Video Archives - The Anti-Political Prejudices of Modernity: A Civil Humanist Critique (2012)
10-02-2014(Featured Image - "Double Alienation", by Cornelia Mittendorfer)
Tuesday, November 13, 2012: “The Anti-Political Prejudices of Modernity: A Civil Humanist Critique”
Participants: Michael McCarthy, a retired professor of philosophy at Vassar College
In 2012, Professor McCarthy delivered a lecture adapted from his paper “The Anti-Political Prejudices of Modernity: A Civil Humanist Critique” at Bard. An Arendtian scholar who had taught courses on political thought for decades, McCarthy provides his audience with an excellent analysis of Arendt’s ideas translated to a macro scale, focusing on her opus in its entirety rather than restricting himself to any single text.
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Michael McCarthy (Source: Vassar The Alumnae/i Quarterly)[/caption]
His talk hinges on an idea of Arendt as a civic humanist, a proponent of an active political life which elevates the citizen through participation in public affairs. As McCarthy elaborates and develops this idea, he is able to analyze Arendt’s critique of what she called “the world alienation of modernity,” which he identifies as a unifying theme across her disparate works. In order to explain his idea of civic humanism in a relatively brief period of time, McCarthy begins by reminding us of what Arendt was not: she was neither a liberal nor a communist. “Arendt openly challenged the historical innocence of liberalism, while acknowledging its important contributions to modern life. At the theoretical level, she criticized classical liberalism for its social atomism, its instrumental view of political activity, its utilitarian account of the public good, its elevation of private happiness above the joys of republican citizenship, its reduction of human motives to a narrow concern for self-interest and self-preservation,” says McCarthy. For Arendt, whereas dedicated citizens of a republic meet the high civic demands to transcend themselves through their citizenship, both liberalism and Marxism promote world alienation and are intrinsically skeptical of the value of citizenship.
He illustrates the above point through a short discussion of freedom. For a laissez-faire capitalist, freedom is unrestricted private enterprise; for a Marxist, freedom exists only in a classless communist society. Both perspectives locate freedom outside of participation in government, which contributes to a world alienation of modernity—an alienation from public life. It is a phenomenon where citizens no longer commit to substantive political action and, as such, allows for the formation of totalitarianism, the pinnacle of the anti-political in the sense that its politics are bereft of true action.
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The Political Humanism of Hannah Arendt, by Michael McCarthy (Source: Amazon)[/caption]
In contrast to liberalism and communism, Arendt posits that freedom manifests itself in a republican citizen’s public action. This is key to understanding Arendt’s philosophy. As such, McCarthy uses it as a theoretical foundation to divide her civic republicanism into two strands: agonistic and communitarian. The former emphasizes political life as a means to worldly immortality (through renown), and the latter stresses the role of political activity as the free gathering of human society in a public forum. Both give the Arendtian reader a richer understanding not only of Arendt’s ideas but also of the importance of civic duty and the freedom to exercise it.
If any reader wishes to engage McCarthy’s ideas on Arendt further, you can read his book The Political Humanism of Hannah Arendt or watch the Q&A session that follows the lecture.
Analysis by Dan Perlman
You can watch McCarthy's lecture and the subsequent Q&A session below:
Michael McCarthy Lecture from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.