Hannah Arendt (1906—1975)

arendtHannah Arendt is a most challenging figure for anyone wishing to
understand the body of her work in political philosophy. She never
wrote anything that would represent a systematic political philosophy,
a philosophy in which a single central argument is expounded and
expanded upon in a sequence of works. Rather, her writings cover many
and diverse topics, spanning issues such as totalitarianism,
revolution, the nature of freedom, the faculties of "thinking" and
"judging," the history of political thought, and so on. A thinker of
heterodox and complicated argumentation, Arendt's writings draw
inspiration from Heidegger, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Nietzsche,
Jaspers, and others. This complicated synthesis of theoretical
elements is evinced in the apparent availability of her thought to a
wide and divergent array of positions in political theory: for
example, participatory democrats such as Benjamin Barber and Sheldon
Wolin, communitarians such as Sandel and MacIntyre, intersubjectivist
neo-Kantians such as Habermas, Albrecht Wellmer, Richard Bernstein and
Seyla Benhabib, etc. However, it may still be possible to present her
thought not as a collection of discrete interventions, but as a
coherent body of work that takes a single question and a single
methodological approach, which then informs a wide array of inquiries.
The question, with which Arendt's thought engages, perhaps above all
others, is that of the nature of politics and political life, as
distinct from other domains of human activity. Her attempts to
explicate an answer to this question and, inter alia, to examine the
historical and social forces that have come to threaten the existence
of an autonomous political realm, have a distinctly phenomenological
character. Arendt's work, if it can be said to do anything, can be
said to undertake a phenomenological reconstruction of the nature of
political existence, with all that this entails in way of thinking and
acting.

1. Chronology of Life and Works

The political philosopher, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), was born in
Hanover, Germany, in 1906, the only child of secular Jews. During
childhood, Arendt moved first to Königsberg (East Prussia) and later
to Berlin. In 1922-23, Arendt began her studies (in classics and
Christian theology) at the University of Berlin, and in 1924 entered
Marburg University, where she studied philosophy with Martin
Heidegger. In 1925 she began a romantic relationship with Heidegger,
but broke this off the following year. She moved to Heidelberg to
study with Karl Jaspers, the existentialist philosopher and friend of
Heidegger. Under Jasper's supervision, she wrote her dissertation on
the concept of love in St. Augustine's thought. She remained close to
Jaspers throughout her life, although the influence of Heidegger's
phenomenology was to prove the greater in its lasting influence upon
Arendt's work.

In 1929, she met Gunther Stern, a young Jewish philosopher, with whom
she became romantically involved, and subsequently married (1930). In
1929, her dissertation (Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin) was published.
In the subsequent years, she continued her involvement in Jewish and
Zionist politics, which began from 1926 onwards. In 1933, fearing Nazi
persecution, she fled to Paris, where she subsequently met and became
friends with both Walter Benjamin and Raymond Aron. In 1936, she met
Heinrich Blücher, a German political refugee, divorced Stern in '39,
and the following year she and Blücher married in 1940.

After the outbreak of war, and following detention in a camp as an
"enemy alien," Arendt and Blücher fled to the USA in 1941. Living in
New York, Arendt wrote for the German language newspaper Aufbau and
directed research for the Commission on European Jewish Cultural
Reconstruction. In 1944, she began work on what would become her first
major political book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In 1946, she
published "What is Existenz Philosophy," and from 1946 to 1951 she
worked as an editor at Schoken Books in New York. In 1951, The Origins
of Totalitarianism was published, after which she began the first in a
sequence of visiting fellowships and professorial positions at
American universities and she attained American citizenship.

In 1958, she published The Human Condition and Rahel Varnhagen: The
Life of a Jewess. In 1959, she published "Reflections on Little Rock,"
her controversial consideration of the emergent Black civil rights
movement. In 1961, she published Between Past and Future, and traveled
to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann for the New
Yorker.

In 1963 she published her controversial reflections on the Eichmann
trial, first in the New Yorker, and then in book form as Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In this year, she also
published On Revolution. In 1967, having held positions at Berkeley
and Chicago, she took up a position at the New School for Social
Research in New York. In 1968, she published Men in Dark Times.

In 1970, Blücher died. That same year, Arendt gave her seminar on
Kant's philosophy of judgement at the New School (published
posthumously as Reflections on Kant's Political Philosophy, 1982). In
1971 she published "Thinking and Moral Considerations," and the
following year Crisis of the Republicappeared. In the next years, she
worked on her projected three-volume work, The Life of the Mind.
Volumes 1 and 2 (on "Thinking" and "Willing") were published
posthumously. She died on December 4, 1975, having only just started
work on the third and final volume, Judging.
2. Arendt's Thought: Context and Influences

