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Introduction

In Pursuit of Authentic Political Philosophy

There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging that has nothing whatever to do with the biblical “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” … For behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done.… Hence the huge outcry the moment anyone fixes specific blame on some particular person instead of blaming all deeds or events on historical trends and dialectical movements, in short on some mysterious necessity that works behind the backs of men.

—Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship”

Hannah Arendt continues to provoke us. That was her intention. She was not interested in making things easy for her readers. This was not to toy with them: there were urgent purposes behind it. All writers have priorities, and among the highest priorities of modern philosophy and political thought has been to convey clarity of thought and idea. Hannah Arendt had other priorities. She wanted to challenge her readers to look at their past and present world anew, to provoke them not to think what she thought, but to think like she thought. And to the extent her ultimate goal had not been to win arguments or begin schools of thought, but to, so to speak, awaken her readers from their dogmatic slumbers, she was no doubt successful. Yet, achieving this goal came at a price, and that price meant giving up the assurance that she would pass on a stable set of ideas. Did this mean there was no fundamental core to her thought? Was she merely “moving within the gap between past and future,” as she often put it, with no central goals or fundamental purposes directing this movement? It will be my contention here that, though she rarely openly discussed it and arguably never published a direct account of it, there was indeed a fundamental goal orienting her thought, and that goal revolved around the question of how to reestablish the possibility of authentic practical reason and political judgment in the modern world.

Arendt’s work—provisional, essayistic, intentionally foreign—presents a formidable challenge to anyone who tries to definitively explain its fundamental purposes and meaning. The problems presented by Arendt’s style of thinking and writing are in many ways unique to her. Even in her most coherent projects, such as On Revolution or The Origins of Totalitarianism, many of the most important arguments and conclusions are buried in a dense, historically detailed narrative. She often refused to write in a clear and straightforward manner, at times even seeming to deliberately hold back the central point of her argument. She almost never writes outside of the essay format, and even her monographs are better described as a series of essays that form something like a conceptual mosaic, rather than a sustained, systematic argument.

Compounding the problem of understanding her is a kind of reflexive skepticism in the academic community instigated by her unusual influence and notoriety. In her day, Arendt was a true public intellectual, on the level of Emerson or Dewey, the sort more often found in Europe but rarely in America. She came to prominence with the publication of her first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which was a best seller and launched her into worldwide fame.¹ It was acclaimed by many as a work of genius,² and Arendt herself joked that she had become a “cover girl” when her pictures began appearing on magazine covers.³ Her next book, The Human Condition, raised her profile even higher, introducing a nearly unheard of level of erudition and philosophical depth into mainstream literature. Yet despite her undeniable fame, her work, largely thanks to its rather literary nature, has perhaps been less consistently influential than that of other recent figures like Rawls, Strauss, or Habermas. Many have found her work to be more suggestive than definitive, her arguments difficult to follow, and the content of her thought, at times, frustratingly obscure. At a conference on her work in 1972, Christian Bay expressed a frustration no doubt common to her readers, saying, “I read Hannah Arendt with pleasure, but out of aesthetic pleasure. She is a philosopher’s philosopher. I think it is beautiful to follow her prose, her sense of unity in history, and to be reminded of the great things the Greeks have said that are still pertinent today. I think, however … there is a certain lack of seriousness about modern problems in much of her work.”⁴

