Abstract
David D. Kim’s Arendt’s Solidarity illuminates “the most striking blind spot in the copious body of Arendt scholarship”: the concept of solidarity (xv). Kim makes a persuasive case that, despite this lack of engagement—in contrast to, say, the reams of scholarship on Arendtian nonsovereign freedom and action—solidarity is a pivotal concept for understanding Arendt’s political theory. Via deft readings of archival materials alongside canonical works, Kim manages to show in remarkable depth how solidarity is a theoretical site to which Arendt returned throughout her career “as a crux in every major concern of hers: Jewish assimilation, Zionism, Nazi ideology, revolution, violence, education, the American Republic, and decolonization” (4). The experience of reading the book is such that its central thesis—that Arendt’s political-theoretic “troubles” with solidarity are pivotal to her transatlantic political thought as such (4–11)—came to feel highly intuitive and indispensable to my conception of Arendtian thought. It is the kind of argument one could have sworn had already been made (though it has not!), lending the core claim the uncanny sense of familiarity that signifies a scholarly work of the first order. While the book would stand as a contribution to Arendt studies and Arendtian political theory along this dimension alone, Kim also proposes to use Arendt’s ambivalent theorization of solidarity as a concept and her uneven attunement to solidarity in practice to consider questions about solidarity in Arendt’s time, and ours.
Kim lays the groundwork for his argument with an introduction that frames the elusive contours of the concept of solidarity in social and political thought and the selective, overly inferential readings of Arendt on solidarity. The decisive conceptual point across Arendt’s work is that the stakes of solidarity tend in two contradictory directions. On the one hand, solidarity seems to be pivotal to binding collective subjects, reaching out across asymmetric circumstances as an innovative force for new practices of freedom. On the other hand, solidarity flattens. It draws dangerous equivalences where they may not exist and/or binds collective subjects so fanatically that they erase any possibility of solidarity with those whom they subordinate as outsiders to the solidaristic community. Here, Kim’s Arendt promisingly envisages solidarity as a form of acting with others that does not presuppose uniformly aligned interests or ends. At least in the abstract, Arendt very much embraces how solidarity binds actors across differentiated, even asymmetric positions.
The first three chapters track how Arendt’s prewar writings explore solidarity through the influence of existential philosophy, her fascination with Augustinian Christianity, and “a concealed history of critical Jewish thought and action” responsive to the advent of modern post-Enlightenment European antisemitism (96). The point of these three chapters is not only to demonstrate how Arendt’s focus on solidarity dates back all the way to her first book, The Concept of Love in Augustine, but also to show how those considerations inflect her later, more canonically recognized thought across the Atlantic. For example, her critical reading of Christian neighborly love as an isolating, otherworldly orientation that presaged a flight from more worldly forms of care is evident in her November 1962 letter to James Baldwin. In this letter, she declares herself “frightened” by Baldwin’s excoriating appeal to a politics of love because solidarity based on love can morph into hate or “vengeance” (54–57). For Arendt, Christian love and other “intense feelings” could only ultimately intrude upon the politics of solidarity by collapsing the space for persuasion among co-citizens, as her first philosophical intuitions dating back to Augustine had suggested to her (197). Such is one of many object lessons in Arendt’s inability to stretch her categorical distinctions to lend insight to newly encountered contexts of freedom and domination in dialogue with concrete others.
The tragedy about these missed opportunities is that the power of her prewar philosophical vision to analyze the dilemmas of domination is still in evidence in Kim’s reading of Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen. In typically futile ways, Arendt’s Varnhagen confronts the false promise of Enlightenment humanism. Exposing how neither the individualized social striving of assimilation into German upper-class circles nor a retreat to an insular Jewish communal solidarity could transform European antisemitism after the Dreyfus Affair, Arendt explores the dilemmas of an oppressed, class-stratified community that had to navigate its visible exclusions and partial incorporation into the imperial nation-state. In retrospect, the possible connections to other struggles against oppression and critical postures that intellectuals might therein assume are glaring. What is striking here is how many of the conclusions about the need for a critical politics of pariahdom that Arendt draws from her deep insight into the structural bind into which antisemitism placed European Jewry—and the failures both of assimilation and the Zionist replication of the nation-state model alike to resolve that bind—could have led to much more sophisticated and sympathetic connections to the politics of the oppressed in her adopted home of the United States and elsewhere. But they did not. On the whole, despite her own exposure to similar chasms of understanding separating the worlds of Jewish refugees from those of even critical German exiles like Thomas Mann, Arendt frequently overestimated the flexibility of her own approach to translate across connected-but-differentiated modes of domination. Thus, her limited capacity to effectively refigure concepts gleaned from experiences on one side of the Atlantic to the other moved her notion of solidarity more toward the pole of an undifferentiated uniformity in practice. She cast racialized others as performing the “wrong” (too angry) kind of solidaristic claims-making. This inflexibility was shaped by her disavowal of the most basic realities of U.S. racial politics and its histories.
