“In every crisis a piece of the world, something common to us all, is destroyed. The failure of common sense, like a divining rod, points to the place where such a cave-in has occurred.

Hannah Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics’, Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the state of politics, culture, education and truth in the modern world are truly examples of what she calls ‘exercises in thought’, which arise ‘out of incidents of living experience’ and intervene in those ‘intervals’, which may ‘contain the moment of truth.’[1] Thinking in a crisis is something ‘we seem to be neither equipped nor prepared for’ (p.13). And yet, precisely in such a crisis, against the despairs of ‘ever finding truth through mere contemplation’, we might begin instead to ‘try out [our] capacities for action’ and learn that wherever we act, we begin something. (p.62) For Arendt, a crisis is a beginning, and what is new emerges from moments of crisis as a sign of the persistence of human freedom and the common world within which we exercise it.

However, not all crises are the same, and not all responses to crisis involve building or expanding the common world. The neoliberal response to crisis actively undermines our common world, and replaces it with atomised, competitive units incapable of exactly the kind of thinking and acting Arendt thought characteristic of human freedom. In this essay I want to show how Arendt’s thinking about crisis can be used to rethink what I am calling the crisis of the common world. After presenting one of the central crises identified by Arendt – that of truth – I show how her analysis illustrates the corrosive features of neoliberalism and financial capitalism, and then return to Arendt to imagine how we might respond.

Between Past and Future offers a dark picture of the modern world. In essence, each essay exercises political thought in response to a crisis: tradition, history, authority, freedom, education, culture and truth. Arendt is neither shy about dramatizing the ‘fateful enormity in this state of affairs’ (p.63), nor timid in rousing us: ‘Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake.’ (p.156). Truly, from few others would we take this seriously, but from Arendt I am willing to trust: the world is at stake. What she means is less the existential threat of climate change and more the possibility of politics itself, for which a common world is necessary.

As a species of thinking in response to the threat of neoliberalism, critique must be as untimely as the crisis into which it intervenes. In Politics Out of History, Wendy Brown (2001, p.141-2) recommended to us the ‘ground of political motivation’ extolled by Arendt: ‘love of the world.’ The crisis upon which the possibility of political action was staked, was the loss of that world induced not only by the erosion of trust and authority but also by more systematic and deliberate efforts to sabotage the common world. Sabotage, for Theodore Veblen, defined the financial industries (see Nesvetailova & Palan 2020, pp.15-31); they operate on the principles that Arendt thought most deleterious to this common world.

In sketching an outline for Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy, Arendt (1992, pp.17-8) argued that the truly bad person is:

one who makes an exception for himself… those who are “secretly inclined to exempt themselves. The point is secretly: they could not do it publicly because then they would obviously stand against the common interest – be enemies of the people… And in politics, as distinguished from morals, everything depends on “public conduct.”

The crisis of the common world is in part induced by systematic features of neoliberal capitalism. Finance is only profitable because corporations secretly subvert the rules and regulations set for them, and, as we are seeing more and more, they actively propagate disinformation and ignorance about their activities.

Arendt was no particular critic of capitalism (nor a progressive), yet there are reasons to think she is far more astute in her analysis than the critics of today. Perry Anderson (1984, p.17) lamented the cultural turn in Marxist criticism, substituting deconstructive flair ‘in glittering compensation for [its] neglect of the structures of politics and economics’. Anderson’s nostalgic vision of a positivist Marxism has become Wendy Brown’s (2019, p.171) nostalgia for traditional liberalism, calling her opponents simply ‘uncultured’. Nancy Fraser (2013, p.9) is more sympathetic to the predicament we are in, but maintains that ‘the cultural turn seemed to swallow up political economy, even as it should have enriched it’. And Philip Mirowski, one of the foremost historians and critics of neoliberalism, goes further in proposing that the neoliberal thought collective and its numerous, well-funded branches ‘nurtures a much better appreciation of the relation of ideas to praxis than the nominal Left’ (Mirowski 2019, p.11; see also Mirowski & Plehwe 2009). These indictments of progressive and critical thought have eroded its ability to counteract the destructive opportunism of the right in various crises (see Mirowski 2013).

