Abstract
Few thinkers of the twentieth century have had such a pervasive impact on contemporary political theory as that of Hannah Arendt. Her ideas about human action, thought, and politics have had a persistent influence on political theorists who, after the collapse of Marxism, have looked for an intellectual framework to rejuvenate political culture and civic life in an era of bureaucracy and an ever-expansive institutional rationality. Scholarship on her ideas has become a veritable academic industry. This is somewhat ironic considering that one of the animating ideas of her work is the notion that activity in the political realm, what she calls “action,” the highest expression of the vita activa, should be seen as a central and distinct mode of politics. Politics is conceived as the giving and taking of opinions, the deccntcring of theoretical reason, and the embrace of communal action. Politics becomes “the political,” a term that she uses to convey the essential nature of politics not in terms of the control of resources, domination, or other forms of institutionalized power dynamics but rather as a kind of action where individuals act in concert, sharing opinions, acting freely as equals to constitute a shared understanding of their world. To see politics as a realm with its own practices and ways of thinking and acting, separate from economic or scientific forms of rationality was a core element of her project. But this would lead her down a path that, I submit, was deeply flawed and that enabled her to reshape the relation between truth, knowledge, and judgment and to displace the realist tenets of political theory.
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Notes
Hannah Arendt. The Origins, of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace jovanovich. 1951), 466.
Karl jaspers, Reason and Existenz (New York: The Noonday Press, 1955 [1933]), 77.
Karl jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 2. Trans. E. B. Ashton (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970 [1932]), 50.
Arendts direct comments on jaspers make reference to his ideas about communication and knowledge. See her essay “Jaspers as Citizen of the World,” in Paul Arthur Schlipp (ed.) The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1957), 539–550.
Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, “Existentialism Politicized: Arendt’s Debt to Jaspers.” The Review of Politics, vol. 53, no. 3 (1991): 435–468.
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, 1971), 59.
Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Peter Lasiert and W. G. Runciman (eds.) Philosophy Politics and Society, Third Series (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 104–133
Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Shocken Books, 2005), 18.
Arendt says that freedom is a group phenomenon, constituted by action, and not equivalent with “liberty,” which is simply the absence of restraint: “The life of the free man needed the presence of” others. Freedom itself needed therefore a place where people could come together—the agora, the marketplace, or the polls, the political space proper.” On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 31. She further equates freedom and action when she argues that “men are free—as distinguished from their possessing the gift for freedom as long as they act. neither before nor after; for ro be free and to act are the same.” Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1961), 151.
Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2002), §§26–30.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Tire University of Chicago Press, 1958), 200.
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt; Brace, 1970), 43ff.
Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York: Harper Torch hooks, 1971), 130.
Arendt’s thesis has been used by postmodernists to justify the attack on universalist principles in the formation of any demos. As Chantal Mouffe claims: “Hannah Arendt was absolutely right to insist that in the political sphere one finds oneself in the realm of opinion, or ‘doxa,’ and not in that of truth, and that each sphere has its own criteria of validity and legitimacy. There are those, of course, who will argue that such a position is haunted by the specter of relativism. But such an accusation makes sense only if one remains in the thrall of a traditional problematic, which offers no alternative between objectivism and relativism.” “Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?” in Andrew Ross (ed.) Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism (Minneapolis. MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 31
Lois McNay, The Misguided, Search for the Political: Social Weightlessness in Radical Democratic Theory. (Cambridge: Polity Press. 2014), 67ff.
Foran excellent comparative study of the ideas of legitimacy in Rousseau and Weber, sec J. G. Merquior, Rousseau and Weber: Two Studies in the Theory of Legitimacy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).
Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Shock en Books, 2003), 97.
Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Vintage, 1966), 245.
Philip Green, “In Defense of the State,” in his American Democracy: Selected Essays on Theory, Practice and Critique (New York: Palgravc Macmillan, 2014), 31–60.
Recently, antistatism has become an ascendant theme in left politics, and Arendt’s work is usually cited as one of a series of forerunners. See the discussion by Miguel Abensour, Democracy against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 90ff.
Philip Pettit has made the distinction between “neo-Athenian” and “neo-Roman” conceptions of republicanism. See his “Democracy, Electoral and Con testatory,” in Ian Shapiro and Stephen Macedo (eds.) Designing Democratic Institutions (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 105–147.
Arendt seeks to create a philosophical justification for tills thesis through a defective reading of Kant, particularly the Kritik der Urteilskraft. For a critique of Arendt’s reading of Kant in this regard, see Matthew C. Weidenfield, “Visions of Judgment: Arendt. Kant and the Misreading of Judgment.” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 2 (2013): 254–266.
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© 2015 Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson
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Thompson, M.J. (2015). Inventing the “Political”: Arendt, Antipolitics, and the Deliberative Turn in Contemporary Political Theory. In: Smulewicz-Zucker, G., Thompson, M.J. (eds) Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137381606_4
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