Hannah Arendt is a most challenging figure for anyone wishing to
understand the body of her work in political philosophy. She never
wrote anything that would represent a systematic political philosophy,
a philosophy in which a single central argument is expounded and
expanded upon in a sequence of works. Rather, her writings cover many
and diverse topics, spanning issues such as totalitarianism,
revolution, the nature of freedom, the faculties of "thinking" and
"judging," the history of political thought, and so on. A thinker of
heterodox and complicated argumentation, Arendt's writings draw
inspiration from Heidegger, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Nietzsche,
Jaspers, and others. This complicated synthesis of theoretical
elements is evinced in the apparent availability of her thought to a
wide and divergent array of positions in political theory: for
example, participatory democrats such as Benjamin Barber and Sheldon
Wolin, communitarians such as Sandel and MacIntyre, intersubjectivist
neo-Kantians such as Habermas, Albrecht Wellmer, Richard Bernstein and
Seyla Benhabib, etc. However, it may still be possible to present her
thought not as a collection of discrete interventions, but as a
coherent body of work that takes a single question and a single
methodological approach, which then informs a wide array of inquiries.
The question, with which Arendt's thought engages, perhaps above all
others, is that of the nature of politics and political life, as
distinct from other domains of human activity. Her attempts to
explicate an answer to this question and, inter alia, to examine the
historical and social forces that have come to threaten the existence
of an autonomous political realm, have a distinctly phenomenological
character. Arendt's work, if it can be said to do anything, can be
said to undertake a phenomenological reconstruction of the nature of
political existence, with all that this entails in way of thinking and
acting.

The phenomenological nature of Arendt's examination (and indeed
defense) of political life can be traced through the profound
influence exerted over her by both Heidegger and Jaspers. Heidegger in
particular can be seen to have profoundly impacted upon Arendt's
thought in for example: in their shared suspicion of the "metaphysical
tradition's" move toward abstract contemplation and away from
immediate and worldly understanding and engagement, in their critique
of modern calculative and instrumental attempts to order and dominate
the world, in their emphasis upon the ineliminable plurality and
difference that characterize beings as worldly appearances, and so on.
This is not, however, to gloss over the profound differences that
Arendt had with Heidegger, with not only his political affiliation
with the Nazis, or his moves later to philosophical-poetic
contemplation and his corresponding abdication from political
engagement. Nevertheless, it can justifiably be claimed that Arendt's
inquiries follow a crucial impetus from Heidegger's project in Being &
Time.

Arendt's distinctive approach as a political thinker can be understood
from the impetus drawn from Heidegger's "phenomenology of Being." She
proceeds neither by an analysis of general political concepts (such as
authority, power, state, sovereignty, etc.) traditionally associated
with political philosophy, nor by an aggregative accumulation of
empirical data associated with "political science." Rather, beginning
from a phenomenological prioritization of the "factical" and
experiential character of human life, she adopts a phenomenological
method, thereby endeavoring to uncover the fundamental structures of
political experience. Eschewing the "free-floating constructions" and
conceptual schema imposed a posterioriupon experience by political
philosophy, Arendt instead follows phenomenology's return "to the
things themselves" (zu den Sachen selbst), aiming by such
investigation to make available the objective structures and
characteristics of political being-in-the-world, as distinct from
other (moral, practical, artistic, productive, etc.) forms of life.

Hence Arendt's explication of the constitutive features of the vita
activa in The Human Condition(labor, work, action) can be viewed as
the phenomenological uncovering of the structures of human action qua
existence and experience rather then abstract conceptual constructions
or empirical generalizations about what people typically do. That is,
they approximate with respect to the specificity of the political
field the 'existentials', the articulations of Dasein's Being set out
be Heidegger in Being and Time.

This phenomenological approach to the political partakes of a more
general revaluation or reversal of the priority traditionally ascribed
to philosophical conceptualizations over and above lived experience.
That is, the world of common experience and interpretation
(Lebenswelt) is taken to be primary and theoretical knowledge is
dependent on that common experience in the form of a thematization or
extrapolation from what is primordially and pre-reflectively present
in everyday experience. It follows, for Arendt, that political
philosophy has a fundamentally ambiguous role in its relation to
political experience, insofar as its conceptual formulations do not
simply articulate the structures of pre-reflective experience but can
equally obscure them, becoming self-subsistent preconceptions which
stand between philosophical inquiry and the experiences in question,
distorting the phenomenal core of experience by imposing upon it the
lens of its own prejudices. Therefore, Arendt sees the conceptual core
of traditional political philosophy as an impediment, because as it
inserts presuppositions between the inquirer and the political
phenomena in question. Rather than following Husserl's methodological
prescription of a "bracketing" (epoché) of the prevalent philosophical
posture, Arendt's follows Heidegger's historical Abbau or Destruktion
to clear away the distorting encrustations of the philosophical
tradition, thereby aiming to uncover the originary character of
political experience which has for the most part been occluded.

