This edition of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is about Seyla Benhabib’s Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin. Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and was Director of the Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics (2002-2008). Benhabib was President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association between 2006-2007, has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1995, and has been a Corresponding Member of the British Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences since 2018. She received the Ernst Bloch prize in 2009 for her contributions to cultural dialogue in a global civilization, the Leopold Lucas Prize of the Evangelical Academy of Tubingenin 2012, and the Meister Eckhart Prize of the Identity Foundation and the University of Cologne in May 2014 for her contributions of contemporary thought. She is the author and editor of many works, most notably Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations (2008), Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (1986), and Dignity in Adversity: Human Rights in Troubled Times (2011). You can learn more about her here.
What is this book about?
Exile, Statelessness, and Migration explores the intertwined lives, careers, and writings of a group of prominent Jewish intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century—in particular, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Hirschman, and Judith Shklar as well as Hans Kelsen, Emmanuel Levinas, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss.
These well-known thinkers faced migration, statelessness, and exile because of their Jewish origins. Even if they did not take positions on specifically Jewish issues, the sense of not being wholly at home in the larger society led them to confront essential questions: What does it mean for the individual to be an equal citizen and to wish to retain one’s ethnic, cultural, and religious differences, or perhaps even to rid oneself of these differences altogether? What forms would such expressions of difference take?
The book is clustered around four systematic issues: political voice and loyalty, legality and legitimacy, value pluralism and the problem of judgment.
The title of your book “Exile, Statelessness, and Migration” suggests many different issues that could be the subject matter of sociology, law, cultural studies, migration studies etc. Yet the book is about the “intertwinement” of the lives and ideas of some of the most significant Jewish thinkers of the previous century. How do biographical factors throw light on these ideas?
I am fascinated by how these thinkers experienced exile, migration, and statelessness in their own lives and how this is reflected or refracted in their writings. In that sense, the book practices “thick contextualization,” without reducing ideas to biographical details. I borrow the term “force fields” from Martin Jay to describe my methodology. In a “force field,” a cluster of ideas and themes develops as a result of the strength of the center pulling these elements toward itself, while there are also centripetal forces pushing them away from the center as well as from one another.
While exile, statelessness and migration are central to Hannah Arendt’s, and in later years, to Judith Shklar’s work, Albert Hirschman did not write about the loss of citizenship but rather about “exit, voice, and loyalty.” Yet as I show in chapter 8, “exit” can also refer to having to exit or leave a country, a homeland, and not just to leaving a firm, as is often supposed that Hirschman refers to. This dimension of political exit becomes clearer in Hirschman’s work as he revisits his birth city of Berlin many years after leaving it as a young socialist militant.
Isaiah Berlin’s case is very interesting in that rather than being an exile or a stateless person, he is a paradigm of successful integration into the host culture of the United Kingdom. Yet in his case as well, multiple loyalties and their conflicts continue, such as to the Russian culture of his childhood, to Israel and the Jewish people and to his Majesty’s UK. How do these loyalties influence his understanding of pluralism and his claim that there can be no universe that encompasses all human values worth cherishing and that one must choose one or the other among them?
Why is your subtitle “Playing Chess with History” ?
Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin were political refugees in Paris from 1933 to 1940 and they taught Arendt’s future husband, Heinrich Blücher, to play chess. I open the book with the correspondence among the three of them concerning these chess games. Playing chess was not only a pastime for Walter Benjamin but also a powerful metaphor for many complex thoughts.
Thus, one of Walter Benjamin’s most famous writings, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” begins with the unforgettable description of an automaton in old Turkish attire playing chess. The movements of the puppet chess master are controlled by a dwarf sitting invisibly under the chess table. We know from historical sources that such automatons existed and were much cherished in the European courts of the Enlightenment. The fact that a dwarf controls the moves of the puppet master is a metaphor for those who believed, such as orthodox Marxists did, in the inexorable march of history. Benjamin thought that such a conception of history led to political quietism and capitulation Rather, he argued, history does not consist of the inevitable march of uncontrollable forces but is a contingent assemblage of events in the midst of which a Messianic, wholly unexpected, moment of redemption can emerge.
I argue that Arendt, as well as Adorno, were indebted to Benjamin’s idea of “constellations’’ through which a wholly new and unexpected configuration could erupt. The tangled personal and intellectual relationship between Arendt, Benjamin, and Adorno is one of the central questions in the book.
The metaphor of playing chess with history is also applicable to Shklar’s escape with her family from Riga, Latvia over Sweden, then Siberia, to Japan, and eventually to Montréal, after a brief stint in New York.
We also learn from Jeremy Adelman’s fantastic biography of Albert Hirschman, The Worldly Philosopher. The Odyssey of Albert Hirschman (2013), that in the 1940’s, Hirschman was helping the American Friends Committee settle refugees in the US by forging papers for them in Marseilles, France such as to enable them to cross the border from occupied France to Spain. Among those who were helped to escape via this route were Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher but, alas not Walter Benjamin, who would commit suicide in the Spanish border town of Port Bou. Hirschman certainly was among the few militants and resistance fighters of the time who helped refugees like Hannah Arendt to leave Europe. The pieces of the chess game were in place but not known to the players themselves.
