Cybernetic Muse: Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951–1958

Brian Simbirski

Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 77, Number 4, October 2016, pp. 589-613
(Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2016.0032

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/635629

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 Cybernetic Muse:
Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951–1958

Brian Simbirski

Technology is often thought of as a feature of the dismal modern landscape

Hannah Arendt juxtaposed with a vision of the ancient Greek polis.1 The
Human Condition (1958) was perhaps Arendt’s most vivid depiction of
modernity. It is well known that she opened the book with the announce-
ment that the 1957 launch of Sputnik would have a greater impact on all
humanity than the splitting of the atom. It is perhaps less known that the

My thanks to Dr. Duncan Bell for his reading various drafts of the text, and to the
anonymous readers for their helpful comments.

Abbreviations
AU John Diebold, Automation: The Advent of the Automatic Factory (Toronto: Van
Nostrand, 1952).
HC Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (1958; repr., London: University
of Chicago Press, 1998).
MSS Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington,
DC.
CA Hannah Arendt, “Cybernetics and Automation,” 1964, MSS Box 72.
OT Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr., New York: Har-
court, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973).

1
Dana Villa, “The Development of Arendt’s Political Thought,” in The Cambridge Com-
panion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
Jerome Kohn, introduction to The Promise of Politics by Hannah Arendt (New York:
Schocken Books, 2005), xxv.

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manuscript was submitted for publication months before Sputnik’s launch.2

What has received far less attention was what Arendt described as “no less
threatening” and “closer at hand”—the advent of automation.3 Although
Arendt placed automation at the center of a world “born with the first
atomic explosions,” consideration of how it fit into her wider conceptual
scheme remains cursory.4
The splitting of the atom, the launch of Sputnik, and the advent of
automation affected Arendt’s political theory from 1951 to 1958. The way
she connected these brought automation, cybernetics, and political action
together in her work. In The Human Condition, she did not, however,
deliver an explicit theory of automation. This article elucidates that theory,
demonstrating how key technological trends culminating in American
industrial automation were essential to the framework “against whose
background” The Human Condition “was written.”5 This article traces
Arendt’s response to problems attributed to automation in research and
industry. It recovers the implications of the term “automation” that
emerged during the 1950s, showing how her evaluation of political action
came to hinge on this term.
Extensive interest in particular areas of Arendt’s political writings has
overshadowed her explicit commitment to reconciling technology with
political theory. This article aims to recover the significance Arendt attrib-
uted to technology, advancing the argument that by 1958 her conception
of political action pivoted on automation and cybernetics. Each section
maps stages in this transition. The first demonstrates how the atom bomb
led Arendt to question historical political thought and attempt to reconcile
politics with what she called “technicalization,” a term she employed to
highlight undercurrents within nuclear power, manufacturing, and infor-
mation systems—trends later consolidated in the development of automa-
tion and cybernetics. The second locates Arendt’s writings amid public

2
Hannah Arendt to Alexander Morin, 2 August 1957, Box 39, University of Chicago
Press Records, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. See
also Patchen Markell, “Arendt, Aesthetics and ‘the Crisis in Culture,’ ” in The Aesthetic
Turn in Political Thought, ed. Nikolas Kompridis (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 64.
3
HC, 1, 4.
4
Mary Dietz, “Arendt and the Holocaust,” in Villa, Cambridge Companion to Hannah
Arendt, 93–96; Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), 200–201; Jeffrey Champlin, “Born Again: Arendt’s
‘Natality’ as Figure and Concept,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory
88, no. 2 (2013): 150–51, 159; HC, 5–6.
5
HC, 6.

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 Simbirski ✦ Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951–1958

dialogue on the social implications of automation that stemmed from

American industrial, research, and military consolidation around techno-
logical projects of the 1950s. This section traces how, in this context, auto-
mation (especially computerization) became synonymous with applied
cybernetics. It shows how these grew out of military research projects and
had bearing on contemporary social science. The third section interprets
how key passages in The Human Condition responded to American dis-
course on automation, and how political action was defined in relation.

NUCLEAR AGE POLITICS

When Arendt first arrived in America, she found commonplace technology,

“the icebox and automobile,” inconsequential relative to the “political
traditions of the American Republic.”6 Years later she overturned this,
claiming “atomic technicalization” had made traditional political ideas
obsolete.7 By 1963 she announced that “only the rise of technology” and
“not the rise of modern political ideas” had “refuted the old and terrible
truth that only violence and rule over others could make some men free.”8
What changed how Arendt related technology to politics? What was techni-
calization? How did the rise of technology affect political ideas? Uncover-
ing the connections Arendt drew between expanding American power and
atomic era innovation helps to answer these questions.
Arendt described modern warfare as reduced to “technical mastery of
the means of destruction.”9 While she prefaced political works with invoca-
tions of the nuclear threat, she proceeded with little further mention
thereof. Yet contemporaries concerned with the bomb saw an omnipresent
problem that changed the context for political discourse altogether.10 In the
years following the Second World War, the devastation of carpet bombing
campaigns and the atomic strikes on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were in
recent memory. The implications of escalating nuclear tensions were stark.
Little was needed to cast a long shadow. Jonathan Schell argues that Arendt

6
Arendt, “Foreign Affairs in the Foreign-Language Press,” in Essays in Understanding,
1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 1994), 98. Originally published as
“Our Foreign Lanugage Groups,” Chicago Jewish Forum 3, no. 1 (1944).
7
Arendt, “Europe and the Atom Bomb” (1954), in Kohn, Essays in Understanding, 420.
8
Arendt, On Revolution (1963; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 104; David
Bates, “On Revolutions in the Nuclear Age,” Qui Parle 15, no. 2 (2005): 171–95.
9
Arendt, On Revolution, 7.
10
Jonathan Schell, The Seventh Decade (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 7–11.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2016

brought nuclear proliferation and totalitarianism together in just this sense.

For Schell, these are the kernel of her later political thought, “twin expres-
sions” of the “crisis of the modern age.”11 However, Schell downplays
Arendt’s lack of direct confrontation with nuclear proliferation (suggesting
she may have left this to colleagues already dedicated to the problem, nota-
bly Günther Anders and Karl Jaspers), abating connections she made
between nuclear technology and American trends in automation during the
1950s.12
Arendt came to associate nuclear violence with automation and cyber-
netics, topics she engaged with directly. In 1964 she delivered an address at
the first annual conference of the Institute for Cybercultural Research. In her
address she spelled out that “automation” was “a new revolution” threaten-
ing to “interrupt the life cycle” in unpredictable ways.13 She explained that
“human beings” were “conditioned beings by definition,” yet not “just con-
ditioned by” their “environment”—automation created a dynamic wherein
“man conditions the environment and the environment then conditions
him.”14 To define the automation revolution, Arendt adopted a cybernetic
conception of technological interplay between man and environment. Yet this
did not spring directly from engagement with the Institute for Cybercultural
Research. Her 1964 encounter with cybernetics and automation was not her
first. Behavioral theories indebted to cybernetics, automation, and computer-
ization—advances intimately linked to nuclear R&D—had been sweeping
the American social sciences throughout the 1950s.15
For figures such as David Easton and Karl Deutsch, an empirical basis
for political science was latent in these advances. They became leading pro-
ponents of a redefinition of political theory specifically in cybernetic
terms.16 John Gunnell argues that émigrés such as Arendt and Leo Strauss