There is no simple way of presenting Arendt's diverse inquiries into
the nature and fate of the political, conceived as a distinctive mode
of human experience and existence. Her corpus of writings present a
range of arguments, and develop a range of conceptual distinctions,
that overlap from text to text, forming a web of inter-related
excurses. Therefore, perhaps the only way to proceed is to present a
summation of her major works, in roughly chronological order, while
nevertheless attempting to highlight the continuities that draw them
together into a coherent whole.
3. On Totalitarianism

Arendt's first major work, published in 1951, is clearly a response to
the devastating events of her own time – the rise of Nazi Germany and
the catastrophic fate of European Jewry at its hands, the rise of
Soviet Stalinism and its annihilation of millions of peasants (not to
mention free-thinking intellectual, writers, artists, scientists and
political activists). Arendt insisted that these manifestations of
political evil could not be understood as mere extensions in scale or
scope of already existing precedents, but rather that they represented
a completely 'novel form of government', one built upon terror and
ideological fiction. Where older tyrannies had used terror as an
instrument for attaining or sustaining power, modern totalitarian
regimes exhibited little strategic rationality in their use of terror.
Rather, terror was no longer a means to a political end, but an end in
itself. Its necessity was now justified by recourse to supposed laws
of history (such as the inevitable triumph of the classless society)
or nature (such as the inevitability of a war between "chosen" and
other "degenerate" races).

For Arendt, the popular appeal of totalitarian ideologies with their
capacity to mobilize populations to do their bidding, rested upon the
devastation of ordered and stable contexts in which people once lived.
The impact of the First World War, and the Great Depression, and the
spread of revolutionary unrest, left people open to the promulgation
of a single, clear and unambiguous idea that would allocate
responsibility for woes, and indicate a clear path that would secure
the future against insecurity and danger. Totalitarian ideologies
offered just such answers, purporting discovered a "key to history"
with which events of the past and present could be explained, and the
future secured by doing history's or nature's bidding. Accordingly the
amenability of European populations to totalitarian ideas was the
consequence of a series of pathologies that had eroded the public or
political realm as a space of liberty and freedom. These pathologies
included the expansionism of imperialist capital with its
administrative management of colonial suppression, and the usurpation
of the state by the bourgeoisie as an instrument by which to further
its own sectional interests. This in turn led to the delegitimation of
political institutions, and the atrophy of the principles of
citizenship and deliberative consensus that had been the heart of the
democratic political enterprise. The rise of totalitarianism was thus
to be understood in light of the accumulation of pathologies that had
undermined the conditions of possibility for a viable public life that
could unite citizens, while simultaneously preserving their liberty
and uniqueness (a condition that Arendt referred to as "plurality").

In this early work, it is possible to discern a number of the
recurrent themes that would organize Arendt's political writings
throughout her life. For example, the inquiry into the conditions of
possibility for a humane and democratic public life, the historical,
social and economic forces that had come to threaten it, the
conflictual relationship between private interests and the public
good, the impact of intensified cycles of production and consumption
that destabilized the common world context of human life, and so on.
These themes would not only surface again and again in Arendt's
subsequent work, but would be conceptually elaborated through the
development of key distinctions in order to delineate the nature of
political existence and the faculties exercised in its production and
preservation.
4. The Human Condition

The work of establishing the conditions of possibility for political
experience, as opposed to other spheres of human activity, was
undertaken by Arendt in her next major work, The Human Condition
(1958). In this work she undertakes a thorough
historical-philosophical inquiry that returned to the origins of both
democracy and political philosophy in the Ancient Greek world, and
brought these originary understandings of political life to bear on
what Arendt saw as its atrophy and eclipse in the modern era. Her goal
was to propose a phenomenological reconstruction of different aspects
of human activity, so as to better discern the type of action and
engagement that corresponded to present political existence. In doing
so, she offers a stringent critique of traditional of political
philosophy, and the dangers it presents to the political sphere as an
autonomous domain of human practice.

The Human Condition is fundamentally concerned with the problem of
reasserting the politics as a valuable ream of human action, praxis,
and the world of appearances. Arendt argues that the Western
philosophical tradition has devalued the world of human action which
attends to appearances (the vita activa), subordinating it to the life
of contemplation which concerns itself with essences and the eternal
(the vita contemplativa). The prime culprit is Plato, whose
metaphysics subordinates action and appearances to the eternal realm
of the Ideas. The allegory of The Cave in The Republic begins the
tradition of political philosophy; here Plato describes the world of
human affairs in terms of shadows and darkness, and instructs those
who aspire to truth to turn away from it in favor of the "clear sky of
eternal ideas." This metaphysical hierarchy, theôria is placed above
praxis and epistêmê over mere doxa. The realm of action and appearance
(including the political) is subordinated to and becomes instrumental
for the ends of the Ideas as revealed to the philosopher who lives the
bios theôretikos. In The Human Condition and subsequent works, the
task Arendt set herself is to save action and appearance, and with it
the common life of the political and the values of opinion, from the
depredations of the philosophers. By systematically elaborating what
this vita activa might be said to entail, she hopes to reinstate the
life of public and political action to apex of human goods and goals.
a. The Vita Activa: Labor, Work and Action

In The Human Condition Arendt argues for a tripartite division between
the human activities of labor, work, and action. Moreover, she
arranges these activities in an ascending hierarchy of importance, and
identifies the overturning of this hierarchy as central to the eclipse
of political freedom and responsibility which, for her, has come to
characterize the modern age.
i. Labor: Humanity as Animal Laborans

