JUDITH N. SHKLAR
69
they were not isolated. Only their homesickness, aggravated by
worry about friends who did not get out, was overwhelming.
It
is
something that has to be experienced to be understood.
Homelessness, however, has its political dimensions, and one of
Arendt's best early essays dealt with statelessness. Her argument,
based on her own experience and that of other refugees in France,
was that in a world of nation-states, human rights are meaningless
apart from citizenship . The only fundamental right of man, there–
fore, is the right to be the legal citizen of some state. Without that
nothing else is possible. This, however, is not a call for an organic
community or nationality, but for citizenship as a legal and political
entitlement, not an accident of birth. The distinction is theoretically
very important, but it was also one of her blind spots. By the time
she wrote
The Origins of Totalitarianism
she had made up her mind that
nationalism was a thing of the past-it was dead and not to be con–
fused or compared with the living ideologies of the age. This notion,
which her Marxist inclinations reinforced, was immune to evidence;
nothing could persuade her that nationalism was still a very great
force in the present. On this point, I speak from personal experi–
ence. As one of her friends, Erich Heller, was to note, when Arendt
was wrong she "exploded into wrongness."
Young-Bruehl tells us that Arendt had a hard time organizing
the book that made her famous, and indeed
The Origins of Totalitarian–
ism
consists of three detached parts.
It
is also mistitled since
origins
suggests an historical account of social changes from their first
beginnings onward. Like most readers, Young-Bruehl, however,
finds Arendt's approach to history confusing. And well she might.
Arendt never showed the slightest respect for historians. She called
the heirs of Ranke "eunuchs" because of their striving for objectiv–
ity. The representation of the past through the chronological
arrangement of all the available evidence struck her as trivial. She
had no interest in explaining how something came to be, step by
step. What she found valuable was" the unpremeditated attentive
facing u'p to and resisting of reality," which was Heidegger's
response to
Geschichtlichkeit .
With bits of history, literature, biogra–
phy, and a lot of personal imagination and speculation, she set out,
and in fact managed, to create an enveloping sense of the world of
anti-Semites and Jews, and of the imperialists and their victims.
This indeed is Nietzschean history, not as piety, political advice, or
science, but in the service of the social
i~agination,
if not of "life."
