Obedience and political affairs

In the Hannah Arendt Center’s latest “Quote of the Week,” DIIS researcher Johannes Lang analyses Arendt’s conceptual critique of obedience. Arendt—one of the most celebrated and controversial political thinkers of the twentieth century—wrote that “there is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters.”

How could Arendt reject obedience as a factor in political and moral affairs? Was her basic point about totalitarianism not that it had reduced people to thoughtless puppets of the regime? Did she not describe Adolf Eichmann, chief organizer of transports to the Nazi death camps, as someone who had simply exchanged “one system of values for another” in order to serve his new masters? The individual, she seemed to be saying, had disappeared into a mass movement. But if this was not obedience, then what could possibly deserve the name?

To read the full article, visit the Hannah Arendt Center.

See also Johannes Lang’s recent article, “Against obedience: Hannah Arendt’s overlooked challenge to social-psychological explanations of mass atrocity”, published in Theory & Psychology 24, no. 5.