Labor is that activity which corresponds to the biological processes
and necessities of human existence, the practices which are necessary
for the maintenance of life itself. Labor is distinguished by its
never-ending character; it creates nothing of permanence, its efforts
are quickly consumed, and must therefore be perpetually renewed so as
to sustain life. In this aspect of its existence humanity is closest
to the animals and so, in a significant sense, the least human ("What
men [sic] share with all other forms of animal life was not considered
to be human"). Indeed, Arendt refers to humanity in this mode as
animal laborans. Because the activity of labor is commanded by
necessity, the human being as laborer is the equivalent of the slave;
labor is characterized by unfreedom. Arendt argues that it is
precisely the recognition of labor as contrary to freedom, and thus to
what is distinctively human, which underlay the institution of slavery
amongst the ancient Greeks; it was the attempt to exclude labor from
the conditions of human life. In view of this characterization of
labor, it is unsurprising that Arendt is highly critical of Marx's
elevation of animal laborans to a position of primacy in his vision of
the highest ends of human existence. Drawing on the Aristotelian
distinction of the oikos (the private realm of the household) from the
polis (the public realm of the political community), Arendt argues
that matters of labor, economy and the like properly belong to the
former, not the latter. The emergence of necessary labor , the private
concerns of the oikos, into the public sphere (what Arendt calls "the
rise of the social") has for her the effect of destroying the properly
political by subordinating the public realm of human freedom to the
concerns mere animal necessity. The prioritization of the economic
which has attended the rise of capitalism has for Arendt all but
eclipsed the possibilities of meaningful political agency and the
pursuit of higher ends which should be the proper concern of public
life.
ii. Work: Humanity as Homo Faber

If labor relates to the natural and biologically necessitated
dimension of human existence, then work is "the activity which
corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not
embedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species'
ever-recurring life-cycle." Work (as both technê andpoiesis)
corresponds to the fabrication of an artificial world of things,
artifactual constructions which endure temporally beyond the act of
creation itself. Work thus creates a world distinct from anything
given in nature, a world distinguished by its durability, its
semi-permanence and relative independence from the individual actors
and acts which call it into being. Humanity in this mode of its
activity Arendt names homo faber; he/she is the builder of walls (both
physical and cultural) which divide the human realm from that of
nature and provide a stable context (a "common world") of spaces and
institutions within which human life can unfold. Homo faber's typical
representatives are the builder, the architect, the craftsperson, the
artist and the legislator, as they create the public world both
physically and institutionally by constructing buildings and making
laws.

It should be clear that work stands in clear distinction from labor in
a number of ways. Firstly, whereas labor is bound to the demands of
animality, biology and nature, work violates the realm of nature by
shaping and transforming it according to the plans and needs of
humans; this makes work a distinctly human (i.e. non-animal) activity.
Secondly, because work is governed by human ends and intentions it is
under humans' sovereignty and control, it exhibits a certain quality
of freedom, unlike labor which is subject to nature and necessity.
Thirdly, whereas labor is concerned with satisfying the individual's
life-needs and so remains essentially a private affair, work is
inherently public; it creates an objective and common world which both
stands between humans and unites them. While work is not the mode of
human activity which corresponds to politics, its fabrications are
nonetheless the preconditions for the existence of a political
community. The common world of institutions and spaces that work
creates furnish the arena in which citizens may come together as
members of that shared world to engage in political activity. In
Arendt's critique of modernity the world created by homo faber is
threatened with extinction by the aforementioned "rise of the social."
The activity of labor and the consumption of its fruits, which have
come to dominate the public sphere, cannot furnish a common world
within which humans might pursue their higher ends. Labor and its
effects are inherently impermanent and perishable, exhausted as they
are consumed, and so do not possess the qualities of quasi-permanence
which are necessary for a shared environment and common heritage which
endures between people and across time. In industrial modernity "all
the values characteristic of the world of fabrication – permanence,
stability, durability…are sacrificed in favor of the values of life,
productivity and abundance." The rise of animal laborans threatens the
extinction of homo faber, and with it comes the passing of those
worldly conditions which make a community's collective and public life
possible (what Arendt refers to as "world alienation").
iii. Action: Humanity as Zoon Politikon

So, we have the activity of labor which meets the needs that are
essential for the maintenance of humanities physical existence, but by
virtue of its necessary quality occupies the lowest rung on the
hierarchy of the vita activa. Then we have work, which is a distinctly
human (i.e. non-animal) activity which fabricates the enduring, public
and common world of our collective existence. However, Arendt is at
great pains to establish that the activity of homo faber does not
equate with the realm of human freedom and so cannot occupy the
privileged apex of the human condition. For work is still subject to a
certain kind of necessity, that which arises from its essentially
instrumental character. As technê andpoiesis the act is dictated by
and subordinated to ends and goals outside itself; work is essentially
ameans to achieve the thing which is to be fabricated (be it a work of
art, a building or a structure of legal relations) and so stands in a
relation of mere purposiveness to that end. (Again it is Plato who
stands accused of the instrumentalization of action, of its conflation
with fabrication and subordination to an external teleology as
prescribed by his metaphysical system). For Arendt, the activity of
work cannot be fully free insofar as it is not an end in itself, but
is determined by prior causes and articulated ends. The quality of
freedom in the world of appearances (which for Arendt is the sine qua
non of politics) is to be found elsewhere in the vita activa, namely
with the activity of action proper.

