Je n’ai pas de traditions, je n’ai pas de parti, je n’ai point de cause, si ce n’est celle de la liberte et de la dignite humaine.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Souvenirs – 144
I should have loved freedom at all times, but in the time in which we live, I am ready to worship it.
Democracy in America, Vol II, 340
The dignity of the human person has been the central concern of modern humanism. From Pico Della Mirandola to Hannah Arendt, humanists have celebrated the creative capacities of men and women and have encouraged their desire to transform nature and history. They have also risen in defense of human dignity when it has been systematically threatened or violated. In ascribing dignity to human existence, they have been asserting the intrinsic worth of every person without regard for their specific place in a social or cultural hierarchy. Human beings are ends in themselves worthy of unconditional respect; they are not simply means or instruments subordinated to some higher purpose. In the moral categories of Immanuel Kant, means have exchange value or price, while ends have dignity and worth.
Kant located the source of human dignity in the autonomy of pure practical reason. For Kant, human beings are worthy of respect because they are the legislators of the universal moral law. Kant’s enlightenment humanism was distinctively modern because it grounded human dignity in active freedom or responsible agency. The modern conceptions of human existence are inseparable from theories of freedom and the deeper and truer their understanding of freedom the more compelling their account of human worth.
In classical antiquity, freedom was predicated of bioi, complex forms of life centered on a specific human activity. For a form of life to be liberal or free, it had to be independent of biological necessity and human coercion. It had to be an intrinsically desirable way of living, allowing human beings to actualize what is divine or godlike in their natures. Both Plato and Aristotle agreed that the philosophical life, the life in search of wisdom, enjoyed the greatest freedom and dignity. Thought and contemplation, the central activities in the philosophical bios, are both instances of solitary freedom. In thought, the philosopher engages in an internal dialogue with himself; in contemplation he becomes silent before the revealed presence of God or eternal truth. The characteristic freedom of the bios theoretikos draws the lover of wisdom away from the human circle and from the cooperative ventures the presence of others makes possible.
The most influential modern conception of freedom is based on production rather than contemplation. Modernity rejects the ancient preference for the theoretical life and coordinates freedom directly with constructive agency. According to the moderns, we are most free when making or creating rather than when thinking or knowing. In the course of making or building, we exercise technical mastery over nature and control natural materials and energies for our own purposes and ends. The isolated artisan in his studio provides a good model for the modern picture of freedom. Through the exercise of craftsmanship, the artisan brings the raw materials of nature into accord with his individual intentions and aims.
Both the ancient and the modern paradigms of liberty are based on activities performed when alone. Despite their evident dissimilarities, solitary thought and sovereign craftsmanship are equally independent of human association. In grounding human dignity on freedom and then modeling freedom on making or thinking, it is easy to ignore the striking fact of human plurality. It is not man in the singular but human beings in the plural who inhabit the earth. Although the human creature may be made in the image and likeness of the Biblical God, the Creator’s singularity stands in direct contrast to the creature’s multiplicity. In the memorable words of Genesis 1:27, “male and female created He them.” (though the Christian God is explicitly conceived as a community of persons).
If plurality is an essential feature of the human condition, then it should enjoy a central place in the understanding of human dignity and freedom. To think freedom under the condition of plurality is to discover the limits of sovereignty and individual autonomy as ideals of liberty. Despite their insights, neither Pico, nor Kant, nor modern technological humanism provides an adequate conception of cooperative agency. Each of these thinkers and traditions fails to situate freedom securely in the web of human association; each fails to acknowledge the dependence of our limited autonomy on the prior condition of communal belonging. Only by belonging to a common world of meaning do we become capable of solitary reflection; only by apprenticeship in a community of craftsmen do we learn how to make what is durable and lasting. But communal belonging is not merely an enabling condition of individual initiative. There are distinctive modes of freedom that require the presence of others; there are important forms of activity that depend on collaboration; there is an essential connection between secure human dignity and active citizenship in a free society.
To emphasize the public aspect of liberty is not to deny freedom of thought or production. But it is to set limits on images of freedom based on these solitary experiences. When liberty is connected with plurality, it is reasonable to ask what forms of community offer the strongest support for human freedom and the greatest protection for human dignity. It is a sign of our complexity that we need to belong to many different communities in order to become fully human. The ancient Greeks believed that the polis, the distinctively political form of association, offered the greatest potential for freedom. Although the internal connection between liberty and citizenship is no longer self-evident, there are two great western political traditions that still insist on their interdependence. The tradition of civic humanism, which draws inspiration from the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, continues to uphold the ideal of public liberty. The modern revolutionary tradition, whose origins are traceable to Machiavelli, has also made political liberty a good worth fighting to establish. Despite intense debates between civic republicans and Jacobin revolutionaries, they share the conviction that active political citizenship is an essential part of a good human life.
Hannah Arendt, a contemporary political humanist, openly embraced these classical republican convictions. Because she was ardent in defending human dignity, she became a friend of public liberty, articulating the civic republican vision with remarkable passion and depth. The key to her thought, I believe, was her attention to human plurality and her insistence that the deep political implications of plurality have never been fully acknowledged. Her thought is often strikingly original, not because she concentrated on arcane subjects, but because she examined familiar phenomena from an unfamiliar perspective. A case in point is her reflection on human existence from the perspective of natality or birth.
A philosophical anthropology centered on human mortality, on the fact that human beings die alone, and, in dying, withdraw from the company of others, naturally emphasizes human solitude. There is a striking analogy between our permanent disappearance from the world in death and the provisional withdrawal from human affairs that occurs whenever we think. Theories of human existence keyed to the fact of mortality, typically highlight thought rather than action, solitary withdrawal rather than engagement in the human circle, and the private rather than the public dimension of freedom. But Arendt shows clearly how these priorities are reversed when birth rather than death becomes the focus of reflective attention. At birth, new human beings insert themselves into an old world, rather than receding from its ranks. Children renew the world by their appearance within it, providing a basis for worldly hope; in this respect, birth is the contrary of death, which constantly threatens the world with despair. Birth reminds us vividly of our situated existence and of our profound dependence on other persons. We do not choose to be born but are given the gift of existence by our parents. With this fundamental gift, we receive several others: the earth, our natural home, the world, our humanly created dwelling place, the different communities within which we develop and exercise our humanity.
