Arendt, Montesquieu, and the Spirits of Politics
Lucy Cane
Although Montesquieu is not always recognized as a central influence on Hannah Arendt, she finds in him a unique resource for conceiving political freedom amid the losses and possibilities of the modern age. Through Montesquieu’s understanding of the principles that animate government, such as virtue and honor, Arendt develops a set of political values oriented toward realizing freedom and sustaining a common world for action. She repeatedly links modern catastrophes to the erosion of those principles, including the failure of the American revolutionary spirit to endure through local institutions and culture, and, most dramatically, the utterly worldless condition of totalitarianism. In doing so, she underscores the modern tendencies toward rootlessness that often stymied possibilities for political freedom. Montesquieu’s concern about the conservation of principles aligns with this melancholic attitude toward the risks inherent in modernity. His perspective is, furthermore, relatively compatible with the performative, sui generis aspects of action that Arendt famously distills from the experience of the Greek polis. Yet, Arendt’s appeal to Montesquieu also demonstrates the limits of her reservations about the modern age, since she draws here on a champion of modern constitutionalism to articulate a new thinking of politics, rather than attempting to revive premodern forms of community. Moreover, it is through engaging with animating principles that Arendt qualifies her contentious critiques of the modern invasion of politics by instrumentality and by “the social.”1
Animating Principles and Arendt’s Worldly Values
Arendt claims, most prominently in The Human Condition, that the intrinsic greatness of political action lies in its initiation of radically new beginnings. Given that such beginnings are unpredictable and may even be destructive, some critics worry that her ideal of “greatness” is ethically unrestrained and that she lacks adequate political standards.2 On the other hand, much of her work confronts precisely the question of how to reconceive political values without the traditional bases of authority in which they were once anchored, lest politics be neglected or replaced by deadly ideologies.3 Indeed, while the performative sui generis aspects of action are important for Arendt, she maintains that we must cultivate robust, secular political standards to replace the traditional bases of authority that are lost in modernity, and she considers Montesquieu to be “the greatest representative of this political secularism.”4
The key insight of Montesquieu’s secular “revision of the tradition” is his claim in The Spirit of The Laws that each form of government is animated by a “principle” that operates as a source for law, an ongoing spring to action, and a standard by which to judge the health of the polity.5 He identifies three such principles: virtue (or “love of equality”) in republics, honor in monarchies, and fear in despotisms.6
Arendt refers to Montesquieu in all of her key texts, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to The Life of the Mind (1978), taking up his notion of principles as the “guiding criteria by which all actions in the public realm are judged beyond the merely negative yardstick of lawfulness, and which inspire the actions of both rulers and ruled.”7 For her, it is critical that Montesquieu understand principles as being strictly political, rather than moral or religious: that is, they concern the well-being of “the world” rather than the purity of the inner self or soul. For example, Arendt understands “virtue” to manifest in actions that engage others as equal citizens in public space, rather than to concern the moral character of the soul. In “What is Freedom?” she claims that this worldly understanding of principles enables Montesquieu to envision a strictly political form of freedom based on our capacity to act in public, as opposed to Judeo-Christian and philosophical forms of freedom tied to the inner will.8 Seeking further to divorce principles from any sense of interiority, Arendt insists that their animating force is also distinct from that of motives: they “inspire, as it were, from without.”9 Finding Montesquieu’s enumeration of principles to be “pitifully inadequate,” however, she cites various other egalitarian principles that share this worldly character, including “justice,” “solidarity,” “public or political happiness,” and “consent and the right to dissent.”10 In claiming that action must be animated and judged by such principles, Arendt points toward a distinctly political set of values that exceeds the problematic notion of greatness.