11
Schell, “In Search of a Miracle: Hannah Arendt and the Atom Bomb,” in Politics in
Dark Times, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 248,
250.
12
Schell, “In Search of a Miracle,” 247–48. See also Karl Jaspers, The Atom Bomb and
the Future of Man, trans. E. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961);
Günther Anders, Die Antiquierheit des Menschen: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten
industriellen Revolution (1956; repr., Munich: Beck, 1988).
13
CA, 1, 3.
14
CA, 5.
15
Steve Heims, The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 15–17,
271; Magnus Ramage, “Norbert and Gregory: Two Strands of Cybernetics,” Informa-
tion, Communication and Society 12, no. 5 (2009): 737–38; Hunter Heyck, Age of Sys-
tem: Understanding the Development of Modern Social Science (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2015), 67–69.
16
See David Easton, The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science

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 Simbirski ✦ Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951–1958

defined political theory polemically within disciplinary debate, leveling crit-

icism against behavioralists, and Easton specifically.17 Gunnell demon-
strates how Arendt and others engaged in North American debates over
behavioralism especially in relation to political theory. But this focus on
disciplinary debate makes Gunnell’s interpretation of émigré political
thought reductive. Arendt’s terms reflected an engagement with public dia-
logue on the broader implications of automation, to which academic trends
driven by figures such as Easton and Deutsch were integral. In American
research institutions, technology-driven initiatives modeled on wartime
programs such as the Manhattan Project were rapidly gaining traction
across virtually all disciplines.18 Just as in Los Alamos, scientists looked to
developing computer technology in advancing large-scale research projects.
Waves of social research adopted quantitative behavioral modeling meth-
ods, effectively necessitating electronic information systems and cybernetic
concepts, especially “feedback” and “circular systems.”19 It was in this
sense that Arendt later described automation as an outgrowth of nuclear
fission. Expanding on what she called technicalization, she pointed to com-
puters as embodiments of automation, borne of the age heralded by the
splitting of the atom.
Arendt mentioned atomic weapons only sporadically in The Origins of
Totalitarianism (1951), but what she did say resonated amid contemporary
anxieties about the politics of nuclear technology.20 By 1951 atomic annihi-
lation and the very notion of totalitarianism seemed to be inseparable
aspects of the same dilemma.21 As the first Soviet detonation of an atomic
weapon in 1949 brought the American nuclear monopoly to an end, fear-
inducing media radicalized American attitudes towards the bomb. Maga-
zines including Time and Life presented nuclear proliferation as the best

(New York: Knopf, 1953); Karl Deutsch, The Nerves of Government (1963; repr., New
York: Free Press, 1966), vii–x. See also Heyck, System, 68, 130–31, 163.
17
John Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Voca-
tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 141, 233, 246.
18
Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical
Research in the United States, 1940–1960,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biolog-
ical Sciences 18, no. 1 (1987): 152–53; Heyck, System, 58–64.
19
Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 5, 9, 11, 94–136; Heims, Cybernetics Group, 18–19;
Ramage, “Norbert and Gregory,” 737–38. See also Jamie Cohen-Cole, “Cybernetics and
the Machinery of Rationality,” British Journal for the History of Science 41, no. 1 (2008).
20
Bernard Crick, “On Rereading The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Social Research 44,
no. 1 (1977): 106–26.
21
For an account of how “totalitarianism” was used to associate Soviet communism with
fascism, see Bo Stråth, “Ideology and Conceptual History,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Political Ideologies, ed. Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Marc Stears

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2016

defense against “Soviet totalitarians” in possession of the bomb and

“remorselessly driven towards war.”22 Origins suggested that nuclear fis-
sion itself, not only the bomb, was intrinsically violent. Allusions to nuclear
power added to the book’s theoretical immediacy as a guide to political
practice—one of Arendt’s primary intentions in writing it.23 With the post-
war economic boom and the sense that overwhelming technological superi-
ority was critical to American security, there was an almost bipolar attitude
towards the prospects for technological progress.24 Atomic scientists
insisted that nuclear power offered the means to establish world govern-
ment and material wealth, remedies to its innate dangers.25 This was espe-
cially true among atomic physicists involved in the creation of nuclear
weapons. Prominent intellectuals including Oppenheimer and Einstein
announced that “World Peace” or “World Destruction” were the only
political alternatives left in the wake of the bomb.26 Arendt suggested that
expecting to establish peace through material abundance and “automatic
progress” was a disastrous course, since “destruction” had proven to be
“the only secure form of possession.”27 Only the imposition of “political
limitations” could inhibit “the power-accumulating machine” that could
“envelop the whole earth in its tyranny.”28 But how, if at all, could this
commentary on neo-imperialism inform political action in 1950s America?
Arendt’s resolve to write Origins “against the background of both
reckless optimism and reckless despair” fits the milieu of nuclear politics.29
Her prologue’s assertion that “Progress and Doom” had become “two sides
of the same medal” jarred with the “peace or annihilation” binary champi-
oned by atomic physicists in the public spotlight at the time.30 Nuclear tech-
nology did not simply mean bigger bombs. Arendt saw radical change that
altered the nature of political problems. Nuclear violence embodied a sheer
break of technical capability from social understanding.31 The very premise

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See also Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The
Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 9–12, 108–13.
22
Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn
of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 336–37.
23
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006), 33.
24
Boyer, Early Light, 124.
25
Ibid., 194.
26
Dexter Masters and Katharine Way, eds., One World or None (1946; repr., New York:
New Press, 2007), v.
27
OT, 144–46.
28
OT, 146.
29
OT, vii.
30
Ibid.
31
OT, viii.

