hello my name is Roger Berkowitz I'm the founder and academic director of the Hana RN Center at Bard College welcome to the discussion of on revolution the lecture related to on revolution by Hannah Arendt which we're meeting today in the virtual reading group today we're gonna be talking about the chapter on the social question this is perhaps one of the most controversial chapters Hannah Arendt wrote after essay on Little Rock maybe her most infamous chapter it's widely criticized I think less widely understood so today I'm going to try and help us understand that it's a long and and fairly involved chapter and so let me give you a quick run-through of the overview of the argument which isn't gonna cover everything there's a lot of asides in this chapter so the argument goes like this poverty is different from misery mass poverty is a kind of misery in which we're not just poor we're miserable and at the mercy of our needs and our bodily necessity this misery is politicized at some point most theoretically by Karl Marx but also in the French Revolution and as it is it's no longer seen as as a natural part of life poverty has always been there but now misery is seen as something that can be overcome and gotten rid of the problem then is that the rulers of the French Revolution and most rulers of most states are from the wealthier classes and thus their legitimacy is found in compassion and compassion with the poor and so they have to sort of show themselves to be compassionate and talk about ending poverty this compassion though which is a real emotion when one confronts a single individual in pain or suffering is perverted when it's converted into pity we she's felt four masses of people the poor in general as opposed to a particular person and this pity is cruel insofar as pity allows us to cut off a patient's leg in order to save their life in order to save the lives of the poor we can basically treat them with utter disdain and subject them to our rule nobody she says is good in their heart and thus this claim for pity always is a kind of hypocrisy and this hypocrisy is part of politics and yet with the rise of this claim of compassion and goodness into politics that comes from the French Revolution and the need for the wealthy rulers to find their legitimacy in their goodness um we run into this claim of unmasking the hypocrites exposing the natural person behind them and claiming them to be good or bad but since nobody's good we end up with naked need and interest and a kind of corruption that can lead to terror she says on page 102 at the very end of the chapter quote although the whole record of past revolutions demonstrates beyond doubt that every attempt to solve the social question political means weeds into terror and that it is terror which sends revolutions to their doom it can hardly but knock did not be denied but to avoid this fatal mistake is almost impossible when a revolution breaks out under conditions of mass poverty so pity leads to compassion I'm sorry too poverty leads to compassion at least is perverted into pity pity brings hypocrisy that policy leads to the seeking to eliminate all persons who aren't purely good which is terror and badly this is what happens to revolutions under conditions of mass poverty the one exception which Arendt finds is the American Revolution which she says was blessed by a kind of ignorance and an ignorance ignorance of misery in its midst namely slavery uh and as a result it was not a revolution driven by compassion and pity but by solidarity and then she thus offers solidarity as an alternative to pity as a way of uniting the different classes of the society in a revolution based on freedom and so there's only one page on solidarity in the text it's widely ignored I think it's probably one of the most important of our ents ideas that is almost completely ignored by most RN scholars so we'll talk about that in sections 4 of the text so that's the the structure of it I it's long and complicated as I said and I'm gonna try and do my best to walk you through it section one is on this question of poverty and mass poverty and she writes on page 50 poverty is more than deprivation it is a state of constant want an acute misery whose ignominy consists in it's dehumanizing force poverty's abject because it puts men under the absolute dictates of their bodies that is under the absolute dictate of necessity so the key here is we distinguish poverty for misery and misery is really what is the problem you can have for people who aren't miserable who are an abject who aren't under the dictate of necessity and she says on page 52 and 53 that it was really Karl Marx who made poverty political force misery of political force insofar as he made the crucial claim that poverty is the result of exploitation it's not natural whereas for Arendt um poverty had been a natural phenomena for centuries if not longer Marx transform the social question into a political force by employing the word exploitation and arguing that the ruling classes power is a result of exploitation the second and and so this set in motion the idea of the social revolution as one that would undo the political fruits of exploitation and make everybody equal um the second chapter is is a second section of this chapter is about the American Revolution and it's sort of the the road not taken' for most modern revolutions and it suggests that american revolution succeeded in avoiding terror and the question of the social question because poverty was absent from the american scene but present everywhere else in the world this is a quote on page 58 um what does it mean to say that poverty was absent from the american scene on the one hand there were poor people in america but what RN says is that what everyone who came to america talked about america said is that even though they were poor people they were they were part of the american political world in a way that the