the "inventor of class struggle," of which he was not only not the "inventor" (facts are not invented) but not even the discoverer. More recently, attempting to distance themselves from the name (though hardly the influence) of Marx, others have been busy proving how much he found in his avowed predecessors. This searching for influences (for instance, in the case of class struggle) even becomes a bit comical when one remembers that neither the economists of the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries nor the political philosophers of the seventeenth century were needed for a discovery of what was already present in Aristotle. Aristotle defined the substance of democratic government as rule by the poor and of oligarchic government as rule by the rich, and stressed this to the extent that he discarded the content of those already traditional terms, namely, rule by the many and rule by the few. He insisted that a government of the poor be called a democracy, and that a government of the rich be called an oligarchy, even if the rich should outnumber the poor. (2) The political relevance of class struggle could hardly be more emphatically stated than by basing two distinct forms of government on it. Nor can Marx be credited with having elevated this political and economic fact into the realm of history. For such elevation had been current ever since Hegel encountered Napoleon Bonaparte, seeing in him the "world spirit on horseback."

But the challenge with which Marx confronts us today is much more serious than these academic quarrels over influences and priorities. The fact that one form of totalitarian domination uses, and apparently developed directly from, Marxism, is of course the most formidable charge ever raised against Marx. And that charge cannot be brushed off as easily as can charges of a similar nature--against Nietzsche, Hegel, Luther, or Plato, all of whom, and many more, have at one time or another been accused of being the ancestors of Nazism. Although today it is so conveniently overlooked, the fact that the Nazi version of totalitarianism could develop along lines similar to that of the Soviet, yet nevertheless use an entirely different ideology, shows at least that Marx cannot very well stand accused of having brought forth the specifically totalitarian aspects of Bolshevik domination. It is also true that the interpretations to which his teachings were subjected, through Marxism as well as through Leninism, and the decisive transformation by Stalin of both Marxism and Leninism into a totalitarian ideology, can easily be demonstrated. Nevertheless it also remains a fact that there is a more direct connection between Marx and Bolshevism, as well as Marxist totalitarian movements in nontotalitarian countries, than between Nazism and any of its so-called predecessors.

It has become fashionable during the last few years to assume an unbroken line between Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, thereby accusing Marx of being the father of totalitarian domination. Very few of those who yield to this line of argument seem to be aware that to accuse Marx of totalitarianism amounts to accusing the Western tradition itself of necessarily ending in the monstrosity of this novel form of government. Whoever touches Marx touches the tradition of Western thought; thus the conservativism on which many of our new critics of Marx pride themselves is usually as great a self-misunderstanding as the revolutionary zeal of the ordinary Marxist. The few critics of Marx who are aware of the roots of Marx's thought therefore have attempted to construe a special trend in the tradition, an occidental heresy that nowadays is sometimes called Gnosticism, in recollection of the oldest heresies of Catholic Christianity. Yet this attempt to limit the destructiveness of totalitarianism by the consequent interpretation that it has grown directly from such a trend in the Western tradition is doomed to failure. Marx's thought cannot be limited to "immanentism," as if everything could be set right again if only we would leave utopia to the next world and not assume that everything on earth can be measured and judged by earthly yardsticks. For Marx's roots go far deeper in the tradition than even he himself knew. I think it can be shown that the line from Aristotle to Marx shows both fewer and far less decisive breaks than the line from Marx to Stalin.