The fundamental defining quality of action is its ineliminable
freedom, its status as an end in itself and so as subordinate to
nothing outside itself. Arendt argues that it is a mistake to take
freedom to be primarily an inner, contemplative or private phenomenon,
for it is in fact active, worldly and public. Our sense of an inner
freedom is derivative upon first having experienced "a condition of
being free as a tangible worldly reality. We first become aware of
freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the
intercourse with ourselves." In defining action as freedom, and
freedom as action, we can see the decisive influence of Augustine upon
Arendt's thought. From Augustine's political philosophy she takes the
theme of human action as beginning:

To act, in its most general sense, means to take initiative, to
begin (as the Greek word archein, 'to begin,' 'to lead,' and
eventually 'to rule' indicates), to set something in motion. Because
they are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take
initiative, are prompted into action.

And further, that freedom is to be seen:

as a character of human existence in the world. Man does not so
much possess freedom as he, or better his coming into the world, is
equated with the appearance of freedom in the universe; man is free
because he is a beginning…

In short, humanity represents/articulates/embodies the faculty of
beginning. It follows from this equation of freedom, action and
beginning that freedom is "an accessory of doing and acting;" "Men are
free…as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and
to act are the same." This capacity for initiation gives actions the
character of singularity and uniqueness, as "it is in the nature of
beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from
whatever happened before." So, intrinsic to the human capacity for
action is the introduction of genuine novelty, the unexpected,
unanticipated and unpredictable into the world:

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of
statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical,
everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always
appears in the guise of a miracle.

This "miraculous," initiatory quality distinguishes genuine action
from mere behavior i.e. from conduct which has an habituated,
regulated, automated character; behavior falls under the
determinations ofprocess, is thoroughly conditioned by causal
antecedents, and so is essentially unfree. The definition of human
action in terms of freedom and novelty places it outside the realm of
necessity or predictability. Herein lies the basis of Arendt's quarrel
with Hegel and Marx, for to define politics or the unfolding of
history in terms of any teleology or immanent or objective process is
to deny what is central to authentic human action, namely, its
capacity to initiate the wholly new, unanticipated, unexpected,
unconditioned by the laws of cause and effect.

It has been argued that Arendt is a political existentialist who, in
seeking the greatest possible autonomy for action, falls into the
danger of aestheticising action and advocating decisionism. Yet
political existentialism lays great stress on individual will and on
decision as "an act of existential choice unconstrained by principles
or norms." In contradistinction, Arendt's theory holds that actions
cannot be justified for their own sake, but only in light of their
public recognition and the shared rules of a political community. For
Arendt, action is a public category, a worldly practice that is
experienced in our intercourse with others, and so is a practice that
"both presupposes and can be actualized only in a human polity." As
Arendt puts it:

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between
men…corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that
men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all
aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this
plurality is specifically the condition – not only theconditio sine
qua non, but the conditio per quam – of all political life .

Another way of understanding the importance of publicity and plurality
for action is to appreciate that action would be meaningless unless
there were others present to see it and so give meaning to it. The
meaning of the action and the identity of the actor can only be
established in the context of human plurality, the presence others
sufficiently like ourselves both to understand us and recognize the
uniqueness of ourselves and our acts. This communicative and
disclosive quality of action is clear in the way that Arendt connects
action most centrally to speech. It is through action as speech that
individuals come to disclose their distinctive identity: "Action is
the public disclosure of the agent in the speech deed." Action of this
character requires a public space in which it can be realized, a
context in which individuals can encounter one another as members of a
community. For this space, as for much else, Arendt turns to the
ancients, holding up the Athenian polis as the model for such a space
of communicative and disclosive speech deeds. Such action is for
Arendt synonymous with the political; politics is the ongoing activity
of citizens coming together so as to exercise their capacity for
agency, to conduct their lives together by means of free speech and
persuasion. Politics and the exercise of freedom-as-action are one and
the same:

…freedom…is actually the reason that men live together in
political organisations at all. Without it, political life as such
would be meaningless. The raison d'être of politics is freedom, and
its field of experience is action.

5. On Revolution

From the historical-philosophical treatment of the political in The
Human Condition, it might appear that for Arendt an authentic politics
(as freedom of action, public deliberation and disclosure) has been
decisively lost in the modern era. Yet in her next major work, On
Revolution (1961) she takes her rethinking of political concepts and
applies them to the modern era, with ambivalent results.

Arendt takes issue with both liberal and Marxist interpretations of
modern political revolutions (such as the French and American).
Against liberals, the disputes the claim that these revolutions were
primarily concerned with the establishment of a limited government
that would make space for individual liberty beyond the reach of the
state. Against Marxist interpretations of the French Revolution, she
disputes the claim that it was driven by the "social question," a
popular attempt to overcome poverty and exclusion by the many against
the few who monopolized wealth in the ancien regime. Rather, Arendt
claims, what distinguishes these modern revolutions is that they
exhibit (albeit fleetingly) the exercise of fundamental political
capacities – that of individuals acting together, on the basis of
their mutually agreed common purposes, in order to establish a
tangible public space of freedom. It is in this instauration, the
attempt to establish a public and institutional space of civic freedom
and participation, that marks out these revolutionary moments as
exemplars of politics qua action.

