theory of judgment that has been developed by many of her interpreters, coupled with her articulations of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, are like three large chunks of a picture puzzle; but, unfortunately, they do not form a full picture. We still need more pieces. It will be my task in what follows to attempt to reconstruct, at times through well-informed inference, what this prequel would have argued by showing what the relationship between thought and action truly were for Arendt and how she understood it to be a genuine positive response to the modern predicament. For Arendt, this meant coming to understand the authentic meaning of political philosophy.
Considering Arendt in a Different Light
People have, of course, practiced political philosophy for millennia. Is it really believable that they did not know what they were doing? Does understanding the true nature of political philosophy even matter, so long as it produces useful answers to political problems? As we will see, it does matter quite a bit. For as Arendt will show us, what one understands political philosophy to be can have an enormous impact on the answers it produces. Arendt criticized the tradition of political thought for understanding itself in terms of sovereignty: the idea that politics was concerned with who should rule. She would argue that this notion of sovereignty was ultimately derived from a set of assumptions about what thought and action were, and how they should be related. She argued that, beginning with Plato, political thought had fundamentally grasped itself on the model of techne, as the application of rules to improve and legitimize political practice. Sovereign rulership became its model because the assumptions of the technical paradigm ultimately suggest that there can only be one right answer to fundamental political questions. The problem with this is that the sovereignty-based model presumes that politics can be made subordinate to philosophy, so that philosophy can prescribe rules and laws to politics. But what if politics could not so easily be made subordinate? What if the two activities were of such different natures that it was impossible to so simplistically understand their relationship? “If we really believe—and I think we share this belief,” Arendt once said, “that plurality rules the earth, then I think one has got to modify this notion of the unity of theory and practice to such an extent that it will be unrecognizable for those who tried their hand at it before.… These are two entirely different—if you want to call it—‘existential’ positions.”33
In The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s explorations of action and thought showed each was so much more phenomenally rich than the sovereignty-based conception suggests—that their natures, in fact, were so fundamentally different—it was difficult to imagine how they could ever be reconciled.34 “It lies in the nature of philosophy,” she wrote, “to deal with man in the singular, whereas politics could not even be conceived if men did not exist in the plural.”35 Politics, Arendt would go on to argue elsewhere, was essentially “non-sovereign.”36 It was characterized by what the Greeks called isonomie, or “no-rule,”37 a political state of being where “men in their freedom can interact with one another without compulsion, force, and rule over one another, as equals among equals, commanding and obeying one another only in emergencies … but otherwise managing all their affairs by speaking with and persuading one another.”38 In the 1969 “Philosophy and Politics” course, she appears to arrive at an aporetic conclusion concerning the question of their relation: “If you ask what is the solution to the riddle, I’d answer: in terms of this course, simply the unity that is man: it is human to act and to want to act; it is human to think and to want to think.… It is always life that offers the solutions.”39 But her note that this conclusion was only “in terms of this course” is a crucial qualification. Arendt believed there was faculty that had the capacity to reach across the abyss that separated thought and action: the faculty of judgment. Using a creative appropriation of Kantian aesthetic judgment, she arguably conceived the first truly non-sovereign form of political philosophy: an account of political judgment that was neither arbitrary nor universally determinative in its mode of validity, one that could make room for human plurality. Indeed, this non-sovereign political philosophy was at its best when practiced by a diverse, committed, and politically engaged group of citizens.
This, I believe, represents a new way of understanding Hannah Arendt. The traditional interpretative approach has focused on Arendt’s civic republicanism. My approach argues that Arendt’s work is best understood if the interpretive focus makes room for another, as it were, center of gravity, one that recognizes that both Arendt’s civic republicanism and her search for an authentic political philosophy operate in a kind of “virtuous circle.” In other words, I want to argue that Arendt’s positive project in response to modernity can only be intelligibly reconstructed if it is recognized that there was a second dimension to her thought beyond her civic republicanism, a dimension that centered on theorizing authentic political philosophy. Pivotal to this will then be to show that her account of judgment was much more central to her work than is commonly recognized. Arendt’s theory of judgment has received significant scholarly consideration in the years since her death, and, moreover, her interest in judgment has inspired many scholars to consider the question outside the scope of her work, building on her insight that Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” can be applied to practical philosophy in general.40 Virtually all these engagements with her account of judgment take place in numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, and it is somewhat surprising that only one book has claimed to be devoted to the topic, Max Deutscher’s Judgment After Arendt, which in fact is only partially concerned with her theory of judgment, in the context of his phenomenological analysis of The Life of the Mind.41 Moreover, Deutscher’s book is not really about her theory of political judgment, and in fact completely ignores the political elements of her theory. Given the volume of work on Arendt’s theory of judgment, it is perhaps surprising that no real consensus has ever emerged about the meaning of her theory. As recently as 2010, after literally dozens of pieces had been written and published on the topic, Bryan Garsten perhaps summarized this literature best when he wrote that “we cannot avoid confronting the fact that while her theory of judgment is suggestive it is also notoriously difficult to understand.”42
At the same time, her theory of political judgment has most often been treated as a kind of appendix to her thought—an interesting possible direction that she pointed toward but that remained obscure and incomplete at her death. George Kateb spends no time discussing it in his book on Arendt, while Margaret Canovan devotes only four pages to the topic in a section devoted to Arendt’s account of “thinking.”43 More recent work done by Dana Villa and Seyla Benhabib give it deeper treatment, but it still remains at best in a supporting role,44 and, in fact, as recently as 2012, Michael McCarthy claimed in his book that “her account of the intelligible connection between thought and action remains obscure.… Although practical wisdom is the supreme political virtue, Arendt is surprisingly silent about it.”45 My claim, in fact, is that virtually all Arendt did was examine the nature of this relationship between thought and action, that Arendt’s political thought should be understood as always fundamentally concerned with understanding the true relationship between theory and practice.46 In other words, I propose to present an interpretation of Arendt that places political judgment at the very center of her thought. I will argue that her advocacy for civic republicanism and idealization of the ancients’ noninstrumental political action had behind them the goal of renewing practical reason in a modern era that has profoundly undermined it, for her pursuit of authentic political philosophy could only be fully realized when political judgment is practiced in such a republican context. Placing judgment at the center of her work, in other words, will make it possible for us to understand the systematic thread that runs through her diverse body of work.
However, while this can give us a substantial push in the right direction, it cannot fully resolve all of the difficulties involved in interpreting Arendt. Along with the focus on political judgment, this study draws on a wide range of sources that have been heavily underutilized in the literature on Arendt. Once these sources are taken into account, many of the historical and theoretical gaps that have perplexed her readers and made her theory of