Why should Arendt offer something different, especially when her ‘crises’ are those of education, culture and truth (along with authority, freedom, tradition and history) rather than political economy? Arendt recognized two things that are crucially missing in much of what passes as critique today. She recognised the power of nostalgia for ‘traditional concepts’, which have not,

lost their power… On the contrary, it sometimes seems that this power of well-worn notions and categories becomes more tyrannical as the tradition loses its living force and as the memory of its beginning recedes; it may even reveal its full coercive force only after its end has come and men no longer even rebel against it (p.26)

The left reaches into its armory of concepts, only to find they have been hollowed out by the strategies of neoliberal politics, for instance ‘labour’, ‘commodification’, ‘alienation’ and ‘exploitation’ replaced from the inside with ‘human capital’ (Mirowski 2019, p.13).[2] Reaching for moral categories to condemn financial capitalism proves ineffectual, even as those same moral and political categories like freedom are deployed coercively. Linda Zerilli (2016, p.177) argues that for Arendt, the ‘real threat of nihilism is not the loss of standards as such but the refusal to accept the consequences of that loss’.

Arendt also provides a rubric for understanding what Dominic Kelly has recently called ‘reactionary conservatives’ of the hard right (see Kelly 2019, pp.217-24). Under the pressure of crisis, some use the ‘destructive distortions of tradition’ in order to attempt to ‘overcome and resolve’ something ‘new’ into ‘something old.’ (p.29) Reactionary politics has disastrous and violent consequences in times of crisis. Kelly’s portrait of the Lavoisier Group shows how climate denial has become a well-networked political movement, built on deliberately distorted versions of the call for scientific neutrality and objectivity, balanced media reporting, and the use of critical analysis (see Kelly 2019, pp.160-95).[3] However much we might object to their stated politics, Arendt shows how the far more corrosive aspect of these organizations is their sinister erosion of the conditions of ordinary truth and a common world.

The Crisis of Truth

Arendt’s essay ‘Politics and Truth’ resonates particularly in the context of hand-wringing about truth in its aftermath, that is, the discovery of ‘post-truth’ among rationalist liberals who believed in their fantasy of technocratic post-politics. Arendt recognises the difficult relationship between truth and politics, voicing a suspicion that ‘it may be in the nature of the political realm to deny or pervert truth of every kind, as though men were unable to come to terms with its unyielding, blatant, unpersuasive stubbornness.’ (p.237) Truth is unpersuasive because it refuses to grant us our fantasies. Colin Burrows (2020), discussing Pride and Prejudice, comments that Austen ‘identifies truth with a frustration of what we want to believe, and lies as the fictions towards which we are drawn’. Burrows perspicaciously identifies the willingness of what he calls the lie-ee, making the work of the liar much easier. Fiction, he argues, ‘wants to deliver plausible inventions which have a kind of allure while at the same time differentiating between those inventions and the seductive untruths of the liar.’ This distinction, at once obvious and subtle, echoes the role Arendt establishes for culture in her essay ‘The Crisis of Culture’.

But the distinction between fiction and lies also points to the important fact that truth in modernity is ‘neither given to nor disclosed to but produced by the human mind’, implicated in what she calls ‘facts and events’ that ‘constitute the very texture of the political realm’ (p.231). These facts, she elaborates, are ‘publicly known, and yet the same public that knows them can successfully, and often spontaneously, taboo their public discussion and treat them as though they were what they are not – namely, secrets’ (p.236). Like Burrows, Arendt identifies the peculiar wish to believe untruth and avoid fact that characterizes what we now call the era of post-truth. Liars know they’re lying, and so do their believers. Arendt highlights the fragility of factual truth, made all the more dire by the fact that such truths are the condition of a common world.

Factual truth is ‘no more self-evident than opinion, and this may be among the reasons that opinion-holders find it relatively easy to discredit factual truth as just another opinion’ (p.243). This base strategy that sows doubt in all directions and proclaims the subjectivity of essential facts about the world – like climate change or inequality – threatens to dissolve the very fabric of political activity. Unlike truth, lies need ‘no context to be of political significance’ (p.249). The liar is:

an actor by nature; he says what is not so because he wants things to be different from what they are – that is, he wants to change the world. He takes advantage of the undeniable affinity of our capacity for action, for changing reality, with this mysterious faculty of ours that enables us to say, “The sun is shining,” when it is raining cats and dogs (p.250)

