“Nothing much had happened”: Settler colonialism in Hannah Arendt
| Author | David Myer Temin |
| Published date | 01 July 2022 |
| Date | 01 July 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885119893077 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article EJPT
“Nothing much had
happened”: Settler
colonialism in
Hannah Arendt
David Myer Temin
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, USA
Abstract
Hannah Arendt’s account of imperialism has become an unlikely source of inspiration
for scholars invested in anti-colonial and postcolonial critique. However, the role of
settler colonialism in her thought has come under far less scrutiny. This essay recon-
structs Arendt’s account of settler-colonization. It argues that Arendt’s republican anal-
ysis of imperialism hinges on her notion of the boomerang effect, which is absent in
settler-colonial contexts. Arendt recognized some of the distinctive features of settler
expansionism but reproduced many of the ideologies that sustain practices of settler-
colonial conquest. This interpretation sheds light on the promises and limits of con-
temporary retrievals of Arendt’s analysis and critique of imperialism by foregrounding
the specificity of settler colonialism as an axis of ongoing colonial violence.
Keywords
Decolonization, empire, Hannah Arendt, imperialism, race, republicanism, settler colo-
nialism, totalitarianism
‘Wherever you go, you will be a polis’...these famous words became not merely the
watchword of Greek colonization, they expressed the conviction that action and
speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location
almost any time and anywhere.
Corresponding author:
David Myer Temin, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, 5700 Haven Hall,
505 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1045, USA.
Email: dtemin@umich.edu
European Journal of Political Theory
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885119893077
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2022, Vol. 21(3) 514–538
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1998: 198)
Even exploitation and oppression still make society work and establish some kind of
order.
Hannah Arendt, “On Violence” (1972: 131)
In recent years, Hannah Arendt’s account of imperialism has become an unlikely
source of inspiration for a wide range of scholars invested in anti-colonial and
postcolonial critique (Grosse, 2006; King and Stone, 2007; Lee, 2007, 2011;
Mantena, 2010; Samnotra, 2019; Steinmetz, 2006). Where early reviews and later
assessments of The Origins of Totalitarianism well into the 2000s largely zoomed in
on the controversial concept of totalitarianism and the eccentric “method” Arendt
deployed (King, 2015: 43–67), this more recent group of scholars has turned to
Arendt to reckon with the interrelations among imperialism, racism, anti-semitism,
colonial genocide, the Holocaust, and totalitarianism. Within this broader turn,
scholars have also drawn from Arendt’s larger corpus to think through the con-
temporary dilemmas more specific to settler-colonial societies such as Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand (Muldoon, 2003; Schaap, 2004; Strakosch, 2016).
In this essay, I explore Arendt’s account of settler-colonization, a category in
her thought that has come under little scrutiny despite her revival as a proto-
postcolonial thinker. I reconstruct the place of colonization in her work on impe-
rialism so as to demonstrate the limits of her analysis to mount a serious critique of
settler-colonial dynamics of the past or present. My argument is that Arendt
adopts her basic categorical distinctions among different modes of empire from
19th-century English and, more broadly, republican debates and commitments.
Alongside the famed eccentricities of Arendt’s conceptual apparatus in The
Origins of Totalitarianism and other works, these archival adoptions legitimize
or simply disavow settler-colonial practices in multiple ways. More troubling
still, as the epigraph from The Human Condition attests, Arendt sometimes
endorsed colonization as a practice that enabled new beginnings for politics.
Because settler-colonization involved acts of political founding—enabling the spa-
tial pre-conditions for her performative conception of freedom—Arendt could
more easily disavow this axis of colonial violence.
My reading helps to rethink contemporary retrievals of Arendt on imperialism
in light of the specificity of settler-colonialism as an analytic of power.
The “boomerang effect,” one of the key concepts in Arendt’s postcolonial recep-
tion, captures how authoritarian practices from the colonies erode the constitu-
tionalist political culture of the metropole. The concept of the boomerang is the
centerpiece of her republican critique of imperialism, especially in the Origins of
Totalitarianism. It repurposes a classical republican trope in a powerful and
appealing way. Yet the boomerang effect is absent in many settler-colonial
contexts, which—if settlers are successful in forming independent states—will ulti-
mately lack a metropole entirely. The historical literature commenting on Arendt
primarily asks whether and how boomerang effects took place empirically
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