this contradiction is so fundamental that the only conclusion one might draw is that she must have had two different theories of judgment.3 These critics assert that her texts indicate that there was an earlier, more political and practical account of judgment in such places as the Between Past and Future essays, and a later much more contemplative and historical account offered in texts such as The Life of the Mind.4
But suppose Arendt understood politics and history to be much more closely related than these critics think? Might it be possible that Arendt was simply viewing judgment from two different perspectives: one from the side of politics and the vita activa, and the other from the side of history and the vita contemplativa? I argue here that Arendt’s political and historiographic concerns were in fact intimately linked, and it was the recognition of this link that prompted her to develop a unique genealogical approach. There were a set of long-standing modern conflations about the nature of politics and history that Arendt hoped to deconstruct, and her first step in doing this was through reconceiving the very nature of historical reflection. Thus, while it is no doubt true that her work was primarily focused on politics, we will see in this chapter that it was her concerns over history both as a political problem and as a methodological problem that originally prompted that concern with politics. In her work, she would seek to reassert the primary place of human agency in history, and when the implications of this project are adequately appreciated, many misunderstandings of her thought, I believe, are cleared up. On the account I propose, what defined political agency for Arendt had much more to do with the historical significance of a specific deed or event, and little to do with whether instrumental activity was involved in the deed. As for the notion that there is a conflict in Arendt between political judgment and historical reflection, her approach shows that she understood history and politics to be coterminous. Thus, what appears to be a conflict turns out merely to be a shift in perspective.
What results from this assertion of the primordial place of human action in history is an incredibly strong notion of human agency—stronger even than many readers already familiar with her work may realize. The difficulty understanding Arendt’s approach presents, however, is that she never explicitly formulated it, and therefore it must be gleaned from a number of disparate texts. As a result, the argument of this chapter must inevitably be somewhat long and dialectical. Pivotal will be understanding the central role her teacher and mentor Martin Heidegger played in the development of her approach, whose ideas she adopted but also heavily revised. It will therefore be necessary to discuss Heidegger’s contributions to Arendt’s ideas in some depth, before turning to her departures from him and their consequences. First, however, it will be helpful to have a sense of Arendt’s basic genealogical approach.
The Problem of Origins
A genealogy is a narrative that seeks to comprehend and explain a historic occurrence or circumstance by uncovering its origins or fundamental causes. This, of course, is an extraordinarily perplexing endeavor. How does one, after all, find these sources? What are the criteria for judging their relevance? On what authority does the genealogist make her claims? Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Arendt is often accused of contradicting herself or engaging in a mode of theorizing that was overly messy. This was to be expected: the chief goal of a genealogist is to pursue what Heidegger called aletheia, the fundamental experiences that lay at origins of history. Arendt was much more concerned with capturing those experiences adequately than she was with conceptual and logical consistency, which ultimately is more a consequence of the simplicity of our articulations of concepts than the authenticity of our explorations of lived experience.
The problem of genealogy seems to have been forced on Arendt by her analysis of the modern situation, and specifically what she felt was the complete failure of the tradition of political thought to cope with that situation. The tradition’s “moral, legal, theoretical, and practical standards,” she claimed, “together with its political institutions and forms of government, broke down spectacularly” in the first part of the twentieth century.5 As a result, we now lived in an era without a “testament,” or tradition, which “selects and names, which hands down and preserves, which indicates where the treasures are and what their worth is.”6 She believed Tocqueville captured the historical moment best when he wrote that “since the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.”7 As a result, we are “confronted anew … by the elementary problems of human living-together.”8 The elemental nature of such problems must present unique difficulties for historical reflection. If tradition has failed, there is no authority to appeal to in order to establish the validity of historical claims and the significance of events. As a result, a historian in this era ultimately has nothing to guide her but her own judgment. This, to say the least, is a daunting prospect, and Arendt recognized the almost unavoidable presumptuousness in this era of the kind of historical reflections she pursued. She called this activity “thinking without a banister.”9 It was her way of indicating that the practice of genealogy was the only place genuine historical reflection could begin in our era. The historian must go back to the primordial experiences that preceded the tradition and awaken those experiences in order to make history intelligible again.
One of Arendt’s earliest discussions of her approach came in her reply to Eric Voegelin’s review of The Origins of Totalitarianism.10 Voegelin criticized her for incorporating value judgments too deeply into her analyses of totalitarianism, arguing that the “morally abhorrent and the emotionally existing will overshadow the essential.”11 Arendt rejected this criticism. She insisted that this qualitative aspect of the analysis formed “an integral part of it. This has nothing to do with sentimentality or moralizing, although, of course, either can become a pitfall for the author. If I moralized or became sentimental, I simply did not do well what I was supposed to do, namely, to describe the totalitarian phenomenon as occurring, not on the moon, but in the midst of human society.” She argued that, for instance, her use of “the image of Hell” to describe the Nazi death camps was not meant “allegorically, but literally … a description of the camps as Hell on earth is more ‘objective,’ that is, more adequate to their essence than statements of a purely sociological or psychological nature.”12 For Arendt, in other words, descriptions of historical phenomena cannot be separated from their qualitative context.13
She was significantly influenced in this approach by the “critical interpretation of the past” done by Heidegger and her close friend Walter Benjamin.14 Heidegger and Benjamin showed Arendt a mode of genealogical practice that could bring the original meaning of vital words in our language back to life through thought and imagination. They had argued that words carried behind them authentic experiences that often are lost with passage of time. These experiences could be revived and used to shed light on the past and, consequentially, also on the present world where tradition can no longer illuminate the most important aspects of lives.15 She called this mode of genealogy “pearl diving”:16
[Pearl diving] works with the “thought fragments” it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea … to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past.… What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization … as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living.17
For Arendt, the break in tradition meant that there was no longer an “Ariadne thread” that connected our political language to our commonsense experiences.18 Our political words were “empty shells,”19 which, because they had lost their moorings in authentic experiences, could be redefined at will so long as they served to support some “functionalized” theory.20 While pearl diving could not “retie the broken thread of tradition,” it could perhaps “discover the real origins of traditional concepts in order to distill
