in two human activities taking place in utter withdrawal from the experience of engaged human agency in the world: the thinking activity that exists as a two-in-one dialogue I have with myself and the ultimate philosophical goal of this dialogue, speechless wonder or contemplation. It was this experience of contemplation that provided the legitimacy Plato drew on to establish the tradition of political thought. In doing so, Arendt believed the resulting rather crude conception of political philosophy came to base itself on the production analogy of theory and practice, which ignored the characteristics of this relationship that essentially involved speech. On its basis, Plato would establish the concept of rulership and its resulting politics of sovereignty as a kind of master idea of traditional political theory, an idea that even those members of the tradition that attacked Plato never fully escaped. I will argue that when properly understood, Arendt presents a serious challenge to the tradition of political thought in this analysis.
Chapter 4 explores Arendt’s account of the rise of modernity and its odd, near-coincidental political compatibility with the tradition of political thought’s sovereignty paradigm of politics, along with her analysis of the modern political pathologies that this connection seemed to facilitate. While her critique of the tradition of political thought has long been recognized as crucial to the development of her political thought, its role in her analysis of the modern situation has generally remained somewhat opaque. Using a much more extended set of sources to supplement the incomplete canonical texts, I seek to provide the clearest and most comprehensive account to date of the role and culpability of the tradition’s flawed model of the relation of thought and action in modern political pathologies. Modernity was characterized by world alienation, and this alienation led to a series of revolutionary attempts to re-found a new public realm in a common world. What thwarted these attempts was the revolutionaries’ inability to escape the categories of the tradition of political thought. In the fluid context of revolutionary politics, a variety of specifically modern patterns of thought would become virulently dangerous after having been given political legitimacy by the traditional understanding of political thought. The venerable tradition of political thought, while not itself culpable for the revolutionary experiences that led to tyranny and totalitarianism, was revealed to be highly vulnerable to abuse at the hands of evil men. If there was to be a successful revolution in the modern world, Arendt believed it would have to appeal to a richer and more authentic form of political thought.
Chapter 5 seeks to reconstruct what Arendt believed this authentic form of political philosophy would have looked like. While it is undeniable that this final piece of the puzzle for Arendt’s thinking remained incomplete at her death, I use numerous texts and well-researched inference to reconstruct what I believe was bold new way to practice political philosophy, one that was essentially intersubjective. In Chapter 5, I defend Arendt’s attempt to apply Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” to politics. I outline the problems Arendt detected in earlier accounts of practical reason that led to her turn to the third Critique. I argue that in his concept of “enlarged mentality,” Kant made an original and profound discovery: that the phenomenon of common sense contains a hidden faculty, which Arendt believed anchored the validity of moral and political judgments. With this advanced concept of political common sense in hand, Arendt was able to argue that the rational validity of political opinion was of a different order than that of cognitive rationality, leading to a notion of political philosophy that did not seek a sovereign perspective in relation to political questions. Political philosophy, in Arendt’s mind, should not ask “Who is right?” but instead ask “Who is more right?”: who had a deeper and broader insight into the world that citizens share in common with each other? In this theory, I argue that Arendt could claim to have truly fulfilled her goal of returning political philosophy to the citizens, for Arendt understood the structure of Kantian judgment to imply that the more broad and diverse the perspectives offered in the process of deliberation, the better the resulting judgments will be.
In the concluding chapter, I will take stock of Arendt’s ideas. First, I offer some concluding critical comments on Arendt, her project, and her ideas. I briefly consider the historical, theoretical, practical, and methodological limitations of what Arendt accomplished, and then seek to begin a discussion of its position in relation to current political thought. After this, in the final portion of the book, I confront the common critique of Arendt that her apparent goals of renewing the political action and judgment of modern citizens are of limited practical value in modern liberal capitalist society. I argue that in the context of modern commercial democratic regimes this critique is largely accurate, given that the clear goal of liberal politics has historically been to remove most of the responsibility for the preservation and realization of political goals from the majority of citizens by politically organizing them through market and institutional mechanisms. However, I then seek to think beyond where Arendt concluded her work by considering how her political ideals relate to an analysis of modern society she perhaps died too soon to appreciate: the likely unsustainability of contemporary liberal political economy in the near future. I argue that in the likely future context where the vast majority of citizens will not be able to expect robust economic advancement and relatively unlimited career choices and prospects, the traditional liberal reliance on markets and institutions will become much less effective, and therefore modern political regimes will need to rely much more on the political judgment and direct political action of their citizens. The sustainable future of civilization, in other words, may very well depend on our ability to realize something like Arendt’s non-sovereign ideal of republican political freedom at a federated global level.
| 1 | Action, Politics, Genealogy |
Hannah Arendt’s theory of action has both inspired and perplexed her readers. Its revival of the ancient idea of publicly performed freedom reintroduced a lost dimension into political theory, one that insisted that free human action, at its highest level, was more than merely doing as one pleases in private life. Authentic action, according to Arendt, was something visible in the public realm, carrying a genuine potency capable of changing the world. Given its centrality to her thought and its radical character, it has, not surprisingly, been a target of significant critique. In this chapter, I want to attempt to turn aside some of the more serious criticism of Arendt by offering a new interpretation of her theory of action. I believe that a great deal of the criticism of her thought originates in a misunderstanding of the role and meaning of her theory of action, especially her attempt to revive the ancient ideal of noninstrumental political action. Though it may come as a surprise, I believe this criticism is rooted in a failure to understand Arendt’s long-standing concern over the problem of history and her unique practice of historiography.
There are at least two misunderstandings of Arendt that I believe the account of Arendtian action offered here can resolve. First, many critics have interpreted Arendt’s attempt to revive the noninstrumental ideal of political action as a deliberative, participatory, and performative activity, which situates politics from a kind of quasi-aesthetic perspective. They argue that Arendt—drawing strongly on the logic of Aristotle’s assertion that praxis, as the highest human activity, cannot have a telos beyond itself, but is a-telos, an “end in itself”—believed that any instrumental or teleological activity must therefore be kept out of politics. As a result, readers have often understood her as suggesting a dichotomous relationship between political action and instrumental activity, with the implication that social concerns such as poverty or discrimination cannot be a concern of genuine politics. Politics should instead be free to engage in a deliberative and performative disclosive activity of individual identity.1 Readers have often found the idea that there could ever be such a sharp separation established between social concerns and the political odd and possibly unintelligible. Even Mary McCarthy, her close friend, editor, and literary executor, once told Arendt, “I have always asked myself: ‘What is somebody supposed to do on the public stage, in the public space, if he does not concern himself with the social? That is, what’s left?’”2 A second misunderstanding concerns her theory of judgment.