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 Simbirski ✦ Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951–1958

that conscious decisions could be made about the development and use of
such complex technology became tenuous. Nuclear technology marked a
fundamental shift in what it meant to pursue power.32 At the dawn of the
atomic age, familiar ideas—like the imperialistic dream to “annex the
planets”—bore outlandish implications for the material conditions of
human existence.33
Origins pointed to ties between consumption and the pursuit of power,
grounded in material conditions technological change made unstable. Mod-
ern innovation, exemplified by fission, was violent. While nature was con-
ceived of as an object of both mastery and truth, resignation to natural
determinism would, paradoxically, accompany the manipulation of natural
processes.34 This drive to expand technological capabilities pitted human
beings against nature: “Since man learned to master [nature] to such an
extent that the destruction of all organic life on earth with man-made
instruments has become conceivable and technically possible, he has been
alienated from nature.”35 Atomic era technology embodied a new antago-
nism with nature. What seemed to follow from nuclear fission was incessant
change based on interactions between humans and their “natural” environ-
ment. To conceive of political action in the static terms of philosophical
tradition became untenable under dynamic conditions.36 Through the
1950s Arendt developed a response to this dilemma, coming to relate politi-
cal action to automation.
The Human Condition took up the problems with nuclear fission sug-
gested in Origins, reconciling political action with technological change.
Allusions to technology in Origins would become prominent in The Human
Condition, where Arendt claimed that the splitting of the atom, the launch
of Sputnik, and the emergence of new forms of behavioral science pointed
back to automation. The development of a dynamic conception of political
action in response to key technological trends was an essential aspect of

32
OT, 329.
33
OT, 137, 146. For Arendt’s take on Cecil Rhodes’s vision of global annexation and her
1951 depiction of the “human condition,” see Norma Claire Moruzzi, Speaking through
the Mask: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2000), 90–92. See also Robert Bernasconi, “When the Real Crime Began: Hannah
Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and the Dignity of the Western Tradition,” in
Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History, ed. Richard King and Dan Stone (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2008), 58–60.
34
OT, 192.
35
OT, 298.
36
OT, 478. See also Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lan-
ham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 94; Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American
Thought and Culture in the 1960s (New York: Cornell University Press, 2000), 33–35.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2016

this reconciliation—culminating in Arendt’s premise that automation

would radically alter human existence.

MODERN LIVING: THE AUTOMATION REVOLUTION

Technology became a ubiquitous problem for Arendt in the 1950s. She

began to describe modernity in terms of technology, showing parallels to
interwar German debates indicative of her study in Heidelberg from 1924
to 1933.37 How this and continued exchanges with Weimar intellectuals
influenced Arendt’s later work (especially how Martin Heidegger influenced
her writing on technology subsequent to her reengagement with him
through the 1950s) has been accounted for.38 Her experience as an émigré
is typically examined with a view to German culture, philosophical tra-
dition, the Holocaust, and totalitarianism, downplaying other factors
relevant to her work in America.39 Consequently, her consideration of
American technological development, particularly automation and cyber-
netics, has been marginalized, despite indication that Heidegger himself
looked to American scientific and technological trends—in reflecting on

37
For a consideration of German discourse on politics and technology and its influence
on Arendt’s conception of totalitarianism, see Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism:
Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), 154, 200; John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liber-
alism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
22–23.
38
Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 182–202; Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah
Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001), 14, 30–69; Martin Woessner, Heidegger in America (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 40–43, 88–91; Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation
with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1990), 197–99; Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (London: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 98–103. See also Lewis Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman, “In Hei-
degger’s Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s Phenomenological Humanism,” Review of Politics
46, no. 2 (1984); Richard King, Arendt and America (London: University of Chicago
Press, 2015), 103–6, 141–42.
39
Margaret Canovan, “Hannah Arendt as a Conservative Thinker,” in Hannah Arendt:
Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1997), 17; Mitchell G. Ash and Alfons Söllner, eds., Forced Migration and Scientific
Change: Émigré German-Speaking Scientists and Scholars after 1933 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1996), 4, 14; Gunnell, Descent, 177–78; Steven Aschheim,
Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2007), 81–86. See also Villa, “Arendt’s Political Thought,” 3, 6–7; Benhabib,
Reluctant Modernism, 130–37; Sheldon Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the
Political,” Salmagundi 60 (1983): 6, 8–10; King, Arendt, 3–11.

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 Simbirski ✦ Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951–1958

technology, Heidegger engaged with arch-cyberneticist Norbert Wiener’s

work, particularly The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), and in an
interview conducted in 1966 (unpublished until 1976) he explicitly stated
that cybernetics was the form of technology replacing philosophy.40
Wiener defined the field of control and communication in animals and
machines with the 1948 publication of Cybernetics. Oddly, the book
received widespread attention despite being predominantly technical, testi-
mony to how cybernetics was from its conception as much a social and
political initiative as it was technical.41 As computerization proliferated
across military, corporate, and academic circles, Wiener became a public
figure, leading commentary on technology in America.42 Particularly, he
speculated on how nascent trends in nuclear power, automation, electron-
ics, and communications systems could affect society.43 It was within this
context that Arendt came to view automation as an outgrowth of nuclear
fission. The development of thermonuclear weapons and Eisenhower’s pro-
motion of technological solutions to military and economic problems were
issues Arendt privately discussed with Karl Jaspers.44 While Arendt rarely
challenged her lifelong mentor, she criticized his failure to recognize how
crucial “the coming automation” had become to American corporations,
and how corporatization was shaping the global economy.45
The importance of automation was clear, but its significance among

40
Martin Heidegger, “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,” Der Spiegel 23 (May 31,
1976): 193–219. See William Lovitt, introduction to The Question Concerning Technol-
ogy and Other Essays, by Heidegger, trans. Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), xi. See also
Søren Riis, “The Ultimate Technology: The End of Technology and the Task of Nature,”
Artificial Life 19, no. 3 (2013); Richard Polt, “A Heideggerian Critique of Cyberbeing,”
in Horizons of Authenticity in Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Moral Psychology,
ed. Hans Pedersen and Megan Altman (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 179–200.
41
Ronald R. Kline, The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information
Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 1–5, 10, 68–101.
42
Heims, Cybernetics Group, 11. See also Joel Isaac, “Tangled Loops: Theory, History
and Human Sciences in Modern America,” Modern Intellectual History 6, no. 2 (2009):
409–15; Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 17, 54–66; Andrew Pickering, “Cyborg History
and the World War II Regime,” Perspectives on Science 3 (1995): 33.
43
Gerovitch, “Mathematical Machines,” 262–63; Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Con-
trol and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: Technology Press,
1948), 19.
44
Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, eds., Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers: Correspondence,
1926–1969, trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1992),
303–9; Ira Chernus, Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace (College Station: Texas A&M Univer-
sity Press, 2002), 2, 68–74; Saki Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New-Look National Security
Policy, 1953–61 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 140–47, 210–17, 284.
45
Arendt to Jaspers, 29 October 1962, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, 486.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2016

other trends was not. Contextualizing Arendt’s work amid contemporary

American debates on technology elucidates the specific bearing automa-
tion had on political action in The Human Condition. A stipulation of
the Rockefeller Foundation grant Arendt received to write The Human
Condition was that it must address contemporary American social
issues.46 Nuclear fission, automation, and astronautics were all central to
her conception of major problems America faced at the time. She sug-
gested these converged in a process wherein the distinction between
humans and living environments was eroding. This was occurring
through a continuous alteration of the fabric of human and nonhuman
nature. Arendt attributed this process to automation, “the culminating
point” of modern fabrication that “illuminates the whole history of mech-
anism.”47
Automation seemed to make the “artificialization of natural life” ines-
capable, yet this was not inherently problematic.48 Automation “opened”
the possibility of making consumption the only remaining “toil” bound to
the “motor” of “human life.”49 The danger was that “all human productiv-
ity” was being “sucked into” an “enormously intensified life process”—
transforming the “age-old dream of the poor and destitute” into a “fool’s
paradise,” the “true consumers’ society.”50 Consumerist idealism was nei-
ther new nor necessarily threatening. But automation was transmuting
harmless dreams into a bizarre reality. The “grave danger” of increasing
the “spare time of the animal laborans” threatened “annihilation through
consumption.”51 Automation was the key to this threat, making all things
consumable while accelerating consumption—“no object in the world” was
safe from automation.52 Idiosyncratically, Arendt left the term virtually
unqualified. What constituted automation and how was it a serious threat?
Through the 1950s automation increasingly entered American public
debate. In defining the term, Arendt extrapolated from the seminal work of
the American automation movement of the 1950s, John Diebold’s Automa-
tion (1952).53 She assumed that certain aspects of Automation reflected real
and imminent change. In many ways, they did. Diebold was at the center