Yet Arendt sees both the French and American revolutions as ultimately
failing to establish a perduring political space in which the on-going
activities of shared deliberation, decision and coordinated action
could be exercised. In the case of the French Revolution, the
subordination of political freedom to matters of managing welfare (the
"social question") reduces political institutions to administering the
distribution of goods and resources (matters that belong properly in
the oikos, dealing as they do with the production and reproduction of
human existence). Meanwhile, the American Revolution evaded this fate,
and by means of the Constitution managed to found a political society
on the basis of comment assent. Yet she saw it only as a partial and
limited success. America failed to create an institutional space in
which citizens could participate in government, in which they could
exercise in common those capacities of free expression, persuasion and
judgement that defined political existence. The average citizen, while
protected from arbitrary exercise of authority by constitutional
checks and balances, was no longer a participant "in judgement and
authority," and so became denied the possibility of exercising his/her
political capacities.
6. Eichmann and the "Banality of Evil"

Published in the same year as On Revolution, Arendt's book about the
Eichmann trial presents both a continuity with her previous works, but
also a change in emphasis that would continue to the end of her life.
This work marks a shift in her concerns from the nature of political
action, to a concern with the faculties that underpin it – the
interrelated activities of thinking and judging.

She controversially uses the phrase "the banality of evil" to
characterize Eichmann's actions as a member of the Nazi regime, in
particular his role as chief architect and executioner of Hitler's
genocidal "final solution" (Endlosung) for the "Jewish problem." Her
characterization of these actions, so obscene in their nature and
consequences, as "banal" is not meant to position them as workaday.
Rather it is meant to contest the prevalent depictions of the Nazi's
inexplicable atrocities as having emanated from a malevolent will to
do evil, a delight in murder. As far as Arendt could discern, Eichmann
came to his willing involvement with the program of genocide through a
failure or absence of the faculties of sound thinking and judgement.
From Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem (where he had been brought after
Israeli agents found him in hiding in Argentina), Arendt concluded
that far from exhibiting a malevolent hatred of Jews which could have
accounted psychologically for his participation in the Holocaust,
Eichmann was an utterly innocuous individual. He operated
unthinkingly, following orders, efficiently carrying them out, with no
consideration of their effects upon those he targeted. The human
dimension of these activities were not entertained, so the
extermination of the Jews became indistinguishable from any other
bureaucratically assigned and discharged responsibility for Eichmann
and his cohorts.

Arendt concluded that Eichmann was constitutively incapable of
exercising the kind of judgement that would have made his victims'
suffering real or apparent for him. It was not the presence of hatred
that enabled Eichmann to perpetrate the genocide, but the absence of
the imaginative capacities that would have made the human and moral
dimensions of his activities tangible for him. Eichmann failed to
exercise his capacity of thinking, of having an internal dialogue with
himself, which would have permitted self-awareness of the evil nature
of his deeds. This amounted to a failure to use self-reflection as a
basis forjudgement, the faculty that would have required Eichmann to
exercise his imagination so as to contemplate the nature of his deeds
from the experiential standpoint of his victims. This connection
between the complicity with political evil and the failure of thinking
and judgement inspired the last phase of Arendt's work, which sought
to explicate the nature of these faculties and their constitutive role
for politically and morally responsible choices.
7. Thinking and Judging

Arendt's concern with thinking and judgement as political faculties
stretches back to her earliest works, and were addressed subsequently
in a number of essays written during the 1950s and 1960s. However, in
the last phase of her work, she turned to examine these faculties in a
concerted and systematic way. Unfortunately, her work was incomplete
at the time of her death – only the first two volumes of the projected
3-volume work, Life of the Mind, had been completed. However, the
posthumously publishedLectures on Kant's Political Philosophy
delineate what might reasonably be supposed as her "mature"
reflections on political judgement.

In the first volume of Life of the Mind, dealing with the faculty of
thinking, Arendt is at pains to distinguish it from "knowing." She
draws upon Kant's distinction between knowing or understanding
(Verstand) and thinking or reasoning (Vernunft). Understanding yields
positive knowledge – it is the quest for knowable truths. Reason or
thinking, on the other hand, drives us beyond knowledge, persistently
posing questions that cannot be answered from the standpoint of
knowledge, but which we nonetheless cannot refrain from asking. For
Arendt, thinking amounts to a quest to understand the meaning of our
world, the ceaseless and restless activity of questioning that which
we encounter. The value of thinking is not that it yields positive
results that can be considered settled, but that it constantly returns
to question again and again the meaning that we give to experiences,
actions and circumstances. This, for Arendt, is intrinsic to the
exercise of political responsibility – the engagement of this faculty
that seeks meaning through a relentless questioning (including
self-questioning). It was precisely the failure of this capacity that
characterized the "banality" of Eichmann's propensity to participate
in political evil.

The cognate faculty of judgement has attracted most attention is her
writing on, deeply inter-connected with thinking, yet standing
distinct from it. Her theory of judgement is widely considered as one
of the most original parts of her oeuvre, and certainly one of the
most influential in recent years.