Concentrating on the reality of birth dispels the illusions of human autonomy and sovereignty. We are situated inescapably in a complex web of human relationships; within that web we are educated, we acquire language, we master the arts and virtues required for adult existence, we become citizens and assume our share of worldly responsibility. Speech and action, the specifically political faculties, allow human beings to actualize the potential inherent in their birth. Speech permits new human beings to share with their elders their distinctive perceptions of the common world. The bonds of civic community are created through this public conversation that humanizes the world and those who belong to it. The capacity to act, to begin or initiate unpredictable processes, is directly analogous to the nature of birth. Every human birth is a new beginning in an old world; and each child is born with the capacity to begin, the capacity for freedom. But human speech and action require the presence of others for their intelligibility. Speech would be meaningless if other persons could not understand what was said and respond to its claims and appeals appropriately; and action would be futile without peers to witness and remember what was done, or cooperative partners to carry through what the individual agent began.
Hannah Arendt’s spirited defense of public liberty did not occur in an historical vacuum. Her apologia for freedom was neither an academic exercise nor a piece of disinterested scholarship. For her, the most dangerous threats to human dignity in this century were caused by extreme political alienation. It was the alienation of the European masses from parliamentary democracy that led to the rise of totalitarian governments. Even in the liberal democracies, like England and the United States, where civic alienation is less advanced, there has been a marked decline in political legitimacy. Evidence of this decline can be found in the loss of governmental authority, a diminished sense of civic obligation, low levels of electoral participation, and a growing contempt for traditional political parties and their leaders. On Arendt’s thoughtful analysis, these are not transient historical phenomena easily corrected with the passage of time. They are structural features of the modern world directly connected to the modern understanding of human existence and freedom.
Hannah Arendt chose to serve the cause of liberty in four inter-related ways: as a thinker, teacher, storyteller and judge. Although she carefully distinguished thought from action, she treated them as functional complements rather than contraries. Action and speech require thought to clarify their meaning and importance; human words and deeds will be forgotten unless recollective thinking transforms them into episodes in a memorable story. Arendt was convinced that the great western thinkers and storytellers had neglected the public dimension of liberty. Because of this neglect, a major part of our republican political inheritance had been left to us without a testament.[1] Deep and original thinking is needed to remedy this failure, but in contemporary life such thinking has become exceedingly difficult. There are numerous sources of thoughtlessness to contend with: a reliance on clichés and slogans as a substitute for independent reflection; an habitual inattention to what we are actually doing and saying; a dependence on shopworn ideologies whose automatic thought patterns serve as a buffer against the revelatory power of experience; the loss of candor and courage under the levelling pressure of mass society; the appeal to traditions of political thought that no longer address the vital concerns of our age.
Although thinking is a solitary activity, it greatly depends on the framework of categories and principles the thinking person inherits. We assimilate those categories in acquiring language and rely on them to understand and appraise what we do. Most of us are content to think within an existing tradition, trusting in the linguistic resources it offers for making sense of existence. But Hannah Arendt believed that the dominant western traditions had distorted or misrepresented political experience rather than rendering it intelligible. Her revisionary criticisms of both ancient and modern political theory closely resemble Heidegger’s challenge to western metaphysics and Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of morals. These deliberately subversive thinkers wanted to transform the inherited languages in which we think and speak about being and the good. According to Arendt, western political theories were chiefly created by philosophers, theologians or scientists rather than citizens or statesmen. Perhaps this explains the common flaw marring their credibility and relevance. Their categories of analysis and appraisal are not based on political events or on experiences rooted in human plurality but on solitary activities like thinking and making. Moreover, their emphasis on ruling as the essential political activity obscures the dependence of genuinely political relations on human equality. Rather than helping us understand and appreciate the actual contours of political experience, the dominant traditions have disparaged the importance of plurality, largely ignored public liberty, blurred important distinctions within the active life, and converted the history of republican freedom into a narrative of dialectical necessity. Because of these powerful prejudices, we cannot rely on the great traditions, ancient or modern, to guide our understanding and judgment of political events.
If Arendt’s critical suspicions are justified, the contemporary political thinker is faced with a formidable challenge. The deep political alienation of our century threatens human dignity and freedom, but “our tradition of political thought” lacks the resources to address this threat effectively. The prevailing cultural climate encourages thoughtlessness rather than authentic reflection, but our need to think, to examine the insistent realities of personal and public life, is inseparable from our need for meaning. Thinking is the sustained human effort to understand or make sense of experience. In political thinking we attempt to clarify the fundamentals of politics and to articulate the criteria by which they should be judged. When our inherited traditions can no longer be trusted, the need for free and independent thinkers becomes urgent. Hannah Arendt aspired to be such a thinker and modeled her “selbst denken” on the philosophers she most admired: Socrates, Augustine, Scotus, Lessing, Kant and Heidegger. She respected these thinkers because of their intellectual courage and freedom; they had remained independent of tradition’s authority and were willing, as she said, “to think without banisters.”[2]
Independent thinking of the sort Arendt attempted is not systematic and progressive but foundational and critical. Faced with a crisis in politics, we need to rethink the basic principles of human association. Faced with a systemic assault on human dignity, we need to rethink its foundation in the nature of the human person. Faced with an erosion of public liberty, we need to reestablish the interdependence of plurality and freedom. These foundational tasks are obligatory for the critical thinker who challenges the answers of the tradition but does not dismiss them, who seeks to recover the past and not to forget it.[3]
But where are the resources for independent foundational thinking to be found? Hannah Arendt sought them in observable phenomena, in the concrete experiences of political life; in natural languages, in the original linguistic expressions created to name and describe new political realities; in historical events and in the memorable stories that attempted to disclose their meaning and importance; in a return to the questions with which the tradition began rather than to its carefully codified answers; in appropriating the retrievable past rather than in ideological speculations on the future. To think in this exploratory way is to do for our time what Socrates had attempted to do for his. Not to produce secure epistemic results, but to liberate citizens from prejudice, to pry open unexamined opinions, to cast new light on familiar realities, to prepare human beings to judge for themselves when the ancestral rules of conduct no longer apply.[4]
If the political thinker withdraws from the human circle to think for herself, the engaged citizen returns to the public realm to share her thinking with others. The sharing of insights is the work of a teacher, and it was as teacher and storyteller that Hannah Arendt partly fulfilled her civic obligations. She believed that the genuine teacher is inspired by a dual love, love for the old and common world that needs to be conserved and protected by its adult inhabitants, and love for the young, the energetic newcomers, who need to be welcomed into that world and taught to become at home in it. The voice of the teacher is that of an older citizen transmitting a common culture and language to younger peers about to accept responsibility for the commonweal. Through this successful transmission of meaning and memory, the young learn to know and care for the world and to identify themselves with its future. Arendt believed that civic education should deliberately cultivate the humanitas of its students. It should free them from self-centered concern with economic necessity and utility, and awaken within them the spirit of liberality, a love of the world and its culture that transcends their natural egoism.
