Notes on The Adequacy of the Canon
Central Question
The essay asks whether the canon of political theory is adequate to help readers in our time understand the awful events of the twentieth century. Kateb believes political theory's object of inquiry should be facing "the worst"—deliberate policies of mass suffering—to illuminate moral psychology and the springs of action by initiators and followers.
The question can be broken into two parts:- (1) Does the canon up to the end of the nineteenth century illuminate or help predict the terrible events that occurred in the twentieth century?
(2) Are there any twentieth-century political thinkers who plausibly belong in the canon and offer this kind of illumination?
The tools and categories of 19th-century political theory, while valuable for understanding moral psychology, are ultimately inadequate for grasping the major events of the 20th century because they insufficiently anticipated the unprecedented scale and new dynamics introduced by:
Population growth: more potential victims and instruments for atrocity.
Technological power: advances enabling monitoring, organizing, mobilizing, coercing, and killing on an unprecedented scale.
Religion and secularism: the decline of traditional moral guidance and the rise of secular fanaticism.
The overall scale of twentieth-century atrocities seems to "break out of the conceptual net provided by texts up to 1900." The canon's pessimism about human nature needs adjustment to account for hyperactive imagination and moral blindness.
Kateb’s stance: the canon up to the nineteenth century helps but probably not enough; the scale of twentieth-century atrocities seems to break out of the conceptual net provided by texts up to 1900. He argues that two prominent Nietzscheans, Heidegger and Arendt, make substantial contributions to our ability to comprehend the awful events of the twentieth century, with Arendt standing out as a thinker in her own right (influenced by Nietzsche, but original).
He emphasizes that the value of the canon is not exhausted by its utility for interpreting atrocity; other aspects of the canon remain valuable for moral psychology, political theory, and human self-understanding.
Traditional vs. Twentieth-Century Adequacy: The Canon Before 1900
The main aim of reading the canon is to face the worst—defined as deliberate policies of mass suffering, not merely neglect or indifference, though neglect and indifference can be blameworthy as well.
The canonical texts help illuminate moral psychology—the springs of action by initiators and followers—and, for this purpose, moral phenomenology (self-characterization by agents) complements external psychological analysis. Imaginative literature offers especially rich insights for moral phenomenology, whereas moral psychology provides broader external analysis.
The twentieth century introduces new scales of atrocity: World War I, World War II, atomic weapons, nuclear deterrence theory, gulags, the Holocaust, induced famines, and large-scale massacres (among others). The scale is the defining discontinuity; the events are not simply repeats of earlier patterns but amplify them dramatically.
The canon’s pessimism about human nature remains valuable but must be adjusted to account for the unprecedented scale and new dynamics (hyperactive imagination, large populations, and advanced technology). Three factors contribute to the scale of twentieth-century atrocities, which the canon up to 1900 insufficiently anticipated: these are the tendencies that made catastrophic violence more likely and larger in scale:
Population growth: more people alive means more potential victims and instruments for atrocity.
Technological power: advances in technology empower planners to monitor, organize, mobilize, coerce, and kill on an unprecedented scale.
Religion and secularism: religious modes may have declined in providing meaningful moral guidance in technologically advanced societies; secular fanaticism, driven by a death of God and a turn toward aesthetic justification of reality design, becomes prominent.
These tendencies have had profound effects on the human subject by, for instance, transforming individuals into "standing reserve" or mere "materials" for grand projects (Heidegger's analysis), facilitating unreflective obedience and bureaucratic detachment (Arendt's banality of evil), and fueling a drive to redesign reality through hyperactive imagination combined with moral blindness.
A core claim: the same human nature that informed canonical pessimism is insufficient to explain twentieth-century scale without accounting for hyperactive imagination (the drive to redesign reality) and its companion, moral blindness (the failure to see the present reality and others as fully real). The canon must address how these imbalances contribute to mass atrocity.
Three Uses of the Canon (Beyond Nostalgia)
The canon provides instruction in moral psychology—the drives that initiate and sustain terrible deeds.
