Fugitive Democracy by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

HANNAH ARENDT AND THE ORDINANCE OF TIME

HANNAH ARENDT WAS A RARE UNION of passion, nobility, and intellect. Her passion was expressed in affection for public things and public deeds, res publicae and res gestae, and a determination to preserve them. Her nobility was displayed in her response to these public themes. She elevated politics and political action to the level of epic and tragedy, not in order to exonerate actors from their misdeeds or to glorify a particular nation, but to impose a demand upon those who presumed to decide great public matters and upon those who presumed to theorize about political actors and actions. The power of her intellect was revealed in the subjects she elected to confront. By any reasonable criterion of importance, they were among the fundamental problems of twentieth-century politics: totalitarianism, anti-Semitism, revolution, and the nature of political action. She also created a distinctive language to convey their meaning and urgency. Finally, and above all, she disclosed some important truths about politics; and even when she erred, her errors were instructive in that they compelled the critic to face a problem rather than remain content with scoring a logical point.

The briefest epitaph for Hannah Arendt would be: She lived the theoretical life, the bios theoretikos. While brief, the epitaph is not simple. To live the theoretical life is not just to pursue the truth but to tell it. The authentic theorist is, as she put it, a “truth-teller.” Telling the truth about politics, not for partisan purposes or for self-dramatization, can be dangerous, as she learned when she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Before discussing some of her theoretical ideas, I want briefly to call attention to a special achievement of Hannah Arendt, one that is apt to be overlooked because it lacked the dramatic importance of her other accomplishments. She occupies a special place in the recent history of political theory in the United States. Prior to the appearance of The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, the study of political theory was essentially a special branch of the history of ideas. It was neither political nor theoretical. As a consequence, political theory was exceedingly vulnerable to the challenge posed shortly after World War II by the proponents of the scientific study of politics who argued for an idea of theory based upon the methods of the natural sciences. The version of theory which political scientists borrowed from their colleagues in the more advanced social sciences was remarkable not only for its tendency to associate theory with “methodology” but for its distinct hostility toward history and philosophy. As a consequence, this new form of theory had nothing very significant or interesting to say about the issues which dominated the politics of the twentieth century: war, totalitarianism, democracy, imperialism, racial oppression, ecological policy, and corporate power.

To those who were trying to restate a conception of political theory relevant to the contemporary world the appearance of The Human Condition in 1958 came as a deliverance. It fulfilled

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