The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt

225 Pages·1993·11.38 MB·English

by  Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves

The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt
“This is an incisive, penetrating and clear presentation of some of the
major philosophical and political tensions in Hannah Arendt’s work.
Departing from the usual characterization of Hannah Arendt’s political
thought as a nostalgic longing for the lost Greek polis, d’Entrèves analyzes
the persistence and complexity of the problems of modernity in Arendt’s
thought. It is well written and well argued and will be immensely useful to
newcomers as well as more advanced readers of Hannah Arendt’s work.”
Seyla Benhabib, Harvard University
“The conclusions that d’Entrèves draws from Hannah Arendt’s work for the
implementation of more extended and participatory forms of democracy and
citizenship demonstrate the acute contemporary relevance of Arendt’s writings
for our political thinking after the collapse of totalitarianism. d’Entrèves’ writing
is distinguished by compelling and clearly articulated argument, and his
exposition and assessment of Arendt is of a consistently high quality. This is
a sophisticated entrance point to Arendt’s political thought.”
Simon Critchley, University of Essex
“A learned and subtle account of Arendt’s work. It offers a fresh and
needed perspective.”
George Kateb, Princeton University
Hannah Arendt is recognized as one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth
century. This book provides a systematic reconstruction of four major
concepts underpinning her work: modernity, action, judgment, and
citizenship. Taking each concept in turn, d’Entrèves offers an original
assessment of Arendt’s conception of modernity, identifies two distinct
models of political action as well as two distinct conceptions of judgment,
and shows the relevance of her political theory to contemporary debates
on the nature and scope of democratic citizenship. D’Entrèves argues that
Arendt’s conception of active citizenship and democratic deliberation
provides the best framework for rethinking the nature of political agency
and for the reactivation of public life in the modern world. The Political
Philosophy of Hannah Arendt is an ideal text for students of Arendt, as it
provides a novel and systematic account of her political theory and offers
a fresh perspective from which to evaluate her work.

