Hannah Arendt’s Concept of “Impotent Bigness”

“Impotent bigness uses empty violence to lash out against the vulnerable to compensate for its own utter inability to change the world in any meaningful way.”

Introduction

The great 20th century political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote a great deal about the feelings of powerlessness that had befallen those of her generation. These casualties included the lonely subjects of modernity who became isolated and detached by the emergence of capitalism and liberalism, the tragic victims of prejudice and oppression, and—most famously—refugees and the stateless, who were left without even the basic “right to have rights.” Why this occurred is directly tied to Arendt’s theorizing on evil; along with Augustine, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, Arendt was among evil’s shrewdest analysts. Her most famous work is on the infamous “banality of evil,” which has become forever associated with the thoughtless mechanic reasoning of bureaucrats like Adolf Eichmann, as they carried out mass murder. Arendt chimed that the banality of 20th century evil was reflected in the desire of totalitarian subjects to surrender even their capacity for critical thought and dissent to a fascist leader (and his propagandistic apparatus). These subjects could not even become demonic or “radically evil”—as Kant and Arendt herself once thought in The Origins of Totalitarianism—because a radically evil person knows the good and chooses to do evil. The banal bureaucrat of death thinks nothing of good or evil, and only of orders and power.

Less attention is paid to another dimension of Arendt’s analysis: political leaders who embody the traits of “impotent bigness,” as she framed it. In an era where the American President is obsessed with “bigness” and continues to enjoy mass appeal among post-modern conservatives (analyzed by myself and others here), it is worth looking into this matter.

Modernity and Power

Last week, I published a piece at Merion West entitled “Why Millennials Are Angry,” which discussed the feelings of powerlessness—of being a wasted generation—that prompt many younger people to gravitate towards either reactionary or socialist views. The reasons are very similar to what Arendt herself would have diagnosed 70 years ago. The classical world of antiquity was characterized by a deep sense of human powerlessness before nature. This was reflected in a variety of different mythological and religious traditions, from the Buddhist insistence on liberating one’s self from the root of all suffering in desire to the Daoist call for “effortless action” to integrate into existence. While very distinct in many respects, these philosophies share an insight that much of life’s suffering comes from trying to master a world that permits no master. In a Greek context, heroes such as Achilles and Oedipus lived in a universe governed by fortune and fate. For a time, the bold and powerful figure might be able to win fortune’s favor and, consequently, ascend to venerated status. However, like all mortals their efforts were doomed from the start to eventual tragedy and annihilation. In the underworld, the best one could hope for was an eternity of meaningless peace and changelessness, a point that led Achilles in The Odyssey to exclaim that he would rather be a slave on earth than to rule over the “breathless dead”:

“But you, Achilles,/ There is not a man in the world more blest than you—/ There never has been, never will be one./ Time was, when you were alive, we Argives/ honored you as a god, and now down here, I see/ You Lord it over the dead in all your power./ So grieve no more at dying, great Achilles.’

I reassured the ghost, but he broke out protesting,/ ‘No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!/ By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—/ Some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”