Political theorists are familiar with the problem of authority. We know better than to claim, say, that Hobbes is right because he is Hobbes. But is the line so easily drawn? After all, he is Hobbes. It is a natural hazard of standing on the shoulders of greats that we peer down and behold their greatness. In graduate school, the problem manifests as nagging insecurity. We want to do exciting and novel readings of texts, but the path is treacherous—it is natural to wonder: Am I missing something? The issue emerges early on. The first time I read Hobbes was as an undergraduate; naturally, I assumed he was brilliant—otherwise, why would I be reading him in a freshman-year philosophy lecture?

In fact, authority presents two discrete problems: the first is putting thinkers on a pedestal (i.e., “the Hobbes problem”); the second is borrowing their gaze—what I like to think of as “the Marx problem.” Something is progressive if Marx said it; to be progressive is to think like Marx. “Such and such contemporary case is an example of what Marx once critiqued,” we might confidently claim, with the implication being that what makes the case important is the linkage with Marx—as though there were a transitive nature to argumentation. This is different than the Hobbes problem, but there is feedback between the two: to look at the world through Marx’s eyes is to replicate his gaze. At one point, it is difficult to know if we are doing so because Marx was right or simply because he was Marx.

So, how do we break this cycle? What tools does a researcher have to counter this wall of authority? One answer is the archive—understood here in the historical sense, as an official deposit of information—which can be used as a foil against the hegemony of rote application or received wisdom. I illustrate this point with an experience from the Stasi Records Archive (Stasi Unterlagen Archiv) in Berlin as it relates to the writing of Hannah Arendt.Footnote ¹

In her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951/2017), Arendt made a now-famous claim about loneliness: namely, that totalitarian states—defined by extralegal violence and indoctrination—separate people from one another, ripping apart the fabric of society and rendering citizens unable to organize politically. This makes people turn inward, cowed by fear of persecution, forced into a state of collective isolation in which they no longer share their experiences. Loneliness is the term Arendt used to describe this phenomenon: the special type of solitude where we feel alone, even when surrounded by others; where we lose the sense that we are part of a common world. This, Arendt wrote, is “among the most radical and desperate experiences of man” (1951/2017, 624).

During my research, I turned to Arendt because her argument in Origins fit well with the nature of authority in the former East Germany (i.e., the German Democratic Republic, or GDR), where citizens were lorded over by the ever-watchful eyes of the state security services (the Stasi), infamous for infiltrating social units and destroying the trust people had in one another. Indeed, Arendt’s conception of totalitarian isolation confirmed precisely our priors about the GDR.Footnote ² Yet, in this case, following the Arendtian line too closely—especially if reliant on secondary sources about the GDR—would have meant missing out on the potential for critical engagement with the subject material, both empirically and theoretically. This is where the archive comes in.

One of my objectives in the Stasi Unterlagen Archiv was to chronicle Stasi attempts to stop would-be refugees from escaping the GDR, especially via Hungary. (Beginning in May 1989, the Hungarian government had pioneered reforms to the Iron Curtain, making it potentially easier for people to cross.) At first glance, these files tell the story of a ruthless and well-oiled operation—almost all attempts were stymied, at least in the beginning—precisely the vision we have of the Stasi. However, with time, another portrait emerges: of an organization which, by 1989, was struggling to comprehend why so many people were trying to escape. This is manifested clearly in interrogation reports compiled later, after individuals were apprehended and brought back to the GDR.

The following example is perhaps illustrative. M was captured trying to flee to Austria on May 16.Footnote ³ However, unlike so many others who were dissatisfied with the GDR, M had been a devoted citizen. As a kid, he had been a socialist pioneer; he recently had begun working as an engineer. This generated a puzzle for the Stasi. Why would a man like this try to flee? The dossier does not say. M lived a very private life; whatever discontent he felt, he kept to himself. This is illustrative of the type of place the GDR had become, so effective at driving people inward, away from the public sphere and into their private sanctum. That M’s intentions went unnoticed was thus not simply a failure of the system but also, paradoxically, evidence of its success.

This is Arendt’s loneliness par excellence. For a researcher like me, trying to forge such a connection, the pursuit could have ended there. Yet, the further I dug into the archive, the more complex and multifaceted the story became. In fact, M was lonely, in the Arendtian sense. However, in spite of this, he did ultimately pursue freedom—thinking freedom and acting, as Arendt would have it. How can we explain this? Part of the difficulty is that M’s loneliness did not derive from actual state power but rather from the lingering hold of that power on the imaginary. By 1989, the Stasi edifice was collapsing beneath the weight of its investigations. What I was finding was less a reflection of state authority than the shape and contours of its disappearance.

In the archives, the problem of what the Stasi did not know is everywhere present. Many of the East Germans I interviewed during my research gave me permission to examine their personal files. This required substantial paperwork but, after the signatures were acquired and the forms submitted, I found almost nothing. This is shocking: these people were refugees, there should have been a considerable paper trail; but name after name produced only slender folders (or no files at all). This is the non-story of the archive: what state power did not or could not understand. Perhaps this is simply reflective of state decline. However, there are many more elegant stories embedded here too: of nameless bureaucrats choosing not to flag these vulnerable individuals; the everyday morality of looking the other way.

Returning to Arendt: What can we say about loneliness? In some sense, East Germany had become a society riddled with loneliness, but this experience took root in many different forms (some conformed to the Arendtian conception, others did not). As such, the sociological structure of the late-GDR, and the moral and political relationships that the system engendered, was something altogether discrete—certainly from the priors about the GDR with which I began my research (and which the simple application of Arendt’s text would have confirmed) but also from the systems that Arendt analyzed.

The point here is not to critique Arendt’s conception of loneliness, but rather to highlight a problem in the way that we political theorists use texts as authorities. I so easily could have taken Arendt’s ideas (attaining credibility by dint of her authority) and grafted them onto familiar depictions about the GDR. This scholarship would have met the demands of our discipline, in which relying on secondary historical sources is a norm—we are not, after all, historians. Indeed, I was on my way to doing just this, had the evidence from the archives not stopped me in my tracks. In this case, the archive freed me from the received wisdom about Stasi rule and from adopting wholesale the Arendtian gaze—thereby helping me develop a gaze of my own.