## 1. Biographical Sketch




Hannah Arendt, one of the leading political thinkers of the twentieth
century, was born in 1906 in Hanover and died in New York in 1975. In
1924, after having completed her high school studies, she went to
Marburg University to study with Martin Heidegger. The encounter with
Heidegger, with whom she had a brief but intense love-affair, had a
lasting influence on her thought. After a year of study in Marburg,
she moved to Freiburg University where she spent one semester
attending the lectures of Edmund Husserl. In the spring of 1926 she
went to Heidelberg University to study with Karl Jaspers, a
philosopher with whom she established a long-lasting intellectual and
personal friendship. She completed her doctoral dissertation, entitled
*Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin* (hereafter LA) under Jaspers's
supervision in 1929. She was forced to flee Germany in 1933 as a
result of Hitler's rise to power, and after a brief stay in Prague and
Geneva she moved to Paris where for six years (1933-39) she worked for
a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1936 she separated from
her first husband, Gunther Stern, and started to live with
Heinrich Blucher, whom she married in 1940. During her stay in
Paris she continued to work on her biography of *Rahel
Varnhagen*, which was not published until 1957 (hereafter RV). In
1941 she was forced to leave France and moved to New York with her
husband and mother. In New York she soon became part of an influential
circle of writers and intellectuals gathered around the journal
*Partisan Review*. During the post-war period she lectured at a
number of American universities, including Princeton, Berkeley and
Chicago, but was most closely associated with the New School for
Social Research, where she was a professor of political philosophy
until her death in 1975. In 1951 she published *The Origins of
Totalitarianism* (hereafter OT), a major study of the Nazi and
Stalinist regimes that soon became a classic, followed by *The
Human Condition* in 1958 (hereafter HC), her most important
philosophical work. In 1961 she attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann
in Jerusalem as a reporter for *The New Yorker* magazine, and
two years later published *Eichmann in Jerusalem* (hereafter
EJ), which caused a deep controversy in Jewish circles. The same year
saw the publication of *On Revolution* (hereafter OR), a
comparative analysis of the American and French revolutions. A number
of important essays were also published during the 1960s and early
1970s: a first collection was entitled *Between Past and Future*
(hereafter BPF), a second *Men in Dark Times* (hereafter MDT),
and a third *Crises of the Republic* (hereafter CR). At the
time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes on
*Thinking* and *Willing* of her last major philosophical
work, *The Life of the Mind*, which was published posthumously
in 1978 (hereafter LM). The third volume, on *Judging*, was
left unfinished, but some background material and lecture notes were
published in 1982 under the title *Lectures on Kant's Political
Philosophy* (hereafter LKPP).


## 2. Introduction




Hannah Arendt was one of the seminal political thinkers of the
twentieth century. The power and originality of her thinking was
evident in works such as *The Origins of Totalitarianism*,
*The Human Condition*, *On Revolution* and *The Life
of the Mind*. In these works and in numerous essays she grappled
with the most crucial political events of her time, trying to grasp
their meaning and historical import, and showing how they affected our
categories of moral and political judgment. What was required, in her
view, was a new framework that could enable us to come to terms with
the twin horrors of the twentieth century, Nazism and Stalinism. She
provided such framework in her book on totalitarianism, and went on to
develop a new set of philosophical categories that could illuminate
the human condition and provide a fresh perspective on the nature of
political life.




Although some of her works now belong to the classics of the Western
tradition of political thought, she has always remained difficult to
classify. Her political philosophy cannot be characterized in terms of
the traditional categories of conservatism, liberalism, and socialism.
Nor can her thinking be assimilated to the recent revival of
communitarian political thought, to be found, for example, in the
writings of A. MacIntyre, M. Sandel, C. Taylor and M. Walzer. Her name
has been invoked by a number of critics of the liberal tradition, on
the grounds that she presented a vision of politics that stood in
opposition some key liberal principles. There are many strands of
Arendt's thought that could justify such a claim, in particular, her
critique of representative democracy, her stress on civic engagement
and political deliberation, her separation of morality from politics,
and her praise of the revolutionary tradition. However, it would be a
mistake to view Arendt as an anti-liberal thinker. Arendt was in fact
a stern defender of constitutionalism and the rule of law, an advocate
of fundamental human rights (among which she included not only the
right to life, liberty, and freedom of expression, but also the right
to action and to opinion), and a critic of all forms of political
community based on traditional ties and customs, as well as those
based on religious, ethnic, or racial identity.




Arendt's political thought cannot, in this sense, be identified either
with the liberal tradition or with the claims advanced by a number of
its critics. Arendt did not conceive of politics as a means for the
satisfaction of individual preferences, nor as a way to integrate
individuals around a shared conception of the good. Her conception of
politics is based instead on the idea of active citizenship, that is,
on the value and importance of civic engagement and collective
deliberation about all matters affecting the political community. If
there is a tradition of thought with which Arendt can be identified,
it is the classical tradition of civic republicanism originating in
Aristotle and embodied in the writings of Machiavelli, Montesquieu,
Jefferson, and Tocqueville. According to this tradition politics finds
its authentic expression whenever citizens gather together in a public
space to deliberate and decide about matters of collective
concern. Political activity is valued not because it may lead to
agreement or to a shared conception of the good, but because it
enables each citizen to exercise his or her powers of agency, to
develop the capacities for judgment and to attain by concerted action
some measure of political efficacy.




In what follows, we reconstruct Arendt's political philosophy
along four major themes: (1) her conception of modernity, (2) her
theory of action, (3) her theory of judgment, and (4) her conception
of citizenship.


## 3. Arendt's Conception of Modernity




In her major philosophical work, *The Human Condition*, and in
some of the essays collected in *Between Past and Future*,
Arendt articulated a fairly negative conception of modernity. In these
writings Arendt is primarily concerned with the losses incurred as a
result of the eclipse of tradition, religion, and authority, but she
offers a number of illuminating suggestions with respect to the
resources that the modern age can still provide to address questions
of meaning, identity, and value.




For Arendt modernity is characterized by the *loss of the
world*, by which she means the restriction or elimination of the
public sphere of action and speech in favor of the private world of
introspection and the private pursuit of economic interests. Modernity
is the age of mass society, of the rise of the *social* out of
a previous distinction between the public and the private, and of the
victory of *animal laborans* over *homo faber* and the
classical conception of man as *zoon politikon*. Modernity is
the age of bureaucratic administration and anonymous labor, rather
than politics and action, of elite domination and the manipulation of
public opinion. It is the age when totalitarian forms of government,
such as Nazism and Stalinism, have emerged as a result of the
institutionalization of terror and violence. It is the age where
history as a "natural process" has replaced history as a
fabric of actions and events, where homogeneity and conformity have
replaced plurality and freedom, and where isolation and loneliness
have eroded human solidarity and all spontaneous forms of living
together. Modernity is the age where the past no longer carries any
certainty of evaluation, where individuals, having lost their
traditional standards and values, must search for new grounds of human
community as such.




This is Arendt's vision of modernity, a vision which, at first sight,
appears quite stark and unredeeming. It is worth pointing out,
however, that Arendt's negative appraisal of modernity was shaped by
her experience of totalitarianism in the twentieth century, and that
her work provides a number of important insights that may help us to
address certain problematic features of the modern age. In her
political writings, and especially in *The Origins of
Totalitarianism*, Arendt claimed that the phenomenon of
totalitarianism has broken the continuity of Occidental history, and
has rendered meaningless most of our moral and political categories.
The break in our tradition has become irrevocable after the tragic
events of the twentieth century and the triumph of totalitarian
movements East and West. In the form of Stalinism and Nazism,
totalitarianism has exploded the established categories of political
thought and the accepted standards of moral judgment, and has thereby
broken the continuity of our history. Faced with the tragic events of
the Holocaust and the Gulag, we can no longer go back to traditional
concepts and values, so as to explain the unprecedented by means of
precedents, or to understand the monstrous by means of the familiar.
The burden of our time must be faced without the aid of tradition, or
as Arendt once put it, "without a bannister" (RPW, 336).
Our inherited concepts and criteria for judgment have been dissolved
under the impact of modern political events, and the task now is to
re-establish the meaning of the past outside the framework of any
tradition, since none have retained their original validity. It is the
past, then, and not tradition, that Arendt attempts to preserve from
the rupture in modern time-consciousness. Only by reappropriating the
past by means of what Arendt called "the deadly impact of new
thoughts" (MDT, 201) can we hope to restore meaning to the
present and throw some light on the contemporary situation.




The hermeneutic strategy that Arendt employed to re-establish a link
with the past is indebted to both Walter Benjamin and Martin
Heidegger. From Benjamin she took the idea of a fragmentary
historiography, one that seeks to identify the moments of rupture,
displacement and dislocation in history. Such fragmentary
historiography enables one to recover the lost potentials of the past
in the hope that they may find actualization in the present. From
Heidegger she took the idea of a deconstructive reading of the Western
philosophical tradition, one that seeks to uncover the original
meaning of our categories and to liberate them from the distorting
incrustations of tradition. Such deconstructive hermeneutics enables
one to recover those primordial experiences (*Urphaenomene*)
which have been occluded or forgotten by the philosophical tradition,
and thereby to recover the lost origins of our philosophical concepts
and categories.




