Racism in the Theory Canon: Hannah Arendt and ‘the One Great Crime in Which America Was Never Involved’
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829817695880 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Author | Patricia Owens |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Conference Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829817695880
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2017, Vol. 45(3) 403 –424
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829817695880
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1. Hannah Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, Dissent 6, no. 1 (1959): 46.
Racism in the Theory Canon:
Hannah Arendt and ‘the One
Great Crime in Which America
Was Never Involved’
Patricia Owens
University of Sussex, UK
Abstract
Hannah Arendt’s monumental study The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, is a founding
text in postcolonial studies, locating the seeds of European fascism in the racism of imperial
expansion. However, Arendt also harboured deep racial prejudices, especially when writing
about people of African descent, which affected core themes in her political thought. The
existing secondary literature has diagnosed but not adequately explained Arendt’s failures in this
regard. This article shows that Arendt’s anti-black racism is rooted in her consistent refusal to
analyse the colonial and imperial origins of racial conflict in the United States given the unique
role of the American republic in her vision for a new post-totalitarian politics. In making this
argument, the article also contributes to the vexed question of how international theorists should
approach important ‘canonical’ thinkers whose writings have been exposed as racist, including
methodological strategies for approaching such a body of work, and engages in a form of self-
critique for marginalising this problem in earlier writing on Arendt.
Keywords
racism, theory canon, Hannah Arendt
I should like to make it clear that as a Jew I take my sympathy for the cause of the Negroes
as for all oppressed or under-privileged peoples for granted.1
Corresponding author:
Patricia Owens, Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, East Sussex, BN1 9SJ, UK.
Email: P.Owens@sussex.ac.uk
695880MIL0010.1177/0305829817695880Millennium: Journal of International StudiesOwens
research-article2017
Conference Article
404 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45(3)
2. Anthony F. Lang, Jr. and John Williams, eds., Hannah Arendt and International Relations:
Reading Across the Lines (London: Palgrave Press, 2005); Patricia Owens, Between War
and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007); Patrick Hayden, Political Evil in a Global Age: Hannah Arendt
and International Theory (London: Routledge, 2009); Patricia Owens, ‘Hannah Arendt’,
in Critical Theorists and International Relations, eds. Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-
Williams (London: Routledge, 2009), 31–41; Kimberley Hutchings, ‘A Conversation with
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)’ in The Return of the Theorists: Dialogues with Great Thinkers
in International Relations, eds. Richard Ned Lebow, Peer Schouten, and Hidemi Suganami
(London: Palgrave, 2016), 245–53.
3. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76
(New York: Picador, [1976] 2003).
4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
[1951] 1966), 206. For an excellent account of the complicated mechanisms of the boomer-
ang effect in Origins, see Karuna Mantena, ‘Genealogies of Catastrophe: Arendt on the Logic
and Legacy of Imperialism’ in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed.
Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 83–112. For the best his-
torical application of the idea, see Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and
the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
5. Joan Cocks, Passion and Paradox: Intellectuals Confront the National Question (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2002), 47; Pascal Grosse, ‘From Colonialism to National
Socialism to Postcolonialism: Hannah Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism”’, Postcolonial
Studies 9, no. 1 (2006): 35–52.
6. Arendt, The Origins, 161.
One of the most significant political thinkers of the 20th century, and arguably the
only woman admitted to the male-dominated ‘canon’ of political thought, Hannah Arendt
is slowly but surely gaining a similar stature in the academic study of world politics.2
This entry into International Relations (IR) is belated to say the least. Franz Fanon, Aimé
Césaire, and Jean-Paul Sartre were not the only intellectuals to conceive European fas-
cism as a kind of European imperialism turned inwards. In a work of breathtaking ambi-
tion, Arendt’s first major book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, showed that the seeds of
fascism were not German, but international. They were imperialism, racism, and anti-
Semitism. She was the central theorist of the ‘boomerang effect’, the unintended conse-
quences of imperial blowback, decades before Michel Foucault.3 The scramble for
Africa, she claimed, ‘became the most fertile soil for the flowering of what later was to
become the Nazi elite. Here they had seen with their own eyes how peoples could be
converted into races and how… one might put one’s own people into the position of the
master race’.4 The Origins of Totalitarianism not only became a founding text in postco-
lonial studies, leading some to claim that it anticipates Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.5 It
was among the first to engage in a sustained historical and global analysis of racist ideol-
ogy. Arendt placed race thinking and racism at the core of the destruction of the European
system of states. ‘Race thinking, rather than class-thinking’, she insisted, ‘was the ever-
present shadow accompanying the development of the comity of European nations, until
it finally grew to be the powerful weapon for the destruction of those nations’.6 In argu-
ing that European and eventually worldwide federation was the antidote to the ‘walking
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