It offers a frame for moral phenomenology—the self-understanding of agents (leaders and followers) who participate in atrocities, often through self-characterization in literature and philosophy.
Three interrogatives the canon helps answer (as interpretive tools):- Why, if at all, is government necessary?
What are the claims of morality when governments and citizens act?
What, for good or ill, is distinctly political?
Kateb adds that while the nineteenth-century canon remains invaluable for moral psychology, it is not fully adequate to the twentieth century’s scale of atrocity. He considers that readings from Arendt and Heidegger offer crucial supplements to the canon.
The Awful Events and Their Significance
By "awful events" Kateb includes deliberate policies of mass murder, torture, and dispossession across multiple regimes and conflicts in the twentieth century.
He stresses not only initiation (the creation of atrocities) but also maintenance (the ongoing policies) and, to a lesser extent, neglect.
He argues that facing the worst requires understanding the motivations of leaders and followers, and how those motivations are shaped by political psychology and imagination.
He stresses the importance of moral psychology and its extension into imaginative life in understanding mass atrocity.
The Three Catalysts of Atrocity in the Twentieth Century
Numerosity of populations: larger populations magnify the potential scope of atrocities; the sheer numbers render the dynamics of power and victimization more complex and deadly.
Technological prowess: modern technology amplifies the ability to monitor, organize, coerce, and destroy, increasing the scale and precision of atrocities.
Religion and secularism: the death of God leaves a vacuum that secular ideologies and fanaticisms fill with new meaning; religious fanaticism can be brutal but secular fanaticism, aided by the death of traditional religious authority, becomes especially expansive and relentless. The combination of these factors makes the twentieth century unprecedented in scale.
A caveat: not all three factors need to be present in every atrocity; but missing one or two does not absolve the analysis—historical cases still reveal the importance of imagination and the dynamics of power.
A final point: the same old human tendencies predate the twentieth century, but their combination with enormous numbers, technology, and a secularized meaning framework produces new possibilities for mass harm.
Imagination as a Central Mechanism
A central claim: imagination has a vicissitude that must be understood to explain atrocities. Kateb contrasts two modes:
Hyperactive imagination: the capacity to make the absent present, to conceive and pursue a new reality or design that does not yet exist. This drives the will to remake the world and to see people as instruments or impediments to a grand scheme.
Inactive imagination (moral blindness): the inability or refusal to recognize the humanity of others or to see how one’s own role fits within a larger policy. This creates a dangerous blindness that allows atrocities to proceed with little personal remorse or responsibility.
Kateb suggests the human moral imagination has become degraded in the 20th century primarily through inactive imagination (moral blindness). Concretely, this means:
An inability or refusal to see the "present reality" and recognize the full humanity of others.
A failure to comprehend one's own role within a larger, often destructive, political policy.
Inactivity in reflecting on the ethical implications of actions.
This degradation makes human beings liable to do the following:Participate in atrocities "with little personal remorse or responsibility."
Engage in compartmentalization and bureaucratic detachment.
Accept the normalization of atrocity within systems.
Be seduced by aesthetically compelling narratives (fictions) that deny the reality and humanity of victims, as described by Arendt's "living by fiction" and "banality of evil."
This allows atrocities to proceed even without individual malevolent intent, through routine, thoughtlessness, and failure to connect actions to their full human consequences.
The interplay: hyperactive imagination and inactive imagination reinforce each other. Hyperactive designers rely on followers who are morally blind, and the combination enables policies that are radically destructive on a large scale. The momentum behind a design of reality can feel like destiny or mission, often accompanied by aesthetic certainty and a sense that ordinary moral limits do not apply.
The role of vices: vices (pride, vanity, envy, jealousy, anger, vengeance, greed, indecent curiosity, malice) act as irritants that stimulate imagination while also enabling it to become morally blind. However, hyperactive imagination can, in some cases, operate beyond recognizable vices, obtaining motivation from a sense of abstract destiny or calling.