Arendt was a student, of course, before she became a teacher, and her teaching depended greatly on her personal educational history. Who were the teachers that had cultivated her humanitas? She openly acknowledged her reliance on the Greek and German poets, who, as she said, keep watch over the storehouse of memory and create the words by which human beings live.[5] She had a complex relation to the culture of the ancient world, openly criticizing Greek political philosophy while making constant appeals to Greek and Roman political experience and language. She looked with disdain on the anti-political culture of early Christianity, but admired the life and teaching of Jesus himself. Her only acknowledged political mentors were republican and revolutionary thinkers: Pericles, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Jefferson and de Tocqueville. Philosophically, she belonged to the German tradition of Lessing, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Jaspers and Heidegger. Her debt to Heidegger was immense and profoundly complicated. Her understanding of human action as self-revelation, her conception of public discourse as disclosure and concealment, her emphasis on temporality as the horizon of human existence, her radical critique of the western intellectual tradition, all these important aspects of her thought bear the stamp of Heidegger’s influence. Although she greatly admired Heidegger as a thinker and teacher, she was deeply critical of his political stance and what she saw as his one-sided analysis of human existence.[6]
Perhaps Arendt’s greatest strength as a teacher was her ability to resist the modern propensity for half-truths. She is difficult to classify in conventional political categories because she combined and connected what modern ideologies have fiercely opposed. She deeply distrusted the sterile oppositions between left and right, progressive and conservative, communitarian and individualist. “Nothing compromises the understanding of political issues and their meaningful debate more seriously than the automatic thought reactions conditioned by the beaten path of ideologies born in the wake and aftermath of the French Revolution.”[7] Since the early nineteenth century conservatives and liberals, progressives and radicals have tended to treat complementary principles as mutually exclusive polarities. But it is only against the background of a common world of meaning that individual differences can truly reveal themselves. And it is only in the midst of a community of peers that personal distinction and excellence can be appreciated. A credible political philosophy needs to connect what the ideologists of both left and right have consistently separated: an old world with young citizens; the spirit of conservation with a commitment to civic initiative; worldly permanence with the eruption of miraculous novelty; the security of law with institutions of republican freedom. To overcome the dichotomies governing modern political thought we need a theory of situated freedom that respects human dignity and individual rights and reveals their dependence on the protection of personal privacy and the imperative of political engagement.
The story telling of poets, historians, citizens and teachers is a primary form of civic education. Although Arendt rejected the authority of tradition, she deeply feared the loss of the past. She understood tradition as our inherited account of the past, but she regularly distinguished the interpretive stories from the actual events to which they referred. A break with tradition did not mean an end to recollective story telling, but the creation of new stories that looked at the past with fresh eyes. The actions and passions, the words and deeds that constitute human affairs are doomed to futility unless memory and narrative save them from oblivion. In a political community composed of mortal citizens, birth and death are regularly changing the roster of active participants. The constant threat of civic disintegration is offset by remembrance and story telling which rescue the dead from forgetfulness and orient the newcomers in the civilizing ways of the world. Enduring political communities are associations of memory that express their collective identity through the stories they tell of their common past. As sources of civic education, these stories reveal the unfolding history of a particular people, but they’re not limited to recording its landmark events. At the core of political teaching is the larger human story that preserves both the best and the worst that human beings have done. Political cooperation is the primary source of collective power and it radically extends the human capacity for good and evil. The history (Geschichte) of politics is the ambiguous record of what human beings have done with their precious public freedom.[8]
Stories contribute as nothing else can to the understanding of human existence, for the storyteller gathers the events of the past into an intelligible pattern that illumines the world of the present. Hannah Arendt often cited the cautionary maxim of her political mentor de Tocqueville, “When the past ceases to cast its light on the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.”[9] The exercise of the mind is subject to two inescapable constraints. The mind needs to reflect on what it has witnessed or heard to satisfy its natural hunger for meaning; but it cannot retain or preserve in memory what it proves unable to connect. Remembrance and story telling meet these constraints by creating a factual record of the past and by distilling from that record a humanly comprehensible meaning. Paul Ricoeur has said that memory and narrative are the primary sources of authentic hope; by preserving the meaning of what lies behind us, they provide reasons for believing there is meaning before us.[10] The political narratives of Hannah Arendt are a source of both hope and warning, for they serve to disclose the perils of politics as well as its great possibility.
It is instructive to remember that her earliest stories portrayed political life at its worst. The totalitarian death camps of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, on which she originally concentrated, are a constant reminder of the grotesque potential of cooperative action. In three of her books, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Men in Dark Times and Eichmann in Jerusalem, she recounts the complex pattern of events that culminated in this systematic assault on human dignity and freedom. Politically inspired anti-Semitism, racially motivated imperialism, the devastating violence of the great wars and the catastrophic effects of global depression, created the setting for the emergence of totalitarian governments in the heart of Europe. Drawing on Montesquieu’s political taxonomy that distinguishes the traditional forms of government based on their spirit (espirit) or energizing principle, Arendt concluded that the totalitarian regimes of twentieth century Europe were historically unprecedented. Following Aristotle, Montesquieu had criticized despotism, whose animating principle is fear of the tyrant, as the worst kind of government. But Arendt argued that traditional despotism, though it denied human beings political liberty, did not deprive them of the freedom to think and speak in their private homes. By contrast, the totalitarian assault on freedom was meant to be unlimited. According to Arendt, the defining principles of totalitarian politics are ideology and terror; ideology seeks to abolish the free exercise of thought, while terror is aimed at eliminating freedom of action and speech. Their intended effect is the total control of human activity, with terror compelling human behavior from without and ideology compelling the human mind from within. In its representative institution, the extermination camp, totalitarianism deliberately dehumanized its victims, first destroying their capacity to think and act, then leveling their individual differences and distinct personalities until they became in their mute submission almost indistinguishable from the brutes.