Whereas Arendt, Benjamin, Adorno, Hirshman are German-Jewish thinkers, neither Shklar nor Berlin can be characterized as such. Do they belong among this group?
Departing sharply from system-building in the mode of German thought, Shklar sought to ask the important questions rather than provide tightly argued systematic answers. She turned to the moral psychology of citizens of post-war liberal democracies and their practices of citizenship as well wage-earning; she saw such activities as providing new forms of dignity and forestalling cruelty. But her early work on Legalism (1963) shows the influence both of Max Weber, the great German sociologist, and of Hannah Arendt. Shklar’s concept of “legalism,” like Weber’s typology of legal-rational authority, means that the legal system is a formally correct and self-referential whole that generates correct statutes and rules in accordance with the proper application of procedures. Yet whether this machinery of legality produces justice, respects human rights or enhances citizens’ autonomy is a moot question. Weber himself thought that the machinery of legal-rational authority would fall prey either to “sensualists without heart and bureaucrats without spirit,” and/or be hijacked by charismatic and demagogic leaders. Modern systems of legitimacy remained unstable, and Weber did not have much faith that liberal democracies could endure without sliding into some form of authoritarianism. Shklar took up this challenge and provided her own answers via a moral psychology and philosophy of everyday virtues and citizenship.
Isaiah Berlin had so intensely internalized Max Weber’s challenge that at times he acknowledged this, while at other times denying Weber’s thesis of the fragmentation of values in modernity upon his own thinking. As opposed to Weber, Berlin’s thesis of the pluralism of values does not describe a condition unique to modernity but is characteristic of previous historical epochs as well. For Berlin, the human horizon contains multiplicity of values, not all of which can be realized either by individuals or by societies at any one point in time. Berlin is, of course, insistent that pluralism is not relativism and it does not mean that we must accept all values. Yet it is unclear how Berlin defends this distinction between pluralism and relativism without resorting to some conception of human nature or essence. Berlin’s answers imply that although we cannot provide deductive, incontrovertible philosophical justifications for why some values are worth defending while others are not, nonetheless we can exercise correct judgment for which good reasons can be given.
I end the book with the “burdens of judgment” as Rawls names this issue. Already Arendt as well as Adorno had turned to Kant’s distinction between “determinative” and “reflective” judgment to articulate a new relationship between the universal and the particular. Like Rawls, they had already argued that the work of judgment did not consist in subsuming the particular under the universal alone, but in the interpretative task of finding the proper universal -that is, a principle, model, or paradigm–if such existed at all. Arendt, in particular, followed Kant’s teaching of the enlarged mentality and the ability to think from the standpoint of others in trying to solve this problem. For her, whatever else good judgment involved, it had to entail the qualities of exercising an enlarged mentality and taking the standpoint of the other as well.
How did the experiences of Adorno, Arendt, Benjamin, Berlin and the others you discuss shape their political philosophies, in particular on the concept of citizenship?”
Reflecting on these experiences, I became aware of how important and yet philosophically neglected one aspect of the concept of citizenship is. I mean “access to citizenship;” the question of who is and who is not a citizen. The tradition of political philosophy from Aristotle to Rousseau has a great deal to say about the virtues and duties of the citizen but very little on the class of persons, who because of their ethnicity, religion, color and gender, were excluded from citizenship.
With the rise of the modern nation-state this question becomes particularly salient because an individual who is not recognized as a citizen of some political entity, becomes de facto stateless. And as Hannah Arendt as well Judith Shklar point out, de facto statelessness is a most vulnerable condition – often equal to not having rights at all.
How does this book fit with your larger research trajectory?
In many ways, this book is a departure from my more conceptual and less historical orientations in works like Critique, Norm and Utopia (1986), Situating the Self (1992); The Rights of Others. Aliens, Citizens and Residents, (2004); Dignity in Adversity. Human Rights in Troubled Times (2011). I got fascinated by the intertwinement of the lives of these thinkers but the guiding questions still remain philosophical, i.e. the problem of judgment in Kant, Arendt and Adorno; relativism versus value pluralism, and the paradox of identity/difference in the liberal constitutional state; human rights versus state sovereignty. These questions have accompanied me in many of my writings; here they are examined more contextually.
How is this book relevant to the Contemporary World?
I end the book with the observation that a time when the crises of our republics are reaching Weimer-like proportions, recalling the lives and works of these emigré intellectuals gives one both fear and hope: fear, because the one country that opened its arms to so many of them, namely the United States, is reproducing the Weimar syndrome of xenophobia and lawlessness in its treatment of migrants and refugees; in its creeping violation of constitutional norms, among other issues. Their lives and thought also give us hope, because we see that catastrophes can be overcome and new beginnings are possible in political life.
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