The relationship can be summarized as: vices irritate and feed imagination; hyperactive imagination pushes beyond ordinary limits; moral blindness keeps participants from recognizing the humanity of victims or the preconditions of their action. Together, they produce mass atrocity.
The Role of Death of God, Fanaticism, and Aestheticism
Death of God: modernity's secularization causes religious frameworks to wane as sole sources of meaning and coherence, enabling new forms of fanaticism that are secular in character.
Secular fanaticism can be worse than religious fanaticism in certain respects because secular ideologies can pursue universal or technocratic aims with fewer recognized moral limits; they can present a grand, aesthetically compelling story of redesigning reality that rationalizes violence.
Aestheticism: leaders and followers seek meaningfulness through grand narratives and designs; the pursuit of meaning becomes aesthetic in nature, rather than anchored in moral reality. The scale of atrocities themselves can become a display of power and mastery; the ends justify the means because the narrative of destiny is aesthetically compelling.
The death of God creates space for a broader, more expansive fanaticism; aesthetics and meaning-making replace traditional religious grounding, enabling mass violence driven by a self-understanding as agents in a drama with no human author other than the initiators themselves.
The practical upshot: to understand twentieth-century atrocities, one must attend to fanaticism and aestheticism as core categories alongside conventional vices and moral psychology.
Religion, Secularism, and Fanaticism
The canonical canon up to 1900 tends to be pious toward religion; most canonical writers were either believers or skeptical of religion but not openly fanatical about it. The Enlightenment, however, intensifies the critique of inherited dogma.
The death of God is seen as a cultural turning point that liberates (and destabilizes) meaning-making; religion’s social cohesion and its capacity to engender meaning begin to erode in modern, secular contexts.
Secular fanaticism tends to be brutal because it enshrines a comprehensive, comprehensive and compelling worldview that becomes a surrogate for religious certainty. This is the vein through which modern mass movements often run—nationalism, racial ideologies, and other forms of identity-driven mobilization.
Religious fanaticism remains potent in various areas, but secular fanaticism, given modern technology and demographic scales, has special capacity to produce atrocity.
Kateb emphasizes that fanaticism, whether secular or religious, is inseparable from aestheticism (the drive to give the world a meaningful, design-dominated frame).
Arendt, Heidegger, and the Imagination
Kateb argues that Heidegger and Arendt offer indispensable insights into moral psychology and the imagination, especially in their analyses of modern totalitarianism and the functioning of power.
Heidegger: his discussions on technology, the essence of technology as a way of revealing (the essence of technology is nothing technological) help explain how modern rationality and instrumentality can lead to mass violence when reality is redesigned as standing reserve (humans as resources).- He warns that technology can transform production into mass destruction and turn human beings into mere materials for a grand project.
Arendt: her analyses in The Origins of Totalitarianism and on the banality of evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem illuminate how ordinary people can participate in monstrous systems through unreflective obedience, routine, and the failure to think critically about policy and its human implications. Her framing of living by and for fiction explains how leaders and followers can be seduced by comprehensive, aesthetically compelling stories that deny the humanity of others.
Kateb’s synthesis: while the canon up to 1900 is valuable, Arendt and Heidegger illuminate aspects of human imagination and political life that are essential for understanding twentieth-century atrocities. He also notes the value of other thinkers (Weil, Sartre, Foucault) for complementary angles on imagination, power, and biopolitics.
He emphasizes that the canonical tradition needs augmentation by the modern phenomenology of totalitarianism, as articulated by Arendt, and by the existential and technological critique offered by Heidegger.
The Scale Problem: What the Canon Missed and What It Should Address
The twentieth century demonstrates a scale of atrocity that the canon up to 1900 did not anticipate in full, particularly in terms of hyperactive imagination and the systematic use of technology to implement murderous designs.
The Numbers: The absolute scale of suffering and death in the twentieth century is enormous; for instance, as Kateb notes, the century saw events in roughly a sixty-year window (roughly 1915 to 1975) with mass killings and genocidal campaigns across multiple regions. This is a scale rarely seen before in human history and is not easily captured by the earlier canon.