By relying on these two hermeneutic strategies Arendt hopes to redeem
from the past its lost or "forgotten treasure," that is,
those fragments from the past that might still be of significance to
us. In her view it is no longer possible, after the collapse of
tradition, to save the past as a whole; the task, rather, is to redeem
from oblivion those elements of the past that are still able to
illuminate our situation. To re-establish a linkage with the past is
not an antiquarian exercise; on the contrary, without the critical
reappropriation of the past our temporal horizon becomes disrupted,
our experience precarious, and our identity more fragile. In Arendt's
view, then, it is necessary to redeem from the past those moments
worth preserving, to save those fragments from past treasures that are
significant for us. Only by means of this critical reappropriation can
we discover the past anew, endow it with relevance and meaning for the
present, and make it a source of inspiration for the future.




This critical reappropriation is facilitated, in part, by the fact
that after the rupture in modern time-consciousness the past may
"open up to us with unexpected freshness and tell us things no
one has yet had ears to hear" (BPF, 94). The breakdown of
tradition may in fact provide the great chance to look upon the past
"with eyes undistorted by any tradition, with a directness which
has disappeared from Occidental reading and hearing ever since Roman
civilization submitted to the authority of Greek thought" (BPF,
28-9).




Arendt's return to the original experience of the Greek *polis*
represents, in this sense, an attempt to break the fetters of a
worn-out tradition and to rediscover a past over which tradition has
no longer a claim. Against tradition Arendt sets the criterion of
genuineness, against the authoritative that which is forgotten,
concealed, or displaced at the margins of history. Only by operating
against the grain of traditionalism and the claims of conventional
historiography can the past be made meaningful again, provide sources
of illumination for the present, and yield its treasures to those who
search for them with "new thoughts" and saving acts of
remembrance.




Arendt articulates her conception of modernity around a number of key
features: these are *world alienation*, *earth
alienation*, the rise of the *social*, and the victory of
*animal laborans*. World alienation refers to the loss of an
intersubjectively constituted world of experience and action by means
of which we establish our self-identity and an adequate sense of
reality. Earth alienation refers to the attempt to escape from the
confines of the earth; spurred by modern science and technology, we
have searched for ways to overcome our earth-bound condition by
setting out on the exploration of space, by attempting to recreate
life under laboratory conditions, and by trying to extend our given
life-span. The rise of the social refers to the expansion of the
market economy from the early modern period and the ever increasing
accumulation of capital and social wealth. With the rise of the social
everything has become an object of production and consumption, of
acquisition and exchange; moreover, its constant expansion has
resulted in the blurring of the distinction between the private and
the public. The victory of *animal laborans* refers to the
triumph of the values of labor over those of *homo faber* and
of man as *zoon politikon*. All the values characteristic of
the world of fabrication -- permanence, stability, durability
-- as well as those characteristic of the world of action and
speech -- freedom, plurality, solidarity -- are sacrificed
in favor of the values of life, productivity and abundance.




Arendt identifies two main stages in the emergence of modernity: the
first, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, corresponds to
world alienation and the rise of the social, the second, from the
beginning of the twentieth century, corresponds to earth alienation and
the victory of *animal laborans*. She also identifies a number
of causes: the discovery of America and the corresponding shrinking of
the earth, the waves of expropriation started during the Reformation,
the invention of the telescope challenging the adequacy of the senses,
the rise of modern science and philosophy and subsequently of a
conception of man as part of a process of Nature and History, and the
expansion of the realm of the economy, of the production and
accumulation of social wealth.




Arendt's interpretation of modernity can be criticized on a
number of grounds. We focus attention here on two categories employed
by Arendt, those of *nature*, and the *social*. With
respect to the category of nature, Arendt oscillates between two
contrasting accounts. According to the first account, the modern age,
by elevating labor, the most natural of human activities, to the
highest position within the *vita activa*, has brought us too
close to nature. Instead of building and preserving the human artifice
and creating public spaces for action and deliberation, we are reduced
to engage in the activity of sheer survival and in the production of
things that are by definition perishable. According to the second
account, however, the modern age is characterized by a growing
artificiality, by the rejection of anything that is not
man-made. Arendt cites the fact that natural processes, including that
of life itself, have been recreated artificially by means of
scientific experiment, that our natural environment has been
extensively transformed and in some instances entirely replaced by
technology, and that we have searched for ways to overcome our natural
condition as earth-bound creatures by setting out on the exploration
of space and envisaging the possibility of inhabiting other
planets. All this leads to a situation where nothing around us will be
a naturally given event, object, or process, but will instead be the
product of our instruments and the will to refashion the world in our
image.




These two accounts are difficult to reconcile, since in the former we
have nature intruding upon and even destroying the human artifice,
while in the latter we have art (*techne*) expanding upon and
replacing everything natural or merely given. The result is to endow
nature with an ambiguous status, since in the former case the victory
of *animal laborans* indicates our subjection to natural
processes, while in the latter case the expansion of scientific
knowledge and of technological mastery indicates the overcoming of all
natural limits. The modern world would thus appear to be too natural
and too artificial, too much under the dominance of labor and the
life-process of the species, as well as too much under the dominance
of *techne*.




With respect to the second category, that of the social, Arendt was
unable to account for certain important features of the modern
world. Arendt identifies the social with all those activities formerly
restricted to the private sphere of the household and having to do
with the necessities of life. Her claim is that, with the tremendous
expansion of the economy from the end of the eighteenth century, all
such activities have taken over the public realm and transformed it
into a sphere for the satisfaction of our material needs. Society has
thus invaded and conquered the public realm, turning it into a
function of what previously were private needs and concerns, and has
thereby destroyed the boundary separating the public and the
private. Arendt also claims that with the expansion of the social
realm the tripartite division of human activities has been undermined
to the point of becoming meaningless. In her view, once the social
realm has established its monopoly, the distinction between labor,
work and action is lost, since every effort is now expended on
reproducing our material conditions of existence. Obsessed with life,
productivity, and consumption, we have turned into a society of
laborers and jobholders who no longer appreciate the values associated
with work, nor those associated with action.




From this brief account it is clear that Arendt's concept of the
social plays a crucial role in her assessment of modernity. However
some have argued that this may have led her to a series of
questionable judgments:


* In the first place, Arendt's characterization of the social
is overly restricted. She claims that the social is the realm of
labor, of biological and material necessity, of the reproduction of
our condition of existence. She also claims that the rise of the
social coincides with the expansion of the economy from the end of the
eighteenth century. However, having identified the social with the
growth of the economy in the past two centuries, Arendt cannot
characterize it in terms of a subsistence model of simple reproduction.
(See Benhabib 2003, Ch. 6; Bernstein 1986, Ch. 9; Hansen 1993, Ch. 3;
Parekh 1981, Ch. 8.)
* Secondly, Arendt's identification of the
social with the activities of the household is responsible for a major
shortcoming in her analysis of the economy. She is, in fact, unable to
acknowledge that a modern capitalist economy constitutes a structure
of power with a highly asymmetric distribution of costs and
rewards. By relying on the misleading analogy of the household, she
maintains that all questions pertaining to the economy are
pre-political, and thus ignores the crucial question of economic power
and exploitation. (See Bernstein 1986, Ch. 9; Hansen 1993, Ch. 3; Parekh
1981, Ch. 8; Pitkin 1998; Pitkin 1994, Ch. 10, Hinchman and Hinchman;
Wolin 1994, Ch. 11, Hinchman and Hinchman.)
* Finally, by insisting on a strict separation between the private
and the public, and between the social and the political, she is
unable to account for the essential connection between these spheres
and the struggles to redraw their boundaries. Today many so-called
private issues have become public concerns, and the struggle for
justice and equal rights has extended into many spheres. By insulating
the political sphere from the concerns of the social, and by
maintaining a strict distinction between the public and the private,
Arendt is unable to account for some of the most important
achievements of modernity -- the extension of justice and equal
rights, and the redrawing of the boundaries between the public and the
private. (See Benhabib 2003, Ch. 6; Bernstein 1986, Ch. 9; Dietz 2002,
Ch. 5; Pitkin 1998; Pitkin 1995, Ch. 3, Honig; Zaretsky 1997, Ch. 8,
Calhoun and McGowan.)


## 4. Arendt's Theory of Action




Arendt's theory of action and her revival of the ancient notion of
*praxis* represent one of the most original contributions to
twentieth century political thought. By distinguishing action
(*praxis*) from fabrication (*poiesis*), by linking it
to freedom and plurality, and by showing its connection to speech and
remembrance, Arendt is able to articulate a conception of politics in
which questions of meaning and identity can be addressed in a fresh
and original manner. Moreover, by viewing action as a mode of human
togetherness, Arendt is able to develop a conception of participatory
democracy which stands in direct contrast to the bureaucratized and
elitist forms of politics so characteristic of the modern epoch.




