Richard Gill

STRANGER THAN FICTION:

HANNAH ARENDT AND G. K. CHESTERTON

J
udging from their respective biographies and reputations, one would
initially imagine that the assertion that there are affinities between the
work of the German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-
1975) and the English-Christian novelist, poet, and journalist G. K. Ches-
terton (1874-1936) would be met with disbelief. After all, Arendt was
educated at the universities of Marburg, Freiburg, and Heidelberg, where
she received instruction from such leading figures in European philosophy
as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers. After the war,
and in exile in the United States, Arendt rose to public recognition as the
somber analyst of the various historical factors which had crystallized into
the twentieth-century nightmares of Nazism and Stalinism — “the dark
lady of American intellectuals,” in Stephen Whitfield’s characterization
(7). Chesterton, by contrast, left the Slade School of Art in London with-
out a degree and embarked on a career as a novelist, poet, and Fleet Street
journalist, where he cut an eccentric and obese figure with his cape, slouch
hat, and swordstick — the epitome of absent-mindedness and wine-fuelled
joviality. Considering the kind of imagery associated with each writer, it is
understandable that the underlying affinities in their work are not exactly
obvious.1
The key to unlocking these affinities is the fact that both authors
shared a sense of wonder at, and gratitude for, sheer existence. By wonder,
we mean the existential amazement at the fact of Being. Fundamental to
this experience of wonder is the awareness of the reality of a world inde-
pendent of our own selves. As the philosopher Mary Midgley explains,
“It is an essential element in wonder that we recognise what we see as
something we did not make, cannot fully understand, and acknowledge
as containing something greater than ourselves” (41). Wonder accepts the
mystery of Being; it represents the experience of being brought back to
an awareness of the actuality of existence, of a reality independent of our-
selves and our own designs. In this perspective, because the source of real-
ity is recognized to originate from outside ourselves it comes to us as a gift
and, like all gifts, demands the response of gratitude.
Arendt herself believed — like Plato and Aristotle — that “thau-
mazein, the shocked wonder at the miracle of Being, is the beginning of all
philosophy” (Human Condition 302). Yet there is something characteristic
about Arendt’s thought which distinguishes her from these philosophers of
the ancient world, who had grounded their contemplation in wonder: she
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maintained that the realm of human affairs was itself worthy of wonder. For
Plato and Aristotle, philosophy did indeed spring from “that thaumadzein,
the wonder at that which is as it is”; but “even they had refused to accept
[it] as a preliminary condition for political philosophy” (“Concern with
Politics” 445). For Arendt, a genuine political philosophy would emerge
when such a sense of wonder was directed into the realm of human affairs
and actions. Central for these new political philosophers would be the idea
of human “plurality”: “Biblically speaking, they would have to accept —
as they accept in speechless wonder the miracle of the universe, of man
and of being — the miracle that God did not create Man, but ‘male and
female created He them.’ They would have to accept in something more
than the resignation of human weakness the fact that ‘it is not good to be
alone’” (“Philosophy and Politics” 103).
It is therefore the sense of wonder which lies behind that most charac-
teristic element of Arendt’s political thought: her stress on the importance
of recognizing human plurality, “the fact that men not Man, live on the
earth and inhabit the world” (Human Condition 7). This is an insight which
Chesterton shared, as we can see from his appreciation of Robert Brown-
ing: “The sense of the absolute sanctity of human difference was the deep-
est of all his senses. . . . He did not love humanity but men” (Browning
187).

A nyone who is familiar with the work of Chesterton — one of the most
important Christian authors of the twentieth century — will know that
such a sense of wonder is the main theme of his work. Indeed, it was an
awakening sense of wonder and gratitude for sheer existence which pulled
Chesterton out of his youthful period of solipsism and morbidity at the
Slade School of Art and launched him on his literary career and conver-
sion to Christianity. Awakening such a sense of wonder in a period which
seemed dominated by doubt and subjectivism was at the forefront of his
literary mission: “Of one thing I am certain, that the age needs, first and
foremost to be startled; to be taught the nature of wonder” (Man Who Was
Orthodox 160). In the context of his study Chaucer (1932), the mature
Chesterton provided one of the most succinct and vivid statements of won-
der at Being — and of the appropriate human response of gratitude:

There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding
and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of
actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we
ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real.
It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is un-
thinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be

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unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he

who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally
to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and under
all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude.
(36-7)

Chesterton’s association of thinking with thanking anticipates the connec-

tion made by Arendt’s former teacher Martin Heidegger — from whom
she may have acquired the philosophical sense wonder. Arendt in fact en-
dorses Heidegger’s combination of thinking and thanking, yet she also
questions how this association can accommodate the fact of evil. Certain-
ly, when Arendt calls for the sense of wonder to be directed into the realm
of human affairs she maintains that it must consider that realm both “in
its grandeur and misery” (“Philosophy and Politics” 103). Furthermore,
Arendt maintains that the experience of horror is akin to that of wonder
and its own exclusion by contemporary political philosophy is entailed by
the general refusal to accept the wondering glance into the realm of human
affairs (“Concern with Politics” 445). At the root of both wonder and hor-
ror is a fundamental awareness of reality, and if wonder brings forth praise
then horror would elicit resistance. In her Preface to The Origins of Totali-
tarianism (1951), Arendt summarized her own attempt at understanding
the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism: “Comprehension, in short, means the
unpremeditated facing up to, and resistance of, reality — whatever it may
be” (Origins viii).
Indeed, while Chesterton’s sense of wonder grounded his philosophy
in a fundamental affirmation of Being, this was not to the extent that it
would entail the denial of evil in human affairs — Chesterton maintained
the orthodox Christian position of man’s fallen nature. And the presence of
evil is encountered with that fundamental perception of reality we find in
the sense of wonder: Charles Dickens, for example, “encounters evil with
that beautiful surprise which, as it is the beginning of all real pleasure, is
also the beginning of all righteous indignation. He enters the workhouse
just as Oliver Twist enters it, as a little child” (Appreciations 48). Ches-
terton’s sense of wonder and horror — directed into the realm of human
affairs — drives the combative character of his work by which he con-
fronted social injustice and led him to oppose, for example, the tyrannical
proposals of eugenics.
By acknowledging both the goodness and evil of experience Chester-
ton constantly distanced himself from the perspectives of optimism and
pessimism which he believed were detrimental to a project of radical so-
cial reform: “The optimist will say that reform is needless. The pessimist
will say that reform is hopeless” (Charles Dickens 207). Arendt also be-
lieved these perspectives avoided the confrontation with reality. She ex-

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plained that The Origins of Totalitarianism had “been written against a

background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair. It holds that
Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles
of superstition, not of faith” (Origins vii).
Arendt’s classification of optimism and pessimism as forms of su-
perstition is of great interest because she herself recognized Chesterton
as being one of the greatest critics of such fictitious beliefs. Arendt was
in fact familiar with Chesterton’s work in a variety of fields: poetry, fic-
tion, philosophical biography, journalism, and even including one of his
obscure works of first-world-war propaganda.2 He is referred to in The
Origins of Totalitarianism as having been one of the very few people who
had seen through the ideology of imperialism which had dominated pre-
war European thought: “Péguy in France and Chesterton in England knew
instinctively that they lived in a world of hollow pretense and that its sta-
bility was the greatest pretense of all” (Origins 147). Arendt also refers
appreciatively to Chesterton’s novel The Return of Don Quixote (1927)
for its “wonderful description” of the turning away from serious political
questioning in the two decades prior to the First World War, quoting his
“penetrating words” to the effect that “everything is prolonging its exis-
tence by denying that it exists” (qtd. in Origins 51).
Arendt does seem to have particularly appreciated his attacks upon
the various absurd and fanatically pursued “progressive” doctrines which
had become a hallmark of modernity. In her early essay “Christianity and
Revolution” (originally published in 1945), she expressed her admiration
for Chesterton in these terms:

There are no more amusing, or better-written polemics against the

host of modern superstitions, from Christian Science to gymnas-
tics as a means to salvation, to teetotalism, and Krishnamurti, than
Chesterton’s essays. . . . When Chesterton describes the rich man
who for the pretended sake of humanity has adopted some fancy
new vegetarian rule as the man who does not go “without gardens
and gorgeous rooms which poor men can’t enjoy” but has “abol-
ished meat because poor men like meat,” or when he denounces
the “modern philanthropist” who does not give up “petrol or . . .
servants” but rather “some simple universal things” like “beef or
sleep, because these pleasures remind him that he is only a man”
— then Chesterton has better described the fundamental ambitions
of the ruling classes than have all the academic discussions of the
functions of capitalists. (152-3)3

Arendt recognized that it was the realism entailed in Christian thought that
enabled its possessors — she gives the examples of Chesterton himself as

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well as her own friends W. H. Auden and Waldemar Gurian — the capac-
ity to see through the ideological fictions and superstitions which typified
modernity.4 Related to this ontological realism is the sense of limits which
pervades Chesterton’s thought: “The moment you step into the world of
facts, you step into a world of limits” (Orthodoxy 69). It is in such terms of
a respect for the limits of the human condition which Arendt praised Ches-
terton in “Christianity and Revolution,” and which she claims allowed him
to be a genuine revolutionary thinker and a powerful social critic, “more
radical than the radicals”:

The insistence of the Christian doctrine on man’s limited condi-

tion was somehow enough of a philosophy to allow its adherents a
very deep insight into the essential inhumanity of all those modern
attempts — psychological, technical, biological — to change man
into the monster of a superman. They realized that a pursuit of
happiness which actually means to wipe away all tears will pretty
quickly end by wiping out all laughter. It was again Christian-
ity which taught them that nothing human can exist beyond tears
and laughter, except the silence of despair. This is the reason why
Chesterton, having once and for all accepted the tears, could put
real laughter into his most violent attacks. (153)

Although Arendt only mentions Chesterton in the closing sentence, it is

fairly clear that she has him in mind from the beginning of the section.
Arendt does not give away any specific reference, but it is obvious through
her allusion to the effect that only despair can exist “beyond tears and
laughter” that she has in mind Chesterton’s novel The Flying Inn (1914).
The passage to which Arendt is referring occurs in the context of an ex-
hibition of “post-futurist” art. Lord Ivywood — the villain of the novel
— declares in the manner of a Nietzschean Superman his contempt for the
limits placed on human life:

I deny that any limit is set upon living things. . . . I would walk
where no man has walked; and find something beyond tears and
laughter. . . . And my adventures shall not be in the hedges and the
gutters; but in the borders of the ever-advancing brain. . . . I will be
as lonely as the first man. . . . He discovered good and evil. So are
these artists trying to discover some distinction that is still dark in
us. . . . I see the breaking of the barriers . . . beyond that I see noth-
ing. (qtd. in Medcalf 118)

By contrast, Chesterton believed that genuine human freedom required

acceptance of the principle of limitation — to refuse such limits would be
self-defeating, for a being’s limits were its very definition: “You can free

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things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own
nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him
from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may
be freeing him from being a camel” (Orthodoxy 69). The refusal of such
limits represented a radical ingratitude for the gift of a world which was
not of our own making:

Human beings are happy so long as they retain the receptive power
and the power of reaction in surprise and gratitude to something
outside. So long as they have this they have as the great minds have
always declared, a something which is present in childhood and
which can still preserve and invigorate manhood. The moment the
self within is consciously felt as something superior to any of the
gifts that can be brought to it, or any of the adventures that it may
enjoy, there has appeared a sort of self-devouring fastidiousness
and a disenchantment in advance, which fulfils all the Tartarean
emblems of thirst and despair. (Common Man 252-3)

The total disdain for reality, understood as a resentment of “the given”

— of that which man did not himself make — was a theme of Arendt’s
“Concluding Remarks” to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarian-
ism (released in England under the title of The Burden of Our Time) and
is linked to the dangers of hubris. In modern times, writes Arendt, “man
has come to resent everything given, even his own existence — to resent
the very fact that he is not the creator of the universe and himself. In this
fundamental resentment, he refuses to see rhyme or reason in the given
world. In his resentment of all laws merely given to him, he proclaims
openly that everything is permitted and believes secretly that everything
is possible.” Arendt asserts that the fundamental dilemma today “is the
choice between resentment and gratitude as basic possible modern atti-
tudes” (Burden 438).