This assessment has no doubt been encouraged by the fact that during her lifetime she was as influential for her social connections and personal magnetism as for her intellectual contributions. A prominent figure in the interconnected communities of New York literary society and postwar Jewish émigrés, the New York Review of Books once called her “the éminence grise of the éminences grises.”⁵ Irving Howe has noted that her personal charisma made her a significant figure in the intellectual world well before she published anything of true significance.⁶ “While far from ‘good-looking’ in any commonplace way,” he tells us, “Hannah Arendt was a remarkably attractive person, with her razored gestures, imperial eye, dangling cigarette.… She bristled with intellectual charm, as if to reduce everyone in sight to an alert discipleship.… Whatever room she was in Hannah filled through the largeness of her will; indeed, she always seemed larger than her setting.” In fact, it is difficult to even draw a clear distinction between her personal and intellectual influence, for many of her ideas had social and political dimensions that transcended intellectual life. She has been claimed by conservatives, progressives, and New Left democrats alike. Origins is both a basic text of social science research and a touchstone of Cold War politics; The Human Condition and On Revolution were virtually required reading in the early days of the New Left.⁷ And of course the impact that Eichmann in Jerusalem had not merely in its own time but in our continuing confrontation with the question of evil in the modern world cannot be overlooked. It is no surprise that she is among the few twentieth-century intellectual figures who has been the subject of a major motion picture. This celebrity has tended to add to the skepticism with which academia often approaches her, epitomized by Christian Bay. The literary quality of her work at times actually counts 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 of philosophy and politics, clearly intending them to be coherent pieces of writing on the question.

It will be my contention here that, though it seems she never felt ready to publish on the topic, this question of the true relationship between philosophy and politics was the ultimate task of Arendt’s work, providing a kind of Rosetta stone for understanding the diverse pursuits and subject matter she wrote and thought about. Of course, it has always been obvious that there was some kind of relationship between Arendt’s discussions of the life of action in The Human Condition and elsewhere and her reflections on the vita contemplativa in her various writings on judgment and in The Life of the Mind. The nature of this relationship has been the topic of much commentary and speculation since the two parts of The Life of the Mind manuscript were published posthumously.²² At her death in 1976, Arendt, as is well known, had written most of the two books of The Life of the Mind, “Thinking” and “Willing,” and had planned a final section on “Judging.” This final installment was never written, but it seems unlikely, given Arendt’s own comments on the nature of the “Judging” section—not to mention extrapolating from the arguments of the first two volumes—that she would have provided there any such account of the relationship between the two major areas of her thought. At no point in either volume of The Life of the Mind does Arendt ever promise any such explanation, and in fact it would have been quite a jolting break in the trajectory of argument as it had developed in the previous two volumes. Several sources attest to the fact that Arendt would have drawn on her lectures on Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which, while quite political, nevertheless have a similar orientation toward that part of her thought that appears as the vita contemplativa.²³ Moreover, her projections of the length of the section, which was not intended to be a full third volume, but more likely some kind of extended concluding section to the “Willing” volume, seemed unlikely to have afforded the necessary space.²⁴ I will eventually argue that the lectures on Kant’s Critique of Judgment are indeed crucial to understanding how the two parts of her work are related—indeed, that it provides the final piece to the puzzle. Nevertheless, it is still only a piece of a puzzle that requires much more information than is available, not only in the Kant lectures, but also in The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind.

That Arendt understood The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind to be her key works addressing the two fundamental spheres of human experience is beyond question. In The Human Condition, Arendt is quite clear that the sphere of experience where thought occurs, what she calls the vita contemplativa, is distinct and separate from the sphere of experience of action, which she calls the vita activa, and she is careful to stipulate that her concern in The Human Condition is almost exclusively with the vita activa.²⁵ Writing of the ancient philosophers’ discovery of contemplation, and the tradition and way of life it gave birth to, Arendt writes that the vita contemplativa “must lie in an altogether different aspect of the human condition, whose diversity is not exhausted in the various articulations of the vita activa and, we may suspect, would not be exhausted even if thought and the movement of reasoning were included in it.”²⁶ Arendt goes on to stipulate that “my use of the term vita activa presupposes that the concern underlying all its activities is not the same as and is neither superior nor inferior to the central concern of the vita contemplativa,” describing this distinction in terms of “the various modes of active engagement in the things of this world, on one side, and pure thought culminating in contemplation, on the other.”²⁷ It is clear, then, that Arendt believed that there is an aspect of the human condition that is separate from that of the vita activa, which exists somehow outside “the world” and its “various modes of active engagement,” and concerns itself with human faculties such as contemplation and thought.

