Sidetracking the Theologico Political Problem: Hannah Arendt's Critique of Political Technology
Year: 2011

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the relationship between religion and politics. The confidence liberal democracy gained after the collapse of communism soon suffered a serious blow following the resurgence of various religious movements reclaiming their rightful place in the public sphere or even openly declaring their hostility to the secular order. This rather unexpected return of the religious on the political scene urged scholars to seriously reconsider the dominant Enlightenment view that the forces unleashed by modernity will eventually totally deprive religion of its authority in public matters. In particular, the question was raised whether it is possible at all to imagine a politics that would not find its legitimacy in a transcendent absolute. Much of this scholarly debate has been framed in terms of what is called "political theology," a term of ancient lineage, but the main outlines of which are usually traced back to a fierce debate among intellectuals in Weimar Germany. The protagonists in this debate included such diverse thinkers as Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Kantorowicz,  Benjamin and Karl Barth, but the clearest formulation of the stakes involved were delivered by Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. Arguing that all politics is merely the continuation of theology by other means, Schmitt famously contended that "all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts." Leo Strauss, on the other hand, argued that there is precisely a fundamental conflict between political theology and political philosophy or, in other words, between the claim that the political order is founded on revelation and the claim that it is founded on reason. Moreover, he maintained that this tension cannot be resolved. Hence his assertion that during the Weimar years he "found himself in the grip of the theologico political predicament." Given the prominent status this debate enjoyed during the Weimar period, it is, however, as also Peter Eli Gordon recently observed, striking to note that Hannah Arendt's political theory doesn't in any way conform to its main terms. Despite the fact Arendt must have been, without doubt, quite familiar with the main arguments and even knew some of the protagonists personally, it is, therefore, not surprising to find that attempts to explore the relationship between Arendt and thinkers such as Strauss and Schmitt usually frame their story in terms of an "unspoken" or "hidden" dialogue. For many contemporary thinkers holding fast to the idea of a secular politics, Arendt's apparent silence on this subject is highly frustrating. While one can find in her one of the most resolute defenders of the autonomy of the political, she indeed seems to have left us no means to ward off recent attempts of the religious to colonize the political realm. Starting from a reading of Arendt's early essay 'Religion and Politics, I will argue, however, that she didn't intervene directly in this debate because she contested its underlying presupposition that politics necessarily requires an absolute foundation in the first place. Contending that the two schools of thought that consider communism as a "political religion" wrongly hold either that politics needs a transcendent source of authority (Vogelin) or that political ideologies merely serve the same functions as religions (Marxism) Arendt argues here that the "long alliance between religion and authority does not necessarily prove that the concept of authority is itself of a religious nature." As Arendt frequently stresses that it were the Romans who bequeathed the concept of authority to Western thought, most commentators have thought to have found the origin of the theologico political presupposition in the subsequent appropriation of Rome's political heritage by the Christian Church. I will show, however, that Arendt holds that the belief that the source of authority must not be man made has a much older history and actually originated with Plato's desire to implement his theory of ideas in the public realm. For Arendt, the idea that politics cannot function without some form of religious sanctification can therefore be traced back to Plato's invention of a system of rewards and punishment in the afterlife as a deterrent to impose transcendent standards on the multitude. Moreover, she even credits Plato for coining the word "theology" in precisely this political context. Subsequently, I will argue that Arendt's work allows us to understand that the central presupposition of political theology finds it origin more precisely in Plato's attempt to escape the contingency and fickleness that permeates the realm of plurality by transforming political action into a mode of fabrication. There is strong evidence that this insight is much indebted to her former teacher Martin Heidegger. From his early critique that ancient ontology transformed Being as presencing into a permanently present ground implying that, for Plato and Aristotle, "the primordial sense of being is being produced" to his later critique of "onto theology" which claims to have certain knowledge of the ultimate cause of all beings, Heidegger never stopped questioning the fact that the central concepts of Western metaphysics originated in the production experience. Similarly, for Arendt, the problem of political theology could only arise at all because politics as such has always been been wrongly understood as a form of poiesis. Punning on Schmitt's dictum, we could consequently say that, in Arendt's view, all significant concepts yielded by the tradition of political philosophy such as sovereignty, means/ends, power, violence, etc. are decontextualized technological concepts. Hence, to conclude, I will argue that the main target of Arendt's critique is not political theology, nor, for that matter, political philosophy, but what we could tentatively call "political technology."