Arendt's Judgment. Jonathan Peter Schwartz

       Introduction

      In Pursuit of Authentic Political Philosophy

      There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging that has nothing whatever to do with the biblical “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” … For behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done.… Hence the huge outcry the moment anyone fixes specific blame on some particular person instead of blaming all deeds or events on historical trends and dialectical movements, in short on some mysterious necessity that works behind the backs of men.

      —Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship”

      Hannah Arendt continues to provoke us. That was her intention. She was not interested in making things easy for her readers. This was not to toy with them: there were urgent purposes behind it. All writers have priorities, and among the highest priorities of modern philosophy and political thought has been to convey clarity of thought and idea. Hannah Arendt had other priorities. She wanted to challenge her readers to look at their past and present world anew, to provoke them not to think what she thought, but to think like she thought. And to the extent her ultimate goal had not been to win arguments or begin schools of thought, but to, so to speak, awaken her readers from their dogmatic slumbers, she was no doubt successful. Yet, achieving this goal came at a price, and that price meant giving up the assurance that she would pass on a stable set of ideas. Did this mean there was no fundamental core to her thought? Was she merely “moving within the gap between past and future,” as she often put it, with no central goals or fundamental purposes directing this movement? It will be my contention here that, though she rarely openly discussed it and arguably never published a direct account of it, there was indeed a fundamental goal orienting her thought, and that goal revolved around the question of how to reestablish the possibility of authentic practical reason and political judgment in the modern world.

      Arendt’s work—provisional, essayistic, intentionally foreign—presents a formidable challenge to anyone who tries to definitively explain its fundamental purposes and meaning. The problems presented by Arendt’s style of thinking and writing are in many ways unique to her. Even in her most coherent projects, such as On Revolution or The Origins of Totalitarianism, many of the most important arguments and conclusions are buried in a dense, historically detailed narrative. She often refused to write in a clear and straightforward manner, at times even seeming to deliberately hold back the central point of her argument. She almost never writes outside of the essay format, and even her monographs are better described as a series of essays that form something like a conceptual mosaic, rather than a sustained, systematic argument.

      Compounding the problem of understanding her is a kind of reflexive skepticism in the academic community instigated by her unusual influence and notoriety. In her day, Arendt was a true public intellectual, on the level of Emerson or Dewey, the sort more often found in Europe but rarely in America. She came to prominence with the publication of her first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which was a best seller and launched her into worldwide fame.¹ It was acclaimed by many as a work of genius,² and Arendt herself joked that she had become a “cover girl” when her pictures began appearing on magazine covers.³ Her next book, The Human Condition, raised her profile even higher, introducing a nearly unheard of level of erudition and philosophical depth into mainstream literature. Yet despite her undeniable fame, her work, largely thanks to its rather literary nature, has perhaps been less consistently influential than that of other recent figures like Rawls, Strauss, or Habermas. Many have found her work to be more suggestive than definitive, her arguments difficult to follow, and the content of her thought, at times, frustratingly obscure. At a conference on her work in 1972, Christian Bay expressed a frustration no doubt common to her readers, saying, “I read Hannah Arendt with pleasure, but out of aesthetic pleasure. She is a philosopher’s philosopher. I think it is beautiful to follow her prose, her sense of unity in history, and to be reminded of the great things the Greeks have said that are still pertinent today. I think, however … there is a certain lack of seriousness about modern problems in much of her work.”⁴

      This assessment has no doubt been encouraged by the fact that during her lifetime she was as influential for her social connections and personal magnetism as for her intellectual contributions. A prominent figure in the interconnected communities of New York literary society and postwar Jewish émigrés, the New York Review of Books once called her “the éminence grise of the éminences grises.”⁵ Irving Howe has noted that her personal charisma made her a significant figure in the intellectual world well before she published anything of true significance.⁶ “While far from ‘good-looking’ in any commonplace way,” he tells us, “Hannah Arendt was a remarkably attractive person, with her razored gestures, imperial eye, dangling cigarette.… She bristled with intellectual charm, as if to reduce everyone in sight to an alert discipleship.… Whatever room she was in Hannah filled through the largeness of her will; indeed, she always seemed larger than her setting.” In fact, it is difficult to even draw a clear distinction between her personal and intellectual influence, for many of her ideas had social and political dimensions that transcended intellectual life. She has been claimed by conservatives, progressives, and New Left democrats alike. Origins is both a basic text of social science research and a touchstone of Cold War politics; The Human Condition and On Revolution were virtually required reading in the early days of the New Left.⁷ And of course the impact that Eichmann in Jerusalem had not merely in its own time but in our continuing confrontation with the question of evil in the modern world cannot be overlooked. It is no surprise that she is among the few twentieth-century intellectual figures who has been the subject of a major motion picture. This celebrity has tended to add to the skepticism with which academia often approaches her, epitomized by Christian Bay. The literary quality of her work at times actually counts against its intellectual seriousness, and she has often been characterized by the social science community, for example, as one of the literati: brilliantly imaginative, but too little concerned with evidence.

      Part of the explanation for her often abstruse and uniquely literary style of theory ultimately seems to have had to do with a certain idiosyncrasy of thought, which she appears to have been unable to fully master. Mary McCarthy states that, as far as she knew, all of Arendt’s books and articles were edited, often by several collaborators, before reaching print, and often over fundamental elements.⁸ Arendt’s way of thinking seems to have been more organic than systematic, often requiring the help of others to give it a more coherent form. She herself was open about the tentative and even potentially experimental nature of her thinking⁹ and even admitted that she was uncertain of how finally to assess them. At the 1972 conference on her work, she concluded the day’s discussions, saying, “I would like to say that