Part 4 of this essay can found here.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
Hannah was a German Jewish intellectual who had the double tragedy of being arrested by the Nazis twice. However, she also had the double fortune of being released on both occasions, fleeing to America with her husband after the second incident. It would seem that these no doubt harrowing experiences would perhaps unsurprisingly shape her approach to the subject of political philosophy.
Prior to her experience with the Nazis, Hannah Arendt’s main interests were philosophy and theology. Politics held little or no interest for her. All that changed tremendously after her experience with the Nazis. By the time she took up residence in America, Arendt viewed politics as being vitally important; an importance, which she felt wasn’t much appreciated in the modern world. She became enamored with the concept of direct democracy as it was practiced in ancient Greece, where everyone took part in public life. She came to view participation in public life as essential to one’s humanity and that political action had an inherent dignity, a fact which she felt had not been highlighted by philosophers throughout the ages.
Arendt spelt out most of her ideas in her most famous work titled, The Human Condition, published in 1958, by coincidence, the same year that Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was published. I pointed out this coincidence because the two have another coincidence between them. They both taught at Bard College in New York, USA although it is unlikely they were there at the same time. The main idea in The Human Condition is that there are three kinds of activity, a classification Arendt borrows from the ancient Greeks. These are labour, work, and action.
According to Arendt (and the ancient Greeks), labor is the activity we do to sustain life, which we sustain by satisfying our fundamental biological needs. This Arendt observed with share with all animals and thus labor is the lowest form of human activity. Above that is work; here, activities are engaged in that produce enduring artifacts like technology, architecture, art etc. that are not merely consumed to keep us alive. Above work lies action; this according to Arendt was highest level of activity which she identified with the realm of politics, with politics being defined as the shared public space where free citizens meet and debate the common affairs.
Arendt presented the political arena as a place where citizens transcended nature, pointing out the contempt the ancient Greeks had for people who took no interest in public affairs reserving the Greek word ‘idiotes’, meaning idiot for such people. She argued that (with some justification) such political apathy had become a feature of the modern world. To guard against such apathy, she suggested that the modern world imbibe the ancient Greek ideal of direct democracy where every citizen at some point would be called upon to perform some public function. This solution is problematic as even political thinkers like Jean Jacque Rousseau who lived centuries before Arendt have pointed out that direct democracy simply doesn’t scale to large nation-states. For the citizens of the representative democracies that we have today, perhaps the minimum that can be achieved is make it a requirement to have civic duty to be taught in schools and for the more driven to become members of Civil Society Organizations or harness the growing power of technology platforms for political action.
Mao Zedong (1893-1976)
I hope any Chinese person who stumbles on this post won’t be offended by the fact that the first time I heard of Mao Zedong as a child, was from watching the British Comedy Mind Your language. For those of you who watched it, you might recall Xu (pronounced Su) Li, the student who worked at the Chinese consulate who answered every question with “Chairman Mao”. I of course had no clue who he was at the time but because of my fondness for the comedy at the time, his name was indelibly etched in my memory.
When I rediscovered him as a young adult, I began to appreciate why he was Xu Li’s answer for everything. Arguably only Confucius’ (who was the very first philosopher we treated in this 5-part series) shadow looms larger in the entire history of China and that like I hinted is a very debatable proposition. He is considered to be the “Father of Modern China” because he led the revolution that ushered in communist rule in China on October 1st, 1949. China till date remains officially communist.
As a young man, Mao Zedong was very much influenced by the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Lenin, you would recall led the first communist revolution, thus making Russia the world’s first communist state in 1917. Mao Zedong would adapt their ideas (known as Marxism-Leninism) to local Chinese conditions. This variant he would name Maoism.
Mao Zedong was a firm believer in the need for societies to constantly reinvent themselves on the back of revolutionary change. To this end, he would, after the initial communist revolution, attempt two more major campaigns to transform China. The first was called “The Great Leap Forward” (1958-62) and the second, “The Cultural Revolution” (1966-1976).
The Great Leap Forward was an attempt to turn then largely agrarian China (90% of the population were rural peasants) into an industrialized country with rural peasants being the driving force. Mao Zedong opted to use rural peasants instead urban technocrats to drive this change because he had a deep mistrust of city dwellers, believing that many of them still harbored desires for a return to China’s capitalist past. The Great Leap Forward is considered by many observers particularly those in the west to have been an unmitigated disaster, ushering in what is considered by many to be history’s largest or second largest famine leading to the deaths of 15-55 million people, though unsurprisingly some Chinese observers dispute some these facts.
