against its intellectual seriousness, and she has often been characterized by the social science community, for example, as one of the literati: brilliantly imaginative, but too little concerned with evidence.
Part of the explanation for her often abstruse and uniquely literary style of theory ultimately seems to have had to do with a certain idiosyncrasy of thought, which she appears to have been unable to fully master. Mary McCarthy states that, as far as she knew, all of Arendt’s books and articles were edited, often by several collaborators, before reaching print, and often over fundamental elements.8 Arendt’s way of thinking seems to have been more organic than systematic, often requiring the help of others to give it a more coherent form. She herself was open about the tentative and even potentially experimental nature of her thinking9 and even admitted that she was uncertain of how finally to assess them. At the 1972 conference on her work, she concluded the day’s discussions, saying, “I would like to say that everything I did and everything I wrote—all of this is tentative. I think that all thinking, the way that I have indulged in it perhaps a little beyond measure, extravagantly, has the earmark of being tentative.”10 Yet, there also seemed to be a kind of ethos behind her writing. She went on to say that she believed that the nature of intellectual activity did not afford the kind of authority that can go beyond such tentative and experimental forays, and that the true purpose of a political thinker might actually only be to teach others to think politically for themselves. During one of the sharpest exchanges of the conference, Bay criticized Arendt’s tentativeness, saying, “I was disturbed when Hannah Arendt said that her desire is never to indoctrinate. I think that this is the highest calling of the political theorist: to attempt to indoctrinate, in a pluralist universe, of course.… Unless we passionately care for certain opinions, I think we will all be lost.” In the ensuing discussion, Arendt said,
I cannot tell you black on white—and would hate to do it—what the consequences of this kind of thought which I try, not to indoctrinate, but to rouse or to awaken in my students, are, in actual politics.… I wouldn’t instruct you, and I would think that this would be presumptuous of me. I think that you should be instructed when you sit together with your peers around a table and exchange opinions … I think that every other road of the theoretician who tells his students what to think and how to act is … my God! These are adults! We are not in the nursery!11
Arendt seemed to believe that theorists somehow had an obligation to hold something back, to somehow avoid robbing those they teach of their ability to think for themselves. She appeared to understand her purpose in teaching as that of helping others to think for themselves by giving them a place to start. Perhaps in a similar way, she seemed careful to maintain a certain distance and tentativeness in her work.
This language of tentativeness and experimentalism might suggest the lack of seriousness Christian Bay chided her over. Yet, this is hardly believable. Arendt wrote with too much urgency and focused her thought on matters that were of momentous political importance for the twentieth century. There is no contradiction between the urgency of her subject matter and the experimentalism and tentativeness of her thought, if experimentalism was what these urgent matters required. Arendt believed that we now live in a historically unprecedented situation. While she did her best to characterize this new world, she did not believe that she could do this exhaustively or alone. As we will see, the most basic commitment of her idea of political judgment was that judgment concerns reflection upon a world that separates and relates individuals who have it in common, and, as a result, no one individual can ever hope to fully comprehend it by themselves, and the closest we come is by taking into account the reflections of those who hold it in common with us. Thus, if Arendt did maintain a certain tentativeness in her writing, it no doubt involved a desire to open a conversation about the world we have in common rather than to close it.
But this does not mean that Hannah Arendt did not make substantial progress toward developing a positive theory that could address the problems of the modern world. She herself characterized The Human Condition as part of a productive element of her political thought in a letter to Karl Jaspers in 1957. Writing as she was about to publish a collection of “transitional essays,” she told Jaspers, “I’m afraid you won’t like them because they are entirely negative and destructive, and the positive side is hardly in evidence … but I wish you were already familiar with [The Human Condition], which you will surely like better.”12 Clearly, Arendt believed Jaspers would have liked The Human Condition because in her view, at least, it would carry much more of her positive project. But as we will see, The Human Condition was only part of this positive project, a project that in fact predated it and which she was never able to complete. That project revolved around the problem of reestablishing practical reason and political judgment in the modern world, and though it remained unfinished at her death, I will argue here that we can reconstruct it from a disparate set of her published, posthumously published, and unpublished writings. While perhaps it indeed remained provisional and experimental, I believe it was well enough developed to carry the possibility of transforming how we think about many of the most fundamental concepts of political thought, including freedom, justice, sovereignty, citizenship, practical reason, and, indeed, the very nature and meaning of political philosophy itself.
In Pursuit of Authentic Political Philosophy
In another letter to Jaspers in 1956, Arendt said, “I am in the midst of [writing] my Vita Activa [the working title of The Human Condition], and I’ve had to put completely out of my mind the relationship between philosophy and politics, which is really of greater interest to me.”13 One of the true surprises of Arendt’s thought is that beginning in 1954 she returned to this question of the relation of philosophy and politics over and over, yet never published a direct account of her conclusions about the question. There are at least four different occasions between 1954 and 1969 when Arendt formally wrote about the relationship between philosophy and politics. Each of these is a distinct and original attempt to address this question.
The first occasion was in 1954. That year she wrote a long essay, which she presented as a set of lectures at Notre Dame,14 entitled “Philosophy and Politics: The Problem of Thought and Action After the French Revolution,”15 the last portion of which Jerome Kohn edited and published as “Philosophy and Politics” in 1990.16 It is a highly illuminating manuscript and develops several notions that are only gestured at elsewhere by Arendt. In this essay, she sought to explain how the relationship between philosophy and politics could be authentically grasped only through an understanding of the true nature of thought and action. This manuscript appears to have set the stage for all of her later work, and indeed it could arguably be viewed as a kind of roadmap for understanding her work as a whole. The second occasion was in a manuscript called “Introduction into Politics,” which was edited and published by Kohn in the volume The Promise of Politics.17 Immediately after finishing The Human Condition, Arendt attempted to write a book that developed the broader meaning of her genealogy of the life of action in The Human Condition. Kohn notes in his introduction that Arendt eventually intended “Introduction into Politics” to be a “large, systematic political work, which as one work exists nowhere in her oeuvre.”18 In a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation in early 1960 requesting support for the project, she wrote that the projected book “will continue where [The Human Condition] ends” and “will be concerned exclusively with thought and action.”19 Part of this project is what eventually resulted in On Revolution after she set this larger project aside to focus on the Eichmann trial and on her examination of the vita contemplativa in The Life of the Mind. Yet, even as she turned to these other projects, she continued to think and write on the question of philosophy and politics, delivering a 1963 lecture course, also called “Introduction into Politics,”20 and a 1969 course called “Philosophy and Politics: What Is Political Philosophy?”21 Arendt, who often used her teaching obligations as opportunities to write initial manuscripts of what later became her essays and books, developed these two lecture courses as distinct and unique treatments of the question