This puts the liar in company with the political idealist, who so wants the world to be different that they might proclaim it so ahead of time. This can have a vindicating effect if the speaker happens to be powerful: they can fantasise a reality into existence by saying that it is so, and having their ‘orders’ obeyed. Truth, Arendt avers, is generally an obstacle to ‘that change of the world and of circumstances which is among the most legitimate political activities.’ (p.251)

Yet without it, we are building a dam in a desert. Arendt warns that falsehood ‘tears… a hold in the fabric of factuality’ (p.253), undermining the common world we share and according to which, alone, we can make decisions and judgments. Such falsehood is commonplace, but there is a species of lie Arendt is most fearful of. The ordinary liar, she notes, must be aware of the distinction between their own lie and reality; like the financiers or surveillance capitalists who lie in order to profit from the ignorance, their success depends on actually knowing (to some extent) the fact they disavow (see Zuboff 2019).[4] They sabotage the conditions of the market, in some instances, by having knowledge they have withheld from others, or mis-informing. Modern liars, however, have begun to believe their own lies. Arendt calls them ‘image-makers’, who come to believe their own lies, or are so immersed in the framework of fantasy they can no longer see beyond it. Their success depends on creating whole worlds out of lies, worlds that they increasingly manipulate and control without reference to facts. Arendt (p.258) speculates that the result of a

consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed.

Conversation with an inveterate liar is disorienting, but trying to make genuine political action in a world of systematic deceit is almost impossible. Without factual truth, ‘the political realm is deprived not only of its main stabilizing force but of the starting point from which to change, to begin something new’ (p.258). Similarly, the crises of education and culture compound the crisis of truth by removing ways in which we practice political judgment. But education and culture can equally enhance the extent to which we are willing to withstand the loss of fantasy. As Burrows noted, literature could help us distinguish between invention and falsehood, and Arendt adds, it can also help us bear the unpleasantness of truth. Arendt quotes Karen Blixen who wrote that, along with sorrow, ‘joy and bliss, too, become bearable and meaningful… only when they can talk about them and tell them as a story.’ (p.262)

Neoliberalism and the Crisis of the Common World

If you had to concoct an ideology that systematically eroded the conditions of the common world, you might come up with neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, it seems, is strangely self-aware, having exploited the various crises since Arendt’s essays were published to the present day. Naomi Klein (2007, p.6) quotes a key neoliberal populariser, Milton Friedman, who observed that:

only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

Having kept their ideas alive through a well-funded network of institutes, access to politicians and secure university positions (despite their constant attacks on the ‘academy’), neoliberalism has become a central political ideology. Part of the key to their success is in shaping perception, hence Friedman’s qualification that the crisis does not have to be ‘actual’. Rather, neoliberalism thrives off an ‘anything goes’ mantra, so long as it goes through the market.

Founded on the same post-Weberian basis as the Frankfurt School of critical theory, the neoliberals such as Hayek, and von Mises attempted to solve the contradictions and irrationality of capitalism ‘by defining, or redefining, or rediscovering, the economic rationality that will make it possible to nullify the social irrationality of capitalism’ (see Foucault 2008, p.105). Wendy Brown has long noted the de-politicising effect of liberal economic rationalism (e.g. Brown 2006, p.15), and Yves Rees (see 2019; The New York Review of Books 2015) has recently described the de-politicisation of the economics profession in Australia. Eliane Glaser (2018) directly identifies neoliberalism as a contributor to what she calls ‘anti-politics’. She argues that the rise of populism denotes a longing for ‘sincere ideology’ rather than the false allure of authentic politicians that the populist right has supplied.

But neoliberalism presents itself as balanced and impartial. As the Australian National University’s resident member of the neoliberal thought collective, the Mont Pelerin Society, Jeff Bennett (2012, p.30) puts it in dispelling the ‘green façade’,

the real challenge for society that arises from any polluting activity, including the extraction and use of fossil fuels [which he compares to breathing and eating], is to weigh the benefits we enjoy from the activities that involve pollution against the costs of those actions.

Under the guise of cost-benefit analysis, economic rationalism is propagated like a virulent weed and has long been the tool of pliant bureaucrats (see Amadae 2003; 2016). Economic rationalism conceals the introduction of market cultures and reasoning into all spheres. Glaser takes aim at ‘focus-grouping’ too, as a means of sneaking market-oriented decision making into, for instance, culture and education. Glaser follows Colin Hay in suggesting that neoliberals ‘deliberately set out to depoliticise’ in order to amass power in both the state and academy all the while denouncing and de-legitimising the more democratic forms of both.