Kim shows across the next four chapters how Arendt came to rigidify her own opposition between the European imperial nation-state that laid the foundations for totalitarianism and what she called in reverential terms the “American Republic.” Here, Kim’s study further extends a welcome series of turns in the Arendt scholarship that has documented (and taken more conceptually seriously) her encounter with the American and global politics of racism, (settler) colonialism, and decolonization. Kim traces how Arendt consistently apes a whitewashed American civic mythology that envisaged her adopted homeland as an exemplary space for republican solidarity and plurality. It was a kind of recast Roman republic without empire. How this analogy unshakably holds for Arendt is a grave error about Roman politics—shocking, even, given her debts to Augustine, himself a great observer of imperial (self-and-other) debasement. Her adulation relied on her dismissing settler colonialism and Native genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, Japanese internment, and U.S. imperialism as aberrations—loose threads distracting from the main weave of citizenship, deliberation, and constitutional balance in American political thought.
Much of the scholarship in political theory on Arendt and race/racism has focused on Arendt’s essay “Reflections on Little Rock,” but Kim joins other recent work in significantly widening the archive to think through a more cacophonous mixture of racial and colonial violence that she could never see her way to acknowledging as truly politically salient. Kim does not pull punches here. He successfully dismantles Richard H. King’s defense of Arendt as a non-racist (or at least as someone whose distasteful personal prejudices did not shape how we ought to view her conceptual theorizing) with detailed readings that show how “her racist beliefs find their way into a hierarchical formulation of citizenship” (154–163). Kim insists: “They manifest themselves in injurious theorizations of politics, violence, revolution, and justice. Her internalized racism is inseparable from the model of survival or the new beginning possible in a white dominated nation. It pits her solidarity with the American republic [as an assimilable immigrant read as white and quickly granted citizenship in 1950] against interracial solidarity” (115). In other words, her racism matters because it shaped not only how Arendt personally practiced solidarity—rather badly!—but also how she conceived of solidarity in promising but ultimately restricted ways.
Kim’s persuasive argument that aspects of Arendt’s theorizations of concepts bear racist implications raises questions about what to do with such concepts. Take violence. One of the striking episodes Kim relates in the book is from Arendt’s participation in a December 1967 public forum on the legitimacy of violence at the Theatre for Ideas in New York. During this event, she articulates the kernel of ideas found in On Violence. In the debate, Arendt’s condemnations of violence—most especially anticolonial and antiracist counterviolence—come up against the more structurally literate analysis of the Irish diplomat Connor Cruse O’Brien. For Cruse O’Brien, the question of (ill)legitimacy must be preceded by a reckoning with the everyday ways that social critics themselves are implicated in the violence of a global order underpinned by the hegemony of a settler-colony fashioned by genocide. When Arendt evades O’Brien’s points, she shows herself unwilling to think beyond (or differently configure) her violence/politics binary to encompass responsibility for these basic realities (237–39). Yet after this thorough demolition of Arendt’s conception of power as the fruit off a white settler-colonial tree, Kim appears to use in his conclusion the classically Arendtian notion that genuine power excludes violence in his critique of Trumpian supremacist authoritarianism (252). It is still sometimes elusive, then, whether the problem lies in Arendt’s concepts, their applications, or a mixture of both, and what that means for theorists wielding these concepts today.
Kim has written a historically rigorous book that nevertheless allows readers to consider Arendt as a screen for the pathologies of disavowal and racialized structures of solidarity haunting the memory politics of the Atlantic world. He powerfully unearths some of her (and its) key moments. At the same time, his conceptual conclusions may disappoint some political theorists, as they tend to fall short of drawing out more fundamental lessons or eliciting more sharply delineated questions about the philosophical and political bases of solidarity. In contrast to the profound interpretive work on Arendt, one is left with a somewhat thinner account of where Arendt and Arendtian political theory fit into recent political-theoretical frameworks that conceptualize solidarity in relation to global and structural injustice, freedom, and neoliberal capitalism. This is the one promise on which Arendt’s Solidarity does not quite make good. For example, Kim tells us in the conclusion that “solidarity needs to be intersectional” (254). Much as I agree, this urgent contemporary appeal does not serve to adjudicate nor normatively redescribe in felicitous ways the kinds of situations, then or now, where solidarity is put to the test—notably but not exclusively the question of Palestine.
Kim also ventures in conclusion that solidarity is an experimental practice: “Each member partakes in solidarization as a collective journey through which we pay attention to those who are not in our boat” (259). This formulation veers close to remoralizing solidarity to (over)compensate for the rigid exclusions at the heart of Arendt’s vision. True, attention to these constitutive outsides is indispensable, but for whom and why? The proposed notion fails to capture a key element of solidarity: that standing with others is not just openness to the other for their sake; indeed, it seems ever less likely that it could be in an age where precarity swallows once- (and in other ways still-) dominant selves. Instead, solidarity today would have to be animated both by a sense of profound historical reckoning and a forward-looking sense of shared stakes in emancipation across asymmetric—even contradictory—positions.