In what follows, we focus on some of the key components of
Arendt's theory of action, such as freedom, plurality and
disclosure. We then examine the links between action and narrative,
the importance of remembrance, and of what may be called
"communities of memory." We then show the connection
between action, power and the space of appearance. Lastly, we look at
the remedies for the unpredictability and irreversibility of action,
namely, the power of promise and the power to forgive.


### 4.1 Action, Freedom, and Plurality



> 
> 
> Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without
> the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human
> condition of plurality ... this plurality is specifically the
> condition -- not only the *conditio sine qua non*, but the
> *conditio per quam* -- of all political life. (HC,
> 7)




For Arendt, action is one of the fundamental categories of the human
condition and constitutes the highest realization of the *vita
activa*. Arendt analyzes the *vita activa* via three
categories which correspond to the three fundamental activities of our
being-in-the-world: labor, work, and action. Labor is the activity
which is tied to the human condition of life, work the activity which
is tied to the condition of worldliness, and action the activity tied
to the condition of plurality. For Arendt each activity is autonomous,
in the sense of having its own distinctive principles and of being
judged by different criteria. Labor is judged by its ability to
sustain human life, to cater to our biological needs of consumption
and reproduction, work is judged by its ability to build and maintain
a world fit for human use, and action is judged by its ability to
disclose the identity of the agent, to affirm the reality of the
world, and to actualize our capacity for freedom.




Although Arendt considers the three activities of labor, work and
action equally necessary to a complete human life, in the sense that
each contributes in its distinctive way to the realization of our
human capacities, it is clear from her writings that she takes action
to be the *differentia specifica* of human beings, that which
distinguishes them from both the life of animals (who are similar to
us insofar as they need to labor to sustain and reproduce themselves)
and the life of the gods (with whom we share, intermittently, the
activity of contemplation). In this respect the categories of labor
and work, while significant in themselves, must be seen as
counterpoints to the category of action, helping to differentiate and
highlight the place of action within the order of the *vita
activa*.




The two central features of action are **freedom** and
**plurality**. By freedom Arendt does not mean the
ability to choose among a set of possible alternatives (the freedom of
choice so dear to the liberal tradition) or the faculty of *liberum
arbitrium* which, according to Christian doctrine, was given to us
by God. Rather, by freedom Arendt means the capacity to begin, to
start something new, to do the unexpected, with which all human beings
are endowed by virtue of being born. Action as the realization of
freedom is therefore rooted in *natality*, in the fact that
each birth represents a new beginning and the introduction of novelty
in the world.




To be sure, Arendt recognizes that all activities are in some way
related to the phenomenon of natality, since both labor and work are
necessary to create and preserve a world into which new human beings
are constantly born. However, of the three activities, action is the
one most closely connected with natality, because by acting
individuals re-enact the miracle of beginning inherent in their
birth. For Arendt, the beginning that each of us represents by virtue
of being born is actualized every time we act, that is, every time we
begin something new. As she puts it: "the new beginning inherent
in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer
possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting
" (HC, 9).




Arendt also stresses the fact that since action as beginning is rooted
in natality, since it is the actualization of freedom, it carries with
it the capacity to perform miracles, that is, to introduce what is
totally unexpected. "It is in the nature of beginning"
-- she claims -- "that something new is started which
cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This
character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings
... The fact that man is capable of action means that the
unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what
is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each
man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes
into the world " (HC, 177-8).




The birth of every individual is thus the promise of a new beginning:
to act means to be able to disclose one's self and to do the
unanticipated; and it is entirely in keeping with this conception that
most of the concrete examples of action in the modern age that Arendt
discusses are cases of revolutions and popular uprisings. Her claim is
that "revolutions are the only political events which confront
us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning," (OR,
21) since they represent the attempt to found a new political space, a
space where freedom can appear as a worldly reality. The favorite
example for Arendt is the American Revolution, because there the act
of foundation took the form of a constitution of liberty. Her other
examples are the revolutionary clubs of the French Revolution, the
Paris Commune of 1871, the creation of Soviets during the Russian
Revolution, the French Resistance to Hitler in the Second World War,
and the Hungarian revolt of 1956. In all these cases individual men
and women had the courage to interrupt their routine activities, to
step forward from their private lives in order to create a public
space where freedom could appear, and to act in such a way that the
memory of their deeds could become a source of inspiration for the
future. In doing so, according to Arendt, they rediscovered the truth
known to the ancient Greeks that action is the supreme blessing of
human life, that which bestows significance to the lives of
individuals.




In the book *On Revolution* Arendt devotes much attention to
the rediscovery of this truth by those who participated in the
American Revolution. In her view the Founding Fathers, although they
might have pretended that they longed for private life and engaged in
politics only out of a sense of duty, made clear in their letters and
recollections that they had discovered unexpected delights in action
and had acquired a taste for public freedom and for earning
distinction among their peers.



**Plurality**, to which we may now turn, is the other
central feature of action. For if to act means to take the initiative,
to introduce the *novum* and the unexpected into the world, it
also means that it is not something that can be done in isolation from
others, that is, independently of the presence of a plurality of
actors who from their different perspectives can judge the quality of
what is being enacted. In this respect action needs plurality in the
same way that performance artists need an audience; without the
presence and acknowledgment of others, action would cease to be a
meaningful activity. Action, to the extent that it requires appearing
in public, making oneself known through words and deeds, and eliciting
the consent of others, can only exist in a context defined by
plurality.




Arendt establishes the connection between action and plurality by
means of an anthropological argument. In her view just as
*life* is the condition that corresponds to the activity of
labor and *worldliness* the condition that corresponds to the
activity of work, so *plurality* is the condition that
corresponds to action. She defines plurality as "the fact that
men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world," and says
that it is the condition of human action "because we are all the
same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as
anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live " (HC,
7-8). Plurality thus refers both to *equality* and
*distinction*, to the fact that all human beings belong to the
same species and are sufficiently alike to understand one another, but
yet no two of them are ever interchangeable, since each of them is an
individual endowed with a unique biography and perspective on the
world.




It is by virtue of plurality that each of us is capable of acting and
relating to others in ways that are unique and distinctive, and in so
doing of contributing to a network of actions and relationships that
is infinitely complex and unpredictable. This network of actions is
what makes up the realm of human affairs, that space where individuals
relate directly without the intermediary of things or matter --
that is, through language. Let us examine briefly this connection
between action and language.



 In *The Human Condition* Arendt stresses repeatedly that
action is primarily symbolic in character and that the web of human
relationships is sustained by communicative interaction (HC,
178-9, 184-6, 199-200). We may formulate it as
follows. *Action entails speech*: by means of language we are
able to articulate the meaning of our actions and to coordinate the
actions of a plurality of agents. Conversely, *speech entails
action*, not only in the sense that speech itself is a form of
action, or that most acts are performed in the manner of speech, but
in the sense that action is often the means whereby we check the
sincerity of the speaker. Thus, just as action without speech runs the
risk of being meaningless and would be impossible to coordinate with
the actions of others, so speech without action would lack one of the
means by which we may confirm the veracity of the speaker. As we shall
see, this link between action and speech is central to Arendt's
characterization of power, that potential which springs up between
people when they act "in concert," and which is actualized
"only where word and deed have not parted company, where words
are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil
intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to
violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new
realities " (HC, 200).


### 4.2 Action and Speech as Disclosure




Let us now turn to an examination of the disclosing power of action
and speech. In the opening section of the chapter on action in *The
Human Condition* Arendt discusses one of its central functions,
namely, the disclosure of the identity of the agent. In action and
speech, she maintains, individuals reveal themselves as the unique
individuals they are, disclose to the world their distinct
personalities. In terms of Arendt's distinction, they reveal
"who" they are as distinct to "what" they are
-- the latter referring to individual abilities and talents, as well as
deficiencies and shortcomings, which are traits all human beings
share. Neither labor nor work enable individuals to disclose their
identities, to reveal "who" they are as distinct from
"what" they are. In labor the individuality of each person
is submerged by being bound to a chain of natural necessities, to the
constraints imposed by biological survival. When we engage in labor we
can only show our sameness, the fact that we all belong to the human
species and must attend to the needs of our bodies. In this sphere we
do indeed "behave," "perform roles," and
"fulfill functions," since we all obey the same
imperatives. In work there is more scope for individuality, in that
each work of art or production bears the mark of its maker; but the
maker is still subordinate to the end product, both in the sense of
being guided by a model, and in the sense that the product will
generally outlast the maker. Moreover, the end product reveals little
about the maker except the fact that he or she was able to make it. It
does not tell us who the creator was, only that he or she had certain
abilities and talents. It is thus only in action and speech, in
interacting with others through words and deeds, that individuals
reveal who they personally are and can affirm their unique identities.
Action and speech are in this sense very closely related because both
contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: "Who
are you?" This disclosure of the "who" is made
possible by both deeds and words, but of the two it is speech that has
the closest affinity to revelation. Without the accompaniment of
speech, action would lose its revelatory quality and could no longer
be identified with an agent. It would lack, as it were, the conditions
of ascription of agency.