Glaser also notes that the confluence of ‘markets and machines’ is particularly worrying for the crisis in politics. Reading Philip Mirowski vindicates this claim: both machines (as controlled by platform capitalists such as Alphabet and Facebook) and markets (as imagined by neoliberals) are ways of processing information.[5] Yet they are specifically defined information processors that exceed the capacities either of individuals, or of collective entities (such as the state), and so are designed to subvert the potential for coordinated political action. The neoliberals are not simply anti-scientific, they rather want what Mirowski calls a ‘tortured marriage of science and corporate commodification’. This requires ‘denialism’, which ‘postpones the issue’; ‘better to defer all political action to the market, which will come to some eventual accommodation to the transformation of nature [with geoengineering] in good time’ (see Mirowski 2013). They recognise that there is a crisis,[6] but they deny that you or I could make any judgment about how to deal with the crisis: we must leave it to the market.

That is, they deny what Arendt identifies as a primary political capability: judgment. As Mirowski writes, the success of their ‘information processors’ (here including the uncannily neoliberal Wikipedia) ‘only holds water if we are allowed great latitude in the definition of “truth.” Neoliberals have great faith in the marketplace of ideas; and for them, the truth is validated as what sells.’[7] And the markets so beloved of neoliberals actively erode primary democratic virtues: transparency, publicity and consistency.

There are a number of examples one could choose, and the global response to the financial crisis of 2007-2008 supplied critics with many more (see Robinson 2020). Many involve a seemingly contradictory situations where a lie is knowingly propagated and accepted by all parties in order to avoid the consequences of the crisis. For instance, Robert Skidelsky, a Keynesian economist, relates how governments imposed austerity in the wake of the crisis despite knowing that greater stimulus would have a better effect.[8] They did so because of what he calls a ‘fiscal delusion’ that consolidating public debt was necessary to appease investor confidence, and convince the wealthy business people that they were not going to increase taxes.[9] Austerity produced a greater economic decline than would otherwise have occurred, but what mattered was protecting particular assets and maintaining ‘financial stability.’ In responding to the crisis, then, governments actively sabotaged their capacity to coordinate democratic, planned responses,[10] and moreover, claimed to be supporting the economy when in fact they were simply sending covert messages to investors that their interests were being looked after.[11]

We all know that it takes a great deal of structural violence (law and order), socialised risk for private profit, and deliberately obscure or enabling legal regimes to keep corporations profitable (see Pistor 2019). But, dissatisfied with the already significant advantages they gain from these regulatory affordances, businesses are also actively engaged in sabotaging the very conditions that allow them to profit. For instance, the industrial scale tax avoidance arms of big banks destroy the ability of governments to manage their cosy legal regimes. Nesvetailova and Palan (2020) write that nations

need those taxes to maintain security, infrastructure and economic stability that afforded the individuals or companies living there the wealth to purchase such contracts in the first place. But they have been sabotaged.

They conclude that the fact that businesses need regulatory environments to survive and profit is ‘one of those unpleasant truths that somehow fell out of fashion’ (ibid., p.145).

Indeed, William Davies (2019) contends that falsehood is very much in fashion, as though ‘there is now a penalty attached to speaking the truth… Words have now broken free of their factual moorings’ (see also Davies & McGoey 2011). But Davies recognises the appeal of new wave of blatant lying that has appeared during the 2016 American presidential election and campaigning for Brexit: ‘the yearning to be able to say anything’ combats the moralised reprimand, ‘you can’t say anything any more’, and can ‘easily find expression in a leader who will do precisely that, regardless of evidence.’ It is perhaps for this reason that centrist and establishment outlets are worried about populism on both the left and right, for their insistence on naming either reality (the orthodox left’s insistence on class, for instance, or on [in]equality more generally) or an appealing fantasy or widely held mis-belief (the right’s insistence that universities are conducting left-wing indoctrination, and suppressing ‘free speech’).[12]

