Tyranny and law

Where does tyranny come from? Levinas and Simone Weil argue that it grows out of the decay of neighborliness and hospitality, and Hannah Arendt claims that it comes when the creative solidarity of political friendship and spontaneous political action are suppressed. True; but all these fail to deal with what Gillian Rose called the “question of law” and thus become complicit in totalitarianism.

So argues Andrew Shanks in Against Innocence: An Introduction to Gillian Rose : “totalitarianism is also the extreme form of what emerges where institutions designed to enable cultural pluralism collapse, to be replaced by mere violence . . . . Good institutions are needed as a bulwark against totalitarianism – a good civil service, a good judiciary, above all perhaps good, well-established religious institutions – defusing the tensions, between rival groups and individuals, on which totalitarianism feeds.”

Shanks characterizes Arendt in particular as an “Augustinian” thinker without interest in how the “Earthly City” (what Arendt derisively dismisses as “society”) is organized. Her brief nod to institution, law, and authority in her essay “On Authority” is “no more than a nod.” He acknowledges that “Arendt’s essay is repudiation of any over-generalized ‘liberal’ repudiation of auctoritas , inasmuch as naive liberalism, in that sense, is knocking away a major sort of bulwark against totalitarianism.” That is heartening, but it is not enough: It “is still not a full opening up of the question of law.”

The reason, Rose suggests, is that Arendt’s contempt for “society” keeps her outside any association, where she can “preserve her innocence, untainted by any direct association.”

In place of this “Augustinianism” (which is doubtfully Augustinian), Rose draws on both Hegel and Kierkegaard (!) to re-legitimize authority, particularly the “authority of traditional, non-revolutionary religious Sittlichkeit .”