Hannah Arendt on Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship

"Let me now raise two questions: First, in what way were those few different who in all walks of life did not collaborate and refused to participate in public life, though they could not and did not rise in rebellion? And second, if we agree that those who did serve on whatever level and in whatever capacity were not simply monsters, what was it that made them behave as they did? On what moral, as distinguished from legal, grounds did they justify their conduct after the defeat of the regime and the breakdown of the 'new order' with its new set of values? The answer to the first question is relatively simple: the nonparticipants, called irrespon­sible by the majority, were the only ones who dared judge by themselves, and they were capable of doing so not because they disposed of a better system of values or because the old standards of right and wrong were still firmly planted in their mind and con­science. On the contrary, all our experiences tell us that it was precisely the members of respectable society, who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values against another. I therefore would suggest that the nonparticipants were those whose consciences did not function in this, as it were, automatic way–as though we dis­pose of a set of learned or innate rules which we then apply to the particular case as it arises, so that every new experience or situa­tion is already prejudged and we need only act out whatever we learned or possessed beforehand. Their criterion, I think, was a different one: they asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having commit­ted certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be changed for the bet­ter, but simply because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves at all. Hence, they also chose to die when they were forced to participate. To put it crudely, they refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command 'Thou shalt not kill,' but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer–themselves.

. . . The dividing line between those who want to think and therefore have to judge by themselves, and those who do not, strikes across all social and cultural or educational differ­ences. In this respect, the total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler regime may teach us that under such circum­stances those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable: we now know that moral norms and stan­dards can be changed overnight, and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something. Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds. Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.

[. . .]

In these terms, the nonparticipators in public life under a dicta­torship are those who have refused their support by shunning those places of 'responsibility' where such support, under the name of obedience, is required. And we have only for a moment to imagine what would happen to any of these forms of govern­ment if enough people would act 'irresponsibly' and refuse sup­port, even without active resistance and rebellion, to see how effective a weapon this could be. It is in fact one of the many variations of nonviolent action and resistance–for instance the power that is potential in civil disobedience–which are being dis­covered in our century. The reason, however, that we can hold these new criminals, who never committed a crime out of their own initiative, nevertheless responsible for what they did is that there is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters. The only domain where the word could possibly apply to adults who are not slaves is the domain of religion, in which people say that they obey the word or the command of God because the rela­tionship between God and man can rightly be seen in terms simi­lar to the relation between adult and child.

Hence the question addressed to those who participated and obeyed orders should never be, 'Why did you obey?' but 'Why did you support?' This change of words is no semantic irrele­vancy for those who know the strange and powerful influence mere 'words' have over the minds of men who, first of all, are speaking animals. Much would be gained if we could eliminate this pernicious word 'obedience' from our vocabulary of moral and political thought. If we think these matters through, we might regain some measure of self-confidence and even pride, that is, regain what former times called the dignity or the honor of man: not perhaps of mankind but of the status of being human."

Hannah Arendt. "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship", in Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books (2003), pp. 43-48. Available at: https://social-ecology.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Arendt-Personal-Responsibility-under-Dictatorship-copy.pdf.