Social Theory After the Holocaust

CHAPTER 2
Hannah Arendt: Politics and
Understanding after the Holocaust
Making Sense of the Senseless
ROBERT FINE
Hannah Arendt described the Holocaust as a ‘rupture with civilisation’ that
shattered all existing ideas of progress, all feelings of optimism, all previously
engraved images of Europe as a civilised community, all notions of the innocence
of modern political thought. In ‘Mankind and Terror’, for example, she writes:
‘Not only are all our political concepts and definitions insufficient for an
understanding of totalitarian phenomena but also all our categories of thought
and standards of judgement seem to explode in our hands the instant we try to
apply them.’ 1 Arendt was one of the first to argue that the attempted
extermination of Jews – only later to be called the Holocaust or the Shoah – was
an event that marked, or should mark, a caesura in modern social and political
thought.
The concern of this paper is with this notion of a ‘gap’ between past and future
– of a ‘fracture’ in the continuity of political thought and moral judgement –
which is provoked by the thought of the Holocaust. From the point of view of
social theory, this question may be seen as a particular case study of the impact
of historical events on social theorising and presupposes that social theory does
not develop in isolation from the political world of which it is part. The focus
on the writings of Hannah Arendt is chosen not only because she took seriously
this question, the question of social theory after the Holocaust, soon after she
learnt about the Holocaust itself, 2 and not only because she was an
extraordinarily gifted and radical political thinker; it is chosen also because she
offered a ‘worldly’ perspective on this rupture with civilisation which was rather
lost in the later reflections on the Holocaust which stressed the uniqueness,
singularity, non-representability and ineffability of the Holocaust and which
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