Politics of the Idea: (Anti-)Platonic Politics in Arendt and Badiou

Jussi Backman

doi:10.1080/17570638.2020.1842701

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper compares two influential but conflicting contemporary models of politics as an activity: those of Hannah Arendt and Alain Badiou. It discovers the fundamental difference between their approaches to politics in their opposing evaluations of the contemporary political significance of the legacy of Plato, Platonism, and the Platonic Idea. Karl Popper’s and Arendt’s analyses of the inherently ideological nature of totalitarianism are contrasted with Badiou’s vindication of an ideological “politics of the Idea.” Arendt and Badiou are shown to share an understanding of politics as a realm for the human deployment of novelty and world-transformation. Their key disagreement concerns the form of activity that accomplishes this deployment. For Arendt, political activity has the basic form of noninstrumental and nonteleological action (praxis), devalued by the Platonic tradition of political philosophy. Badiou, by contrast, follows Plato in regarding politics essentially as a process of production (poiēsis) oriented to an ideal end.

Highlights

In his 1938 essay “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” a rather unique statement of the totalitarian approach to ideology by a totalitarian leader, Joseph Stalin writes that far from denying the significance of “social ideas,” Marxist historical materialism stresses their importance, as “it is impossible to carry out the urgent tasks of development of the material life of society without their organizing, mobilizing and transforming action” (Stalin 1972, 314)
Stalin’s statement can be read as a synthesis of the two main totalitarian strategies distinguished by Karl Popper in his The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper 1945, 1–4, 138–148): radical historicism and utopian social engineering. The first of these refers to a view of history as a developmental process determined by immutable objective laws; the latter refers to the possibility of immeasurably accelerating this process through the total ideological mobilization and reshaping of society. Popper famously starts his genealogy of totalitarian thought with Plato, whose political philosophy he sees as “the earliest and probably the most influential” example of historicism and social engineering (19), even arguing for an “identity of the Platonic theory of justice with the theory and practice of modern totalitarianism” (4)
Plato’s particular version of “historicism” is his political idealism, that is, the view that “all [political] change can be arrested if the state is made an exact copy of its original, i.e. of the Form or Idea of the city” (74)

Summary

Introduction

In his 1938 essay “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” a rather unique statement of the totalitarian approach to ideology by a totalitarian leader, Joseph Stalin writes that far from denying the significance of “social ideas,” Marxist historical materialism stresses their importance, as “it is impossible to carry out the urgent tasks of development of the material life of society without their organizing, mobilizing and transforming action” (Stalin 1972, 314). What is expected of the ideal totalitarian subject is not so much belief in the pre-existing truth of the ideological idea, but rather total conformity to the logic of movement that it generates.

Results

Conclusion