A Prisoner to Ideological Thinking?
Adventures with Hannah Arendt in Communist Albania
According to the great German-born Jewish American political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, “totalitarianism differs from other forms of political oppression” such as despotism, tyranny, and dictatorship. What makes totalitarianism unique is that, far from being lawless like these other authoritarian regime types, totalitarian rule is rather rigorously law-bound.
Totalitarian regimes are, to be sure, scornful of positive law—laws, that is, devised by mere human beings. But totalitarian rule is not, in consequence, simply arbitrary. On the contrary, totalitarian policy, in Arendt’s view, is determined by suprahuman forces: in the case of communism, the “law of History”; for fascism, the “law of Nature.”
Naturally, Arendt did not wish for us to believe the absurd nomological claims of totalitarian governments. These are nonsense-laws, she was keen to stress, constructed by imbecilic ideologues and their even more imbecilic disciples.
Among the Party faithful in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, a facile kind of deductive reasoning dominated. Instead of viewing the world empirically, history and the present were made to conform to a preconceived idea: the necessity of class struggle or the biological superiority or inferiority of certain races of people.
Arendt argued that the success of a totalitarian regime can be measured by the extent to which its subjects have ceased to think, how their experience of the world has been traduced by their internalisation of the stipulations of theory. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule was not a communist or a Nazi. It was, simply, a person for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer obtained—a person who jumped instinctively when the Party told them to.
The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951, and, with the benefit of hindsight, we may wish to quibble with aspects of Arendt’s analysis—the way she neglected the role, for example, played by simple self-interest in shaping policy in totalitarian regimes. Nonetheless, even if total terror was not always only designed to translate into reality the “law of History” or “Nature,” Arendt was undoubtedly right to identify terror as “the essence of totalitarian domination.”
In Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, Lea Ypi’s memoir of growing up in communist Albania, we learn what that terror looks like. Ypi, a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, does not use the term totalitarian in her wonderfully poignant and amusing new book. It is, however, perfectly clear that that’s precisely what the evil and deranged Peoples Socialist Republic was under which Ypi had the misfortune to be born in 1979.
In Enver Hoxha’s Albania—a peculiarly purist, autarkic variation of the communist model—terror reigned supreme. When, for instance, the young Ypi returns home one afternoon with a packet of biscuits when a new factory manager mistakenly hands them out to children, assuming their presence at the factory gates was a one-off event rather than a routine occurrence, her parents are terrified by the potential implications. More seriously, when Ypi complains to neighbours that her parents consistently fail to fulfil their promise to have a photo of “Uncle Enver” framed and put pride of place on the mantelpiece, calling into question their loyalty to the leader and the Party, total panic ensues.
Terrified of how their children might unintentionally betray them, the subjects of Albanian communism were more terrified still of the purposive persecution of their fellow nationals. When the first free elections were held in 1991, after demonstrators successfully forced the regime to introduce multi-party democracy the previous year, Ypi’s parents prevaricate, laying in bed “like hospital patients who’d just been drugged in preparation for surgery,” debating the best time to cast their votes. After all, no one could predict the outcome, and the elections of 1946 had not worked out well for the Ypi’s.
Free not only offers a perceptive and engaging insight into how a society governed by a totalitarian regime functions. It is also a fascinating and immensely affecting family biography. As a child, Ypi knew that there was something about her that was different from other children. Unlike her peers, she was taught French before she was taught Albanian. When fascism was discussed in school, Ypi could recount no stories of relatives who’d fought in the War or supported the resistance movement. Worst of all, the Albanian quisling who collaborated with the invading Italian forces in 1939, Xhaferr Ypi, shared a name with both her father and her great grandfather.
It was not until communism fell in 1990 that Ypi finally learnt the truth about her family and the society she lived in. Far from a socialist utopia, she was told, her country was an “open-air prison.” Rather than an embarrassing coincidence, a mere accidental duplication of names, the “national traitor” and “class enemy,” Xhaferr Ypi was in fact her father’s grandfather. From educated and propertied families, the “biographies”—an evaluative word in frequent use in communist Albania—of her mother and father could scarcely have been any worse, and they were punished accordingly: not imprisoned, like their parents, but surveilled unrelentingly and prevented from developing their bounteous talents for their own sake or for the sake of the common good.
Ypi’s book comes with an endorsement from the leading British left-liberal political theorist, David Runciman. Yet Free is the perfect antidote to the Cambridge Professor’s risible proposal, advanced recently in the Guardian, to lower the voting age to six. In Ypi’s memoir, narrated for the most part from a child’s perspective, the credulity of youth is on full display.
Wrongly assuming that her parents are incurious about politics and history, owing to their calculated silences on issues of sensitivity, the young Ypi nonetheless notes their “keen interest” in people who finish university: when they mention degrees and graduations, subjects and teachers and results, she accepts that they are simply discussing higher education. A true believer—“I’d always thought there was nothing better than communism,” writes Ypi—little does she know that university is code for prison, teachers means spies and wardens, expulsion means death, and dropping out is a euphemism for suicide.