The Cultural Revolution was a massive reorientation program were millions of urban dwellers were forcibly relocated to the rural areas to learn communist values from peasant farmers. Many urban intellectuals and other technocrats were forced to give up white-collar jobs and become small-scale farmers. Also many artifacts and symbols like temples and statues from pre-communist China were destroyed as part of the reorientation. The Cultural revolution only ended with Mao Zedong’s passing in 1976.
China would begin an overhaul of its communist economy with market oriented reforms in 1978. It would also slowly begin to open itself to the world and cautiously integrate itself into the global economy. The Chinese economy is now fully capitalist though curiously presided over by a communist government. Personally, I think it is more accurate to describe the current Chinese leadership as authoritarian rather communist even though it officially keeps the communist label.
Though Maoism has been clearly set aside and seemingly on a permanent basis, Mao Zedong himself will probably always cast some kind of shadow over China.
Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992)
Friedrich Hayek was primarily an economist who championed free markets at a time when the idea of free markets was unfashionable, but his concern with safeguarding the liberty of markets led him to study political and legal philosophy. He was particularly considered that government interventions into the workings of the market was the beginning of a slippery slope that would eventually lead to an all-encompassing government dictatorship and wrote extensively about this in his classic The Road to Serfdom published in 1944. It is important to have some background as to why this was a realistic fear for Hayek. At the time parts of Europe (including Russia) were in the throes of two very different forms of dictatorship, fascism and communism and it was by no means clear that democracy would eventually triumph over fascism and communism.
What actually pushed Hayek to the study of political and legal philosophy was a friendly critique of The Road to Serfdom that came from John Maynard Keynes, whose ideas were the reigning economic orthodoxy at the time and that Hayek was in principle against. Hayek had made clear that he wasn’t against all forms of government intervention. He supported interventions in the form of social insurance and Universal Basic Incomes (UBI) that brought relief to the economically disenfranchised that he thought did not interfere with the workings of the market. But Keynes pointed out that by permitting a government-sponsored program of social insurance, Hayek himself was on the same slippery slope to serfdom that he accused Keynes of being on. Keynes further remarked that Hayek had no principle by which to distinguish good public policy that promoted liberty from bad public policy that destroyed it. Hayek would as a result of this critique embark on a mission to discover a theoretical basis to distinguish good public policy and law from bad. That search would lead to the study of the very foundations of human society, culture and institutions.
In the end, Hayek (in my opinion) never really convincingly found the principle Keynes accused him of not having, but he did expend a lot of energy trying to understand the nature of order because he felt it was important to his defence of liberty and markets. His research led him to distinguish between two types of order: spontaneous order and designed order.
For Hayek spontaneous order is the kind that emerges naturally while designed order is deliberately made or imposed. He further posited that spontaneous order has no purpose of its own but serves to further the aims of the people who use and so spontaneous order promotes individual freedom. He considered markets an example of spontaneous order (and governments an example of designed order) and considered his preference for free markets to be based on the natural social order, since markets emerge naturally in society without being explicitly designed.
In any case, Hayek who found himself ignored for many years found his ideas becoming increasingly popular to the point of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974, though this was a surprise too many as Keynesianism was still the reigning orthodoxy. By the late 70s and early 80s, the pendulum had swung firmly in his favor as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan became Prime Minister of Britain and President of the United States respectively. Both were devotees of Hayek, particularly Thatcher. In her first cabinet meeting, she slammed Hayek’s writings on the conference table and declared “This is what we believe”. Both would go on to devise economic programs based on Hayek’s ideas and both were crucial to the emergence of the “Washington Consensus”, which can be considered an economic creed that aggressively pushes market-oriented reform practices like liberalization, deregulation and privatization. The Washington Consensus would be heavily imbibed by the multilateral, international finance organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in the early 80s and 90s with the resultant effect being that their Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP), which nations like Nigeria participated in (with dubious effect to say the least) were designed along Washington Consensus lines.
None of the above paragraph is to suggest that Hayek was a bad man or a bad thinker. He was a lot less dogmatic than his followers and had it been up to him to design the SAPs, given his penchant for social insurance and Universal Basic Incomes, those programs would have probably been a lot more humane.