poor in europe were not they weren't miserable they had land or they at least could go and participate in town meetings they had a voice and they could also if they were really poor they could move out west and then have land and there was not the kind of misery that there had been in the cities of Europe the result is that the poor were not invisible and this she has this great little dissertation here on how misery is not actually a product of money so much as it is a product of invisibility now they're related insofar as that here abject leap or you've become a slave to the needs of your body you are invisible publicly because all you can do is find food and shelter but it's this idea of misery and darkness that is the curse of poverty that one great exception here is slavery and so she will write on page 60 the absence of the social question in America quote must strike us as very strange indeed when remind us when we remind ourselves that the absence of a social question from the American scene was after all quite deceptive and that object in degrading misery was present everywhere in the form of slavery and Negro labor and so she says this is clearly based on overlooking of slavery and this is a problem because what do we say about this American Revolution which succeeded in a way because it overlooked misery and a little therefore overlooked the misery of slavery and she says on 61 we are tempted to ask ourselves if the goodness of the poor white man's country did not depend to a considerable degree upon black labor and black misery and then she says there were more miserable black slaves in America than miserable poor people in Europe and so she thinks in many ways it is the case that the success and goodness of the white man's country did depend upon black labor in black misery and she concludes quote from this we can only conclude that the institution of slavery carries an obscurity even blacker than the obscurity of poverty the slave not the poor man was wholly overlooked and this is for um the real problem of the American Revolution she calls slavery the primordial sin she says the founders were not moved by pity and that was because they ignored slavery and it wasn't just them she says it wasn't immoral she says it wasn't just American founders all the European visitors have came she says ignored slavery talked about how America was a land without poverty and misery and so for Arendt this will come back this absence of slavery overlooking of it is perhaps the primordial sin that will undo the success of the American Republic uh in part three she returns to the main story so part part two of this chapter on America was really the the road not taken' and now in part three we come back to this story that she's telling of the politicization of mass poverty and now the rise of compassion and therefore pity as the center of social question in modern revolutions so in the French Revolution she says the revolutionaries were the upper class not the poor and thus solidarity with the poor required a kind of special effort of virtue which was so and then Robespierre called the passion of compassion Arendt writes quote on 65 this virtue was not Roman it did not aim at the rest palooka and had nothing to do with real burke she meant to have the welfare of the people in mind to identify one's own will with the will of the people and this effort was directly directed primarily toward the happiness of the many the personal legitimacy of those who represented the people could have reside only in the capacity to suffer with the immense class at the poor accompanied by the will to raise compassion to the rank of the supreme political passion and the highest political virtue so that's the shift from the rest public concern of the leaders with the public world with the institutions and the palace as a whole to a compassionate politics in which the concern is to prove one's legitimacy and goodness by one's compassion for the poor leads to this idea that there is a single voice a single interest in society which is the interest of the people the the poor and that this is the kind of solidarity through a oneness a pity with the one voice of society and so she writes to Robespierre it was obvious this is on page 71 it was obvious that the one force which could and must unite the different classes of society into one nation was the compassion of those who did not suffer with those who were Valu of the highest classes with the low people the magic of compassion was that it opened the heart of the sufferer to the sufferings of others whereby it established and confirmed the natural bond between man which only the rich had lost so compassion is a magical passion that we bonds the rich who had lost this bond with the poor and so the great effort she says is the selfish self less capacity to lose oneself in the suffering of others rather than active goodness and this then becomes perverted from compassion which can be again a real emotional connection with those who are suffering to pity the sudah solidarity with the rich not with individuals who are suffering but with this abstract called the poor and she she talks about this both within the context of Herman Melville and Dostoyevsky I think the easiest way to understand it is through her description of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov the point is that Judy Jesus has compassion but his compassion is mute it can't say anything it must simply suffer when confronted with the suffering of a person whereas the Grand Inquisitor pities the lump and he tries to pity the whole people he personalizes the sufferers and thus we feel how false and idealistic his pity is and he can then deprive them of their freedom in order to give them bread and in a sense use them to keep his own rule in enforce and this is the kind of perversion that pity is she writes on on page seventy six to seven because combat compassion abolish --is the