A rendt had seen that twentieth-century totalitarianism was marked by

a flight from the recognition of a reality which would be replaced by
the attempt at a fabrication of an ideological “fictitious world.” The condi-
tion of the masses in both Germany and Russia who had been dislocated
by war, revolution, and inflation produced solitary and “lonely” individu-
als who lacked a world in common with others — the framework for the
common sense which tolerates the ambiguities and fortuitous aspects of
reality. Such atomized masses became easy prey to the illusions of a ficti-
tious yet ideologically consistent world offered by the propagandists of to-
talitarian movements who could “conjure up a lying world of consistency
which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself;
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in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home

and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experi-
ences deal to human beings and their expectations” (Origins 352). The
masses could easily be conditioned “to think that everything was possible
and that nothing was true” (353). That is, to lose both their awareness of
reality and the sense of limits which coincides with “the given.” Nazis and
Stalinists — in the manner of a paranoiac — were committed to a ruthless
logicality, pursuing their theories to their ultimate conclusions in complete
defiance of conventional assumptions as to what was considered either ac-
ceptable or possible.
For Chesterton too, the fictitious ideologies of the Edwardian intel-
lectuals also possessed a ruthless logicality. In political terms, Chester-
ton’s recognition of external reality manifested itself as a distrust of those
utopian reformers who would recreate the world as a reflection of their
own solitary and imagined fantasies — they were quite literally maniacs.
Chesterton understood that the problem was not reason itself — he was
no romantic irrationalist and indeed sought to defend reason — but ex-
plained that the danger was to be found in reason freed from the limits of
common sense and mystery: “The madman is not the man who has lost
his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his
reason” (Orthodoxy 30). When transferred to the political realm, such in-
temperate reasoning leads to tyranny: the solitary view of the monomaniac
is imposed without any recognition of the different views of others, i.e.
without respect to common sense, which for Chesterton represents a form
of practical wisdom formed through living life in common with others
(Canovan, “Chesterton and Hannah Arendt” 141-2). Like Arendt, Chester-
ton perceived that the modern preference for ideological illusions was a re-
treat into a narrower world. It was a haven for minds that could not tolerate
the unexpected and contradictory aspects of our existence — and indeed it
was a narcissism which lay behind theories of racial superiority:

The Lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a
large one: he is the man who lives in a tenth of the truth, and thinks
it is the whole. The madman cannot conceive any cosmos outside a
certain tale or conspiracy or vision. Hence the more clearly we see
the world divided into Saxons and non-Saxons, into our splendid
selves and the rest, the more certain we may be that we are slowly
and quietly going mad. The more plain and satisfying our state
appears, the more we may know that we are living in an unreal
world. For the real world is not satisfying. The more clear become
the colours and facts of Anglo-Saxon superiority, the more surely
we may know we are in a dream. For the real world is not clear or
plain. The real world is full of bracing bewilderments and brutal
surprises. (Charles Dickens 152)

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Modern ideologies involved the subordination of distinct human beings to

some all-embracing process of becoming. In What’s Wrong with the World
(1910), Chesterton claimed that the popular aversion to evolutionism per-
ceived the threat that such an intellectual shift entailed: “when one begins
to think of man as a shifting and alterable thing, it is always easy for the
strong and crafty to twist him into new shapes for all kinds of unnatural
purposes” (What’s Wrong 259).

F or Arendt, in the mid-nineteenth century a crucial change occurred

in how history and nature were conceptualized and which reflected a
refusal to accept wonder at Being. Instead of the wonder at that which is
“as it is” we find the concept of process; in this context nothing can be ap-
preciated in terms of its own existence but only as a stage for some future
development:

Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the

law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a
natural development which does not necessarily stop with the pres-
ent species of human beings, just as under the Bolsheviks’ belief
in class-struggle as the expression of the law of history lies Marx’s
notion of society as the product of a gigantic historical movement
which races according to its own law of motion to the end of his-
torical times when it will abolish itself. (Origins 463)