### 4.3 Action, Narrative, and Remembrance




We have seen, then, how through action and speech individuals are able
to disclose their identities, to reveal their specific uniqueness
-- their *who* -- as distinct from their personal
abilities and talents -- their *what*. However, while
engaging in speech and action individuals can never be sure what kind
of self they will reveal. Only retrospectively, that is, only through
the stories that will arise from their deeds and performances, will
their identity become fully manifest. The function of the storyteller
is thus crucial not only for the preservation of the doings and
sayings of actors, but also for the full disclosure of the identity of
the actor. The narratives of a storyteller, Arendt claims, "tell
us more about their subjects, the 'hero' in the center of
each story, than any product of human hands ever tells us about the
master who produced it" (HC, 184). Without a Plato to tell us
who Socrates was, what his conversations with fellow Athenian citizens
were like, without a Thucydides to set down Pericles' Funeral
Speech and refashion it in his powerful and dramatic style, we would
not have known what made Socrates and Pericles such outstanding
personalities, nor would the reason for their uniqueness have been
made fully manifest. Indeed, it is one of Arendt's most important
claims that the meaning of action itself is dependent upon the
articulation retrospectively given to it by historians and
narrators.




Storytelling, or the weaving of a narrative out of the actions and
pronouncements of individuals, is partly constitutive of their
meaning, because it enables the retrospective articulation of their
significance and import, both for the actors themselves and for the
spectators. Being absorbed by their immediate aims and concerns, not
aware of the full implications of their actions, actors are often not
in a position to assess the true significance of their doings, or to
be fully aware of their own motives and intentions. Only when action
has run a certain course, and its relationship to other actions has
unfolded, can its significance be made fully manifest and be embodied
in a narrative, whether of poets or historians. The fact that this
narrative is temporally deferred, that it is at some distance from the
events it describes, is one of the reasons why it can provide further
insight into the motives and aims of the actors.




Narratives can thus provide a measure of truthfulness and a greater
degree of significance to the actions of individuals. But they also
preserve the memory of deeds through time, and in so doing, they
enable these deeds to become sources of inspiration for the future,
that is, models to be imitated, and, if possible, surpassed. One of
the principal drawbacks of action, Arendt maintains, is to be
extremely fragile, to be subject to the erosion of time and to
forgetfulness; unlike the products of the activity of work, which
acquire a measure of permanence by virtue of their sheer facticity,
deeds and words do not survive their enactment unless they are
remembered. Remembrance alone, the retelling of deeds *as*
stories, can save the lives and deeds of actors from oblivion and
futility. And it is precisely for this reason, Arendt points out, that
the Greeks valued poetry and history so highly, because they rescued
the glorious (as well as the less glorious) deeds of the past for the
benefit of future generations (HC, 192 ff; BPF, 63-75). It was
the poet's and the historian's political function to preserve the
memory of past actions and to make them a source of instruction for
the future. Homer was known as the "educator of Hellas,"
since he immortalized for all those who came after him the events of
the Trojan War; Thucydides, in his *History of the Peloponnesian
War*, told a story of human ambition and folly, of courage and
unchecked greed, of ruthless struggle and inevitable defeat. In their
work the past became a repository of instruction, of actions to be
emulated as well as deeds to be shunned. Through their narratives the
fragility and perishability of human action was overcome and made to
outlast the lives of their doers and the limited life-span of their
contemporaries.




However, to be preserved, such narratives needed in turn an audience,
that is, a community of hearers who became the transmitters of the
deeds that had been immortalized. As Sheldon Wolin has aptly put it,
"audience is a metaphor for the political community whose nature
is to be a community of remembrance" (Wolin 1977, 97). In other
words, behind the actor stands the storyteller, but behind the
storyteller stands a *community of memory*.




It was one of the primary functions of the *polis* to be
precisely such a community, to preserve the words and deeds of its
citizens from oblivion and the ravages of time, and thereby to leave a
testament for future generations. The Greek *polis*, beyond
making possible the sharing of words and deeds and multiplying the
occasions to win immortal fame, was meant to remedy the frailty of
human affairs. It did this by establishing a framework where action
and speech could be recorded and transformed into stories, where every
citizen could be a witness and thereby a potential narrator. What the
*polis* established, then, was a space where *organized
remembrance* could take place, and where, as a result, the
mortality of actors and the fragility of human deeds could be
partially overcome.


### 4.4 Action, Power, and the Space of Appearance




The metaphor of the *polis* recurs constantly in the writings
of Arendt. This is indeed a 'metaphor' because in
employing this term Arendt is not simply referring to the political
institutions of the Greek city-states, bounded as they were to their
time and circumstance, but to all those instances in history where a
public realm of action and speech was set up among a community of free
and equal citizens. "The *polis*, properly speaking, is
not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of
the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its
true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no
matter where they happen to be" (HC, 198). Thus the famous
motto: "Wherever you go, you will be a *polis*"
expressed the conviction among the Greek colonists that the kind of
political association they had set up originally could be reproduced
in their new settlements, that the space created by the "sharing
of words and deeds" could find its proper location almost
anywhere.




For Arendt, therefore, the *polis* stands for the
**space of appearance**, for that space "where I
appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely
like other living or inanimate things, but to make their appearance
explicitly." Such public space of appearance can be always
recreated anew wherever individuals gather together politically, that
is, "wherever men are together in the manner of speech and
action" (HC, 198-9). However, since it is a creation of action,
this space of appearance is highly fragile and exists only when
actualized through the performance of deeds or the utterance of words.
Its peculiarity, as Arendt says, is that "unlike the spaces which
are the work of our hands, it does not survive the actuality of the
movement which brought it into being, but disappears not only with the
dispersal of men -- as in the case of great catastrophes when the body
politic of a people is destroyed -- but with the disappearance or arrest
of the activities themselves. Wherever people gather together, it is
potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not
forever" (HC, 199).




The space of appearance must be continually recreated by action; its
existence is secured whenever actors gather together for the purpose
of discussing and deliberating about matters of public concern, and it
disappears the moment these activities cease. It is always a potential
space that finds its actualization in the actions and speeches of
individuals who have come together to undertake some common
project. It may arise suddenly, as in the case of revolutions, or it
may develop slowly out of the efforts to change some specific piece of
legislation or policy. Historically, it has been recreated whenever
public spaces of action and deliberation have been set up, from town
hall meetings to workers' councils, from demonstrations and
sit-ins to struggles for justice and equal rights.




This capacity to act in concert for a public-political purpose is what
Arendt calls **power**. Power needs to be distinguished
from strength, force, and violence (CR, 143-55). Unlike
strength, it is not the property of an individual, but of a plurality
of actors joining together for some common political purpose. Unlike
force, it is not a natural phenomenon but a human creation, the
outcome of collective engagement. And unlike violence, it is based not
on coercion but on consent and rational persuasion.




For Arendt, power is a *sui generis* phenomenon, since it is a
product of action and rests entirely on persuasion. It is a product of
action because it arises out of the concerted activities of a
plurality of agents, and it rests on persuasion because it consists in
the ability to secure the consent of others through unconstrained
discussion and debate. Its only limitation is the existence of other
people, but this limitation, she notes, "is not accidental,
because human power corresponds to the condition of plurality to begin
with" (HC, 201). It is actualized in all those cases where
action is undertaken for communicative (rather than strategic or
instrumental) purposes, and where speech is employed to disclose our
intentions and to articulate our motives to others.




Arendt maintains that the legitimacy of power is derived from the
initial getting together of people, that is, from the original pact of
association that establishes a political community, and is reaffirmed
whenever individuals act in concert through the medium of speech and
persuasion. For her "power needs no justification, being
inherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does
need is legitimacy ... Power springs up whenever people get together
and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial
getting together rather than from any action that then may
follow" (CR, 151).




Beyond appealing to the past, power also relies for its continued
legitimacy on the rationally binding commitments that arise out of a
process of free and undistorted communication. Because of this, power
is highly independent of material factors: it is sustained not by
economic, bureaucratic or military means, but by the power of common
convictions that result from a process of fair and unconstrained
deliberation.




Power is also not something that can be relied upon at all times or
accumulated and stored for future use. Rather, it exists only as a
potential which is actualized when actors gather together for
political action and public deliberation. It is thus closely connected
to the space of appearance, that public space which arises out of the
actions and speeches of individuals. Indeed, for Arendt, "power
is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance
between acting and speaking men, in existence." Like the space
of appearance, power is always "a power potential and not an
unchangeable, measurable and reliable entity like force or strength
... [it] springs up between men when they act together and
vanishes the moment they disperse" (HC, 200).




