Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics

2017

The promise of democracy is that citizens can make collective choices not only about short-term policies but also about the kind of institutions and future they want to share. This possibility turns not just on elections and other constitutional features of democratic government, but also on commitments to the public good-even the very idea that there is a public good-and participation in public communication to establish it and guide its pursuit. This is a claim against the authority or necessity of monarchs or dictators, but also for the possibility of choosing a way of life and organization of social solidarity. There have been many skeptics. In 1925, Walter Lippman (1993 [1925]) famously suggested that the public was a phantom, at most a reference point for establishing the collective interest but not a meaningful part of the process for ascertaining what policies would actually serve that interest. Solving problems, he said, required experts and effective administration but not large-scale public action or debate. Lippman's argument served famously to occasion John Dewey's (2012 [1927]) spirited defense of democracy and the centrality of public engagement to democracy. In a sense, Lippman can be seen as the foil to the entire ensuing development of the academic study and popular discussion of democratic publics: he said they don't matter much, that the real work of policy-making and problem-solving inevitably gets done by political insiders; most people are mere bystanders not agents; and democracy itself is best limited to elections that check abuses of power or resolve crises. In this chapter, I want to explore some ideas of the three most important authors to take up the theme of what publics might accomplish in the decades after Lippman's challenge: John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas. These can be brought together to help develop a stronger theoretical grasp of the problems and potential of democratic publics.

Within the current political context, it seems uncontroversial to assert that public discourse about matters of shared concern is generally regarded as toxic and not as an inviting opportunity for citizens. Generally speaking, participation in public discourse and in the public space is not something we seek out, unless perhaps, it is from behind the privacy of our electronic devices. Hannah Arendt's thought provides some of the best resources for rethinking these concepts. This essay, then, seeks to accomplish two tasks at once. First, I utilize Arendt's thought as a vehicle for attempting to rethink public discourse as perhaps the political problem confronting contemporary citizens. Second, it will be this very rethinking of public discourse that allows me to wade into a more specific debate within Arendt scholarship about the role of judgment in her thought.

Wittgenstein and Democratic Politics: Language, Dialogue and Political Forms of Life, ed. Lotar Rasinski et al., 2024

What is the problem of democratic persuasion today? Looking at the hard cases of what Robert Foeglin calls “deep disagreement,” this essay brings Hannah Arendt and Ludwig Wittgenstein into a critical dialogue about the possibilities for persuasive speech. Questioning the received reading of “form of life” and “worldview” as the hard limit on such speech, it argues for a world-opening approach to persuasion where shared premises are missing. By contrast with those who reduce persuading to convincing based on such premises, Wittgenstein and Arendt show how to create them. Persuasion entails learning to see from different points of view: what Arendt calls “seeing politically,” and Wittgenstein calls “seeing an aspect.”

Argumentation and Advocacy, 2012

Polity, 2001

Hannah Arendt and the Boundaries of the Public Sphere

The rise of populism and the polarization of traditional and new media pose threats to pluralistic democratic action and judgment. Citizens often vilify each other, deny each other the space to test and justify their perspectives publicly, either because they hold radically different political views, or because they ascribe an essentialist identity upon the other, one that they believe must be negated in accordance with the logic of their own ideology. This paper presents three vital resources in Hannah Arendt's thought for addressing these challenges to democracy. First, Arendt promotes physical-not merely virtual or digital-spaces of public deliberation in which actors disclose "who" they uniquely are and the "world" that contextualizes their action. Arendt proposes a principle of resistance to totalitarianism and a "responsibility for the world" as the appropriate limit to free action within these spaces. Second, Arendt presents a limit, or standard of intelligibility, to political action and speech permissible in public: the sensus communis of Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment. This standard of common sense, which binds the public sphere, demands that a speech act's intersubjective validity appeal to an objectivity that can be shared from different perspectives, but which allows for disagreement, and is not as restrictive as an Aristotelian ethos or an internally consistent ideology. Finally, Arendt asserts the imperative of factual truth telling and attention to the details of public phenomena, as necessary conditions for intelligible action and judgment in a pluralistic public sphere.

Constellations 3, no. 3 (January 1997): 377–400.

Communicative reason is of course a rocking hullbut it does not go under in the sea of contingencies, even if shuddering in high seas is the only mode in which it 'copes' with these contingencies.

2013