The Technological Leverage: The combination of large human populations, technological power, and the ability to coordinate and mobilize people on a vast scale is unique to modernity and requires the canon to account for how these factors alter political psychology and collective behavior.
The Religious/ Secular Dynamic: Secular attempts to provide meaning and the transformation of religious fervor into secular fanaticism demand an expanded framework for understanding the rhetoric and motives behind large-scale violence.
The Role of Imagination: The interaction of hyperactive imagination and moral blindness (in both initiators and followers) is central to understanding the scale and tempo of twentieth-century atrocities. The canon must address how imagination can shape political will and erode moral perception.
The Interplay of Responsibility: Leaders, Followers, and Institutions
Leaders deploy hyperactive imagination to justify drastic actions; followers become complicit through seduction, routine, and organizational cohesion.
Followers’ blindness can be categorized into two forms:- Inactive imagination: inability or unwillingness to see the humanity of others or to recognize the larger policy they are helping to implement. This involves compartmentalization, bureaucratic detachment, and the normalization of atrocity.
The “doublethink” of Orwell: simultaneously holding a belief system and participating in its contrary practices without acknowledging the dissonance.
The canons’ portrayal of human beings as morally characterized by a mix of vices and rationalizations must be expanded to include the role of aesthetic meaning-making and the social dynamics of leadership and submission.
Kateb emphasizes that “seduction” by aesthetically compelling narratives is often the more responsible factor in propagating atrocity than the raw brutality of individuals alone; followers’ cravings for belonging and meaning can drive participation, even among those who are not inherently vicious.
The Banality of Evil, Meaning-Making, and the Politics of Fiction
Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil highlights ordinary people’ s compliance with monstrous systems without malevolent intent, simply because they fail to think about the consequences of their actions and fail to see the humanity of victims.
The interplay of “living by fiction” and the drive to create comprehensive meaning structures helps explain why people accept, justify, or participate in large-scale violence.
Kateb’s claim is that Arendt’s and Heidegger’s insights must be integrated with traditional canonical pessimism to grasp how mass atrocity arises not only from personal vice but from the structures, technologies, and aesthetic rationales that govern political life.
Conclusion: Adequacy of the Canon and the Case for Augmenting It
The canon up to 1900 remains invaluable for moral psychology and for offering cautionary insights into political life, but it is not sufficient to explain twentieth-century atrocities on their unprecedented scale.
The twentieth century requires supplementing the canonical tradition with the insights of Arendt, Heidegger, and related thinkers who address the imaginative dynamics, the bureaucratic and technological infrastructures, and the secular aesthetics that underwrite mass violence.
Kateb gestures toward a broader, more inclusive framework that also draws on Simone Weil, Sartre, and Foucault for complementary angles on group self-love, imagination under oppression, and biopolitics.
Three crucial theses about the canon’s inadequacy and the needed augmentation:- (i) The canon’s pessimism about human nature must be recalibrated to account for the scale and dynamic of twentieth-century evil, especially the interplay of hyperactive imagination and moral blindness.
(ii) The role of technology, numbers, and secular meaning-making demands a robust phenomenology of power, mass mobilization, and ideological manufacture.
(iii) The methodological lens must include Arendt and Heidegger’s analyses of totalitarianism, technology, and the “death of God” as catalysts for modern atrocity, to complement the canonical moral psychology and political theory.
Does Kateb offer any prescriptions to help us move beyond these conditions? Kateb primarily offers a prescription for how to understand these conditions, not a direct plan for action. His emphasis is on augmenting the canon with thinkers like Arendt and Heidegger to ensure political theory is adequately equipped to comprehend modern atrocities. The "educational implications" section suggests that for students, these thinkers should be treated as "essential contemporary supplements." By improving our conceptual tools and frameworks for analysis, Kateb implicitly suggests that a deeper understanding is a necessary precondition for addressing such events in the future.
Notable References and Endnotes (illustrative)
Kateb cites Hobbes’ Behemoth (examples of early mass violence): died in the English Civil War.
