are resolved. The reason for the underuse of these sources is mainly that until recently they were not easily accessible. One of the secondary goals of this study is to provide a roadmap of sorts for engaging with these lesser known sources. The only other book to make serious use of these sources was Margaret Canovan’s Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought. While it was a fine interpretation of Arendt, it was plagued by two major difficulties. One is that at the time of its publication in 1992, these underutilized sources could only be accessed through on-site archival research at the Library of Congress, and as a result the usefulness of the book was limited because her readers could not refer to these sources. Now that the Library of Congress holdings are available electronically and various other writings and correspondences have been published posthumously, access to her sources is much easier. The second problem, however, is that although Canovan did pay attention to these materials, she did not recognize the centrality of political judgment that in my view they make explicit, nor that Arendt’s overall project concerned discovering the authentic nature of political philosophy, and these are the elements of her work that I believe make her most valuable to us.
Looking Ahead
What has yet to be explained, of course, is how exactly this proposed authentic political philosophy constituted a positive response to the modern situation as Arendt understood it. This question is essentially the subject and theme of this book, and its chapters each seek to flesh out the answer. The climax of the book occurs in Chapter 5. There I defend Arendt’s theory of judgment against numerous critiques, explain its theoretical power and novelty as a mode of political philosophy only practicable intersubjectively by engaged and committed citizens, and argue that it represented a “solution” (in Arendt’s rather unorthodox sense) to the problem of how to found and maintain a new public realm in a modern world dominated by what she called the social realm. This, however, will require a number of interventions, reinterpretations, and refinements of how Arendt has been understood to this point. The four chapters leading up to Chapter 5 develop a series of concepts and concerns that allow this climax to occur. There is an organic, weblike quality to Arendt’s thought, which can make the exploration of specific concepts and areas of her work challenging. The 1950s in particular were an extremely fertile intellectual period of her life, and significant ideas seem to have emerged almost simultaneously. Many ideas that occur in one area of her thinking inform other areas, with the result that an appreciation of the meaning and worth of a certain concept may require understanding theories and concepts developed in distant or seemingly unrelated work. This has been the greatest challenge of this book and no doubt represents a significant limitation: there is no specifically chronological or linear thread that runs from Chapter 1 to Chapter 5. The four chapters leading up to Chapter 5 in many ways illuminate each other along with Chapter 5, so that a full assessment of each may require having read the others.
This is especially the case in Chapter 1, whose full significance will not be appreciated until Arendt’s analysis of modernity, its politics, and its modes of political judgment are examined in Chapter 4. Chapter 1 offers a new theoretical treatment of what has been called Arendt’s “non-sovereign” conception of political action. Arendt’s account of human agency and its realization in political action typically occurs within the context of specific historical instantiations, such as the Greeks, the Romans, and the modern revolutionaries, and, as a result, I will argue that past treatments have often had difficulty distinguishing between general characteristics of Arendtian non-sovereign agency and characteristics unique to each historically specific occurrence. Thus, I will approach the question of Arendtian action in two steps: one that occurs in Chapter 1, outlining what I believe are the general characteristics and concerns of Arendtian non-sovereign agency, while turning in Chapter 2 to an examination of the three specific historical instantiations Arendt examined. In Chapter 1, I use a variety of theoretical and interpretative approaches to reconstruct the meaning and purposes behind Arendt’s non-sovereign account of political action, which I believe are in many ways not fully spelled out in canonical texts such as On Revolution and The Human Condition. I triangulate, so to speak, this theoretical account of non-sovereign agency by consulting canonical texts and numerous unpublished and posthumously published texts against what I will argue was her both implicit and explicit critique of Martin Heidegger.
Heidegger will represent a major figure in my interpretation of Arendt, whose centrality both as a foundational thinker and as a theoretical point of departure was so significant to her thought that he will require a brief yet fairly substantial direct engagement himself. What may at times appear to be an almost relentless attack by Arendt on Heidegger in this book belies the far greater Heideggerian philosophical commitments Arendt maintained throughout her work. Nevertheless, it is these points of departure that define her work. I will argue in Chapter 1 that the central motivation behind the development of Arendt’s account of non-sovereign political action was an attempt to challenge modern philosophies of history that robbed human beings of their individuality and political potency, leading ultimately to totalitarian politics. Drawing on Heidegger, Arendt located the origin of history not in historically dialectical forces but in the narrative existence of human beings, and the purpose of her account of action was to theorize a form of historical reflection that placed human action once again at the center of history. In other words, I will argue that Arendt’s turn to politics was motivated by essentially historical concerns and that she understood history and politics to be essentially linked. I show that Arendt was motivated by the ancient Greek concept of athanatizein, to immortalize, the path to which philosophy and politics had taken fundamentally distinct approaches toward. While philosophy pursued a contemplative path, political athanatizein was concerned with historical immortality achieved in the common human world, and it could only be attained by changing that world while at the same time caring for and maintaining it. The resulting conception of human agency, I will argue, is one that is extraordinarily potent and dynamic, whose power and remarkableness human beings have often feared and sought to mitigate, especially in the modern era.
In Chapter 2, I turn to the specific occurrences of political athanatizein Arendt explored: the Greeks, the Romans, and the modern revolutionaries. Arendt, I argue, had more in mind in her work on these instances than merely to articulate authentic political action. Each of these instances was uniquely influential in the history Western politics, providing the original political language we continue to use to this day. Each experience offered distinctive insights into the deep problem that haunted Arendt’s positive project: the problem of how to refound an authentic public realm, a formal “space of appearances,” in a modern world whose basic logic systematically undermined that possibility. The reason she pursued the question of authentic political philosophy, I will argue, was because each of these experiences of founding lacked the capacity for thought that only authentic philosophical experience could provide, and which she believed would be necessary in order to found and maintain a new public realm in the modern era.
Chapter 3 turns to Arendt’s exploration of the experience of philosophical athanatizein and examines her analysis of the impulses, motivations, and internal logic that led it to give birth to the tradition of political thought. We will see
