Dostoyevsky and the Defense of Compassion

Is cruelty a problem for politics? For Hannah Arendt, the answer was no. On her view, a compassionate response towards persons suffering cruelty is best avoided because compassion can only become political by transforming incommunicable individual pain into abstract suffering. At crucial moments in her argument in On Revolution, she cites the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky as an ally. However, I argue that Arendt misrepresents Dostoyevsky. Through a critical examination of his mature novels, I show how suffering is communicable and compassion is political for Dostoyevsky. By attending to this theme in his writings, I argue that Dostoyevsky sheds light on the problem of cruelty in a way that Arendt’s framework cannot. This suggests that he is more at home with theorists like Judith Shklar who “put cruelty first” than with Arendt, although in favoring compassion I argue that he departs from Shklar’s liberalism of fear and offers a more constructive, hopeful political vision.