In totalitarian regimes these laws of movement are made manifest through

terror, which, for the totalitarian government, takes the place of positive
laws that had previously functioned as stabilizing boundaries. If lawless-
ness was the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian-
ism: it is the means by which the forces of nature or history can “move
freely through mankind unhindered by any spontaneous actions” (465).
Total terror “substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communica-
tion between individual men a band of iron which holds them so tightly
together that it is as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man
of gigantic dimensions” (465-6).
In his own opposition to modern ideologies Chesterton did not take up
a Right-wing or romantic-irrationalist position. Arendt herself wished to
drive home the point about Chesterton’s democratic radicalism. In “Chris-
tianity and Revolution,” she distinguished between radical Catholic con-
verts such as Chesterton and those “Catholics without faith” who were not
themselves attracted to the Church by any teachings of charity, democracy,
or human equality — which they found repugnant — but out of a desire for
authoritarian and hierarchical organization. Chesterton in England, with

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Péguy and Bernanos in France, were quite different from such “dilettantes
of fascism” according to Arendt:

For what these men hated in the modern world was not democracy
but the lack of it. They saw through the appearances of democra-
cies which might be more accurately described as plutocracies and
through the trimmings of a republic which was much more a po-
litical machine. What they sought was freedom for the people and
reason for the mind. What they started from was a deep hatred of
bourgeois society, which they knew was essentially anti-democrat-
ic and fundamentally perverted. What they fought against always
was the insidious invasion of bourgeois morals and standards into
all walks of life and all classes of people. (152)

This passage provides a good example of the “radical populist” element

in Arendt’s early work and which, although less strident, can be detected
in her later work too. According to Richard J. Bernstein, it is possible to
see “a strong radical populist strand in her thinking about politics. She
advocated a politics ‘from below’ in which the Jewish people would or-
ganize themselves and fight for their rights as Jews in alliance with other
oppressed groups. There is a direct continuity between her earliest sum-
mons to the Jewish people to fight for their political rights and her later
attempt to recover ‘the lost treasure’ of the revolutionary spirit” (10-11).
This populism, “the most persistent strand in Arendt’s understanding of
politics,” is intimately connected with her adoption of the position of the
“conscious pariah.” Arendt, writes Bernstein, “was never tempted to ‘be-
long’ to society; she never wanted to be the ‘exceptional Jew’; she never
exhibited any parvenu tendencies. She wrote to Karl Jaspers: ‘I’m more
than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today
only on the fringes of society’” (qtd. in Bernstein 180). This populism and
the support of the pariah, the marginal figure “who is at once an outsider
and yet never completely an outsider,” writes Bernstein, is also reflected in
Arendt’s sympathy for the losing side in history: “She was never afraid of
championing the defeated cause — and knew the consequences of doing
so” (183). Against the progressive view of history and against the belief
that a cause is vindicated by success, Arendt liked to cite the line from
Cato: “victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni (the victorious cause
pleases the gods, but the defeated cause pleases Cato)” (105).
Indeed, Chesterton’s sympathies were also with the defeated side in
history — in his perspective, the English working class — and he was
constantly ridiculing the “worship of success” and all the other “fads” of
the privileged classes which, more often than not, represented not only an
attack on reason but on the freedoms of ordinary people. Chesterton had

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himself been one of England’s most powerful radical populist writers.5

Vigorously anti-capitalist, yet believing socialism would only lead to tyr-
anny, Chesterton distrusted the rule of elites and experts and favored the
common sense of ordinary people who, he maintained, ought to possess
their own productive property as a guarantee of their political freedom and
should no longer remain the servants either of a class of capitalists, politi-
cal administrators, or, indeed, aristocratic landowners. Chesterton was the
intellectual figurehead of a social and political perspective known as “dis-
tributism” which would take inspiration from the Papal encyclicals Rerum
Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931) and which represented
a reassertion of the Thomist principle of private property for common use.
Chesterton maintained that capitalism was a system based on the denial of
productive property to large numbers of the population — instead, it was
a commercial process which concentrated ownership into a minority of
capitalists. Chesterton rejected socialism because it failed to get to the root
of the problem and merely offered to extend the concentration of owner-
ship even further — into an even smaller minority of state officials.
For Chesterton, capitalism was an economy built on the principle of
exchange value rather than use value and as such it initiated an endless
process of capital accumulation: “There is a limit to the number of apples a
man can eat. But there is no limit to the number of apples he may possibly
sell; and he soon becomes a pushing, dexterous and successful Salesman
and turns the whole world upside-down” (Well and Shallows 229). Central
to the distributist vision of a society marked by widespread ownership of
small-scale and well-defined private property was a concern to reassert
the economic principles of the mediaeval Guild system in order to impose
limits on the use of property, such that its use was directed to the common
good and not to amassing a personal fortune.