46
Farhang Rajaee, Kenneth W. Thompson, the Prophet of Norms: Thought and Practice
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 67–68.
47
HC, 149.
48
HC, 132.
49
HC, 131.
50
HC, 132–33.
51
HC, 133.
52
HC, 133; Crick, “On Rereading The Origins of Totalitarianism,” 109.
53
HC, 149–52.

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 Simbirski ✦ Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951–1958

of postwar industrial expansion. Automation represented a movement

expanding rapidly across military, corporate, and academic spheres from
1945 onward.54 Fueled by government policy designed to accelerate inno-
vation, technology-driven spending skyrocketed throughout the period.55
Between 1949 (the earliest Soviet atomic weapons tests) and 1954, the
American budget for nuclear strategic forces quadrupled.56 As was the case
for the Manhattan Project in World War II, the expectation was that R&D
initiatives would ensure military–technological advantage over the Soviets.
Moreover, atomic age innovation promised to revolutionize living condi-
tions everywhere. Academic, industrial, and military collaboration aimed
to intensify the scale and pace of innovation. From factory production to
corporate and military decision-making, priority was given to reorganiza-
tion around systems that took advantage of automation.57 One facet of this
was the wide dissemination of behavioral models and training programs
adapted to computerization (a trend reflected in the work of political scien-
tists including Easton and Deutsch).58 Automation was seen as crucial in
accelerating innovation, consolidating state power, and quashing domestic
ills with big technology.59 To harness the potential of atomic age innovation
would require automation, especially information systems like those essen-
tial to the creation of the bomb in the first place.60
This course of technological development was a major source of the
discontent Arendt harbored against the American government. She pri-
vately detested the Eisenhower administration’s “dangerous” and “idiotic”
initiatives to hinge security and prosperity on technological advance.61 In

54
Spencer Ante, Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital (Bos-
ton: Harvard Business Press, 2008), 131.
55
Dockrill, New-Look, 154.
56
Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold
War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 89.
57
Benjamin L. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning
the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s–1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2003), 208, 220; Edwards, Closed World, 47, 53–54, 90, 99–100; Boyer, Early Light,
109–21, 302.
58
Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, “Cognitive and Perceptual Training in the Cold War Man-
Machine System,” in Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War,
ed. Duncan Bell and Joel Isaac (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 267.
59
Gordon Adams, The Politics of Defense Contracting: The Iron Triangle (New York:
Transaction Publishing, 1989), 24; Edwards, Closed World, 81–82, 99–104, 124; Heyck,
System, 62–64.
60
Edwards, Closed World, 43, 51.
61
Ernst Vollrath, “Hannah Arendt Views the United States,” in Hannah Arendt and Leo
Strauss: German Émigrés and American Political Thought, ed. Peter Graf Kielmansegg,
Horst Mewes, and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 53–54.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2016

1954 she declared that atomic weapons, power plants, and new forms of
mass media formed an “intimate connection between modern warfare and
a technicalized society.”62 Her discussion of “progressing technicalization”
alluded to the “second industrial revolution,” the automation movement.63
The backbone of this movement was the drive to harness abundant energy
through fully automated production. This depended on driving radical
change in established industries. Diebold prominently advocated automa-
tion to major American corporations. Increasingly, Arendt came to relate
automation (what she called the “new revolution” in her 1964 address on
cybernetics) to what she had described as “progressing technicalization” in
1954.
Barry Cooper argues that technology had become central to Arendt’s
conception of modernity by the late 1950s.64 For Cooper, modernity spans
centuries marked by the “reversal of the relationship between the vita
contemplativa and the vita activia” manifest in technology.65 Yet Arendt
insisted that particular forms of contemporary technology destabilized nat-
ural processes, and her explicit references to automation had more immedi-
ate implications.66 This has been obscured since Arendt did not provide a
systematic theory of automation, instead placing it in the “backdrop” of
modernity. At the time the automation movement was reaching its peak.
Little needed to be said to invoke wide anxiety about it. The “Sputnik Cri-
sis” of 1957 set off unprecedented state centralization of research. Comput-
erization and cybernetics were becoming essential to astronautics and
continental defense systems; the impetus to improve information systems
redoubled.67 The launch of Sputnik initiated irreversible technological
trends tied to automation. These events set a looming backdrop that gave
political action immediate value during the 1950s.

62
Arendt, “Atom Bomb,” 418–422; Bates, “On Revolutions,” 174.
63
Arendt, “Atom Bomb,” 418–422; David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History
of Industrial Automation (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2011), 62, 69–70,
212–13.
64
Barry Cooper, “Hannah Arendt’s Reflections on Technology,” in Democratic Theory
and Technological Society, ed. Richard Day, Ronald Beiner, and Joseph Masciulli (Lon-
don: M. E. Sharpe, 1988); Cooper, Action into Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of
Technology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 101–9, 129–32,
146–50.
65
Cooper, Action into Nature, 108, 146–47.
66
HC, 238.
67
Slava Gerovitch, “Mathematical Machines of the Cold War: Soviet Computing, Ameri-
can Cybernetics and Ideological Disputes in the Early 1950s,” Social Studies of Science
31, no. 2 (2001): 264, 272; Zuoyue Wang, In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science

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 Simbirski ✦ Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951–1958

Arendt established a dialectical connection between political action

and a shifting technological landscape. She claimed that innovation and
human evolution were reciprocal. Automation embodied this pattern fol-
lowing the development of nuclear power. These new kinds of systems were
not tools but factors emerging through the logic of technical advance, shap-
ing human nature. Arendt projected a range of possibilities and limitations
imposed by automation, setting preconditions for political action. How her
work incorporated American discourse on automation demonstrates this.
The Human Condition opened with the proclamation that the “advent of
automation” was as decisive and threatening as Sputnik while “closer at
hand” in America.68 While automation developed from a wider historical
span, the term was redefined by Diebold, who popularized it in promoting
the adaptation of industrial operations to electronic systems. By the late
1950s the term was widely recognizable and associated exclusively with
the cybernetic technology that had discernable beginnings in wartime
research.69
Arendt drew from popular American debate to discuss how automa-
tion would shape living conditions everywhere, for everyone.70 A strange
admixture of hope and fear colored such debates about atomic age technol-
ogy. The benefits of automating military and industrial operations were
weighed against concerns that comprehensive technological systems would
inhibit freedom and spontaneity.71 However, the adoption of new behav-
ioral standards seemed to placate public fears of thermonuclear exchange.72
Public unease was abated in the hope that technological advance would
either ensure security through international superiority or alleviate resource
struggles that led to political tensions. Cybernetics and automation espe-
cially were bound up with popular imagination. A future wherein people
were encapsulated within controllable environments seemed an alternative
to annihilation. Conformity to modern behavioral standards of work and
consumption was conflated with hopes for security and prosperity that
could transcend the nuclear threat.73 Projections of future society radically