A terrible irony pervades the totalitarian experiment in complete domination. When human beings aspire to absolute freedom, to be the uncontested masters of nature and history, they inevitably become agents of terror rather than liberty, turning themselves into executioners and their victims into corpses and skeletons. In seeking to become more than human, the agents of terror end by effacing their own humanity as well as that of the innocent people they terrorized.
Hannah Arendt never forgot the example of the European death camps. For her, they served as a warning against many things: the threatening potential of political mass movements, the inherent dangers in an atomized and fragmented society, the profound instability of the European moral inheritance in our secular age. But they also provided an inverted model of what political action should really be striving for. If the death camps were holes of oblivion and anonymity, then an authentic polis should be a community of remembrance and personal distinction. If the camps had eliminated spontaneity and driven human beings into brutelike silence, then the public realm should be a space of freedom where human beings reveal their uniqueness in word and deed. If the camps systematically destroyed human dignity through ideology and terror, then a true republic must render dignity secure by guaranteeing each citizen’s civil and political rights and by ensuring that all persons will be publicly judged based on opinions they freely express and actions they really perform. If the camps turned human beings into naked and submissive animals, then genuine politics should create a world where they can live like free men and women.
Hannah Arendt’s account of western political history was strikingly anti-progressive. She had open contempt for the liberal theory of progress, an ideology based on the achievements of modern science and technology rather than on the extension and protection of human liberty. For her, the grim events of the twentieth century had dispelled the innocence of liberalism and forced us to reexamine the meaning of human progress and decline. Because of her civic republican convictions, she made the establishment of political freedom and the protection of human rights the touchstone of collective wellbeing. But the history of republican liberty is not marked by a uniform pattern of advance or decline. In the Arendtian story, public liberty enjoys brief periods of glory and greatness, long centuries of neglect and disparagement and intermittent episodes of retrieval and restoration. The strongest political commitment to public liberty occurred in the ancient republics of Greece and Rome. “Never before or since have human beings thought so highly of political activity and bestowed so much dignity on the political realm.”[11] There was a rebirth of this ancient republican ideal in the northern Italian cities of the Renaissance, inspired by the civic humanism of Machiavelli and Guiccardini. In the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, the celebrated example of the Roman republic was deliberately appropriated with uneven results. The drafters of the American constitution found in republican Rome a model for dividing governmental power, but in France the commitment to public liberty faltered under the pressure of “the social question” and the Jacobin reliance on terror. The political history of nineteenth and twentieth century Europe was marked by several experiments with the council system, a federated union of local republics in which political power is generated through popular initiative. This alternative model of republican governance, however, failed to displace the class-based party system of the continental nation-states that it actively opposed. But Arendt believed that mounting distrust of political parties, national governments, and nineteenth century ideologies has led thoughtful citizens throughout the world to yearn for a civic republican alternative to the status quo.
Arendt conceived her idealized republic of liberty as the complete antithesis of the totalitarian death camp. An organization of human beings founded on terror was to be replaced by a political community animated by freedom. As Arendt understood the spirit of freedom, it has both negative and positive aspects.[12] It requires that citizens be free from the demands of biological necessity and practical utility, so that they might assemble as peers in the spirit of liberality. Genuinely free citizens are united by their knowledge, love, and shared responsibility for the common world. Because they are legally and politically equal, their civic transactions are marked by debate and persuasion, rather than coercion or command. The traditional assumption that rule is the basic political relationship is explicitly rejected. Although the republic of liberty is governed by laws, its primary purpose is not ruling and being ruled, but the revelation of personal identity in public speech and action and voluntary cooperation for the sake of collective greatness and glory. Arendt’s model of the free republic is clearly based on Pericles’ funeral oration to the citizens of Athens and on Machiavelli’s portrait of humanistic virtü in the Discourses on Livy. In the public realm of the Arendtian city, epiphanic personal initiatives, spontaneous communal action, and memorable historic events are expected to become commonplace. The uninspired prose of public administration and governance gives way to the heroic poetry of the ancient republic.[13]
At one level it is clear that Hannah Arendt continued the historic fascination of German philosophers with the classical polis. In this respect, she reenacted a pattern that Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger had already established. What is less clear is the purpose for which she invoked her idealized model of the classical city. Was it intended as a trans-historical norm by which all political communities should be measured? Was it a model to be imitated by modern citizens and statesmen who live under radically different social conditions from the ancient Greeks? Was it a narrative reminder intended to inspire contemporary civic republicans in their quest for a community of freedom, or a citation of the neglected past, in the spirit of Walter Benjamin, meant to shatter the mindless complacency of the present age? In different narrative contexts, Arendt’s portrait of the free republic appeared to serve all of these critical functions, but it is difficult to say with assurance which goal was her primary concern. In the following chapters, we shall examine Arendt’s republic of liberty with critical care. But at this point, I simply want to raise some exploratory questions that later chapters will probe in detail. 1) Is public freedom rather than justice, the primary purpose of republican politics? 2) How are the stipulated political ends of individual greatness and collective glory related to the traditional telos of the common good? 3) On what forms of personal and civic virtue does Arendtian liberty rely, and what virtues does it seek to encourage and foster among republican citizens? 4) On what socioeconomic arrangements does the republic of liberty depend for its popular acceptance and enduring stability? And within the global economy, to what range of citizens is the Arendtian model of politics really available? 5) How idealized is her portrait of Periclean democracy, how selective her espousal of Machiavelli’s republican vision and how candid her recounting of the ambiguous history of republican patriotism? 6) Does her sweeping political narrative obscure the contrast between ancient and modern republicanism, particularly in its account of the spirit animating the American Revolution? Finally, is her allegiance to the council system as a model for political reform open to the criticism Benjamin Constant levelled at the revolutionary Jacobins, namely, that they refused the French people the kind of liberty they actually wanted and imposed on them a model of liberty they no longer desired? Is Arendt in danger of encouraging despotism in the hope of promoting liberty?