Arendt's concern with political judgement, and its crisis in the
modern era, is a recurrent theme in her work. As noted earlier, Arendt
bemoans the "world alienation" that characterizes the modern era, the
destruction of a stable institutional and experiential world that
could provide a stable context in which humans could organize their
collective existence. Moreover, it will be recalled that in human
action Arendt recognizes (for good or ill) the capacity to bring the
new, unexpected, and unanticipated into the world. This quality of
action means that it constantly threatens to defy or exceed our
existing categories of understanding or judgement; precedents and
rules cannot help us judge properly what is unprecedented and new. So
for Arendt, our categories and standards of thought are always beset
by their potential inadequacy with respect to that which they are
called upon to judge. However, this aporia of judgement reaches a
crisis point in the 20th century under the repeated impact of its
monstrous and unprecedented events. The mass destruction of two World
Wars, the development of technologies which threaten global
annihilation, the rise of totalitarianism, and the murder of millions
in the Nazi death camps and Stalin's purges have effectively exploded
our existing standards for moral and political judgement. Tradition
lies in shattered fragments around us and "the very framework within
which understanding and judging could arise is gone." The shared bases
of understanding, handed down to us in our tradition, seem
irretrievably lost. Arendt confronts the question: on what basis can
one judge the unprecedented, the incredible, the monstrous which
defies our established understandings and experiences? If we are to
judge at all, it must now be "without preconceived categories
and…without the set of customary rules which is morality;" it must be
"thinking without a banister." In order to secure the possibility of
such judgement Arendt must establish that there in fact exists "an
independent human faculty, unsupported by law and public opinion, that
judges anew in full spontaneity every deed and intent whenever the
occasion arises." This for Arendt comes to represent "one of the
central moral questions of all time, namely…the nature and function of
human judgement." It is with this goal and this question in mind that
the work of Arendt's final years converges on the "unwritten political
philosophy" of Kant's Critique of Judgement.

Arendt eschews "determinate judgement," judgement that subsumes
particulars under a universal or rule that already exists. Instead,
she turns to Kant's account of "reflective judgement," the judgement
of a particular for which no rule or precedent exists, but for which
some judgement must nevertheless be arrived at. What Arendt finds so
valuable in Kant's account is that reflective judgement proceeds from
the particular with which it is confronted, yet nevertheless has a
universalizing moment – it proceeds from the operation of a capacity
that is shared by all beings possessed of the faculties of reason and
understanding. Kant requires us to judge from this common standpoint,
on the basis of what we share with all others, by setting aside our
own egocentric and private concerns or interests. The faculty of
reflective judgement requires us to set aside considerations which are
purely private (matters of personal liking and private interest) and
instead judge from the perspective of what we share in common with
others (i.e. must bedisinterested). Arendt places great weight upon
this notion of a faculty of judgement that "thinks from the standpoint
of everyone else." This "broadened way of thinking" or "enlarged
mentality" enables us to "compare our judgement not so much with the
actual as rather with the merely possible judgement of others, and
[thus] put ourselves in the position of everybody else…" For Arendt,
this "representative thinking" is made possible by the exercise of the
imagination – as Arendt beautifully puts it, "To think with an
enlarged mentality means that one trains one's imagination to go
visiting." "Going visiting" in this way enables us to make individual,
particular acts of judgement which can nevertheless claim a public
validity. In this faculty, Arendt find a basis upon which a
disinterested and publicly-minded form of political judgement could
subvene, yet be capable of tackling the unprecedented circumstances
and choices that the modern era confronts us with.
8. Influence

We can briefly consider the influence that Arendt's work has exerted
over other political thinkers. This is not easy to summarize, as many
and varied scholars have sought inspiration from some part or other of
Arendt's work. However, we may note the importance that her studies
have had for the theory and analysis of totalitarianism and the nature
and origins of political violence. Similarly, her reflections on the
distinctiveness of modern democratic revolutions have been important
in the development of republican thought, and for the recent revival
of interest in civic mobilizations and social movements (particularly
in the wake of 1989's 'velvet revolutions' in the former communist
states of Eastern and Central Europe).

More specifically, Arendt has decisively influenced critical and
emancipatory attempts to theorize political reasoning and
deliberation. For example, Jürgen Habermas admits the formative
influence of Arendt upon his own theory of communicative reason and
discourse ethics. Particularly important is the way in which Arendt
comes to understand power, namely as "the capacity to agree in
uncoerced communication on some community action." Her model of action
as public, communicative, persuasive and consensual reappears in
Habermas' thought in concepts such as that of "communicative power"
which comes about whenever members of a life-world act in concert via
the medium of language. It also reappears in his critique of the
"scientization of politics" and his concomitant defense of practical,
normative reason in the domain of life-world relations from the
hegemony of theoretical and technical modes of reasoning. Others (such
as Jean-Luc Nancy) have likewise been influenced by her critique of
the modern technological "leveling" of human distinctiveness, often
reading Arendt's account in tandem with Heidegger's critique of
technology. Her theory of judgement has been used by Critical
Theorists and Postmoderns alike. Amongst the former, Seyla Benhabib
draws explicitly and extensively upon it in order to save discourse
ethics from its own universalist excesses; Arendt's attention to the
particular, concrete, unique and lived phenomena of human life
furnishes Benhabib with a strong corrective for Habermas' tendency for
abstraction, while nonetheless preserving the project of a
universalizing vision of ethical-political life. For the Postmoderns,
such as Lyotard, the emphasis placed upon reflective judgement
furnishes a "post-foundational" or "post-universalist" basis in which
the singularity of moral judgements can be reconciled with some kind
of collective adherence to political principles.
9. Criticisms and Controversies

It is worth noting some of the prominent criticisms that have been
leveled against Arendt's work.