Until the age of 12, Lea Ypi was protected from the truth. Her parents played the psychotic game, predictable until it wasn’t predictable anymore, established by Hoxha’s regime for the sake of their children. They did not significantly impede their daughter’s indoctrination at school and in wider society. The Ypi’s never lost touch with reality, however. Compliant as far as necessity dictated, they were not cowed at the level of conscience.
When a family member is released from prison they congratulate him and invite him for coffee, fully aware of the risks involved in such a seemingly apolitical act. A few weeks later, her father is demoted at work. More obliquely, but more revealingly, after preparing to undertake the series of ritual humiliations required to secure a place for their daughter at school—ensuring she knew by heart the poems about the Party and “Uncle Enver” and the partisan songs she learnt in nursery—they discover, to their consternation, that the ribbon that held up her ponytail on the day of performance in front of the panel of Party officials was white rather than red—the colour of the counter-revolution in Russia. Consciously, in other words, the Ypi’s were cautiously disobedient; unconsciously, they were militantly recalcitrant.
Ypi does not make this connection. But, then, she shows no interest in psychoanalysis and the unconscious mind. “Science and reason were all that mattered,” Ypi recounts when discussing communist education, and it seems that science and reason, crudely understood, still hold a commanding place in Ypi’s worldview now. She treats with disdain the idea that socialism is contrary to human nature, as the tourists in her country supposed. Marxism isn’t merely for “stupid people,” or “criminals,” as her parents claimed; it is, above all, a “theory of human freedom,” we are told. Freud, with his emphasis on human drives which threaten the stability of civilisation, is a disruptive force that Ypi could do without.
It follows, then, that Ypi recoils from her mother’s realism, her belief in free markets, self-reliance, and a non-interventionist state, without pausing to question the source of some of her acute discomfort with her mother’s classical liberal ideals: the traumatic and tumultuous past they shared together during Albania’s brutal experiment in communism, its chaotic transition to democracy, and its subsequent civil war, when her mother spontaneously flees to Italy with her brother leaving the young Ypi behind, no doubt compounding trauma with trauma. It is here, amidst the destruction of Albanian communism, that Ypi’s otherwise very fine book also falls to pieces.
The freedom that finally arrived in Albania in the 1990s may well have been distressingly disappointing; a society in which people smuggling, drug-dealing, and sex-trafficking are treated as normal occupations is, without doubt, scarcely a success. To suggest, however, that Ypi’s “world”—the world of an affluent, Western academic—“is as far from freedom” as the one her “parents tried to escape” is, frankly, astonishing.
To compare the indirect coercion of Western liberal democracies with ample welfare states, with the violent direct coercion of Albanian communism is not only preposterous from an analytical point of view. (The gulf between being told “what to think, what to do, and where to go” and being encouraged, cynically or otherwise, to think and behave in particular ways is, needless to say, vast.) It is also deeply offensive from a moral perspective—a point not lost on Ypi’s relatives who find it difficult to understand why she teaches and researches Marx and writes approbatory articles about the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Certainly, Ypi complains that the Western Marxists who expunge Marx of any guilt for socialism as it existed in countries like Albania in the twentieth century, without properly exploring the relationship between practice and theory, release themselves all too easily from the burden of responsibility. Yet at no point does she set out where Marx went wrong—his inattention to political institutions and how they might work, perhaps? His entirely inadequate vertical conception of power, maybe? His radical disinterest in the individual, possibly? Or, Marx’s ridiculous attempt to associate his own brand of socialism with science?
In contrast to Arendt, Ypi does not see that “all ideologies contain totalitarian elements”: their claims to total explanation, for example, and their related—indeed inevitable—emancipation from reality (consider, for instance, in this latter regard, the Marxist notions of “false consciousness” and “hegemony,” invoked for the best part of 150 years when workers have failed to do what ideology prescribes). Despite her asserted willingness to look difficult questions squarely in the face, it becomes clear in the book that Ypi is in fact a prisoner to ideology.
Rejecting her mother and father’s hostility to abstract thought, Ypi’s commitment to Marxist socialism makes her blind in Free to the diversity of liberalism and renders her immune to its accomplishments. For Ypi, liberalism means only Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, economic “shock therapy” and selfish individualism. It never means John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge, or cooperation and freedom of association, the freedom, that is, to associate in trade unions, as well as political parties, which embody the principle of solidarity she nominally values so highly.
When it comes to discussion of political theory, the book’s previous insight and nuance give way to generalisation and blunt affirmation. Indeed, Ypi makes a virtue of the capacity to flatten the particular into the universal when describing her family’s interactions with “the Crocodile,” the World Bank employee who moves onto the road on which the Ypis live. That he should see only parallels and commonalities between the things he encounters and never the thing itself is “the Crocodile’s” “secret weapon,” she says approvingly: his cosmopolitanism apparently offers him an advantage over the parochialism of Ypi’s family and neighbours, who think that their customs are unique.
