Notes on Context (Callum Tilley, August 2024, London Magazine)

The tension between politics and things people want to separate from it is old, divisive, and extends far beyond artistic media. While not related to literature, Hannah Arendt’s socio-political theory is illustrative of this false dichotomy between politics and apoliticality. In The Human Condition, Arendt distinguished between political and social spaces, arguing that the ‘politicisation’ of social spaces erodes their sanctity. Her opinion on this was so strong that, in ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, she opposed the forcible desegregation of schools in Southern U.S. states because she saw it as a violation of their apolitical nature. She believed, in the words of Samantha Rose Hill, that ‘political change must come through persuasion, not force’, favouring instead organic desegregation through public education about racial issues.

This, of course, is a false choice; centralised policy was needed to overcome the legacy of Jim Crow and begin the march towards educational equity and equality. Failure to recognise this was undoubtedly a product of both Arendt’s unfamiliarity with the U.S. political context and her understanding of the social versus the political being shaped by her experiences of Nazi Germany. To her, the Nazis violated supposedly apolitical spaces such as schools, libraries, shops, and other social spaces to promote their ideology. Her opinion on this was not flexible when applying her idea to very different situation because she thought that schools – and African-American children – were being used as political tools, an assertion for which she remains controversial. However, in being segregated, schools were already politicised; for her, Arendt’s defence of their ‘social’ nature was actually in itself – as Morrison argues – an unwitting political choice to defend the status quo. While trying to avoid politics, Arendt stumbled into it.