The Regeneration of Principles and the Meaning of Despotism
According to Montesquieu, forms of government can be sustained as long as their principles provide vital inspiration for action. This requires not only that principles be reflected in law but also that they be preserved in the various institutions, memories, practices, and environments that constitute the “spirit” animating the law. For example, while the republican principle of virtue rests on a fundamental constitutional structure of separated powers, it also rests on other mediating institutions of civil society, customs, and even climates that cultivate a worldly sense of equality. Accordingly, Montesquieu holds that the corruption of a form of government begins when the institutional, customary, and environmental roots of its principle are eroded. If the animating principle of a republican or monarchical government thus weakens, the law cannot stand on its own and a slide into despotism becomes more likely.11 For Montesquieu, despotism is distinguished from other forms of government by its lawlessness. Relatedly, its animating principle of fear contrasts with virtue and honor in that it is not sustained by enduring institutions and cultures but is rather destructive of them; it is not vulnerable to corruption but is rather “corrupt by nature.”12
Arendt finds value not only in Montesquieu’s notion of animating worldly principles but also in his account of their preservation and potential corruption. She claims that principles “come down to us through history,” and “can be repeated time and again,” but only if they are preserved in institutions, memories, practices, and cultures.13 For example, in On Revolution, she praises the American founders for what she sees to be their endorsement of egalitarian principles such as “consent and the right to dissent” and, echoing Montesquieu’s concern about absolute power, for their efforts to separate powers constitutionally. The egalitarian principles supposedly embraced by the founders constituted their “revolutionary spirit.” However, Arendt claims that America’s revolutionary spirit was not sustained because a reliance on centralized power and political representation eclipsed any “lasting institutions” in which citizens could enact these principles for generations to come.14 In addition to this institutional failure, she identifies a “failure of post-revolutionary thought to remember the revolutionary spirit and to understand it conceptually.”15 With the erosion of its principles of action, the American republic became prone to a mass politics that prioritized instrumental and social concerns over political freedom. This mass politics, for Arendt, has despotic tendencies of its own, and has the potential to clear the way for the lawless despotism about which Montesquieu warns.
Drawing on her notion of “world,” Arendt expands upon Montesquieu’s conception of despotism, specifically his claim that the principle of fear is “corrupt by nature.” She describes fear as an “antipolitical principle within the common world”: while it is worldly in the sense that it may inspire action and concerns how we appear to each other in public, its anti-political effect is to isolate people and thus undermine the conditions for further action.16 She cites other principles, including “rage,” “distrust,” and “hatred,” that share this degenerative quality.17 Moreover, in Origins, Arendt expands Montesquieu’s typology of governmental forms to include totalitarianism, a phenomenon that exceeds conventional despotism. Like despotism, totalitarianism delegitimizes positive law. But whereas citizens under a despotic government maintain “a minimal, fearful contact with other men,” the erosion of worldly ties and consequent loneliness under totalitarian government is more extreme.18 In totalitarianism, the corrupt principle of fear is overtaken by an overarching “ideology,” which is pursued mechanically through terror, making individuals superfluous and leaving no space for spontaneous action.19
Montesquieu, Arendt, and Modernity
Montesquieu is a champion of modern constitutionalism, and his principles provide secular standards for different types of political regimes. However, both he and Arendt worry that there are tendencies inherent in modernity that may erode the support for these principles. Indeed, Arendt does not consider the successful regeneration of principles of action to be the inevitable or even primary tendency of the modern age. This melancholic sensibility enables her to offer powerful diagnoses of catastrophes such as totalitarianism, and it distinguishes her from theorists who find in modernity a rational core to ground discursive theories of the public sphere.20
Yet it is not immediately clear how this concern with the regeneration of principles relates to the other, well-known aspect of Arendt’s apparent anti-modernism: her attempts to distill from the experience of the Greek polis a conception of political action as unpredictable and intrinsically great. In The Human Condition, she deploys sharp distinctions between “action,” “work,” and “labor” to argue that political acts “reach into the extraordinary, where . . . everything that exists is unique and sui generis.”21 This characterization of action is the source of concerns that her only political standard is “greatness.” Ostensibly, this would undermine her emphasis on repetition and structure evident in her claim that egalitarian principles must be regenerated lest we succumb to quasi-despotic, despotic, or totalitarian conditions.