Advisory Committee and Cold War America (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press,
2008), 86.
68
HC, 1, 4.
69
Noble, Forces, 67; AU, 2–3.
70
HC, 147–53.
71
Ghamari-Tabrizi, “Man-Machine System.”
72
Edwards, Closed World, 70, 90.
73
Patricia Warrick, The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1980), xiii, 53–79, 121; Boyer, Early Light, 133–50, 257–65.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2016

altered by technological change were hallmarks of such discussion across

popular, corporate, military, and academic spheres during the 1950s.74 Die-
bold played a key role in debate on the new human–machine integration
and was widely recognized for his vision of automating manufacturing and
administration.75
By 1956 the automation movement reached a “fever pitch.”76 Arendt
approached the problem assuming weary familiarity with automation
debates, the “apparently endless discussion” on whether “man should be
‘adjusted’ to the machine or the machines should be adjusted to the ‘nature’
of man.”77 She presumed human nature would become entirely subject to
boundless innovation, anticipating the automation revolution in Diebold’s
terms. Diebold’s terms were shaped by his engagement with technologists
who consolidated wartime work around principles of automatic control. In
particular, Wiener first sparked Diebold’s interest in automation.78 Wie-
ner’s wartime work designing anti-aircraft weapons systems led him to
found cybernetics, the field of automated control.79 Diebold drew primarily
from Wiener to define automation. In turn, Arendt appropriated Diebold’s
use of the term.80 Her view depended particularly on Diebold’s interpreta-
tion of how computerization would revolutionize manufacturing. Diebold
also looked to Wiener in forecasting the social impact of automation. Wie-
ner’s The Human Use of Human Beings addressed the social and politi-
cal implications of the “crisis” of the “second industrial revolution,” the
automation movement.81 Wiener suggested that the “automatization” of
machine design was “one of the great factors in conditioning the social and
technical life” of a new era.82 The interface “between man and machines”
designed to “exercise our control over our environment” would play an

74
M. Keith Booker, Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science
Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946–1964 (London: Greenwood Press, 2001),
1–5, 105, 139.
75
Ante, Capital, xiv, 129–46; Jennifer Bayot, “John Diebold, 79, a Visionary of the Com-
puter Age, Dies,” New York Times, December 27, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/
12/27/nyregion/27diebold.html.
76
David Brock, “From Automation to Silicon Valley,” History and Technology 28, no. 4
(2012): 378.
77
HC, 147.
78
AU, 3.
79
Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic
Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 245, 253.
80
HC, 148–49.
81
Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950; repr., Bos-
ton: Da Capo Press, 1954), 136.
82
Ibid., 150.

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 Simbirski ✦ Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951–1958

“ever-increasing” role in shaping individual experience and social order

alike.83 The redesign of labor around automatic control systems promised
increased efficiency, but threatened mass unemployment and new forms of
oppression.84 Diebold promoted only the positive aspects of cybernetic
technology, rejecting Wiener’s apprehensions. He launched a polemic
against the “Norbert Wiener School,” attacking “perverse” analogies
between human beings and automated control systems.85 Diebold assured
the emancipation of workers because “free will, the essential human qual-
ity” was necessarily “absent from all of these machines,” framing the
notion that “machines think or are in any essential way human” as an
absurdity.86 Diebold insisted that automation would reduce toil without
creating unemployment, emancipating the masses in abundant leisure.87
Diebold’s program necessitated reforms in education and research tai-
lored to automation. For Arendt, such reforms were obtrusive. She claimed
that automation, bound to “metabolism with nature,” the “very condition
of human life,” was not a source of human liberation.88 Instead, the “con-
tinuous automatic process whose shape will be primarily determined by the
operation of the machine” threatened to “rule and even destroy the world
and things.”89 This would lead to increasingly comprehensive artificial envi-
ronments shaped by the demands of industrial operations, as laid out by
Diebold in Automation. Diebold explained that manufacturing would be
engineered around closed, programmable, self-regulating processes depen-
dent on electronics and abundant energy. He prioritized continuous acceler-
ation of the pace of technological change.90 Automated systems required
constant redesign around evolving requirements. New models for produc-
tion would need to be made “in terms of functions to be performed rather
than in terms of predetermined end products.”91 Thus the automation
movement was as much about changing, at the broadest level, how people
think.92 Reeducating scientists, engineers, businesspeople, factory workers,
and the general public to adapt their behavior to the constantly evolving

83
Ibid., 16–17.
84
Ibid., 161–62.
85
AU, 132, 151–75.
86
AU, 154–55.
87
AU, 28, 29.
88
HC, 131.
89
HC, 151–52.
90
AU, 150.
91
AU, 59.
92
AU, 31, 45–50, 53.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2016

demands of automation was paramount for Diebold.93 It was no coinci-

dence that Arendt contrasted the mere use of tools with technology as a
process.94 She projected a situation wherein automation fused technology
with human evolutionary biology. The “technological environment of
man” would inevitably become “a shell to the body” of a “human organ-
ism” unconsciously driven towards the expansion of automated reproduc-
tion.95
When Arendt wrote The Human Condition, Diebold and Wiener were
at the center of public debate on the social impact of automation. To think
beyond the terms of “future automation”—as set out by Diebold—was
vital to Arendt’s conception of emancipation.96 But what did this entail?
The very systems that Diebold promoted were built on the human–machine
analogies he rejected.97 This paradox was pivotal to Arendt’s view of the
process through which humans, technology, and the environment were mel-
ding. Where Diebold justified automation by maintaining that free will was
innately human, Arendt insisted (as had Wiener) that human nature and
technical development were mutually dependent and coevolving.98 Yet
Arendt also upheld Diebold’s distinction between free will and automated
systems. This paradox informed her conception of political action, an exer-
cise strikingly similar to Diebold’s positing of thought as the “essential
human quality absent from all machines.” What, then, constituted political
action under the conditions of automation?

POLITICAL ACTION IN A TECHNOLOGICAL WORLD

To understand how Arendt related automation to political action, her dis-

tinction between science and technology must be scrutinized. Margaret
Canovan argues that Arendt’s discussion of technology supplemented more
fundamental commentary on science.99 This skews the treatment of auto-
mation in The Human Condition, and Canovan misses how Arendt related
modern science and technology. Canovan suggests that Arendt’s discussion

93
AU, 2, 16, 29, 32, 143.
94
AU, 151–53.
95
Arendt quoted Werner Heisenberg depicting the impact of automation. HC, 153.
96
HC, 132.
97
Ghamari-Tabrizi, “Man-Machine System,” 272.
98
HC, 147.
99
Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 81, 84.

