Arendt, democracy, and judgment

Abstract

S180 www.palgrave.com/journals original, albeit impressionistic, thinker, whose main aim was not to demolish the tradition of political thought, but to reinvigorate it out of the ''pearls'' she had herself found(ed). As to the second, however, Schwartz's case for Arendt's reappropriation of Kantian aesthetic judgment may still be insufficient. The shortcoming strikes me not so much as a problem of the author, who does an excellent job of recreating Arendt's universe, but rests inherently with the Kantian framework. Perhaps, a good example of judgment would have helped to upend this impression. Turning to the structure and main arguments, the first chapter explains the genealogical method that Arendt called ''pearl diving,'' which aimed to ''bring the original meaning of vital words back … to life through thought and imagination'' (pp. 22-23). Schwartz notes the seminal influence of Heidegger, from whom she borrowed not only a method but a conception of human beings as essentially historical. In addition, Arendt adopted several fundamental Heideggerian concepts: the idea that humans are thrown into a world that conditions their existence (which in Arendt became worldliness) and being-in, the ability to engage with worldly situations (which in Arendt became common sense). This chapter also engages Arendt's crucial understanding of ''action'' to be accomplished jointly in the public realm, where words can be heard, deeds can be seen, and events discussed and remembered. Chapter two retraces Arendt's archaeology of Western political thought with a view to retrieving ''the human faculties necessary to found and maintain a new public realm'' (p. 65). From the Greeks, she retrieved isonomia, translated ''literally as norule'' (p. 67), where men interact with one another without compulsion, as equals among equals, commanding and obeying only in emergencies. From the Romans, she retrieved authority as freely given obedience, which revolved around the preservation and carrying forward of the original foundation of the city. The Romans constituted the Western world as world, which began to crumble once the humanists, the Reformation, and seventeenth-century political theorists attacked religion, the church, and tradition. By the revolutionary period, the older world was long gone. Chapter three reverses the perspective and addresses philosophy's establishment of the tradition of political thought as an attempt to ''lay down the rules for the lunatic asylum'' (Pascal). Plato's allegory of the cave established an influential pattern, which Aristotle and the subsequent tradition continued. Schwartz is not so much interested in disputing particular readings by Arendt, but to consider ''whether she has a point'' (p. 105). For the most part, this aim allows him to stay clear of, and circumvent, pedantic criticisms. However, sometimes a further argument would be needed: for example, to restate the meaning of isonomia as ''literally no-rule'' is inaccurate, given that the term actually contains the root for law: ''nomos.'' (I will come back to this later.) Chapter four resumes the historical narrative and explains how ''necessity'' (rather than freedom) came to reign in human affairs. The first thread of the story Review Essay