Arendt’s emphasis on conserving principles and her contrasting emphasis on singularity and rupture can be reconciled only if we understand the general principles that come down to us through history as having contestable meanings that are open to novel re-articulation in action. The capacity of principles to be “enacted further, augmented and spun out” allows for an unpredictable element of action, even a “measure of complete arbitrariness.”22 For Arendt, political values cannot rest on foundations if we are to respect the unpredictability and intrinsic value of action. Nevertheless, principles limit this element of politics: they “save the act of beginning from its own arbitrariness,” providing guideposts for remembrance.23 In other words, Arendt finds that Montesquieu’s conception of principles both impels us to conserve institutions and culture, and allows space to value the “single instances, deeds and events [that] interrupt the circular movement of daily life” and disclose fresh meaning.24 Indeed, she contends that the preservation of the political world in its various dimensions is actually what enables the initiatory action she admires, and in this way, “the concern with stability and the spirit of the new” are “two sides of the same event.”25
Arendt’s appeal to Montesquieu also qualifies the controversial conclusions she draws from her Hellenic view of action regarding the modern invasion of politics by instrumentality and by “the social.” Certainly, she worries that the erosion of political principles in, for example, the United States, allows for the intrinsic greatness of action to be eclipsed by the means-end rationality of “work,” while political freedom is eclipsed by social concerns associated with “labor.” Readers such as George Kateb and Hanna Pitkin worry that this implies an archaic vision of political action as an exercise in hollow dramatics that confines many issues of justice to the private sphere.26 Indeed, some of Arendt’s more extreme statements substantiate these concerns, such as her reference to action’s “practical purposelessness” and her claim that every attempt to solve social problems through politics “leads to terror.”27 However, in her discussions of principles, she clarifies that goals are “important factors in every single act.”28 It is simply that actions are free insofar as they have a meaning that “transcends” both their original motivations and these goals.29 Similarly, she explains that political actors may address social issues so long as they prioritize political freedom by manifesting the principle of solidarity rather than the sentiment of pity.30 In these ways, Arendt’s appeal to Montesquieu ultimately reveals the limits of her supposed anti-modernism. She appreciates durable, secular principles that allow for efficacious and just action, even if she is often pessimistic about the possibilities of sustaining them and seeks also to recognize a sui generis element of action.
Conclusion
Arendt’s work is so stimulating and continually generative of commentary partly because of the apparent tensions among its central theoretical elements. She combines a concern about the loss of historical continuity with a celebration of rupture, and expresses both reservations about modernity and various egalitarian and constitutional impulses characteristic of the modern age. Her engagement with Montesquieu’s conception of animating principles shows how these strands of her thought can be held together in a plausible way. An appreciation of Arendt’s encounter with Montesquieu thus cuts through interpretative disputes over her work and illuminates her insight into the various dimensions of political freedom.
Notes
1 Some of the arguments made here are drawn from Lucy Cane, “Hannah Arendt on the Principles of Political Action,” European Journal of Political Theory 14, no. 1 (2015): 55–75.
2 See, for example, George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (New York: Rowman and Allenheld, 1983), 32–33.
3 Hannah Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 17–40. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1968), 467–68.
4 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future, 159.
5 Hannah Arendt, “Montesquieu’s Revision of the Tradition,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books), 63.
6 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne Cohler et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 21–30.
7 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 65.
8 Ibid., 159.
9 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 151.
10 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 195; Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), 79, 115 .
11 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 112–28.
12 Ibid., 119.
13 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 195; Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 151.
14 Arendt, On Revolution, 224.
15 Ibid., 223.
16 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 68.
17 Arendt, On Revolution, 103; Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 151.
18 Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 336.
19 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 467–68.
20 See Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
21 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 205.
22 Arendt, On Revolution, 37, 198.
23 Ibid., 205.
24 Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” 42.
25 Arendt, On Revolution, 215.
26 Kateb, Hannah Arendt, 29; Hanna Pitkin, “Justice: On Relating Public and Private,” Political Theory 9 (1981): 327–52.
27 Arendt, Human Condition, 177; Arendt, On Revolution, 102.
28 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 150.
29 Ibid.
30 Arendt, On Revolution, 79.