There are two critical periods in the Arendtian story of public freedom; the first coincides with the political splendor of the ancient Greek and Roman republics, the second with the emergence of the modern revolutionary tradition. For Arendt, the American, French and Russian revolutions were the most important political events in the modern age. But the historical narratives through which those events are remembered seriously distorted their political meaning and importance. The revolutionary wars of liberation have been consistently overemphasized; the true purpose of revolution, the constitution of an enduring realm of freedom, has been regularly neglected. As a result, revolution has come to symbolize a violent struggle for public power rather than a concerted attempt to establish lasting institutions of liberty.[14] The true meaning of the revolutionary spirit, the shared commitment of a people to republican self-government has never been fully articulated. This spirit, which Arendt describes as “the nameless treasure” of the revolutions, has been obscured by several factors:[15] the traditional prejudice that political activity is a public burden only accepted under duress; the lack of an articulate theorist to clarify the true meaning of the American Revolution, the only one of the great revolutions actually to establish freedom; the powerful influence of Hegel and Marx, whose memorable narratives of the French Revolution emphasized dialectical necessity rather than public liberty as their central explanatory category. From Arendt’s perspective, the American Revolution was an ambiguous political success. The new constitution contained many elements of which she approved: a structure of national unity based on the principle of political federation, the articulate division of numerous governmental powers, the protection of individual liberties and civil rights. But by failing to incorporate the colonial townships into the federal system of differentiated power, the constitution left the ordinary citizen without a space of public liberty in which to act. The American Revolution gave freedom to the people, but did not provide them with public forums where they could regularly exercise and enjoy it. It gave them the right to political representation but failed to grant them elementary republics for their civic education and political development. The sad result was that for the vast majority of citizens, the revolutionary spirit of republican liberty, of direct engagement and participation in public affairs, eventually withered away.
Profound conceptual confusions attended this loss of civic vitality. Political liberty, the right to participate in republican self-government, became confused with the civil liberties that preserve our security and individual rights. Public happiness, the active collaboration with our peers in securing the common good of the body politic, was reduced to the utilitarian formula of the greatest private happiness of the greatest number. And public spirit, the creation through debate and argument of a responsible conception of the public good, was degraded into the despotism of public opinion as measured by the polling techniques of a consumer society. Thus, the constitutional failure to secure elementary spaces of liberty for individual citizens was compounded by a theoretical failure to clarify for posterity what the true purpose of the revolution had been.
For Arendt, the history of the great modern revolutions is redolent with irony. The partially successful American Revolution lacked a competent theorist to articulate its deepest meaning and achievement; the radically unsuccessful French revolution, whose original quest for freedom was thwarted by violence and terror, had brilliant interpreters whose theoretical narratives transformed a momentous political event into a benchmark of historical inevitability.
As a result, historical necessity rather than freedom became the basic category of revolutionary thought and the critical contributions of political liberty were attributed to vast impersonal forces beyond the influence of human deliberation and choice. Hannah Arendt’s retelling of the revolutionary story as a central part of her political narrative has the revisionary intention of restoring human action and freedom rather than lawful necessity to the thematic center of revolutionary thought.
Arendt wanted to understand the past so that she might eventually pass judgment upon it. She was a fearless and independent judge of human beings, of their actions and failures to act, of the communities and institutions they created or allowed to decay. Her political narratives of liberty and terror are filled with controversial judgments that often aroused the ire of her readers and critics.[16] Perhaps these passionate controversies goaded her to reflect on the activity of judging, for she gradually developed a complex analysis of what she called “our most political mental faculty.”[17] In her philosophical analysis of thinking, she relied heavily on the example of Socrates; in her treatment of memory and will she drew liberally from the work of Augustine. But for the understanding of practical judgment, she turned primarily to Kant, especially to his third critique. Following Kant, she characterized judging as a public activity of reflective appraisal, an activity in which we praise or censure the object, event, person or institution that we presume to judge.
Judging is an essentially political act, an exercise of public freedom conducted among equals, that seeks to achieve through debate and argument an evaluative consensus. By exchanging persuasive arguments with our peers, by wooing them to share our reflective assessment of human affairs, we gain their respect and friendship and make ourselves at home in the world. Judging, according to Arendt, is a retrospective activity that emerges from reflection on earlier sensible appearances. In this respect, willing and judging are temporal opposites, for willing always deals with the future, the not yet, and judging with the past, the no longer. The bulk of the human past disappears from consciousness as soon as it has occurred; but we remember and preserve that portion of the past that we particularly care about, and in remembering our past, we gradually prepare it for understanding and judgment. The act of judging completes the recurrent cycle of action, remembrance, reflection and articulation by incorporating the past into a meaningful story and rendering our verdict upon it.
For Arendt, the appropriate objects of human judgment are historical particulars, individual persons, unique events, concrete situations, political communities, each with its independent dignity and character. She deeply resisted the subsumption of these historical particulars into the universal categories of philosophy and science. Individual persons are to be judged on the basis of their own words and deeds, not as type specimens of a biological species, representative members of an ethnic group or social class, or anonymous participants in an irresistible mass movement. Historical events have their own integrity and intelligibility; they should not be reduced to instances of a pervasive historical trend or to illustrations of a causally determined natural process. The reflective judgments of historians should be like those of judges in a court of law who are asked to appraise this particular person or event as a unique being or occurrence and not to subsume what is judged under the rubric of an explanatory universal.