But what this means – and the refrain of ‘polarization’ plays this out – is that,

we have ceased to live in a common world where the words we have in common possess an unquestionable meaningfulness, so that, short of being condemned to live verbally in an altogether meaningless world, we grant each other the right to retreat into our own world of meaning, and demand only that each of us remain consistent with his own private terminology (pp.95-96).[13]

Arendt’s condemnation of this retreat aims not only at liars, but also at lazy inarticulacy expressed these days by liberal outrage. Conversations too readily begin and end with feeling that fails to, as Linda Zerilli (2016, p.9) writes, ‘get certain objects in view as objects of judgment at all.’[14]  We must, as Deborah Nelson (2017, p.59) puts it, ‘face reality together, not the emotions that reality inspires. Facing reality requires ‘facing facts alone together’ and poses the challenge of (describing) how we do so (ibid., p.92). Nelson describes Arendt as insisting ‘on facing painful reality as the price not only of sharing the world with others in their plurality but of having any world at all left to share’ (ibid., p.48).

(Re-)Constructing the Common World

The above examples illustrate not only neoliberal and financial capitalism’s disregard for the conditions of politics – truth and facts – and political virtues – sincerity, conviction and transparency – they also reflect the sheer power of corporations to continue degrading political life and democracy. Corporations aim to become political entities, like liars, creating a reality into which they act.[15] Arendt believed, perhaps for this reason, that thought should be kept apart from power. As Deborah Nelson notes, following Arendt, ‘Thought married to power means the destruction of plurality…’ (see Nelson 2017).[16] We should take this seriously as a challenge to the possibility of new forms of political life.

And yet, as I argued, although Arendt’s essays signal despair, they also offer ways of rethinking crisis. Arendt writes that,

It is the very nature of every new beginning that it breaks into the world as an “infinite improbability,” and yet it is precisely this infinitely improbably which actually constitutes the very texture of everything we call real. Our whole existence rests, after all, on a chain of miracles… (p.169)

It is an extraordinarily unguarded claim from an extremely measured and circumspect philosopher.

The odds, however, seem stacked against a genuine common world. Davies (2019) writes that ‘Loose talk is infectious and addictive’, and works corrosively against the ‘many mechanisms in place to remind powerful people of the actual facts of the matters – mechanisms that include quangos and policy research institutes and publicly funded broadcasters – [put in place because] we assume they need constant reminding’. Yet those institutions that are to remind us of facts suffer the predicament of politicians: loss of trust, and increasing distraction of their audience in favour of the ‘high-speed internet’, now such a priority with governments (see Davies 2020). They have struggled when it comes to reporting the ongoing catastrophe of climate change and been slow to respond to the fragmentation of audiences.[17]

Institutions are equally badly placed to properly account for what Nelson calls, following Mary McCarthy (Arendt’s good friend), the ‘fact’s dissidence [which] lies in its revelation of the accident, the unexpected, the surprise, or the “miracle” of everyday experience…’ (Nelson 2017, p.87). Institutions police the borders of recognition in a world that Arendt describes, combining the beauty and terror of ‘natality’, as ‘constantly invaded by strangers, newcomers whose actions and reactions cannot be foreseen by those who are already there and are going to leave in a short while.’ (p.61) This phrase, that so devastates at the end, is also hopeful. It asserts the fact of human plurality, which, along with ‘concreteness in language work together as the safeguards of rather than against reality’ (Nelson 2017, p.59). Arendt (in Zerilli 2016, p.35) repeats this fact in The Human Condition, writing that,

reality is not guaranteed primarily by the “common nature” of all men who constitute it, but rather by the fact that, differences of opinion and the resulting variety of perspectives not withstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object.

Thus, of an ancient conception of political freedom Arendt (p.148) writes,

Freedom need[s], in addition to mere liberation, the company of other men who were in the same state, and it needed a common public space to meet them – a politically organized world, in other words, into which each of the free men could insert himself by word and deed.

Political freedom, an idea perverted by the invention of the sovereign will (p.163), is for Arendt fundamental to human life. Human life is both after creation and before meaning, which we must make for ourselves. ‘Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the same.’ (p.167) But the conditions of political freedom are constantly threatened. If the human condition is one of plurality, beginning and the continual need to accommodate strangers, it will always contain an aspect of crisis. Our response to these crises is what matters; it matters that there is a common world within which to respond together, and a confrontation and sense of reality to which to respond.