While the text of The Human Condition never suggests that she planned to write a book devoted solely to the vita contemplativa and its sphere of experience, there are clear indications that she thought it would eventually be necessary. The Human Condition seems to end with the equivalent of a “to be continued.” Quite abruptly, in the book’s final paragraph, Arendt leaves her discussion of the distinctions in the vita activa and turns to the matter of thought. The paragraph clearly has no summary or concluding function—at least, not in relation to the concerns of the vita activa—and it is therefore difficult to imagine that she had any other purpose in concluding with this paragraph than to suggest that her discussions of the vita activa in the book were not a full account of the human condition, and thus that The Human Condition was in a certain sense incomplete. After The Human Condition’s publication, Arendt regularly described the project of The Life of the Mind as a direct sequel to The Human Condition.²⁸ In a letter to Mary McCarthy in 1968 she said that her “preparations for writing about Thinking-Willing-Judging” are “a kind of part II to the Human Condition [sic],”²⁹ while during the 1972 conference on her work, she said, “I feel that this Human Condition needs a second volume and I’m trying to write it.”³⁰ The Human Condition, thus, at least by the late sixties, was in fact understood by Arendt to contain two parts, only one of which had been written.

Yet, it appears that Arendt always recognized there was a further step necessary beyond this vita contemplativa sequel and that this further step was in fact the most important step of all. The crucial issue that originally prompted her to write The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind had always been the matter of the relationship between thought and action and between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. Theoretically speaking, this should not be surprising. The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind focused almost exclusively on their respective spheres of experience and almost completely ignored the question of their broader relationship to each other. Most of the attempts by scholars to flesh out this relationship for Arendt have typically focused on reconstructing Arendt’s theory of political judgment out of a diverse set of published essays such as “Truth and Politics” and “The Crisis in Culture,” along with various posthumously published materials such as the Kant lectures, The Life of the Mind, and, more recently, “Thinking and Moral Considerations” and “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy.”³¹ Yet, these attempts have remained for the most part speculative and lacking a clear connection with Arendt’s work on action, and so much so that some of her most prominent interpreters have concluded that Arendt’s work is somehow fundamentally conflicted.³² The reason for this perplexity, I believe, is that Arendt’s interpreters have been trying to make her theory of judgment do more than it was intended to do. To be sure, they are correct that it does somehow provide a connecting link between the sphere of thought and action. Yet, I believe that the broader relationship between thought and action was never adequately sketched out in the work on judgment. On a theoretical level, it needed something else, something that did not focus exclusively on a particular sphere of experience but instead seeks to come to terms with how these two spheres were related to each other.

Why did Arendt never publish this account the relationship between the vita activa and vita contemplativa? The obvious conclusion would be that she did not really have an answer. But given her continuing unpublished work on the question of the relation of philosophy and politics, this does not appear to be a plausible conclusion, and in fact these writings suggest she felt she understood the general structure of the relationship quite well. But then the question of why she never published an account of the relationship between the two spheres becomes quite perplexing. Frankly, I am doubtful there is any one decisive reason. As we’ve seen, Arendt’s style of theorizing was quite idiosyncratic, verging on eccentric, and she seemed to gravitate much more to the genealogical process of what she called “pearl diving,” of digging deeper and deeper into the origins of our historical world, than to the process of attempting to tie up all the loose ends of her explorations. On the other hand, it may simply have been that she ran out of time, dying before she had even finished The Life of the Mind.

But whatever the reason, it will be my contention here that Arendt in essence needed to write a second sequel to The Human Condition, or perhaps, instead, a prequel, which explained the how the two vitas were related to each other. To simplify things in the form of an analogy, I want to argue that this reconstructed 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 political judgment difficult to understand 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 Arendt argue that the authentic experience of philosophy occurred 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.