The Political Philosophy of
Hannah Arendt
Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves
London and New York
First published 1994
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.
© 1994 Maurizio Passerin d´Entrèves
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Passerin d´Entrèves, Maurizio
The political philosophy of Hannah Arendt/Maurizio Passerin d´Entrèves.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Arendt, Hannah – Contributions in political science. 2. Arendt, Hannah
– Philosophy. I. Title.
JC251.A74P39 1993
320.5–dc20 93-18492
ISBN 0-415-08790-2 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-08791-0 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-00624-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-17422-4 (Glassbook Format)
Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1
1 Hannah Arendt’s conception of modernity 22
2 Hannah Arendt’s theory of action 64
3 Hannah Arendt’s theory of judgment 101
4 Hannah Arendt’s conception of citizenship 139
Notes 167
Bibliography 198
Index 211
Acknowledgments
The writing of a book, although conducted in the solitude of one’s study,
is always the product of a collective dialogue. During the years in which
this work took shape, I had the privilege of learning from and conversing
with a number of generous and supportive scholars. I would first like to
thank Seyla Benhabib, who has been my principal source of inspiration
and support. If this book has taken the shape that it has, it is due to her
vision, her example, and her generous advice. I would also like to thank
James Schmidt for the unfailing care and attention he gave to an earlier
version of this work. He has been a careful reader, a learned commentator,
and a most constructive critic. I also owe a great debt to George Kateb,
who gave me crucially supportive comments at various stages and whose
deep and nuanced understanding of Arendt’s thought was a model for my
own (different) reading of her. I also want to thank him for having
introduced me to the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, and for
his fine defense of the value of democratic individuality. At the opposite
side of the theoretical spectrum, I wish to thank Michael Sandel for drawing
my attention to the neglected dimensions of agency and community in
liberal thought. To Thomas McCarthy I owe my gratitude for having clarified
and deepened my understanding of Habermas, and for his lively
conversations. During the two years spent in Italy, I had the fortune of
attending the seminars of Steven Lukes and John Pocock. To Steven I owe
my thanks for keeping my intellectual project on course. To John Pocock,
whose Machiavellian Moment was crucial for my understanding of Arendt
(and for much else beside), I owe my deepest thanks for his generous
comments and constructive support during a difficult phase of my life. It
was also a great pleasure to witness a scholar at work. Finally, I wish to
thank my friend William Falcetano for the many conversations we have
had in the last ten years, for exemplifying the idea of vocation, and for
having sustained my commitment when it truly mattered.
I would like to thank Adrian Driscoll at Routledge for his interest in my
work and for his unfailing competence in seeing it through.
This book is dedicated to Laura and Niccolò, who know best.
I wish to thank the editors of Praxis International, Philosophy and
Social Criticism, and Thesis Eleven, where earlier versions of portions of
this book were published.
Introduction
Hannah Arendt was one of the seminal political thinkers of the twentieth
century. The power and originality of her thinking was evident in works
such as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, On
Revolution and The Life of the Mind. In these works and in numerous
essays she grappled with the most crucial political events of our century,
trying to grasp their meaning and historical import, and showing how they
affected our categories of moral and political judgment. What was required,
in her view, was a new framework that could enable us to come to terms with
the twin horrors of the twentieth century, Nazism and Stalinism. She provided
such framework in her book on totalitarianism, and went on to develop a
new set of categories that could illuminate the human condition and provide
a fresh perspective on political life.
Although some of her works now belong to the classics of the Western
tradition of political thought, she has always remained difficult to classify.
Her political philosophy cannot be characterized in terms of the traditional
categories of conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. Nor can her thinking
be assimilated to the recent revival of communitarian political thought, to be
found, for example, in the writings of A. MacIntyre, M. Sandel, C. Taylor, and
M. Walzer. Her name has been invoked by some of the communitarian critics,
on the grounds that she presented a vision of politics radically at odds with
the principles of liberalism. There are many strands of Arendt’s thought that
could justify such a claim, in particular, her critique of representative
democracy, her stress on civic engagement and political deliberation, her
separation of morality from politics, and her praise of the revolutionary
tradition. To place Arendt’s thought within the growing chorus of
2 The political philosophy of Hannah Arendt
communitarian objections against liberalism would, however, be a mistake.
Arendt was in fact a stern defender of constitutionalism and the rule of law,
an advocate of fundamental human rights (among which she included not
only the right to life, liberty, and freedom of expression, but also the right to
action and to opinion), and a critic of all forms of political community based
on traditional ties and customs, as well as those based on religious, ethnic,
or racial identity.
Arendt’s political thought cannot, in this sense, be identified either with
the liberal tradition or with the claims advanced by a number of communitarian
critics. Arendt did not conceive of politics as a means for the satisfaction of
individual preferences, nor as a way to integrate individuals around a single
or transcendent conception of the good. Her conception of politics is based
instead on the idea of active citizenship, that is, on the value and importance
of civic engagement and collective deliberation about all matters affecting
the political community. If there is a tradition of thought with which Arendt
can be identified, it is the classical tradition of civic republicanism originating
in Aristotle and embodied in the writings of Machiavelli, Montesquieu,
Jefferson, and Tocqueville. According to this tradition politics finds its
authentic expression whenever citizens gather together in a public space to
deliberate and decide about matters of collective concern. Political activity
is valued not because it may lead to agreement or to a shared conception of
the good, but because it enables each citizen to exercise his or her powers of
agency, to develop the capacities for judgment, and to attain by concerted
action some measure of political efficacy.
Arendt’s conception of politics, with its stress on civic engagement and
unconstrained political deliberation, is clearly indebted to this tradition of
thought. Her conception of action and political discourse is aimed, in fact, at
the reactivation of political agency and efficacy, and articulates the
conditions for the exercise of active citizenship and democratic self-
determination.
In this book I reconstruct and critically evaluate Arendt’s political
philosophy with respect to four major themes. In the first chapter I examine
her conception of modernity, in the second her theory of action, in the third
her theory of judgment, and in the fourth her conception of citizenship.
Throughout these chapters I attempt to provide a reading of Arendt that
highlights her contribution to a theory of participatory democracy based on
the principles of freedom, plurality, equality, and solidarity.
Introduction 3
CHAPTER 1: HANNAH ARENDT’S CONCEPTION OF
MODERNITY
In this chapter I examine Arendt’s conception of modernity and her critique
of modern forms of social and political life. For Arendt modernity is
characterized by the “loss of the world,” by which she means the restriction
or elimination of the public sphere of action and speech in favor of the
private world of introspection and the private pursuit of economic interests.
Modernity is the age of mass society, of the rise of the “social” out of a
previous distinction between the public and the private, and of the victory
of animal laborans over both contemplation and action. It is the age of
bureaucratic administration and anonymous labor, rather than politics and
action, of elite domination and the manipulation of public opinion. It is the
age when totalitarian forms of government, such as Nazism and Stalinism,
have emerged as a result of the institutionalization of terror and violence. It
is the age where history as a “natural process” has replaced history as a
fabric of actions and events, where homogeneity and conformity have
replaced plurality and freedom, and where isolation and loneliness have
eroded human solidarity and all spontaneous forms of living together.
Modernity is the age where the past no longer carries any certainty of
evaluation, where individuals, having lost their traditional standards and
values, must search for new grounds of human community as such.
This is Arendt’s vision of modernity, a vision so stark and unredeeming
as to offer at first sight little room for alternative accounts or different
characterizations. In the first part of the chapter, however, I argue that
Arendt’s negative appraisal of modernity was shaped by her experience of
totalitarianism in the twentieth century, and that her work provides a number
of important insights that may help us to address certain problematic features
of the modern age. In her political writings, and especially in The Origins of
Totalitarianism, Arendt claimed that the phenomenon of totalitarianism has
broken the continuity of Occidental history, and has rendered meaningless
most of our moral and political categories. The break in our tradition has
become irrevocable after the tragic events of our century and the triumph of
totalitarian movements in East and West. In the form of Stalinism and Nazism,
totalitarianism has exploded the established categories of political thought
and the accepted standards of moral judgment, and has thereby broken the
continuity of our history. Faced with the tragic events of the Holocaust and
the Gulag, we can no longer go back to traditional concepts and values, so