Love is Anti-Political

On Hannah Arendt's Conservative Liberalism

I’m delighted to share my latest podcast conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe. We spoke about King David, sincerity and authenticity, authority, liberalism, song and the face. Hope you find it as meaningful as I did.

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In many ways, Hannah Arendt was a classic “Cold War Liberal.” One of the recurrent themes in her work is the notion that love is an “anti-political” force. It leads us to ally with people who go against our group interest or whose ideological commitments conflict with our own.

While many political theorists define liberalism in terms of rights, especially, the right to property and privacy, it’s striking that Arendt takes a more conservative approach—she’s more interested in describing the phenomenology of liberalism than justifying it from first principles. It’s not so much that we have a right to love whomever we want, but that love is simply a fact of the human condition. Arendt says we can’t love groups because the whole thrust of love is that it redraws the lines of filiation, often to the behest of our own group. For Arendt, this wasn’t just theoretical—she claims that she was able to leave Germany with the help of a Nazi guard. The guard didn’t stop believing in Nazism but he seems to have made an exception for Arendt because of some interpersonal bond they shared. The personal story offers evidence that even in totalitarian regimes a liberal principle shines through—as individuals, we can’t help but feel connected to one another, even our enemies.

When speaking to Rabbi Wolpe on my podcast, he offered the perspective of a longtime congregational rabbi, endorsing Arendt’s idea as a bulwark against hyper-politicization in the pews. The ability to celebrate and mourn with people we love even we think they’re terribly wrong is a cultural fundament of liberalism and civil society even if it’s not a formal requirement. Eulogizing people for their character rather than for the signs they put on their yard is the kind of liberalism that Arendt understands and lives (often to great chagrin).

One thing I’ve become interested in is the sociological concept of a “plausibility structure” popularized by Peter Berger. That is, ideas, to live, need not just intellectual adherents but communal norms. Often, liberals and their critics dispute the foundations or first principles of their political theory rather than asking what cultural norms are required to sustain them.

Zohar Atkins @ZoharAtkins

What is the most important and also underestimated cultural norm needed for liberalism to work? You can’t say tolerance or respect or anything that obvious.

One of Arendt’s favorite sayings was a line from Burke that he “prefers the rights of an Englishman to the rights of Man.” This captures well the idea that rights are impractical and meaningless unless people are committed to them. In a radical way, Arendt’s story about the Nazi guard who saved her life is that his politics are not predictive of his ethics. Conversely, “being on the right side of history,” i.e., taking up a righteous cause, is no guarantee that one is a mensch in the interpersonal realm.

Of course, we have the right to befriend or dislike whomever we want—but the ability to befriend those whose values and/or epistemology diverge from our own may be one of those unexamined cultural norms needed to sustain liberalism.

Love, ironically, is anti-political, and yet because it follows laws of individual attraction rather than group interest it ends up being key to the politics of liberalism. For Arendt, there is no transcend obligation to love (in contrast to Dr. King for whom love is a form of imitatio Dei), yet love as a fact ensures that groupthink will always be fragile.

The Torah opens with God’s observation that it is not good to be alone. Loneliness is the first “bad” thing observed in the world. For Arendt, totalitarianism is “organized loneliness.” How fitting, then, that in her telling, the way to oppose totalitarianism is to cultivate solitude (the ability to be with oneself). Perhaps that is what love, too, accomplishes. Both love and solitude resist co-option by the crowd.

It’s worth contemplating Arendt’s diagnoses of the “Origins of Totalitarianism” because they point to the idea that formal rights alone won’t save us unless we are also also able to cultivate habits of mind and heart that pull us back from “the arena” and “into the tent.”