Review: Arendt on the Political
03-13-2020Arendt on the Political by David Arndt. Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2019. 282 + 10 pp.
David Arndt’s (Henceforth David A.) Arendt on the Political is an account of Hannah Arendt’s theory of politics. Instead of understanding politics from a philosophical perspective, we should choose to understand what the “nontheoretical forms of thought that prevail in politics,” tell us (85). He asks us to largely bracket political theorizing and come down from the realm of philosophy to consider the world of action. And his subject is Arendt because she is the only thinker to try to uncover the aspects of politics that are effaced by our philosophical approaches to it. One may well ask, is this not what political theorists have been doing with Arendt’s work since at least George Kateb’s Hannah Arendt, Politics, Conscience, Evil was published in 1983? But David A. argues that political philosophy elides Arendt’s fundamental account of politics with political theorizing, that is, with what he calls “concerns with the eternal, the necessary and the general,” (84). It is philosophy’s method of distillation from the specific to the general that causes us to misunderstand what politics means for the life of action, and instead explains what it is for the life of the mind. His introduction ends with a quote from p. 20 of Arendt’s Essay in Understanding “Every thought is an afterthought, that is, a reflection on some matter or event.” The purpose of this book, then, is to elucidate Arendt’s understanding of politics so that we can eliminate the confusions about politics that come from not just Arendt’s life, but from our contemporary life.The reason for engaging in this process is that “her work is an effort to understand the deepest differences between democratic politics and the anti-politics of totalitarianism,” (32). And while he does not explicitly say so, the confusions he elaborates on, largely from Arendt’s The Human Condition, are also laid at the door of contemporary politics. It is not only that Arendt’s understanding of politics elucidates how political theory misses seeing the life of action, but also that that mistake sends us on the way to the anti-politics of totalitarianism, and that our particular political moment is enacting this confusion. Conceptually speaking, our confusion of philosophizing with understanding politics obfuscates several fundamental aspects of politics that he distills from Arendt’s work. Specifically: Because our political discourse tends to make everything political, we lose the genuine sense of politics; because we speak of politics in Social Darwinist or other discursive formats which control its aims and purposes, we mistake its aims and purposes; because we reduce politics to other spheres and discourses, we bring assumptions from those other spheres into politics; and because we approach it as a means to other ends, we forget that politics is a sphere with a dignity and purpose of its own, that it is an end-in-itself. Thus we forget and misunderstand the experience of politics by philosophizing about it.
The correction for this mistake requires an articulation of Arendt’s method, something she rarely discusses explicitly in her writing, but which David A. gleans from her biography and letters. He begins chapter 1 by talking about Arendt the person, and the experiences that led her to write about politics. This intimacy with Arendt herself is bound to make those of us used to more distance from the person of the author to feel some possibly undesired voyeurism, especially because Arendt was not inclined to speak personally about herself, but the intimacy of this text with the historical Arendt lays the groundwork for its reliance on her version of Heidegger’s articulation of phenomenology in Being and Time to understand politics, which requires experience as its basis. It may be possible to do this work without engaging with biography so directly, but David A. goes this route in the name of clarity and simplicity. If we are to talk about the experience of the political life, we ought to understand her experience of the rise of National Socialism in Germany and across Europe. The text’s truth-claims about the life of Hannah Arendt may raise concerns, and are ancillary to his main argument.
Chapter two of Arendt on the Political lays out the phases of Arendt’s method systematically, and connects it explicitly to Heidegger’s Destruktion/Reduktion/Konstruktion components of phenomenology in Being and Time. The method sketches out the structure for the rest of the book: David A. traces the genealogy of the inherited terms through which we understand politics, so we understand the authentic experiences from which they are born through Arendt’s work. In the second phase of Reduktion, he articulates Arendt’s particular example of the phenomenon of politics as understood by the ancient Greeks and to a lesser extent, the ancient Romans, and in the third, he returns to the traditional concepts of politics, to understand their limits, and to add in the insights derived from the earlier two processes. This chapter may be the most interesting and surprising because Arendt does not write about her method. David A. notes that Arendt distinguishes her work from Heidegger’s when she abandons the aims of philosophy in the contemplative life to properly encounter the active life of politics, which Heidegger never did, but her method here is understood as Heidegger’s early phenomenology. In other words, the way to recover the active life of the political sphere is to follow Arendt through the Greeks and Romans, the “western tradition,” to discern the nontheoretical aspects of politics that we miss when theorizing about them.
The middle of the book traces the genealogies of political concepts Arendt writes about in the body of her work. There is a general footnote to several contemporary classicist historians who wrote about the polis and the ancient Greeks that indicate the sweep of the project, and its engagement with the literature that confirms Arendt’s claims about the ancient world. (It is also a reference to the space limits for secondary literature in the footnotes. At a talk I attended by the author, he handed out copies of some of the footnotes he was asked to delete by his editor.) Nonetheless, there is a serious effort to demonstrate that Arendt’s interpretations, especially of Greek and Roman thought, are born out by expert studies in classics. And as he moves forward into an analysis of the legacy of our misapprehension of what he calls the classical legacy, he remains deeply engaged with the literature of political theory. If we look at a specific instance of the genealogy in this interpretation, we can see how it works with respect to an aspect of the concept of law. The ancients did not worry about legitimacy, because laws (nomos) were understood to be of human making, and opposed to nature. Once law is understood to be a divine command, as in the Old Testament, which enters the tradition along with Christianity, we come to understand law, no longer as something of human origin, but something that must be grounded by the divine. When we come to realize this change, we can revise our understanding of law, and can accept the idea implicit in the U.S. American Revolution that the ground of democratic law can be human-based consent. Of course this conception does not come without friction because we do not choose the community into which we are born, but it does make clear that the Greeks had access to an understanding of law which bypasses the concern with legitimacy that is take up in Arendt’s discussion of the U.S. American Revolution. David A.’s book follows suit with the other major concepts of politics that Arendt analyzes in her body of work. The attempt to lay out as clearly as possible what Arendt’s sense of the political life succeeds to great effect, and is the book’s greatest contribution.
There are tensions in the book that come out of its stylistic choices. The text emphasizes clarity of analysis so much that it eliminates some rhetorical niceties, such as transitions between ideas, and instead substitutes direct questions to move the narrative along. It also seems unnecessary to claim that we need to know Arendt’s experience and intention to understand her explanation of political life. It In a 2003 review essay of then recent monographs on Arendt, Mark Reinhardt asks whether “it is still possible, then to do useful work on Arendt while staying close to Arendt’s own thinking?” He decides that it is, but that truth claims about intention needlessly problematize the epistemological field in which one is working. Reinhardt is concerned with the conflicting needs to claim that one is getting Arendt correct while claiming that adaptations of Arendt can stray from her simple and straightforward purpose. David A. addresses this problem well because he claims that Arendt’s purpose, her elucidation of aspects of political life that political philosophy obscures, is all that he wants us to see, because it is the appropriate remedy to our own political moment. It is somewhat jarring, nonetheless. In the end, though, there is a unity of purpose to Arendt on the Political. Understanding the practical aspects of political life always offers the possibility of beginning that life again. “While it is not a substitute for action, it illuminates and makes meaningful the sphere in which effective action is possible…,” (265). David A. seeks to remind us how to engage in political life in a moment where such life can be hard to find.
- Towata, NJ: Rowman and Allenheld.
- Reinhardt, Mark. “What’s New in Arendt?” Political Theory, Vol. 31, №3 (Jun., 2003), pp. 443–460 DOI: 10.1177/0090591703251910
Ellen M. Rigsby, Saint Mary’s College of California