Power, then, lies at the basis of every political community and is the
expression of a potential that is always available to actors. It is
also the source of legitimacy of political and governmental
institutions, the means whereby they are transformed and adapted to
new circumstances and made to respond to the opinions and needs of the
citizens. "It is the people's support that lends power to the
institutions of a country, and this support is but the continuation of
the consent that brought the laws into existence to begin with
... All political institutions are manifestations and
materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the
living power of the people ceases to uphold them" (CR, 140).




The legitimacy of political institutions is dependent on the power,
that is, the active consent of the people; and insofar as governments
may be viewed as attempts to preserve power for future generations by
institutionalizing it, they require for their vitality the continuing
support and active involvement of all citizens.


### 4.5 Action, Unpredictability, and Irreversibility




The discussion of Arendt's theory of action so far has stressed
a number of features, chief among which is action's capacity to
disclose the identity of the agent, to enable freedom to appear and be
actualized as a worldly reality, to create and sustain a public space
of appearance, and to make possible the generation of power. We have
also emphasized the importance of narrative and remembrance, of the
retrospective articulation of the meaning of action by means of
storytelling and its preservation through a community of memory. In
conclusion, we examine two other features of action,
namely, **unpredictability** and
**irreversibility**, and their respective remedies, the
power of promise and the power to forgive.




Action is unpredictable because it is a manifestation of freedom, of
the capacity to innovate and to alter situations by engaging in them;
but also, and primarily, because it takes place within the web of
human relationships, within a context defined by plurality, so that no
actor can control its final outcome. Each actor sets off processes and
enters into the inextricable web of actions and events to which all
other actors also contribute, with the result that the outcome can
never be predicted from the intentions of any particular actor. The
open and unpredictable nature of action is a consequence of human
freedom and plurality: by acting we are free to start processes and
bring about new events, but no actor has the power to control the
consequences of his or her deeds.




Another and related reason for the unpredictability of action is that
its consequences are boundless: every act sets in motion an unlimited
number of actions and reactions which have literally no end. As
Arendt puts it: "The reason why we are never able to foretell
with certainty the outcome and end of any action is simply that action
has no end" (HC, 233). This is because action "though it
may proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every
action becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause
of new processes ... the smallest act in the most limited
circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one
deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every
constellation" (HC, 190).




Closely connected to the boundlessness and unpredictability of action
is its irreversibility. Every action sets off processes which cannot
be undone or retrieved in the way, say, we are able to undo a faulty
product of our hands. If one builds an artifact and is not satisfied
with it, it can always be destroyed and recreated again. This is
impossible where action is concerned, because action always takes
place within an already existing web of human relationships, where
every action becomes a reaction, every deed a source of future deeds,
and none of these can be stopped or subsequently undone. The
consequences of each act are thus not only unpredictable but also
irreversible; the processes started by action can neither be
controlled nor be reversed.




The remedy which the tradition of Western thought has proposed for the
unpredictability and irreversibility of action has consisted in
abstaining from action altogether, in the withdrawal from the sphere
of interaction with others, in the hope that one's freedom and
integrity could thereby be preserved. Platonism, Stoicism and
Christianity elevated the sphere of contemplation above the sphere of
action, precisely because in the former one could be free from the
entanglements and frustrations of action. Arendt's proposal, by
contrast, is not to turn one's back on the realm of human affairs, but
to rely on two faculties inherent in action itself, the faculty of
**forgiving** and the faculty of
**promising**. These two faculties are closely connected,
the former mitigating the irreversibility of action by absolving the
actor from the unintended consequences of his or her deeds, the latter
moderating the uncertainty of its outcome by binding actors to certain
courses of action and thereby setting some limit to the
unpredictability of the future. Both faculties are, in this respect,
connected to *temporality*: from the standpoint of the present
forgiving looks backward to what has happened and absolves the actor
from what was unintentionally done, while promising looks forward as
it seeks to establish islands of security in an otherwise uncertain
and unpredictable future.




Forgiving enables us to come to terms with the past and liberates us
to some extent from the burden of irreversibility; promising allows us
to face the future and to set some bounds to its unpredictability. As
Arendt puts it: "Without being forgiven, released from the
consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it
were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never
recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences
forever." On the other hand, "without being bound to the
fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our
identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without
direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart" (HC,
237). Both faculties, in this sense, depend on *plurality*, on
the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and
no one can feel bound by a promise made only to one's self. At the
same time, both faculties are an expression of human *freedom*,
since without the faculty to undo what we have done in the past, and
without the ability to control at least partially the processes we
have started, we would be the victims "of an automatic necessity
bearing all the marks of inexorable laws" (HC, 246).


## 5. Arendt's Theory of Judgment




One of the most enduring contributions of Arendt's political
thought is to be found in her reflections on judgment which were to
occupy the last years of her life. Together with the theory of action,
her unfinished theory of judgment represents her central legacy to
twentieth century political thought. We now explore some of the key
aspects of her theory of judgment, and will examine its place in the
architectonic of Arendt's theory of politics.


### 5.1 Judgment: Two Models




Arendt's theory of judgment was never developed as systematically or
extensively as her theory of action. She intended to complete her
study of the life of the mind by devoting the third volume to the
faculty of judgment, but was not able to do so because of her untimely
death in 1975. What she left was a number of reflections scattered in
the first two volumes on *Thinking* and *Willing* (LM,
vol. I; vol. II), a series of lectures on Kant's political philosophy
delivered at the New School for Social Research in the Fall of 1970
(LKPP), an essay entitled "Thinking and Moral
Considerations" written at the time she was composing *The
Life of the Mind* (TMC, 417-46), and two articles included in
*Between Past and Future* where judgment and opinion are
treated in relation to culture and taste ("The Crisis in
Culture" - BPF, 197-226) and with respect to the question
of truth ("Truth and Politics" - BPF,
227-64). However, these writings do not present a unified theory of
judgment but, rather, two distinct models, one based on the standpoint
of the actor, the other on the standpoint of the spectator, which are
somewhat at odds with each other. Arendt's writings on the theme of
judgment can be seen to fall into two more or less distinct phases, an
early one in which judgment is the faculty of political actors acting
in the public realm, and a later one in which it is the privilege of
non-participating spectators, primarily poets and historians, who seek
to understand the meaning of the past and to reconcile us to what has
happened. In this later formulation Arendt is no longer concerned with
judging as a feature of political life as such, as the faculty which
is exercised by actors in order to decide how to act in the public
realm, but with judgment as a component in the life of the mind, the
faculty through which the privileged spectators can recover meaning
from the past and thereby reconcile themselves to time and,
retrospectively, to tragedy.




In addition to presenting us with two models of judgment which stand
in tension with each other, Arendt did not clarify the status of
judgment with respect to two of its philosophical sources, Aristotle
and Kant. The two conceptions seem to pull in opposite directions, the
Aristotelian toward a concern with the particular, the Kantian toward
a concern with universality and impartiality.



 It would appear, therefore, that Arendt's theory of judgment not only
incorporates two models, the actor's -- judging in order to act
-- and the spectator's -- judging in order to cull meaning
from the past -- but that the philosophical sources it draws upon
are somewhat at odds with each other.


### 5.2 Judgment and the Vita Contemplativa




Arendt's concern with judgment as the faculty of retrospective
assessment that allows meaning to be redeemed from the past originated
in her attempt to come to terms with the twin political tragedies of
the twentieth century, Nazism and Stalinism. Faced with the horrors of
the extermination camps and what is now termed the Gulag, Arendt
strove to understand these phenomena in their own terms, neither
deducing them from precedents nor placing them in some overarching
scheme of historical necessity. This need to come to terms with the
traumatic events of the twentieth century, and to understand them in a
manner that does not explain them away but faces them in all their
starkness and unprecedentedness, is something to which Arendt returns
again and again. Our inherited framework for judgment fails us
"as soon as we try to apply it honestly to the central political
experiences of our own time" (UP, 379). Even our ordinary
common-sense judgment is rendered ineffective, since "we are
living in a topsy-turvy world, a world where we cannot find our way by
abiding by the rules of what once was common sense" (UP,
383).




The crisis in understanding is therefore coeval with a crisis in
judgment, insofar as understanding for Arendt is "so closely
related to and interrelated with judging that one must describe both
as the subsumption of something particular under a universal
rule" (UP, 383). Once these rules have lost their validity we
are no longer able to understand and to judge the particulars, that
is, we are no longer able to subsume them under our accepted
categories of moral and political thought. Arendt, however, does not
believe that the loss of these categories has brought to an end our
capacity to judge; on the contrary, since human beings are
distinguished by their capacity to begin anew, they are able to
fashion new categories and to formulate new standards of judgment for
the events that have come to pass and for those that may emerge in the
future.




For Arendt, therefore, the enormity and unprecedentedness of
totalitarianism have not destroyed, strictly speaking, our ability to
judge; rather, they have destroyed our accepted standards of judgment
and our conventional categories of interpretation and assessment, be
they moral or political. And in this situation the only recourse is to
appeal to the *imagination*, which allows us to view things in
their proper perspective and to judge them without the benefit of a
pre-given rule or universal. For Arendt, the imagination enables us to
create the distance which is necessary for an impartial judgment,
while at the same time allowing for the closeness that makes
understanding possible. In this way it makes possible our
reconciliation with reality, even with the tragic reality of the
twentieth century.