The politics expounded in Free is textbook university radical fare: post-capitalist, cosmopolitan, and fervently pro-open borders. There is nothing sui generis, the term Samantha Rose Hill uses to describe Hannah Arendt in her excellent new biography of the much-studied philosopher, about Ypi’s political thinking. That said, Ypi comes from fine stock and she is indelibly marked by the excellent example provided by her parents. Combined, then, with a simplistic reading of freedom of movement which makes it incompatible with immigration controls, we find Ypi invoking the much less discussed notion of the “freedom to stay in one’s place.”
At times, the love and admiration which infuses Ypi’s narration of her family history make Free seem almost Blue Labourish. But ideology eventually wins out. Unlike Arendt, Ypi is unable to escape the Procrustean categories of Left and Right. Her parents, however, were in many ways decidedly Arendtian figures.
Arendt we learn from Rose Hill had a similarly testing life. By age 35, she had “fled two world wars, been arrested by the Gestapo and escaped an internment camp.” She knew about hardship and endurance. Adversity made her strong and unsentimental, life-affirming while recognising the world’s interminable problems. Implacably opposed to identity politics, she refused to be the “exception woman” or the “exception Jew,” rewarded for what was merely accidental about her. Alive to life’s grit and complexity, she did not shy away from expressing controversial views—the idea, for example, that Black Studies was a “nonexistent subject” which, instead of empowering black people in the United States, would only serve to disadvantage them further by preventing them from “acquiring an adequate education.”
Arendt, as one might expect, was roundly cancelled in her day, her commitment to truth repeatedly landing her in hot water, most obviously, with the Jewish community when reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963. Her detractors could denounce her and exclude her for Wrongthink (in this instance, for her claim that Eichmann was a clown whose evil-doing in facilitating the genocide of the Jews in Europe was mostly “banal” rather than actively malicious. Eichmann, on her view, was a man intellectually unfit to do anything other than obey orders, however grotesque and sinister.). But in the United States she enjoyed the liberty of freedom of speech, so, they could not, and would not, silence her.
Mrs Ypi is comparably bold and intransigent. Her daughter recalls how she alienates a group of Western feminists she hosts at their home during the transition to democracy by telling them that, as a young woman, she always carried a knife. Contemptuous of affirmative action and gender quotas, Ypi suspects that her mother would have bought the knife out to “perform a tickle” if anyone had dared to insinuate that her success as a politician and campaigner in post-communist Albania had been due to the fact that she was a woman. Always Stoic and pragmatic, she showed impatience with the concern of Western feminists with issues of representation and participation when many Albanian women had not seen their children for years, separated by conflict and poverty.
More pertinently, though, it is Ypi’s father who embraces a fully Arendtian position, rejecting both the competitive individualism of neoliberal capitalism and the authoritarianism and mindless conformity of Marxist socialism.
Rose Hill explains that Arendt’s work is, fundamentally, “about thinking”; it is about the necessity of carefully considering the judgements we make in life and the consequences of our failure to do so. Mr Ypi, as his daughter describes him, is an immensely thoughtful man. Tasked with firing hundreds of low-skilled Roma workers as part of a series of “structural reforms” in his new job as director of Albania’s largest port following communism’s collapse, he cannot bring himself to do so. He tries to recall their names, instead. “If I forget their names, I will forget about their lives,” he tells the young Ypi. “They will no longer be people; they’ll become numbers. Their aspirations, their fears, will no longer matter. We will only remember the rules, not those to whom they apply.”
If only our professoriate was as thoughtful as Mr Ypi. As it stands, they have ceased to think, engaging instead in glib and schematic ideological warfare. Or else, their thinking has become deranged, reaching insane levels of impracticality through a harebrained commitment to “progress.” Neither trajectory offers much hope for the future. With the current low status assigned to evidence and argument, the threat of totalitarianism is real once again, and it is not the exclusive preserve of the Right; the Left is similarly averse to open discussion and exchange, trading also in “alternative facts.” We can, in short, do without Ypi’s Marxian apologetics, but we cannot do without Arendt.
While Ypi insists that the absence of coercion offered by liberalism does not make one free—the dominant theme of her brilliant but deeply flawed memoir—she struggles, besides a few hints at state-sponsored collective flourishing (i.e., freedom as “self-realisation”), to say what does. Arendt, on the other hand, did not sneer at constitutionally guaranteed liberties even when she also thought that they did not make us free, as such.
When Arendt used the word freedom she knew precisely what she was talking about: it meant spontaneity and initiative and participation in public affairs. Instead of abolishing the liberties secured by classical liberalism and replacing them with fine words about “progress in history,” she recognised that those liberties function as both freedom’s precondition and its insurance. What Arendt understood and Ypi doesn’t is that, while liberty and freedom are distinct, the former must not be discarded before the altar of some speculative utopian scheme.
If Leah Ypi does not know what freedom is, then her mother at least had no difficulty in grasping what it entails. When Ypi’s father grows frustrated with his new life as a bureaucrat in the post-communist era, Mrs Ypi counsels that he ought not to stay idle. He should take action. And to be active meant to be involved in politics. “Politics matters,” she says, “because you don’t just implement other people’s decisions, you get to make them.” Hannah Arendt agreed. A life well lived—a free life—involved both contemplation and activity in the political realm.
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