But who is entitled to judge, and what are the virtues that belong to the person who judges wisely and well. Because Arendtian judgments are retrospective rather than deliberative, they are the responsibility of the spectator rather than the actor, of the historian and poet rather than the hero, of those who observe rather than those who compete in the festival of life. According to Arendt, the good judge must be like Homer who looked with an impartial eye on the heroism of Argives and Trojans, or like Herodotus, who openly praised the greatness of both Greeks and Persians.[18] Once again, it is humanitas, a knowledgeable attachment to the common world superseding narrow partisanship, which is required of a trustworthy judge. The man or woman with humanitas is the intended fruit of a liberal civic culture: he or she is informed, disinterested, courageous, the bearer of an “enlarged mentality” which transcends self-interest and partisan allegiance. The good judge is intensely thoughtful, for sustained independent thinking is the best preparation for judgment, and the habitual failure to think makes us unfit for it.[19] In truth, we can find in the spirit of Arendtian judgment the humanistic spirit of Arendtian politics as a whole. That spirit is liberal, aristocratic, deeply committed to debate and persuasion, and inspired by an active concern for the common world. The political humanism of Hannah Arendt summons human beings to a secular form of self-transcendence in which private interest is replaced by devotion to the public world, and our limited individual perspective on that world is enlarged by appropriating the alternative standpoints and considered opinions of others. While thinking and contemplation are solitary activities, teaching, storytelling, and judging are inherently communal and political. The reasons that we offer in support of our judgments are intended to persuade a community of peers whose differing opinions we consider sine ira et studio , without anger and partisan zeal.[20]
If judging is an exercise of shared rationality, what are the relevant criteria for appraising the res publicae, for assessing the action and speech that occur in the public realm? It is easier to identify the criteria Arendt rejects than to be certain of those she considers appropriate. She insists that political judgments are not religious, nor are they subject to the religious criteria of goodness and sanctity. In politics, we do not judge the souls of other persons nor consign them to everlasting reward or punishment. If there are final judgments to be made of human beings, they belong exclusively to God who alone can read the human soul, and not to their civic peers who lack this divine capacity. This is the partial but important truth expressed in the biblical imperative: “Judge not so that you shall not be judged.”[21] Arendt enters more contested territory when she argues that moral criteria are of limited relevance in appraising political phenomena. She bases this questionable claim on several disputable grounds. First, that moral reflection essentially concerns the integrity of the individual self, whereas political judgment concerns the web of relations within a community of citizens bound together by their shared responsibility for the world.[22] In Arendt’s graphic spatial imagery, religious faith connects the solitary human being to a transcendent and invisible God; morality engages a man or woman in intercourse with him or herself, while politics leads citizens to converse with one another through the medium of a common world. There is a critical difference between the authoritative commands of conscience that tell the particular self what to do and avoid and the persuasive arguments we address to our fellow citizens in seeking their agreement and support. To use Arendt’s deliberately contrastive idiom, morality issues commands on behalf of the self’s integrity, but politics persuades for the sake of a common world.[23]
Arendt believes that the dominant moral traditions of the West shed little light on the nature of political judgments. Utilitarian criteria are not applicable to politics, for action and speech are not means to ends and should not be judged on the strength of their cumulative outcomes. But Kantian moral criteria have equally limited relevance. The maxims and motives that provide the spur to free actions are not the appropriate basis for their political assessment. Nor are political realities to be judged by subsuming them under the natural law, by comparing them to established customs, by deducing them from moral first principles, nor extracting them dialectically from a theory of human nature and society. Finally, they are not to be judged by the pragmatic criteria of worldly success, a vulgar temptation Arendt liked to rebut by quoting an aphorism of Cato, the renowned Roman statesman: “The cause of the victors pleased the gods but the cause of the vanquished pleased Cato.”[24] As her praise of the Paris commune of 1871, the Russian soviets brutally destroyed by Bolshevik despotism, and the short lived Hungarian revolution of 1956, should make clear, her political judgments more often sided with the ostensible losers in history rather than the victors.
But her articulation of positive criteria for political appraisal is often incomplete or obscure. She insists that the criteria should be secular not sacred, commonly accepted not idiosyncratic, inherently liberal, like action and speech themselves, and not based on concern for survival or utility. There is a strong emphasis on public excellence, but a lack of clarity about the nature of excellence in politics. There is a repeated stress on historical greatness and a Nietzsche-like assertion that greatness transcends the strictures of existing law, but the cited examples are deeply problematic and difficult to reconcile with the requirements of justice.[25] Arendt develops an important but controversial analogy between aesthetic and political judgments; both of these forms of appraisal focus on worldly appearances, on what the public world should contain and how it should look. But if beauty is the appropriate measure in the aesthetic domain, what is its legitimate political counterpart; and if beauty is discerned through the disinterested pleasure it offers the spectator, is there an analogous pleasure that accompanies the perception of political excellence? Does Arendt’s analogy of sensible beauty aestheticize politics; does the emphasis on Periclean or Machiavellian greatness de-moralize it? What are the proper connections between politics and justice, between republican liberty and the moral and intellectual virtues, between historical greatness and the enduring requirements of the commonweal? Arendt insists that the responsible appraisal of temporal particulars is not governed by precedent, principle or rule. But judges and juries who exercise judgment are properly subject to those very constraints. Although Arendt’s understanding of judgment, like her correlative conception of action, is clearly important and provocative, in both cases she raises more questions than she is able to answer persuasively.
One of the critical questions concerns the objectivity of political judgments: For whom are they valid and why? Arendt brusquely rejects two familiar responses as mistaken. Because good judgments are supported by reasons, they are not arbitrary expressions of preference, limited in their validity to the selective taste of the judger. Arendt takes sharp exception to the ancient maxim, “De gustibus non est disputandum,” because judgments of taste are public concerns, matters of intense debate, in which reasons and arguments are given to secure the agreement of peers. But these supporting reasons are persuasive not demonstrative in nature. They cannot compel or coerce universal assent as matters of fact or truths of reason are alleged to do.[26] Arendt explicitly contrasts the universal validity of scientific cognition with the restricted validity of evaluative judgments. Political and aesthetic judgments can secure intersubjective agreement, but the scope of their persuasive power is limited to men and women of good taste. For those who lack the impartiality, disinterestedness and reflective intensity of the good judge, even the most rational arguments may not suffice.[27] Specific virtues are required then not only to reach sound judgments on one’s own but to be persuaded by the discerning judgments of others. While there is considerable merit to Arendt’s analysis of evaluative objectivity, it still leaves two important matters unresolved. She fails to clarify the type of reasons it is appropriate to offer in support of political judgments (the question of suitable criteria again) and she deeply oversimplifies the objectivity of epistemic judgments that also rely heavily on the virtues of cognitional subjects.[28]
Many of the problems with Arendt’s theory of judgment can be traced to an over-reliance on the Kantian model. In Kant’s epistemology, both theoretical and practical reason are credited with universal and exceptionless judgments. Both the laws of nature and the laws of freedom are alleged to be invariant and necessary. Pure practical reason, the autonomous source of the categorical moral imperatives, is explicitly distinguished from technical reason whose directives are limited to imperatives of skill or counsels of prudence. The hypothetical imperatives of technical reason have restricted validity for the rational will because they are conditioned by self-interest and personal desire. In his third critique, Kant discovered a form of practical reasoning which is impartial and disinterested, like the autonomous moral will, but whose judgments are of limited personal validity, like those of technical reason (though not, of course, for the same reasons). Arendt modeled her analysis of political judgment on the Kantian theory of aesthetic appraisal. There were several reasons to support this selective appropriation of Kant. Aesthetic judgments privilege the role of the disinterested spectator; they take phenomenal particulars, sensible objects and events, as their intentional objects; they presuppose a community of judging peers whose freedom of judgment is respected in the lively exchange of evaluative debate and argument. Each of these constitutive features is assigned an important place in Arendt’s account of political judgments. But as already noted, there are clear limits to the comparison between sensible beauty and political excellence, between the disinterested pleasure elicited by aesthetic appearances and the appropriate grounds for judging political agents, actions, institutions, and cultures.
