Spaces of 'Politics'. Aspects of Transnationality in Arendt's Thinking

The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, 2000

Hannah Arendt disavowed the title of “philosopher,” and is known above all as a political theorist. But the relationship between philosophy and politics animates her entire oeuvre. We find her addressing the topic in The Human Condition (1958), in Between Past and Future (a collection of essays written in the early 1960s), and in Men in Dark Times (another collection of essays, this one from the late sixties). It is treated in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, composed during the seventies, and also in the posthumous Life of the Mind, two of three projected volumes of which were complete when she died in 1975. Certainly, Arendt’s thought cannot be understood without taking into account her deep suspicion of and equally deep commitment to philosophy in the context of political reflection. For all that, her writings on this abiding preoccupation do not gel into a systematically articulated theory or programmatic statement. Instead, they reflect Arendt’s appreciation of what remained for her a “vital tension” – an enigma.

For Hannah Arendt, a crisis occurs when we can no longer rely on the prejudices that ordinarily guide us through the world. Every crisis is, therefore, an occasion to reflect upon tradition. By pointing to the erosion of our shared background beliefs, however, the crisis also reveals our weakened ability to communicate and cooperate with each other. The crisis simultaneously releases us from our prejudices and alienates us from others. Due to its double nature, the moment of crisis confronts us with the question of what community is possible when we do not have anything in common. Arendt's answer is found in the community of judgment. The paper argues that Arendt formulated her well-known political theory of reflective judgment to address the paradoxes of crisis.

European Journal of Political Theory, 2009

2010

Theoria

Although Hannah Arendt is often described as a radical thinker, this article argues that such a characterization has occluded the question of what ‘radicality’ means within the particular horizon of Arendt’s political thought. While the battle over Arendt’s legacy is often fought on terms that oppose the radical to the conservative, Arendt herself is engaged in a different struggle, namely the opposition of the radical and the banal as it emerges in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), where banality is understood precisely as the problem that unradicality poses to thought. This article will investigate this tension and Arendt’s response to its emergence. Beginning with an account of radicality in relation to Arendt’s work on crisis in The Human Condition (1958) and Between Past and Future (1961), among other texts, this article will draw out an account of what it means to 'think politically' in a radical sense on Arendt's terms, first by considering the spatial logics that allow us to describe the location of the thinker who hopes to think responsively, to avoid both thoughtlessness and withdrawal in times of crisis. The article will then turn towards the particular interruption of Eichmann and ‘the banality of evil' into this project, and it will consider the stakes of this interruption. The manifest crisis of evil was accompanied for Arendt, as this article will go on to argue, by a correlative and immanent crisis of unthinkability, of “shallowness” and “rootlessness,” that threw into question in a precise way the ability of thinking to respond to the present on the terms of Arendt’s earlier work. From this perspective, the article will end by articulating a trajectory towards The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s unfinished attempt, demanded by the particular crisis of Eichmann, to think unradicality radically. It will conclude by reflecting on the form of the unfinished work - that The Life of the Mind itself is - as a way of understanding Arendt's final teaching about judgment and the possibility of a truly 'political thought.' This article is adapted from my Amherst College senior honors thesis in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, titled "A Form of Thinking Called Arendt" (2014).

This paper provides an interpretation of the movement of Arendt’s thought in her Denktagebuch, from 1950 to 1973. This movement results in an incipient political philosophy based on new concepts of freedom, equality, and solidarity. As a contribution to debates on the normative foundations of Arendt’s political thought, the paper seeks to show that her incipient political philosophy is based on an ethical understanding of the human condition as constituted by its openness to the divine, the worldly, and the (human) Other. Despite its fragmentary nature and its politically problematic indebtedness to theological traditions, Arendt’s private thought nevertheless allows us to rethink her place in the history of European ideas. Beyond that, it also provides a powerful alternative to the view that ethical and political thought must remain ‘political not metaphysical’.

What The Human Condition was for the Vita Activa, is The Life of the Mind for the Vita Contemplativa. But this last project, a trilogy in fact, was not completed by Arendt and perhaps therefore less known by the public. In this paper I try to understand Arendt's rather obscure last works by positioning them in the dichotomy between philosophy and politics. Along the way, many interesting themes will be explored, such as Arendt's evaluation of Stoicism, her sympathy for the Socratic method of thinking and the importance of Kant's aesthetic philosophy for the possibility of a meaningful public domain.