Arendt's participation at the trial of Eichmann in the early sixties
made her once more aware of the need to come to terms with a reality
that initially defied human comprehension. How could such an ordinary,
law-abiding, and all-too-human individual have committed such
atrocities? The impact of the trial also forced her to raise another
problem concerning judgment, namely, whether we are entitled to
presuppose "an independent human faculty, unsupported by law and
public opinion, that judges anew in full spontaneity every deed and
intent whenever the occasion arises" (PRD, 187).


### 5.3 Judgment and the Wind of Thought




Arendt returned to this issue in *The Life of the Mind*, a work
which was meant to encompass the three faculties of thinking, willing,
and judging. In the introduction to the first volume she declared that
the immediate impulse to write it came from attending the Eichmann
trial in Jerusalem, while the second, equally important motive, was to
provide an account of our mental activities that was missing from her
previous work on the *vita activa*. It was Eichmann's absence
of thinking, his "thoughtlessness," that struck her most,
because it was responsible in her view for his inability to judge in
those circumstances where judgment was most needed. "It was this
absence of thinking," she wrote, "that awakened my
interest. Is evil-doing ... possible in default of not just
'base motives' ... but of any motives whatever ...
Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from
wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?" (LM, vol. I,
4-5).




Arendt attempted a reply by connecting the activity of thinking to
that of judging in a twofold manner. First, thinking -- the
silent dialogue of me and myself -- dissolves our fixed habits of
thought and the accepted rules of conduct, and thus prepares the way
for the activity of judging particulars without the aid of
pre-established universals. It is not that thinking provides judgment
with new rules for subsuming the particular under the
universal. Rather, it loosens the grip of the universal over the
particular, thereby releasing judgment from ossified categories of
thought and conventional standards of assessment. It is in times of
historical crisis that thinking ceases to be a marginal affair,
because by undermining all established criteria and values, it
prepares the individual to judge for him or herself instead of being
carried away by the actions and opinions of the majority.




The second way in which Arendt connected the activity of thinking with
that of judging is by showing that thinking, by actualizing the
dialogue of me and myself which is given in consciousness, produces
*conscience* as a by-product. This conscience, unlike the voice
of God or what later thinkers called *lumen naturale*, gives no
positive prescriptions; it only tells us what *not* to do, what
to avoid in our actions and dealings with others, as well as what to
repent of. Arendt notes in this context that Socrates' dictum
"It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong," and his
proposition that "It would be better for me that my lyre or a
chorus I directed should be out of tune and loud with discord, and
that multitudes of men should disagree with me, rather than that I,
*being one*, should be out of harmony with myself and
contradict me," derive their validity from the idea that there
is a silent partner within ourselves to whom we render account of our
actions (TMC, 29-30; 35). What we fear most is the anticipation of the
presence of this partner (i.e., our conscience) who awaits us at the
end of the day.




Arendt also remarks that thinking, as the actualization of the
difference given in consciousness, "is not a prerogative of the
few but an ever-present faculty in everybody; by the same token,
inability to think is not a failing of the many who lack brain power,
but an ever-present possibility for everybody" (LM, vol. I,
191). For those who do engage in thinking, however, conscience emerges
as an inevitable by-product. As the side-effect of thinking,
conscience has its counterpart in judgment as the by-product of the
liberating activity of thought. If conscience represents the inner
check by which we evaluate our actions, judgment represents the outer
manifestation of our capacity to think critically. Both faculties
relate to the question of right and wrong, but while conscience
directs attention to the self, judgment directs attention to the
world. In this respect, judgment makes possible what Arendt calls
"the manifestation of the wind of thought" in the sphere
of appearance.


### 5.4 Judgment and Kant's Aesthetics




The foregoing account has explored the way in which Arendt attempted
to connect the activity of thinking to our capacity to judge. To be
sure, this connection of thinking and judging seems to operate only in
emergencies, in those exceptional moments where individuals, faced
with the collapse of traditional standards, must come up with new ones
and judge according to their own autonomous values. There is, however,
a second, more elaborated view of judgment which does not restrict it
to moments of crisis, but which identifies it with the capacity to
think representatively, that is, from the standpoint of everyone
else. Arendt called this capacity to think representatively an
"enlarged mentality," adopting the same terms that Kant
employed in his Third Critique to characterize aesthetic judgment. It
is to this work that we must now turn our attention, since Arendt
based her theory of political judgment on Kant's aesthetics rather
than on his moral philosophy.




At first sight this might seem a puzzling choice, since Kant himself
based his moral and political philosophy on practical reason and not
on our aesthetic faculties. Arendt, however, claimed that the
*Critique of Judgment* contained Kant's unwritten political
philosophy, and that the first part of it, the "Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment," was the most fruitful basis on which to
build a theory of political judgment, since it dealt with the world of
appearances from the point of view of the judging spectator and took
as its starting point the faculty of taste, understood as a faculty of
concrete and embodied subjects (BPF, 219-20).




For Arendt the capacity to judge is a specifically political ability
insofar as it enables individuals to orient themselves in the public
realm and to judge the phenomena that are disclosed within it from a
standpoint that is relatively detached and impartial. She credits Kant
with having dislodged the prejudice that judgments of taste lie
altogether outside the political realm, since they supposedly concern
only aesthetic matters. She believes, in fact, that by linking taste
to that wider manner of thinking which Kant called an "enlarged
mentality" the way was opened to a revaluation of judgment as a
specific political ability, namely, as the ability to think in the
place of everybody else. It is only in Kant's *Critique of
Judgment* that we find a conception of judgment as the ability to
deal with particulars in their particularity, that is, without
subsuming them under a pre-given universal, but actively searching the
universal out of the particular. Kant formulated this distinction as
that between *determinant* and *reflective* judgments.
For him judgment in general is the faculty of thinking the particular
as contained under the universal. If the universal, (the rule,
principle, or law) is given, then the judgment which subsumes the
particular under it is determinant. If, however, only the particular
is given and the universal has to be found for it, then the judgment
is reflective. For Kant determinant judgments were cognitive, while
reflective judgments were non-cognitive. Reflective judgment is seen
as the capacity to ascend from the particular to the universal without
the mediation of determinate concepts given in advance; it is
reasoning about particulars in their relation to the universal rather
than reasoning about universals in their relation to the
particular. In the case of aesthetic judgment this means that one can
understand and apply the universal predicate of beauty only through
experiencing a particular object that exemplifies it. Thus, upon
encountering a flower, a unique landscape, or a particular painting, one
is able to say that it is an example of beauty, that it possesses
"exemplary validity."




For Arendt this notion of exemplary validity is not restricted to
aesthetic objects or to individuals who exemplified certain virtues.
Rather, she wants to extend this notion to events in the past that
carry a meaning beyond their sheer enactment, that is, to events that
could be seen as exemplary for those who came after. It is here that
aesthetic judgment joins with the retrospective judgment of the
historian. The American and French Revolutions, the Paris Commune, the
Russian soviets, the German revolutionary councils of 1918-19, the
Hungarian uprising of 1956, all these events possess the kind of
exemplary validity that makes them of universal significance, while
still retaining their own specificity and uniqueness. Thus, by
attending to these events in their particularity the historian or
judging spectator is able to illuminate their universal import and
thereby preserve them as "examples" for posterity.




For Arendt it is the spectators who have the privilege of judging
impartially and disinterestedly, and in doing so they exercise two
crucial faculties, *imagination* and *common sense*.
Imagination is the faculty of representing in one's mind that which
has already appeared to one's senses. Through the imagination one can
represent objects that are no longer present and thus establish the
distance necessary for an impartial judgment. Once this distancing has
occurred, one is in a position to reflect upon these representations
from a number of different perspectives, and thereby to reach a
judgment about the proper value of an object.




The other faculty that spectators have to appeal to is common sense or
*sensus communis*, since without it they could not share their
judgments or overcome their individual idiosyncrasies. Kant believed
that for our judgments to be valid we must transcend our private or
subjective conditions in favor of public and intersubjective ones, and
we are able to do this by appealing to our community sense, our
*sensus communis*.




The criterion for judgment, then, is *communicability*, and the
standard for deciding whether our judgments are indeed communicable is
to see whether they could fit with the *sensus communis* of
others. Arendt points out that the emphasis on the communicability of
judgments of taste, and the correlative notion of an enlarged
mentality, link up effortlessly with Kant's idea of a united mankind
living in eternal peace. She argues that "It is by virtue of
this idea of mankind, present in every single man, that men are human,
and they can be called civilized or humane to the extent that this
idea becomes the principle not only of their judgments but of their
actions. It is at this point that *actor* and
*spectator* become united; the maxim of the actor and the
maxim, the 'standard,' according to which the spectator
judges the spectacle of the world, become one" (LKPP, 75).