To heighten this contrast, let us very briefly examine an alternative approach to practical reason that avoids some of the Arendtian difficulties. The alternative is offered by Aristotle, to whose political theory Arendt was greatly indebted, in his salient account of phronesis, the distinctive virtue of the statesman.[29] Focusing on the statesman reorients the analysis of judgment from the spectator to the political agent, from retrospective remembrance to prospective deliberation. The statesman’s attention is also concentrated on particulars, on highly concrete human situations of choice; and Aristotle recognizes the insufficiency of universal principles to determine the right course of action within these particular contexts. Aristotle also believes that most ethical and political judgments are persuasive rather than demonstrative in character; their objective validity is restricted to the concrete circumstances in which they arise and to which they are specifically applicable.[30] It is only the phronimos, the practically wise leader or citizen, who can discern the right course of action in difficult cases and then explain why it is right to his peers in the political community.
To be practically wise a statesman must also be morally virtuous; phronesis cannot exist apart from the full range of moral virtues. The essential dependence of good judgment on moral virtue and wisdom indicates that Aristotle does not separate ethics from politics as Arendt tends to do. The phronesis of the statesman manifests itself in sound deliberation, culminating in political judgments that specify how the good of the whole community can best be advanced by this course of action. Sound judgment is dependent on practical wisdom, and wisdom, in turn, on a judge who is morally good and who knows how to actualize the communal good here and now.
Aristotle’s insertion of the moral virtues and the common good into the center of political reflection, counter balances the Arendtian emphasis on beauty just as his stress on practical wisdom challenges the Arendtian focus on taste. When politics is directed to the common good rather than to epiphanic public appearances, it can preserve the Arendtian emphasis on public liberty while placing liberty itself in the service of justice and communal well being. Arendt seemed to fear that an Aristotelian approach to the telos of politics would subvert the dignity of action and speech, converting political conduct into an instrument for achieving extra-political ends. But a nuanced understanding of Aristotle’s internal teleology should allay this questionable fear.[31] Political goods are inseparable from the virtuous civic activities through which they are realized, and, as Arendt rightly insists, public liberty is an essential condition of their just and responsible attainment.
By embracing the cause of liberty and dignity in an age where they were gravely endangered, Arendt was following the example of Alexis de Tocqueville, the great nineteenth century French liberal thinker. Like Arendt, Tocqueville was born into a dying world as a new one struggled to be born. His birth coincided with the collapse of the Ancien Regime, the aristocratic French feudal order and his life overlapped with the great democratic revolutions of Europe and North America. The central theme of Tocqueville’s thought was the uncertain fate of human liberty in these new democratic societies. While Tocqueville accepted the emerging democratic order as more just than its aristocratic predecessor, he was troubled by the dangers democracy posed to liberty and to an elevated conception of the human being.[32]
What are the dangers to liberty in the irreversible movement of modern history towards democratic equality? According to Tocqueville, liberty is threatened by the following constellation of forces: a dramatic growth in the power of the central government which becomes increasingly remote, bureaucratic, impersonal and paternalistic; the loss of intermediate political associations which moderate the relations between democratic citizens and the central political authority; a retreat by uprooted individuals into the narrow confines of their private lives with a corresponding disengagement from public affairs. (Tocqueville describes this political phenomenon as “democratic individualism.”)[33] When these factors coalesce the probable result is a new form of political despotism, the despotism of the democratic majority, in which the isolated and atomized individual is left powerless before the bureaucratic state and the tyranny of majority opinion.
In brilliant and memorable prose, Tocqueville explains why democratic despotism is especially to be dreaded by the friends of liberty. It makes the life and property of human beings insecure; it weakens their civil and individual rights, like the rights to free speech and freedom of worship; and as despotism has traditionally done, it abolishes meaningful political liberty, the effective participation by ordinary citizens in the practice of self-government. As citizens become more dependent on the state and less confident of their own capacities, their opinions and conduct become increasingly uniform. As the power of majority opinion expands, the individual’s willingness to challenge and oppose it contracts. As human beings become ever more similar, nearly all signs of personal greatness, nearly all forms of nobility and heroism, disappear. This level egalitarian plain of atomized uniformity and blandness is Tocqueville’s nightmare image of democratic despotism.[34]
Based on his experiences and conversations in America, Tocqueville concluded that the despotism of the democratic majority was a permanent threat not an historical inevitability. After observing public life in the New England townships, he argued that preserving local political liberty was the strongest protection against the majoritarian tyranny he feared. Adopting Montesquieu’s concept of republican government, he modified its requirements to fit the circumstances of continental republics in a democratic age. In this way, he outlined a new science of republican liberty based on the following principles: the decentralizing of public administration; the distribution of political power towards local units of authority (the principle of subidiarity); the reliance on voluntary associations to mediate the transactions between citizens and their government; the enlightened self-interest of a democratic people firmly committed to the rule of law, respect for individual rights, a free and independent judiciary and press, and an educated readiness to participate regularly in public life. For Tocqueville, an active, informed, responsible citizenry was the best, perhaps the only, antidote to the poison of democratic individualism. “Feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged and the mind developed by the reciprocal influence of human beings on one another.”[35]
Hannah Arendt was born a century later than Tocqueville, but his deepest concerns pervade her political thought. Both of them were aristocratically minded thinkers devoted to the liberty and dignity of the human person; both of them feared that the dangers to liberty in their age were unprecedented; both sought to lessen these dangers by strengthening political liberty and renewing the ideal of republican self-government. However, Arendt believed that the political crisis of the twentieth century was far more severe than the one Tocqueville had faced. As she saw it, the bourgeois liberalism of the nineteenth century, which celebrated the pursuit of private interest both institutionally and culturally, had devalued the meaning of citizenship; the political authority of the European nation states had eroded, and the class structure of Europe had disintegrated into a mass society that radicalized the atomization and loneliness Tocqueville had forecast. Shaken by global war and depression, Europe had been overwhelmed by ideological mass movements that culminated in the criminal regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Under totalitarian rule Tocqueville’s worst fears had been grotesquely exceeded. The zero point of human liberty and dignity became the daily reality of the death camps as the bright dreams of European humanism perished in the ashes of Treblinka and Auschwitz.