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 Simbirski ✦ Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951–1958

of astronautics and automation alluded to scientific advances generally, and

specifically scientific attempts to transcend traditional human limitations
leading to narrow constraints on human behavior.100 Yet according to
Arendt, science was not innately problematic. Rather, technological inno-
vation, especially research in line with automation, was reshaping science.
This subtle difference had significant implications for Arendt’s response to
the crisis in reformulating political action, a conception owing in part to
Heidegger’s thinking on technology. Hubert Dreyfus convincingly argues
that for Heidegger technology was “not a problem for which we must find
a solution but an ontological condition.”101 Consequently, Heidegger
argued that “attempts to reckon existing reality” in “terms of decline and
loss” lapsed into “merely technological behavior,” to “rebel helplessly”
equated to a “compulsion to push on blindly with technology” (a problem
initially bound up with Americanization).102 Along these lines, Arendt did
not reject the narrow behavioral constraints inherent in a modern scientific
worldview, as Conovan suggests, an impulse that would imply an attempt
to return to lost philosophical traditions in the wake of totalitarianism.
Despite her lament for the rupture from philosophical tradition, Arendt
proceeded from the premise that automation, specifically, was an imminent
aspect of reality, an embodiment of the abstract technological condition
that implied irrevocable change to the nature of science itself.
In the 1950s American natural and social sciences alike had undergone
a “revolutionary turn” marked by the import of concepts, such as systems
feedback, from cybernetics.103 In the social sciences (including political sci-
ence), this was in line with the automation movement, bolstered by funding
directed towards large projects that utilized advanced electronics to model
behavior.104 Automation was thus central to Arendt’s conception of modern
science. She later stated more starkly that “every progress in science in the
last decades” had been “absorbed into technology,” bringing “a veritable
avalanche of fabulous instruments and ever more ingenious machinery.”105

100
Canovan, introduction to HC, x–xi.
101
Hubert Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology,
and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 301–7.
102
Heidegger, “The Turning” (1950), in Question Concerning Technology, 48; Heideg-
ger, “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), in ibid., 25–26. See also Sidonie
Kellerer, “Rewording the Past: The Postwar Publication of a 1938 Lecture by Martin
Heidegger,” Modern Intellectual History 11, no. 3 (2014): 593–97.
103
Galison, “Cybernetic Vision,” 255.
104
Heyck, System, 59–64, 76–78.
105
Arendt, “Symposium on Space,” in The Great Ideas Today, 1963, ed. Robert M.
Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1963), 38, 45–46;

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2016

The “science” of the atomic age was essentially technological, having par-
ticular bearing on politics. Technology did not simply follow from scientific
progress. In 1953 she indicated that, instead, technological transformation
had become the essential, defining characteristic of the era.106 She developed
a theory of technological change that turned on the nuclear problem, yet
extended beyond the dilemma of weapons proliferation.107 By 1955 she
suggested that the kind of research that led to fission posed a political prob-
lem surpassing civil war and class struggle.108 By the late 1950s she inte-
grated these themes into her assessment of Diebold’s automation
revolution. In The Human Condition she presumed that technology was
affecting human evolution, assuming the sustained acceleration of techno-
logical change through automation and the reduction of science to a part
of that process.
Researchers advancing innovations such as fission altered natural proc-
esses and became “alienated” from any fixed understanding of nature. It
followed that new forms of research imposed human subjectivity on natural
processes—making objective understanding impossible.109 Knowledge ac-
cumulated in the process of technology-driven research became subject to
endless innovation. As the pace and capacity of manufacturing increased,
the “innate structures of the human organism” would be “transplanted in
an ever-increasing measure into the environment of man.”110 This brought
people and their surroundings into a system wherein they became increas-
ingly indistinguishable, and the impulse to affect natural processes super-
seded the priority of disinterested observation. Any attempt to advance
knowledge of the natural universe within modern research programs
became futile. The false presupposition that research advanced knowledge
thinly veiled the unconscious perpetuation of modern technology.
Science, as it were, was being consumed, and automation was at the
heart of the problem. In The Human Condition the splitting of the atom,

Arendt, “The Archimedian Point,” 1968, MSS Box 72. See also Pieter Tijmes, “The
Archimedean Point and Eccentricity: Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Science and Tech-
nology,” Inquiry 35, no. 3 (1992): 398–403.
106
Arendt, “The Concept of Man as Laborer,” 1952, MSS Box 72.
107
Arendt, “History of Political Theory: Transition to the Modern Age,” 1955, MSS Box
58.
108
Arendt, “Political Theory.”
109
Arendt extended from Heisenberg’s history of physics, particularly “atomic events”
and the observer effect. Tijmes, “Archimedean Point,” 392–99. See also Heisenberg,
Physics and Philosophy (1958; repr., London: Penguin, 2000), 11, 20.
110
HC, 153; Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt
(New York: Routledge, 2001), 37–42, 51–58, 64–69.

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 Simbirski ✦ Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951–1958

the launch of the artificial satellite, and the advent of automation were all
identified as pivotal “events” that together defined modernity.111 These
events marked an epoch in which natural processes and human subjectivity
would merge, with an existential impact on almost all human beings.
Arendt explained how the impetus for technological advance supplanted
scientific aims through a narrative centered on one key event—the adoption
of a new conception of the interface between humans and technology:
“Like the birth in a manger,” she pronounced, Galileo’s “first tentative
glances into the universe through an instrument” would “set the stage for
an entirely new world” and “determined the course of other events.”112 The
thrust of the narrative had less to do with the history of classical astronomy
in itself than with contemporary trends in American research institutions.
The allegorical value of Galileo’s dependence on the telescope had bearing
on the paradigm shift in scientific practices of the 1950s to which cyber-
netics and automation were integral.
Under state and industrial direction of research, science was being sys-
tematically instrumentalized for technological advance. Prosthetic depen-
dence on the innovative use of new devices would drive technological
change while making objective truth transitory.113 Arendt’s position
reflected Heidegger’s commentary on modern research. Yet where Heideg-
ger sought a “metaphysical ground” for “modern science” that would
reveal “the entire essence of the modern age” (and later the ontological
“essence of technology,” a “mode of revealing”), Arendt identified particu-
lar trends, lending an empirical basis to her theory.114 In doing so, her con-
ception of research became precisely characteristic of the paradigm shift
affected by automation and cybernetics, as popularized by Diebold
and Wiener. Arendt later confirmed as much, stating that what she had