He cites Hegel on the New World as having “nearly seven million people have been wiped out”: .
He references Aristotle’s output on superiority and inferiority (Book V of the Politics) as a heuristic for understanding shifts in power and vengeance dynamics.
He cites Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology and Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem as central to the analysis.
He notes Berel Lang’s critique of Heidegger and the Jewish Question and the broader literature on totalitarianism, Nazism, Stalinism, and modernity.
He also mentions Simone Weil, Sartre, and Foucault as valuable additional voices for understanding the twentieth century's ideologies and technological rationalities.
The author’s own caveat: his claims about imagination and evil are provisional and aim to provoke further reflection rather than present a full, final theory.
Key Formulas and Numerical References (LaTeX-ready)
Twentieth-century timeline window referred to: -
Absolute victim-count references cited:- (i.e., 100{,}000) in Hobbes’ Civil War context
(seven million) in the New World context per Hegel
Scale contrast: the twentieth century is described as having a scale of atrocity that is unprecedented in roughly (1915–1975).
The dialogue with the classical canon uses quantitative anchors (numbers of victims) to illustrate the discrepancy between past pessimism and present-scale violence.
// Connections and practical implications
Philosophical implications: the need to revise the canon’s pessimism about human nature to include imaginative capabilities and their political enactment in modern mass violence.
Educational implications: for students studying political theory, Arendt and Heidegger should be treated as essential contemporary supplements to the traditional canon when addressing the moral psychology and the political dynamics of modern atrocity.
Ethical implications: the analysis highlights the moral dangers of spectator detachment, bureaucratic normalization, and the seductive power of aesthetically meaningful narratives that justify harm.
Real-world relevance: understanding the interplay of numbers, technology, religion/secularism, and imagination helps explain why large-scale atrocities can arise even when individual motives vary and moral weaknesses exist:
It alerts policymakers to the risk factors of mass violence: rapid population growth, rapid technological advancement, and the erosion of shared moral grounding.
Do these conditions still exist in the 21st century? Have they become muted or exacerbated? Based on Kateb's analysis, the underlying conditions identified—population growth, technological prowess, and the altered dynamic of religion/secularism and the rise of secular fanaticism/aestheticism—have not only persisted but, in many respects, have become exacerbated in the 21st century:
Population growth continues globally, increasing the potential scale of both victims and perpetrators.
Technological prowess has advanced immensely, with digital surveillance, AI, and increasingly sophisticated weaponry (including cyber warfare and autonomous systems) offering even greater capacities for control, organization, and destruction than in the 20th century. This amplifies the risk of humans being treated as "standing reserve."
The erosion of shared moral grounding and the rise of diverse and often polarizing ideological frameworks (both secular and religious fanaticisms) are arguably more pronounced. The "death of God" continues to open space for aesthetic and self-justifying narratives that can rationalise violence on a large scale.
The interplay of hyperactive imagination (e.g., in ambitious technological and ideological projects) and moral blindness/inactive imagination (e.g., online dehumanization, 'echo chambers,' detachment facilitated by digital interactions) is highly relevant.
Therefore, while the specific manifestations of atrocity may differ, the structural tendencies and psychological dynamics Kateb described remain deeply embedded in the 21st century socio-political landscape, suggesting that the risks are, if anything, heightened by accelerated technological and social changes.
Endnotes (brief paraphrase of notes in Kateb’s piece)
1) Hobbes, Behemoth, 95.
2) Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 163.
3) Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 35.
4) Berel Lang, Heidegger and the Jewish Question (criticizing the silence around cruelty).
5) Rosa Luxemburg, referenced in Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 43.
6) Arendt, Between Past and Future, Tradition and the Modern Age, 28.
Summary Takeaways
The canon up to 1900 is valuable but not fully adequate to explain twentieth-century atrocities; it must be augmented by modern analyses of imagination, totalitarianism, and secular fanaticism.
Heidegger and Arendt offer crucial conceptual tools for understanding the dynamics of power, technology, meaning-making, and the moral psychology of both leaders and followers.
To grasp the scale of modern