At the close of the Second World War when the reality of the holocaust became known, Hannah Arendt committed herself to a work of remembrance and reflection. Was it possible to comprehend and articulate the genesis of totalitarian terror? What earlier spiritual and cultural collapse had made it possible? To what resources and institutions could we now turn to prevent its recurrence? After years of intensive and passionate study, Hannah Arendt concluded that the deepest crisis of the modern world was political, and that the emergence of popularly supported totalitarian movements in the heart of Europe demonstrated how profound that crisis had become. The crisis to which she referred could be discerned on four distinct but interconnected levels: cultural, theoretical, institutional and normative. The world alienation of modernity has created a mass culture antithetical to republican self-government and especially prone to ideological manipulation. Our theoretical capacity to critique this culture and the seductive ideologies it spawns is limited because our inherited traditions have systematically misrepresented the nature of political experience. By substituting making for action, command and coercion for persuasion and debate, and technological mastery for political excellence and wisdom our political theorists have darkened the common perception of politics and reduced it to a servant of economic concerns. The rise of economics to its modern supremacy has transformed the public realm into a sphere of necessity, rather than freedom, while human freedom, with its irresistible force and attraction, has withdrawn into the diverse pursuits of private happiness. As a result, the political institutions of mass society lack the traditions and practices of public liberty that are needed to cultivate and sustain the republican spirit. And without that spirit, the lost spirit of the revolution, modern citizens no longer know what to require of themselves and their political leaders nor how to judge responsibly what they do and say.
In its most compressed and unsparing form, this is Hannah Arendt’s analysis of our political situation today. Though her judgment is harsh, it is not fatalistic. Historical inevitability does not govern the conduct of human affairs. Each of the elements in our political crisis is subject to challenge and redress, and, as her own life has shown, the individual person is not condemned to impotence and despair. The critical thinker can challenge the oversights and distortions of traditional political theory, the dedicated teacher can oppose the culture of humanitas to the complacent egoism of our consumer society, the gifted storyteller can remind us of both the greatness and wretchedness of our common past, and the individual citizen can speak and act, cooperating with others in the unending work of protecting human dignity and renewing human liberty. “Omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt.” “AII truly excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”[36]
1. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (1961; New York: Viking Press) pp. 3-15.
2. See Melvyn Hill, Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (1979; New York: St. Martin’s Press) p. 314; p. 336.
3. “ The disappearance of prejudices simply means that we have lost the answers on which we ordinarily rely without even realizing they were originally answers to questions. A crisis forces us back to the questions themselves and requires from us either new or old answers, but in any case direct judgments.” Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 174.
4. See Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research, (Fall 1971) pp. 417-446.
5. See Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; Chicago: University of Chicago Press) pp. 167-174 and Arendt, Men in Dark Times (1983; New York; Harcourt Brace) p. 249. Arendt often acknowledged her profound gratitude for the blessings of poetry.
6. For Arendt’s complex relation to Heidegger’s thought, see Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (1996; Princeton: Princeton University Press); Elizabeth Young Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982; New Haven: Yale University Press); L. P. Hinchman and S. K. Hinchman, “In Heidegger’s Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s Phenomenological Humanism,” Review of Politics (1984).
7. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963; New York: Viking Press), p. 225.
8. See Arendt, “The Concept of History” and “What is Freedom?” Between Past and Future, pp. 41-90 and 143-171.
9. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II (1945; New York: Vintage Books), p. 349.
10. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, (1984; Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
11. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 154.
12. See Arendt, “What is Freedom?” Between Past and Future, and The Human Condition, pp. 28-37.
13. Arendt relies heavily on the contrast between the political and the social as a way of distinguishing public administration (a social function) from heroic action (the raison d’être of politics). This contested dichotomy runs through all of her writing but it is most fully developed in “The Public and the Private Realm,” The Human Condition, pp. 22-73.
14. See the important contrast between liberation from tyranny and the constitution of freedom in On Revolution, p. 140.
15. See “The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure,” On Revolution, pp. 217-285.
16. The most hostile response was evoked by her analysis and appraisal of the Eichmann trial. See Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, (1963; New York: Viking Press). For the most bitter and relentless criticism see Jacob Robinson, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, (1965; New York: Macmillan). For the larger context of the protracted dispute, see Ron Feldman, The Jew as Pariah, (1978; New York: Grove Press).
17. See Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” Between Past and Future, pp. 218-226 and Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, (1982; Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
18. See Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 262-263.
19. Hannah Arendt returned repeatedly to the close connection between thoughtfulness and the capacity for sound judgment. See Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 294-298; The Life of the Mind: Vol. I. Thinking (1978; New York: Harcourt Brace) pp. 3-16 and “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research, (Fall 1971).
20. See Arendt, “Truth and Politics” Between Past and Future, pp. 227-264 and “The Crisis in Culture” for the dependence of valid judgments on disinterestedness and impartiality.
21. The Gospel of St. Matthew, 7:1.
22. See Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” Crises of the Republic (1972; New York: Harcourt Brace) pp. 58-68.
23. See Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 218-223 and Crises of the Republic, pp. 62-68.
24. See Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, pp. 216. “Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni.”
25. This concern applies to her praise of Periclean Athens, Republican Rome and Machiavellian virtù. Arendt’s sharp separation between political and moral criteria is particularly questionable.
26. See Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture” and “Truth in Politics,” Between Past and Future, pp. 218-223 and pp. 241-264.
27. See Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 221-224.
28. Arendt’s epistemological reflections are always interesting, but they tend to be advanced as personal apercus and obiter dicta rather than as part of a comprehensive analysis of objectivity, knowledge and truth.
29. For the similarities between phronesis and taste, see Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 221. For Aristotle’s concise description of phronesis, see Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, where he compares and contrasts the different intellectual virtues.
30. See Aristotle’s strictures on practical inquiry in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1, chapter 3 and Book VI, chapters 4 and 5.
31. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, (1981; Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press) pp. 188-189, and Bernard Lonergan, Third Collection (1985; Mahwah: Paulist Press) p. 24.
32. See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol II, pp. 349-352. “A state of equality is perhaps less elevated, but it is more just: and its justice constitutes its greatness and its beauty.”
33. Tocqueville, Democracy, II, pp. 104-113.
34. Tocqueville, Democracy, II, pp. 334-348.
35. Tocqueville, Democracy, II, p. 117.
36. Spinoza, Ethics, Part V, Proposition XLII.