distance the worldly space between men where political matters the whole realm of human affairs are located now this is compassion as pity here passion and pity abolished this distance it remains politically speaking irrelevant and without consequence incapable of establishing lasting institution as a rule it is not compassion which sets out to change the worldly conditions in order to ease human suffering but if it does it will shun that drawn-out wearisome processes of persuasion negotiation and compromise which are the processes of law and politics and lend its voice to the suffering itself which must claim for Swift and direct action that is for action with the means of violence point here is that when compassion and pity become politicized and seek to change the world they're not going to barter and negotiate and persuade and compromise they're going to use violence and this is what can lead to terror in the name of goods um to me the key of the chapter is on page 79 again this is where she discusses the alternative to pity which she calls solidarity it's widely ignored by most readers of ahran it's only a page but I think it's worth pulling it out here so first she says on page 78 and 79 that an 80 she describes pity on the one in piteous distant or as compassion is near pity is at the many whereas compassion is for the one kitty is limited to the poor and weak but here pity needs the weak it has an interest in the poor those who are in power because they show their pity and compassion need the poor to show their pity and compassion and thus you never see pity ends so every time a new right is won and a three-time welfare is achieved workplace regulation achieved there's a new inequality a new pity to be shown and thus you constantly have people you can pity and thus I would have a defense and a justification for your own power and rule she says pity is more cruel than cruelty itself she describes us on page 79 to 80 pity taken as the spring of virtue has proved to possess a greater capacity for cruelty than cruelty itself thus the clever and helpful surgeon with his cruel and benevolent knife cuts off the gangrene limb in order to save the body of the sick man in the name of pity we can do all sorts of evil and justify it on the alternative as I said is solidarity and so on 78 79 she writes pity maybe the prefer of compassion but it's alternative is solidarity it is out of pity that men are attracted to their own fable but it is out of solidarity that they establish deliberately and as it were dispassionately a community of interest with the oppressed and Exploited so it is out of solidarity that we don't act passionately with feeling to show and prove ourselves to have a kind of compassion for these poor but it is a kind of a community of interest with the oppressed and Exploited we show that we are all the same we actually have it's not that we admit the interest of the poor we articulate an interest that encompasses the poor and the powerful the poor and the rich that she continues the common interest would then be the grandeur of man or the honour of the human race or the dignity of man for solidarity because it partakes of reason and hence of generality he's able to comprehend a multitude conceptually not only the multitude of a class or a nation or a people but eventually all mankind and this is really her argument that instead of a compassion for the poor which is always a kind of hypocritical claim and then we seek to hunt out hypocrites and expose them but we have to do is articulate a grand human interest which encompasses the public the entirety of the people she continues with this solidarity though it may be aroused by suffering is not guided by it we can the aroused by it got suffering but the point is not to be simply guided by ending the suffering and she continues and it comprehends this new solidarity the strong and the rich no less than the weak and the poor compared to the sentiment of pity it may appear cold and abstract for it remains committed to ideas to greatness or or dignity rather than to any love of men and this this idea of solidarity I think is very fond to many of us and it may be something that people really find silly or idealistic in aren't um and I think she realizes that which is why she says that it's almost impossible in a condition of poverty and misery for a revolution to be governed by solidarity that's the court I read at the beginning from page a hundred but she says there was a revolution that was governed by solidarity and not pity and that was the American Revolution and yet it could only be governed by solidarity and not pity because of an enormous ignorant and overlooking of misery and it's missed a kind of in slavery and so we're left with this somewhat paradoxical I think and difficult claim that Iran is making which is that all revolutions will succumb to pity and become social revolutions and trade freedom for a kind of pitiful social solidarity which will lead to apocrypha and terror the one example of one that didn't the American Revolution could only do so because it was lucky enough to overlook the miserable in its midst it's an extraordinary claim and I think we then have to ask what what does she mean where where - where does she end up do we want to overlook misery in our midst or do we want to recognize it or and here's maybe I think the hope seeing the danger of being driven by misery and also the evil of overlooking misery we can somehow confront misery without being consumed with politically overcoming it in such a way that we sacrifice solidarity and engage in a politics of demon and that seems to be one of the hopes that are in here offers in this chapter the last two sections are on hypocrisy and they're fantastic I think I've already spoken up about them for you to lead them on your own and we can talk about them in our discussion I very much look forward to discussing the social question [Music]