R egaining such a sense of limits would also involve recovering a sense

of reality itself. In the perspective of the commercial elites, the world
becomes a mere reflection of their own fantasies and desires: “The busi-
ness men live in a world of notions; they live in a world of fictions; they
live in a world of dreams” (Sidelights on New London 121). The life rooted
in the enduring ties of family and the solidity of property, by contrast, is
one that is rooted in the distinction between reality and fantasy. The stock-
broker is philosophically speaking a nominalist but the farmer is a realist
who knows that his own subjective feelings do not create the world: “Dis-
tributism is not a dream. It is a project, which may or may not be found
practicable by particular people at a particular time. But when it is estab-
lished, its fundamental facts, like the land or the family, are not affected

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by what other people say about them. They do not vanish as the result of a
rumour or roll away like clouds because somebody releases the rigid strain
of being optimistic about them” (123).
A commodified society which was founded on the principle of wealth
accumulation as opposed to the production of useful objects, Chesterton
realized, was inherently unstable and thereby a context conducive to the
fostering of illusions: “since Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while
Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing, they have swept us into a
society which is no longer solid but fluid, as unfathomable as a sea and
as treacherous as a quicksand” (Well and Shallows 230). Arendt, as we
have already seen, understood totalitarianism in terms of a flight from
reality combined with the construction of a fictitious world marked, not
by stability, but by a relentless process of movement. In contrast, Arendt
understood a genuine, stable public realm as a guardian against such a
politics of illusion; the free public realm was the sphere in which reality
disclosed itself. The public world is shared with others — it is a “common
world” — and the various perspectives from which individuals look upon
commonly shared objects lends a sense of reality (or “objectivity”) to that
world. To be deprived of the public world is to be deprived of the sense of
reality itself: “To men the reality of the public world is guaranteed by the
presence of others, by its appearing to all; ‘for what appears to all, this we
call Being,’ and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away
like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality” (Hu-
man Condition 199).
Pre-modern societies held that private property — and not wealth —
was sacred; it was a private location in the world and the necessary condi-
tion for citizenship: “To own property meant here to be master over one’s
own necessities of life and therefore potentially to be a free person, free to
transcend his own life and enter the world all have in common.” Property
represents “the privately owned share of a common world and therefore is
the most elementary condition for man’s worldliness” (65). At the root of
modern “worldlessness,” by contrast, was the transformation of property
into wealth which began in the sixteenth century with the Reformation’s
expropriation of monastic and Church property. As a result of this process
of expropriation, millions of peasants were deprived of a stable place in
the world — a situation which, says Arendt, “was marked by its cruelty,”
as the laboring poor lost the protections offered by both family and prop-
erty and became the mere embodiments of the productive force of “labor
power” (255). The course of modernity was marked by a move away from
the ownership of stable property towards the inherently worldless activity
of accumulating wealth. “Immobile property,” durable and thus worldly,
came to be replaced by “mobile wealth,” which, lacking any definable end,

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led not to a durable world but culminated in a fluid, ever-expanding con-