In her reflections on Kant's Third Critique Arendt acknowledges the
links between the standpoint of the actor and that of the
spectator. Let us now examine the way in which judgment operates from
the standpoint of the actor.


### 5.5 Judgment and the Vita Activa




Arendt presented a model of judgment in the essays "The Crisis
in Culture" and "Truth and Politics" which could be
characterized as far more 'political' than the one
presented so far. In these essays, in fact, she treated judgment as a
faculty that enables political actors to decide what courses of action
to undertake in the public realm, what kind of objectives are most
appropriate or worth pursuing, as well as who to praise or blame for
past actions or for the consequences of past decisions. In this model
judgment is viewed as a specifically *political* ability,
namely, as "the ability to see things not only from one's own
point of view but from the perspective of all those who happen to be
present," and as being "one of the fundamental abilities
of man as a political being insofar as it enables him to orient
himself in the public realm, in the common world" (BPF,
221). Arendt claims that "the Greeks called this ability [to
judge] *phronesis*, or insight, and they considered it the
principal virtue or excellence of the statesman in distinction from
the wisdom of the philosopher. The difference between this judging
insight and speculative thought lies in that the former has its roots
in what we usually call common sense, which the latter constantly
transcends. Common sense ... discloses to us the nature of the
world insofar as it is a common world; we owe to it the fact that our
strictly private and 'subjective' five senses and their
sensory data can adjust themselves to a non-subjective and
'objective' world which we have in common and share with
others. Judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which
this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass" (BPF,
221).




Moreover, in discussing the non-coercive character of judgment, the
fact that it can only appeal to but never force the agreement of
others, she claims that "this 'wooing' or persuading
corresponds closely to what the Greeks called *peithein*, the
convincing and persuading speech which they regarded as the typically
political form of people talking with one another" (BPF, 222).
Some commentators have claimed that there is a contradiction in
Arendt's employment of the Aristotelian notion of *phronesis*
alongside Kant's idea of an "enlarged mentality," since
they supposedly pull in opposite directions, the former toward a
concern with the particular, the latter toward universality and
impartiality. However, this contradiction is more apparent than real,
since Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment is a theory of
*reflective* judgment, that is, of those judgments where the
universal is not given but must be searched out of the particular. In
this respect the theory of aesthetic judgment to which Arendt appeals
does have close affinities with Aristotle's notion of
*phronesis*: both are concerned with the judgment of
particulars *qua* particulars, not with their subsumption under
universal rules. If a distinction is to be made, it has more to do
with the mode of *asserting validity*: In Aristotle
*phronesis* is the privilege of a few experienced individuals
(the *phronimoi*) who, over time, have shown themselves to be
wise in practical matters; the only criterion of validity is their
experience and their past record of judiciuos actions. In the case of
judgments of taste, on the other hand, individuals have to appeal to
the judgments and opinions of others, and thus the validity of their
judgments rests on the consent they can elicit from a community of
differently situated subjects.




For Arendt the validity of political judgment depends on our ability
to think "representatively," that is, from the standpoint
of everyone else, so that we are able to look at the world from a
number of different perspectives. And this ability, in turn, can only
be acquired and tested in a public forum where individuals have the
opportunity to exchange their opinions on particular matters and see
whether they accord with the opinions of others. In this respect the
process of opinion formation is never a solitary activity; rather, it
requires a genuine encounter with different opinions so that a
particular issue may be examined from every possible standpoint until,
as she puts it, "it is flooded and made transparent by the full
light of human comprehension" (BPF, 242). Debate and discussion,
and the capacity to enlarge one's perspective, are indeed crucial to
the formation of opinions that can claim more than subjective
validity; individuals may hold personal opinions on many subject
matters, but they can form *representative* opinions only by
enlarging their standpoint to incorporate those of others. As Arendt
says:



> Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by
> considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present
> to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I
> represent them ... The more people's standpoints I have present
> in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can
> imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the
> stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more
> valid my final conclusions, my opinion. (BPF, 241)



Opinions, in fact, are never self-evident. In matters of opinion, but
not in matters of truth, "our thinking is truly discursive,
running, as it were, from place to place, from one part of the world
to another, through all kinds of conflicting views, until it finally
ascends from these particularities to some impartial generality"
(BPF, 242). In this respect one is never alone while forming an
opinion; as Arendt notes, "even if I shun all company or am
completely isolated while forming an opinion, I am not simply together
only with myself in the solitude of philosophical thought; I remain in
this world of universal interdependence, where I can make myself the
representative of everybody else" (BPF, 242).


### 5.6 Judgment and Validity




The representative character of judgment and opinion has important
implications for the question of validity. Arendt always stressed that
the formation of valid opinions requires a public space where
individuals can test and purify their views through a process of
mutual debate and enlightenment. She was, however, quite opposed to
the idea that opinions should be measured by the standard of truth, or
that debate should be conducted according to strict scientific
standards of validity. In her view, truth belongs to the realm of
cognition, the realm of logic, mathematics and the strict sciences,
and carries always an element of coercion, since it precludes debate
and must be accepted by every individual in possession of her rational
faculties. Set against the plurality of opinions, truth has a despotic
character: it compels universal assent, leaves the mind little freedom
of movement, eliminates the diversity of views and reduces the
richness of human discourse. In this respect, truth is anti-political,
since by eliminating debate and diversity it eliminates the very
principles of political life. As Arendt writes, "The trouble is
that factual truth, like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be
acknowledged and precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very
essence of political life. The modes of thought and communication that
deal with truth, if seen from the political perspective, are
necessarily domineering; they don't take into account other people's
opinions, and taking these into account is the hallmark of all
strictly political thinking" (BPF, 241).




Arendt's defense of opinion is motivated not just by her belief that
truth leaves no room for debate or dissent, or for the acknowledgment
of difference, but also by her conviction that our reasoning faculties
can only flourish in a dialogic context. She cites Kant's remark that
"the external power that deprives man of the freedom to
communicate his thoughts publicly deprives him at the same time of his
freedom to think," and underlines the fact that for Kant the
only guarantee of the correctness of our thinking is that "we
think, as it were, in community with others to whom we communicate our
thoughts as they communicate theirs to us" (BPF, 234-5). She
also quotes Madison's statement that "the reason of man, like
man himself, is timid and cautious when left alone, and acquires
firmness and confidence in proportion to the number with which it is
associated" (BPF, 234).




The appeal to Kant and Madison is meant to vindicate the power and
dignity of opinion against those thinkers, from Plato to Hobbes, who
saw it as mere illusion, as a confused or inadequate grasp of the
truth. For Arendt opinion is not a defective form of knowledge that
should be transcended or left behind as soon as one is in possession
of the truth. Rather, it is a distinct form of knowledge which arises
out of the collective deliberation of citizens, and which requires the
use of the imagination and the capacity to think
"representatively." By deliberating in common and engaging
in "representative thinking" citizens are in fact able to
form opinions that can claim intersubjective validity. It is important
to stress that Arendt does not want to dismiss the philosophers'
attempt to find universal or absolute standards of knowledge and
cognition, but to check their desire to impose those standards upon
the sphere of human affairs, since they would eliminate its plurality
and essential relativity. The imposition of a single or absolute
standard into the domain of *praxis* would do away with the
need to persuade others of the relative merits of an opinion, to
elicit their consent to a specific proposal, or to obtain their
agreement with respect to a particular policy. Indeed, for Arendt the
imposition of such a standard would mean that individuals would no
longer be required to exercise their judgment, develop their
imagination, or cultivate an "enlarged mentality," since
they would no longer need to deliberate in common. Strict
demonstration, rather than persuasive argumentation, would then become
the only legitimate form of discourse.




Now, we must be careful not to impute to Arendt the view that truth
has no legitimate role to play in politics or in the sphere of human
affairs. She does indeed assert that "All truths -- not
only the various kinds of rational truth but also factual truth
-- are opposed to opinion in their mode of asserting
validity" (BPF, 239), since they all carry an element of
compulsion. However, she is only preoccupied with the negative
consequences of rational truth when applied to the sphere of politics
and collective deliberation, while she defends the importance of
factual truth for the preservation of an accurate account of the past
and for the very existence of political communities. Factual truth,
she writes, "is always related to other people: it concerns
events and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established
by witnesses and depends upon testimony ... It is political by
nature." It follows, therefore, that "facts and opinions,
though they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other;
they belong to the same realm. Facts inform opinions, and opinions,
inspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and
still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. Freedom of
opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the
facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth
informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical
speculation" (BPF, 238).