111
Benjamin Lazier, “Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture,” American
Historical Review, 116, no. 3 (2011): 602–30. Arendt used A. N. Whitehead, Martin
Heidegger, and Alexandre Koyré to formulate her concept of earth alienation. David
Macauley, “Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Place: From Earth Alienation to Oikos,”
in Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology, ed. Macauley (New York: Guilford
Press, 1996), 108–12.
112
HC, 257–58. Arendt took the quote directly from Whitehead’s Science and the Mod-
ern World, lectures given to popularize science in America. Correspondence suggests the
notes were developed while drafting The Human Condition. Arendt, “Science,” n.d.,
MSS Box 84; Arendt to Jaspers, 14 April 1957, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, 314.
113
HC, 260.
114
Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” (1938), in Question Concerning Technol-
ogy, 117, 126, 153; “Question Concerning Technology,” 4, 12–13. See also Wolin, Hei-
degger’s Children, 92–93; Guignon, introduction to Companion to Heidegger, 24.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2016

previously called “progressing technicalization” amounted to automa-

tion—the revolution characterized by cybernetic socialization.115 This phe-
nomenon did not simply distort human perception. Modifying human
senses became an active part of bringing “irreversibility and human unpre-
dictability into the natural realm,” bridging the gap between human subjec-
tivity and nonhuman processes.116 Automation was reconstituting living
environments and integrating all human beings within them, reducing
“modern science” to part of the “life process” of the “human organism.”
Sputnik signaled the expansion of the “human organism.” Its launch
was a step toward enmeshing the earth within an increasingly comprehen-
sive automated infrastructure, something only plausible with the harnessing
of forces such as nuclear energy. Thus the “main stages of modern technol-
ogy’s development” culminated in the advent of automation.117 Automa-
tion closed the gap between human beings and living environments, shaping
the world.118 It was this convergence around increasingly artificial processes
that defined the human condition: “The human condition consists in man’s
being a conditioned being for whom everything, given or man-made, imme-
diately becomes a condition of his further existence . . . man ‘adjusted’
himself to an environment of machines the moment he designed them.”119
Technology as a form of action hinged on altering nature—“science and
technology” did not “observe” or “imitate processes of nature,” together
they “actually act into it.”120 As technology became more subtle and perva-
sive, it became more difficult to perceive beyond it: “Instead of objective
qualities . . . we find instruments . . . the observed object has no existence
independent of the observing subject.”121 That knowledge could be accu-
mulated through a science interlocked with technological innovation was a
false premise—as object and observer fed back into an ongoing process,
change would be indefinite.
Innovation depended on translating thought into tangible data that

115
CA, 1.
116
HC, 238.
117
HC, 148–49.
118
HC, 1, 4, 149.
119
HC, 147.
120
HC, 238. Arendt separated history from nature as essentially different spheres of
action. D’Entrèves, Political Philosophy, 56–57. For Arendt’s contradistinction of authen-
tic political against other kinds of action, see George Kateb, “Political Action: Its Nature
and Advantages,” in Villa, Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, 131, 133. See also
Cooper, Action into Nature, 185; Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 11, 20.
121
HC, 261–62.

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 Simbirski ✦ Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951–1958

could be mobilized to affect natural processes.122 The “giant computers”

becoming integral to American military and industrial operations during
the 1950s were “not capable of erecting a world”; instead they fueled modi-
fication of the “life process,” facilitating human integration with wider nat-
ural processes.123 While computational research might produce arrays of
information, the drive for technological advance made information condi-
tional and transitory. Computerization spurred demand for further innova-
tion, perpetually driving the inevitable obsolescence of older data. Thus
automating research “sucked” thinking into the consumptive “life proc-
esses” of the “human organism.” As information systems advanced, all
thinking was systematically incorporated into automation. What seemed
like a basis for scientific advance threatened to annihilate the world.
Poetry, the “most human and least worldly of the arts” and “closest to
thought,” stood in contrast to reductive, technical language.124 This paral-
leled Heidegger’s response to technological ontology, in which he attempted
to recover a lost tradition in which poetry (especially that of Hölderlin)
was the kernel of profound experience.125 However, Arendt’s conception of
poetry diverged subtly but profoundly from the endeavor to restore authen-
tic experience through a recovery of poetic tradition. Arendt intentionally
departed from the idea of an irrevocably lost intellectual tradition. Instead,
her conception of poetry was defined in the negative, a form of action far
more contingent on immediate circumstance. She took up Diebold’s “free
will amidst machines” problem despite her attempts to separate will from
political action, elevating his notion of thinking beyond automation into an
existential crisis. Automation threatened to undermine its own value by
reducing thinking to a narrow, mechanized, and instrumental function
of organic processes. Paradoxically, this could not be escaped. Arendt’s
solution was to define poetic work against, yet in acquiescence to,
automation—following Diebold’s assertion that the integrity of “the essen-
tial human quality of free will” could be exercised by thinking beyond the
terms of technology. Through poetic work, the “mother of the muses” was
“transformed into memory” to achieve permanence “in the recollection of
humanity.”126 This was an activity that demanded constant adaptation to

122
HC, 265.
123
HC, 172.
124
HC, 169.
125
Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology,” 28. See also John Caputo, “Heidegger
and Theology” in Companion to Heidegger, 338–39.
126
HC, 169–72. See also Jean-Pierre Dupuy, On the Origins of Cognitive Science: Mecha-
nization of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), xii–xv, 29–30.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2016

technologically dynamic conditions, particularly as social and political sci-

ence adapted to computerization.
Arendt claimed that poetic work was an end in itself. However, her
conception of the “Archimedean point” demonstrated how she acted politi-
cally by invalidating alternatives to a particular course of action that was,
by definition, dependent on automation. For Canovan, the “most unex-
pected feature” of The Human Condition was Arendt’s discovery of “an
Archimedean point” in “ancient Greece” from which she “cast a critical
eye on ways of thinking and behaving.”127 But for Arendt, Franz Kafka’s
aphorism, the “archimedischen Punkt,” referred to technology’s inescapa-
bility.128 Arendt’s evocation of Kafka, who epitomized an intellectual elite
critical of the “soul-killing” impact of technology, was unsurprising.129
With the atom bomb, the “anti-technological mood” once confined to an
intellectual elite became a “general hostility to technology—and by implica-
tion, to America.”130 While people evaded responsibility for problems like
nuclear proliferation, they complacently sought material advantages real-
ized through technological progress.
The technology problem only became truly ubiquitous following the
development of fission: “Only we, and we only for hardly more than a few
decades, have come to live in a world thoroughly determined by a science
and a technology whose objective truth and practical know-how are
derived from cosmic” processes.131 Accelerating innovation subjected all
activity to blindly automatic functions of the “human organism.” This was
fundamental to Arendt’s view of corporatization—a perspective she devel-
oped amid the incredible corporate and industrial expansion in America
during the 1950s. Consumer behavior was being reframed around subcon-
scious emotional desire in anticipation of rapidly accelerating automated
production, particularly manifest in corporate advertising.132 That most
people in technologically advanced countries simply adapted to such pat-
terns of consumerism indicated mass complicity. This was especially poi-
gnant in academic circles, among professional intellectuals whose failure to
engage in authentic thinking fueled the threat of technology. Tying the idea
of the Archimedean point to Galileo’s use of the telescope illustrated the

127
Canovan, Hannah Arendt, viii.
128
HC, 248; Canovan, “Conservative Thinker,” 17.
129
Arendt, “Atom Bomb,” 419.
130
Ibid.
131
HC, 268.
132
HC, 149; Lawrence Samuel, “Freud, Fascism, and the Golden Age of American Adver-
tising,” in The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, ed. Jonathan Auerbach and
Russ Castronovo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 261, 268–69.

