Arendt

Works

Four works supply the vocabulary in use here.

• The Human Condition (1958) sets out the vita activa — labour, work and action — with plurality and natality as the conditions of the last of them.
• The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) traces antisemitism, imperialism and total domination, and includes the analysis of statelessness and the right to have rights.
• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) is her trial reporting and the source of the phrase most often taken from her and least often read closely.
• The Life of the Mind (posthumous, 1978) turns to thinking, willing and judging, the faculties she thought Eichmann's case made urgent.

Central ideas

Her categories are technical, and most misuse comes from reading them as ordinary words.

• Labour, work, action: labour serves biological necessity and leaves nothing behind; work fabricates the durable world of objects; action is speech and deed among plural others, and only action discloses who someone is.
• Plurality: the condition of action, which she puts as men, not Man, inhabiting the earth. Politics exists because people are distinct, not despite it.
• Natality: the human capacity to begin something that was not entailed by what came before. She sets it deliberately against a philosophical tradition organised around mortality.
• Forgiving and promising: the two faculties that make action bearable, since action is irreversible and its outcomes unpredictable. Forgiveness releases from the past; promise binds an uncertain future.

Distinctive vocabulary

Four terms carry specific meanings that popular use has flattened.

• Action: speech and deed among equals in a public space, not activity, effort, or getting things done.
• The banality of evil: a claim about thoughtlessness — the absence of the two-in-one dialogue with oneself — not a claim that evil is ordinary, minor, or excusable.
• The space of appearance: wherever people act and speak before others, which exists only while they do and is not a building or an institution.
• The social: her contested name for the rise of household concerns into the public realm; a technical category, and the one most criticised.

Debates and disagreements

Arendt was at the centre of arguments that are still open.

• The Eichmann controversy: Gershom Scholem's charge that she lacked love for the Jewish people, and the furore over her passages on the Jewish Councils.
• Bettina Stangneth's Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2011) draws on the Sassen interviews to show a far more ideologically committed antisemite than the man Arendt judged from his courtroom performance — a serious empirical challenge to the thoughtlessness reading of that particular defendant.
• Hanna Pitkin and others argue her expulsion of social and economic questions from politics is untenable, and that it excludes precisely the concerns of those with the least standing.
• Reflections on Little Rock (1959), opposing federally enforced school desegregation, was widely and rightly criticised at the time and since, including by Ralph Ellison, whose objection she partly accepted.

Intellectual relationships

She read the tradition against itself, and her relationships were part of the argument.

• Heidegger was her teacher and, briefly, her lover; his Nazism and their later contact remain a live matter in her reception rather than a settled one.
• Karl Jaspers was her doctoral supervisor and lifelong friend, and the correspondence is a primary source for her thinking.
• Augustine supplied the root of natality by way of her dissertation on love in his work.
• Kant's Critique of Judgment supplied the model for the judging faculty she was developing when she died.

How it changes this reading

Arendt is named in the lineage of the Political-civic lens, and one distinction of hers does specific work in this reading.

• The lens asks whether an arrangement enlarges participation in something shared; Arendt supplies plurality and the space of appearance as the inherited terms for asking it.
• The who-and-what distinction bears directly on this project's own restraint: a reading assembled from a record can describe what a person is — attributes, recurrences, classifications — while who they are is disclosed only in acting among others and is not recoverable from an archive.
• It is not evidence that the subject read Arendt, held her positions, or acted on them.

Useful comparisons

The lens names three theorists who locate the political in three different places.

• Arendt locates it in appearance among plural equals: politics is what happens when people act and speak in a shared space.
• James C. Scott locates it in the friction between state legibility and local knowledge, and attends to evasion, foot-dragging and the weapons of the weak rather than to public speech.
• Chantal Mouffe locates it in ineradicable antagonism, and asks how conflict can be made agonistic — between adversaries — rather than eliminated.

Where the ideas meet

The three agree on what politics is not.

• None treats politics as administration, or as a technical problem with a correct answer awaiting discovery.
• All three hold that plurality or difference is constitutive rather than an obstacle to be resolved.
• Each is suspicious of consensus reached by removing whoever disagrees.

Where they part

Their disagreements change what the lens can conclude.

• Mouffe's antagonism sits directly against Arendt's public realm of speech among equals, and would treat that equality as a description of who was already admitted.
• Scott attends to precisely the people Arendt's public realm excludes, and finds political meaning in concealment rather than in appearance.
• Arendt's separation of the social from the political is the specific point both others reject, so the lens cannot use all three at once without saying which account of the political it is taking.

Limits

• An account of the conditions under which action is possible is not evidence that anyone acted.
• Her categories describe a structure of public life and cannot be turned into a measure of a particular person's courage, standing, or civic worth.

Criticisms

The objections are substantial and one is not defensible.

• Little Rock is the clearest failure: her argument about the limits of federal power in the social realm read the situation of Black children in the American South through a framework that could not hold it.
• The polis she draws on rested on slavery and the exclusion of women, and critics argue the idealisation carries that exclusion into the theory.
• The social-political distinction is widely judged to make material need politically unspeakable, which disadvantages exactly those who most need politics.
• The Eichmann portrait is empirically contested by later archival work, whatever the merits of thoughtlessness as a general category.

Common misreadings

Four uses this placement does not license.

• Quoting the banality of evil to mean that evil is ordinary, that anyone would have done the same, or that responsibility is thereby diluted. Her claim is about a specific failure to think, and she held Eichmann fully responsible.
• Using action for any purposeful activity, which erases the distinction from labour and work that gives the term its content.
• Treating the public-private distinction as a policy position rather than an analytic one.
• Citing natality as generalised optimism about new beginnings, when it names a capacity that carries unpredictability and irreversibility with it.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish that any person appeared, acted, or was seen in the sense her categories require.
• It cannot convert an account of political conditions into a judgment of a particular life.