Primary amongst these is her reliance upon a rigid distinction between
the "private" and "public," the oikos and the polis, to delimit the
specificity of the political realm. Feminists have pointed out that
the confinement of the political to the realm outside the household
has been part and parcel of the domination of politics by men, and the
corresponding exclusion of women's experiences of subjection from
legitimate politics. Marxists have likewise pointed to the
consequences of confining matters of material distribution and
economic management to the extra-political realm of the oikos, thereby
delegitimating questions of material social justice, poverty, and
exploitation from political discussion and contestation. The
shortcoming of this distinction in Arendt's work is amply illustrated
by a well-known and often-cited incident. While attending a conference
in 1972, she was put under question by the Frankfurt School Critical
Theorist Albrecht Wellmer, regarding her distinction of the
"political" and the "social," and its consequences. Arendt pronounced
that housing and homelessness (themes of the conference) were not
political issues, but that they were external to the political as the
sphere of the actualization of freedom; the political is about human
self-disclosure in speech and deed, not about the distribution of
goods, which belongs to the social realm as an extension of the oikos.
It may be said that Arendt's attachment to a fundamental and originary
understanding of political life precisely misses the fact that
politics is intrinsically concerned with the contestation of what
counts as a legitimate public concern, with the practice of politics
attempting to introduce new, heretofore 'non-political' issues, into
realm of legitimate political concern.

Arendt has also come under criticism for her overly enthusiastic
endorsement of the Athenian polis as an exemplar of political freedom,
to the detriment of modern political regimes and institutions.
Likewise, the emphasis she places upon direct citizen deliberation as
synonymous with the exercise of political freedom excludes
representative models, and might be seen as unworkable in the context
of modern mass societies, with the delegation, specialization,
expertise and extensive divisions of labor needed to deal with their
complexity. Her elevation of politics to the apex of human good and
goals has also been challenged, demoting as it does other modes of
human action and self-realization to a subordinate status. There are
also numerous criticisms that have been leveled at her unorthodox
readings of other thinkers, and her attempts to synthesize conflicting
philosophical viewpoints in attempt to develop her own position (for
example, her attempt to mediate Aristotle's account of
experientially-grounded practical judgement (phronesis) with Kant's
transcendental-formal model).

All these, and other criticisms notwithstanding, Arendt remains one of
the most original, challenging and influential political thinkers of
the 20th century, and her work will no doubt continue to provide
inspiration for political philosophy as we enter the 21st.
10. References and Further Reading
a. Major Works by Arendt

* The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, Harcourt, 1951
* The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958
* Between Past and Future, London, Faber & Faber, 1961
* On Revolution. New York, Penguin, 1962
* Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil, London,
Faber & Faber, 1963
* On Violence, New York, Harcourt, 1970
* Men in Dark Times, New York, Harcourt, 1968
* Crisis of the Republic, New York, Harcourt, 1972
* The Life of the Mind, 2 vols., London, Secker & Warburg, 1978
* Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1982
* Love and St. Augustin, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996

b. Recommended Further Reading

* Benhabib, Seyla: The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt.
London, Sage, 1996
* Bernstein, Richard J: 'Hannah Arendt: The Ambiguities of Theory
and Practice', in Political Theory and Praxis: New Perspectives,
Terence Ball (ed.). Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1977
* Bernstein, Richard J: Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a
Pragmatic Mode. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1986
* Critchley, Simon & Schroeder, William (eds): A Companion to
Continental Philosophy. Oxford, Blackwell, 1998
* d'Entrèves, Maurizio Passerin: The Political Philosophy of
Hannah Arendt. London, Routledge, 1994
* Flynn, Bernard: Political Philosophy at the Closure of
Metaphysics. New Jersey/London: Humanities Press International, 1992
* Habermas, Jürgen: 'Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power' in
Philosophical-Political Profiles. London, Heinemman, 1983
* Hinchman, Lewis P. & Hinchman, Sandra K: 'In Heidegger's Shadow:
Hannah Arendt's Phenomenological Humanism', in The Review of Politics,
46, 2, 1984, pp 183-211
* Kielmansegg, Peter G., Mewes, Horst & Glaser-Schmidt,
Elisabeth(eds): Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigrés and
American Political Thought after World War II. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1995
* Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe & Nancy, Jean-Luc: Retreating the
Political, Simon Sparks (ed). London, Routledge, 1997
* Parekh, Bhikhu: Hannah Arendt & The Search for a New Political
Philosophy. London & Basingstoke, Macmillan Press, 1981
* Villa, Dana: Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political.
Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1996
* Villa, Dana (ed): The Cambridge Companion to Arendt. Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2000