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 Simbirski ✦ Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951–1958

problem.133 Galileo’s dependence on the telescope was unconscious, a dan-

gerous aspect of the “discovery and application of the Archimedean point”
that “Kafka warned us not to do.”134 As research advanced along these
lines it was futile in itself. Knowledge perpetually negated itself while spur-
ring demand for innovation. Most scientists were actually technologists
unconsciously serving automated life processes.135
The alternative to unconscious technological behavior was its exact
antithesis—to become consciously aware of processes in which one was
entangled, something that distinguished members of the world from con-
sumers and technologists. Attempting to reconcile dissent with unabated
technological advance, Arendt defined poetic work as a valid recourse.
Automation was an inexorable, quasi-natural process against which the
self-aware act of “thinking” that “does nothing” became poetic, or in Die-
bold’s terms, essentially human.136 Action outside of these terms could be
rendered politically invalid, unconscious even if intellectually complex.
What qualified as action closest to thinking, poetry, became possible
through contingencies opened by automation. Arendt portrayed automa-
tion as a deterministic process unique to the atomic age, insisting that tech-
nology would dissolve the gap between humans and their environment,
inevitably forming a strange new kind of “human organism.” Everyone
would be continuously exposed to others’ subjectivity, and the predomi-
nant impulse that would manifest was insistent consumption.
The determinism suggested by Arendt’s theory reflected Heidegger’s
argument that no individual group could “brake or direct the progress of
history in the atomic age.”137 Yet Arendt’s conception of political action
actually implied total involvement in just such terms. Acting to transform
thought into something retained in the memory of humanity became vital
in conditioning future behavior to stave off “annihilation by consump-
tion.” All work was inherently reflexive where human subjectivity and nat-
ural processes merged. Where members of the Institute for Cybercultural
Research saw potential to transcend emotional strife and problematic
human behavior in “the fortunate fact we can erase memory in computers,”
Arendt warned that “with human beings” this prospect amounted to

133
Arendt, “Science.” See also Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; repr.,
New York: Free Press, 1967), 5–7.
134
HC, 322.
135
Arendt, “Archimedean Point,” and “Symposium on Space.”
136
HC, 325.
137
Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John Anderson and E. Freund (1959; repr.,
New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 52. See also Dreyfus, “Nihilism, Art, Technology and
Politics,” 304.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2016

“brainwashing.”138 To realize the prospects latent in computerization

threatened to “deprive human existence,” degrading all “human affairs” to
a “sad state” where there remained “nothing but to go on living.”139 It
followed that poetry affected change, particularly through public memory,
even if it lacked quantifiable results. Thus Arendt acted from within the
very context she depicted—“musing” about the inevitability of being condi-
tioned by the artificial environment—as a means to exert influence across a
technologically dynamic era. Having assumed features of the automation
movement from a debate marked by contributors like Wiener and Diebold,
she implicitly appropriated the latter’s call to express “essential human
qualities, free will absent from machines.” This served as a basis for authen-
tic work that rendered alternative forms of activity politically invalid.
It was not altogether clear what authentic thinking was for Arendt,
rather only what it was not, since poetic work was defined against automa-
tion. One crucial aspect of automation was its impact on American social
sciences during the 1950s (particularly in the behavioral basis for political
science posed by contemporaries such as Easton and Deutsch). Unprece-
dented amounts of funding were directed towards projects that utilized
sophisticated technology to solve social ills. Mathematized behavioral mod-
eling adapted to computerization was displacing alternatives across disci-
plines. She saw this as a facet of irreversible technological development,
hard truth demanding reconciliation.140 Thus while poetic expression
seemed an alternative to the narrow limitations of automation, it was not.
Arendt qualified authentic work by assuming that the limitations imposed
by “the coming automation” were imminent. Any action that might
threaten this foundation would be rendered invalid. The sublimation of
invalid action became critically important to sustaining the continuity of a
world shaped by automation. Consequently, legitimate action was that
which predicated plurality of opinion on behavioral adaptation to the fun-
damental principles essential to automation.

Accelerating innovation posed specific problems alongside the overt threat

of nuclear annihilation. Technology entangled unpredictable human subjec-
tivity with natural processes where nature had previously represented

138
CA, 1–2.
139
CA, 2.
140
Arendt contributed to Daedalus in 1962, addressing “methods of easing the impact of
technological change,” an unpublished issue circulated within the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences. Correspondence, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, MSS
Box 17.

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 Simbirski ✦ Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951–1958

unchanging order. What followed from the circumvention of thermonu-

clear annihilation was a trend toward engineering living environments
under the conditions of automation. “Modern science” became a euphe-
mism for technology, knowledge for manipulation of natural processes.
Attempts to control natural processes, however, would have strange and
unforeseeable consequences on those affected by technological change.
Within the R&D framework emerging in America during the 1950s, scien-
tists naively contributed to accelerating innovation. Technology-driven
research unconsciously integrated human and nonhuman into automated
life processes embodied by devices like Sputnik. But what made the crisis
of technology truly ubiquitous was the advent of automation.
Arendt took for granted that what constituted automation was out-
lined most succinctly in a book at the center of the “second industrial revo-
lution” of the 1950s, Diebold’s Automation. Together with the promise of
energy abundance, the integration of electromechanics, computers, commu-
nications systems, and cybernetic theory into factory operations seemed to
provide an empirical basis embodying the technological reconfigura-
tion of humans and their environment. Diebold insisted that automation
would never violate innately human qualities, particularly “thinking” and
“free will.” The Human Condition set thinking as an activity against
automation—a necessarily exclusive activity, open to few. Arendt’s later
work presupposed adaptation to the very behavioral limitations imposed
by the looming “coming automation.” Under her own theoretical commit-
ments, she contributed to the reinforcement of the norms implied in auto-
mation, acting from within to exercise political agency.
In disseminating her theory, Arendt acted politically, defining “think-
ing” as proactive adaptation to the changing standards of work, produc-
tion, and consumption brought on by accelerating technological change.
She used automation to develop a negative definition of thinking, implicitly
granting political authority to the demonstrably conscious, rendering other
forms of action unconscious. But by extending from Diebold’s terms,
Arendt predicated thinking on the demands of automated production. By
assuming that automation was deterministic in bringing the “true consumer
society” to fruition, she played into Diebold’s hand, providing a mechanism
for sublimating volatile political dissent. Such was the vision that architects
of automation and cybernetics believed essential to technocratic stability
and corporate order in 1950s America.

University of Cambridge.

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