sumer’s “society.” The worldlessness of society is marked by a loss of the
sense of reality as individuals are thrown back upon their own subjective
experiences and natural drives, tending less to initiate spontaneous actions
than to conform to predictable patterns of behavior. Humans come to be
understood as interchangeable and not unique beings.
Arendt certainly believed that we were living in “dark times,” but,
as we have seen, neither optimism nor pessimism were available to her.
Arendt retains her capacity for hope in the existence of “natality” — the
fundamental unpredictability in the realm of human affairs due to the fact
that new individuals are constantly being born into the world and bring
with them the potential for new beginnings. Arendt states that the most
succinct and glorious expression of the faith and hope which emerges from
this condition of human experience is to be found in the “glad tidings” of
the Gospels: “A child has been born unto us” (Human Condition 247).6
This hope for new beginnings drew Arendt, in On Revolution (1963),
towards a sympathetic understanding of the “lost treasures” of the revo-
lutionary tradition, which testify to the possibility for resisting apparently
irresistible historical processes, of founding an enduring republic, and for
establishing new forms of government which involve a wider possibility
for citizen participation than representative democracy.
It is less often realized that alongside the hope for a renewed public
world Arendt maintained that private property was an important source for
stability — and she hoped that it could be more widely dispersed. Like
Chesterton, she was aware that capitalism represented the eclipse of the
ideal of private property, not its embodiment, and that socialism was the
logical culmination of the property-destroying trend initiated by capital-
ism. In an interview in 1970 she was more explicit in her own preference
for private rather than capitalist or socialist ownership of property than
she had been in The Human Condition: “Our problem today is not how to
expropriate the expropriators, but, rather, how to arrange matters so that
the masses, dispossessed by industrial society in capitalist and socialist
systems, can regain property” (Crisis 175).

I n their differing ways, Arendt and Chesterton grounded their thought

in the sense of wonder and gratitude for an existence which was not of
their own making. Their understanding of the need to respect the limits of
the human condition allowed them to perceive the dangers when a sense of
resentment for given reality can render us prey to the soothing fictions of
ideologies. Chesterton summed up the dilemma with aphoristic succinct-
ness: “Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we

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have made fiction to suit ourselves” (Heretics 53-4). For both, their philo-
sophical sense of wonder at Being transferred politically into a wonder
at human beings — and a gratitude for human plurality. In shunning the
limits of common sense, the solitary creator of fictitious ideologies betrays
not just a resentment of Being but of those human beings with whom he
shares the world. Both Arendt and Chesterton found it necessary to defend
the need for stability and continuity in human affairs — for unlike Marx
would have us believe, “when all that is solid melts into air” we are not
forced to confront the reality of our existence and relations with others.
Arendt and Chesterton argue that we are driven back into a narcissistic
inner life of subjectivity and deprived of the awareness of a reality shared
in common with others. Both would also defend genuine privately owned
property against either capitalist monopoly or socialist control and offered
a critique of the eclipse of both private and public life by an unlimited
desire for the accumulation of wealth which overruns humanly established
boundaries and stable structures. Nevertheless, while stressing the need
for stability in human affairs, both maintained a hope that unexpected ac-
tions could lead to new beginnings — their perspectives were at the same
time both conservative and revolutionary. The existence of such common
ground is quite striking — particularly when viewed against the back-
ground of Arendt and Chesterton’s very different personalities, experienc-
es, and the contrasting forms and styles of their writing. But then truth is
stranger than fiction, and that is something for which we can be grateful.

Notes

1) I am not the first to notice this as some of the common ground was outlined in a
short article by Margaret Canovan, “Chesterton and Hannah Arendt,” 139-53.
2) Arendt’s published work contains references to or quotes from the following books
by Chesterton: The Flying Inn, The Return of Don Quixote, and The Man Who Was Thurs-
day (novels); The New Jerusalem (travel writing/religion); St. Thomas Aquinas (philo-
sophical biography/religion); and The Crimes of England (war propaganda). See Hannah
Arendt, “Christianity and Revolution,” 153-5; Origins of Totalitarianism, 51, 74, 127-128;
Men in Dark Times, 252.
3) Arendt does not refer to her source, but she is in fact quoting from a conversation
between the Irish Radical Patrick Dalroyd and the Tory landlord Humphrey Pump, the two
heroes in Chesterton’s 1914 novel The Flying Inn, 157-8.
4) See Arendt, “Christianity and Revolution,” 152-4; Men in Dark Times, 257; “Re-
membering Wystan H. Auden,” 185.
5) See Margaret Canovan, G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist.
6) Chesterton, I believe, would have endorsed this insight. See G. K. Chesterton, The
Well and the Shallows, 145-6.

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 renascence

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