The relationship between facts and opinions is thus one of mutual
entailment: if opinions were not based on correct information and the
free access to all relevant facts they could scarcely claim any
validity. And if they were to be based on fantasy, self-deception, or
deliberate falsehood, then no possibility of genuine debate and
argumentation could be sustained. Both factual truth and the general
habit of truth-telling are therefore basic to the formation of sound
opinions and to the flourishing of political debate. Moreover, if the
record of the past were to be destroyed by organized lying, or be
distorted by an attempt to rewrite history, political life would be
deprived of one of its essential and stabilizing elements. In sum,
both factual truth and the practice of truth-telling are essential to
political life. The antagonism for Arendt is between *rational*
truth and well-grounded opinion, since the former does not allow for
debate and dissent, while the latter thrives on it. Arendt's defense
of opinion must therefore be understood as a defense of political
deliberation, and of the role that persuasion and dissuasion play in
all matters affecting the political community. Against Plato and
Hobbes, who denigrated the role of opinion in political matters,
Arendt reasserts the value and importance of political discourse, of
deliberation and persuasion, and thus of a politics that acknowledges
difference and the plurality of opinions.


## 6. Arendt's Conception of Citizenship




In this last section, we reconstruct Arendt's conception of
citizenship around two themes: (1) the public sphere, and (2)
political agency and collective identity, and to highlight the
contribution of Arendt's conception to a theory of democratic
citizenship.


### 6.1 Citizenship and the Public Sphere




For Arendt the public sphere comprises two distinct but interrelated
dimensions. The first is the *space of appearance*, a space of
political freedom and equality which comes into being whenever
citizens act in concert through the medium of speech and
persuasion. The second is the *common world*, a shared and
public world of human artifacts, institutions and settings which
separates us from nature and which provides a relatively permanent and
durable context for our activities. Both dimensions are essential to
the practice of citizenship, the former providing the spaces where it
can flourish, the latter providing the stable background from which
public spaces of action and deliberation can arise. For Arendt the
reactivation of citizenship in the modern world depends upon both the
recovery of a common, shared world and the creation of numerous spaces
of appearance in which individuals can disclose their identities and
establish relations of reciprocity and solidarity.




There are three features of the public sphere and of the sphere of
politics in general that are central to Arendt's conception of
citizenship. These are, first, its *artificial* or constructed
quality; second, its *spatial* quality; and, third, the
distinction between *public* and *private*
interests.




As regards the first feature, Arendt always stressed the artificiality
of public life and of political activities in general, the fact that
they are man-made and constructed rather than natural or given. She
regarded this artificiality as something to be celebrated rather than
deplored. Politics for her was not the result of some natural
predisposition, or the realization of the inherent traits of human
nature. Rather, it was a cultural achievement of the first order,
enabling individuals to transcend the necessities of life and to
fashion a world within which free political action and discourse could
flourish.




The stress on the artificiality of politics has a number of important
consequences. For example, Arendt emphasized that the principle of
political equality does not rest on a theory of natural rights or on
some natural condition that precedes the constitution of the political
realm. Rather, it is an attribute of citizenship which individuals
acquire upon entering the public realm and which can be secured only by
democratic political institutions.




Another consequence of Arendt's stress on the artificiality of
political life is evident in her rejection of all neo-romantic appeals
to the *volk* and to ethnic identity as the basis for political
community. She maintained that one's ethnic, religious, or racial
identity was irrelevant to one's identity as a citizen, and that it
should never be made the basis of membership in a political
community.




Arendt's emphasis on the formal qualities of citizenship made her
position rather distant from those advocates of participation in the
1960s who saw it in terms of recapturing a sense of intimacy, of
warmth and authenticity. For Arendt political participation was
important because it permitted the establishment of relations of
civility and solidarity among citizens. She claimed that the ties of
intimacy and warmth can never become political since they represent
psychological substitutes for the loss of the common world. The only
truly political ties are those of civic friendship and solidarity,
since they make political demands and preserve reference to the
world. For Arendt, therefore, the danger of trying to recapture the
sense of intimacy and warmth, of authenticity and communal feelings is
that one loses the public values of impartiality, civic friendship,
and solidarity.




The second feature stressed by Arendt has to do with the
*spatial* quality of public life, with the fact that political
activities are located in a public space where citizens are able to
meet one another, exchange their opinions and debate their
differences, and search for some collective solution to their
problems. Politics, for Arendt, is a matter of people sharing a common
world and a common space of appearance so that public concerns can
emerge and be articulated from different perspectives. In her view, it
is not enough to have a collection of private individuals voting
separately and anonymously according to their private
opinions. Rather, these individuals must be able to see and talk to
one another in public, to meet in a public-political space, so that
their differences as well as their commonalities can emerge and become
the subject of democratic debate.




This notion of a common public space helps us to understand how
political opinions can be formed which are neither reducible to
private, idiosyncratic preferences, on the one hand, nor to a
unanimous collective opinion, on the other. Arendt herself distrusted
the term "public opinion," since it suggested the mindless
unanimity of mass society. In her view representative opinions could
arise only when citizens actually confronted one another in a public
space, so that they could examine an issue from a number of different
perspectives, modify their views, and enlarge their standpoint to
incorporate that of others. Political opinions, she claimed, can never
be formed in private; rather, they are formed, tested, and enlarged
only within a public context of argumentation and debate.




Another implication of Arendt's stress on the spatial quality of
politics has to do with the question of how a collection of distinct
individuals can be united to form a political community. For Arendt
the unity that may be achieved in a political community is neither the
result of religious or ethnic affinity, not the expression of some
common value system. Rather, the unity in question can be attained by
sharing a public space and a set of political institutions, and
engaging in the practices and activities which are characteristic of
that space and those institutions.




A further implication of Arendt's conception of the spatial quality of
politics is that since politics is a public activity, one cannot be
part of it without in some sense being present in a public space. To
be engaged in politics means actively participating in the various
public forums where the decisions affecting one's community are
taken. Arendt's insistence on the importance of direct participation
in politics is thus based on the idea that, since politics is
something that needs a worldly location and can only happen in a
public space, then if one is not present in such a space one is simply
not engaged in politics.




This public or world-centered conception of politics lies also at the
basis of the third feature stressed by Arendt, the distinction between
*public* and *private* interests. According to Arendt,
political activity is not a means to an end, but an end in itself; one
does not engage in political action to promote one's welfare, but to
realize the principles intrinsic to political life, such as freedom,
equality, justice, and solidarity. In a late essay entitled
"Public Rights and Private Interests" (PRPI) Arendt
discusses the difference between one's life as an individual and one's
life as a citizen, between the life spent on one's own and the life
spent in common with others. She argues that our public interest as
citizens is quite distinct from our private interest as
individuals. The public interest is not the sum of private interests,
nor their highest common denominator, nor even the total of
enlightened self-interests. In fact, it has little to do with our
private interests, since it concerns the world that lies beyond the
self, that was there before our birth and that will be there after our
death, a world that finds embodiment in activities and institutions
with their own intrinsic purposes which might often be at odds with
our short-term and private interests. The public interest refers,
therefore, to the interests of a public world which we share as
citizens and which we can pursue and enjoy only by going beyond our
private self-interest.


### 6.2 Citizenship, Agency, and Collective Identity




Arendt's participatory conception of citizenship provides the best
starting point for addressing both the question of the constitution of
*collective identity* and that concerning the conditions for
the exercise of effective *political agency*.




With respect to the first claim, it is important to note that one of
the crucial questions at stake in political discourse is the creation
of a collective identity, a "we" to which we can appeal
when faced with the problem of deciding among alternative courses of
action. Since in political discourse there is always disagreement
about the possible courses of action, the identity of the
"we" that is going to be created through a specific form
of action becomes a central question. By engaging in this or that
course of action we are, in fact, entering a claim on behalf of a
"we," that is, we are creating a specific form of
collective identity. Political action and discourse are, in this
respect, essential to the constitution of collective identities.




This process of identity-construction, however, is never given once
and for all and is never unproblematic. Rather, it is a process of
constant renegotiation and struggle, a process in which actors
articulate and defend competing conceptions of cultural and political
identity. Arendt's participatory conception of citizenship is
particularly relevant in this context since it articulates the
conditions for the establishment of collective identities. Once
citizenship is viewed as the process of active deliberation about
competing identities, its value resides in the possibility of
establishing forms of collective identity that can be acknowledged,
tested, and transformed in a discursive and democratic fashion.




With respect to the second claim, concerning the question of political
agency, it is important to stress the connection that Arendt
establishes between political action, understood as the active
engagement of citizens in the public realm, and the exercise of
effective political agency. This connection between action and agency
is one of the central contributions of Arendt's participatory
conception of citizenship. According to Arendt, the active engagement
of citizens in the determination of the affairs of their community
provides them not only with the experience of public freedom and
public happiness, but also with a sense of political agency and
efficacy, the sense, in Thomas Jefferson's words, of being
"participators in government." In her view only the
sharing of power that comes from civic engagement and common
deliberation can provide each citizen with a sense of effective
political agency. Arendt's strictures against political representation
must be understood in this light. She saw representation as a
substitute for the direct involvement of the citizens, and as a means
whereby the distinction between rulers and ruled could reassert
itself. As an alternative to a system of representation based on
bureaucratic parties and state structures, Arendt proposed a federated
system of councils through which citizens could effectively determine
their own political affairs. For Arendt, it is only by means of direct
political participation, that is, by engaging in common action and
collective deliberation, that citizenship can be reaffirmed and
political agency effectively exercised.