Hannah Arendt's Theory of Political Judgment by Jonathan Peter Schwartz Department of Political Science Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Michael Gillespie, Supervisor ___________________________ Ruth Grant ___________________________ Thomas Spragens, Jr. ___________________________ Tracy B. Strong Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science in the Graduate School of Duke University. 2014 ABSTRACT Hannah Arendt's Theory of Political Judgment by Jonathan Peter Schwartz Department of Political Science Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Michael Gillespie, Supervisor ___________________________ Ruth Grant ___________________________ Thomas Spragens, Jr. ___________________________ Tracy B. Strong An Abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science in the Graduate School of Duke University. 2014 Copyright by Jonathan Peter Schwartz 2014 Abstract Hannah Arendt's theory of political judgment has been an ongoing perplexity among scholars who have written on her. As a result, her theory of judgment is often treated as a suggestive but unfinished aspect of her thought. Drawing on a wider array of sources than is commonly utilized, I argue that her theory of political judgment was in fact the heart of her work. Arendt's project, in other words, centered around reestablishing the possibility of political judgment in a modern world that historically has progressively undermined it. In the dissertation, I systematically develop an account of Arendt's fundamentally political and non-sovereign notion of judgment. We discover that individual judgment is not arbitrary, and that even in the complex circumstances of the modern world there are valid structures of judgment which can be developed and dependably relied upon. The result of this work articulates a theory of practical reason which is highly compelling: it provides orientation for human agency which does not rob it of its free and spontaneous character; shows how we can improve and cultivate our political judgment; and points the way toward the profoundly intersubjective form of political philosophy Arendt ultimately hoped to develop. iv Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………...iv Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..vi Chapter One: Hannah Arendt's Political Judgment………………………………………1 Chapter Two: Arendt on the Traditional Era of Western Politics…………………….…34 Chapter Three: A Genealogy of Modern Politics……………………………………..…89 Chapter Four: The Failure to Refound Freedom and its Consequences………………..131 Chapter Five: Thinking without a Bannister……………………………………………177 Chapter Six: Arendt's Essential Question: What is Political Philosophy?.......................231 Chapter Seven: Arendt's Theory of Political Judgment………………………………...275 Chapter Eight: Making Sense of Arendtian Political Judgment………………………..331 Epilogue………………………………………………………………………………...395 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………408 Biography……………………………………………………………………………….424 v Acknowledgements Thanks must first go to my supervisor for this dissertation, Michael Gillespie, who has superbly overseen the project. Professor Gillespie initially recognizing that my real interest was with Arendt's theory of judgment, and suggesting I focus on it solely instead of on a broader project. He has been an ongoing source of encouragement, insight, and good counsel, and without his wide-ranging knowledge, open-mindedness, and sensitivity to possibilities this study could not have been done. I also want to thank the members of my committee, each of whom has been invaluable for arriving at this point. Ruth Grant, along with her critical insight and provision of crucial training in the field, was my first adviser at Duke. I have come to recognize her a source of great common sense, and I have often sought to emulate her approach to research in my own work. Thomas Spragens has been a source of intellectual inspiration throughout my graduate studies: I have learned a great deal from his classes and books, and above all from his intellectual generosity and practicality. Finally, I want to thank Tracy Strong for graciously agreeing to serve on my committee and to provide crucial oversight of the specific subject matter of this study. The several classes I took from Professor Strong at UC San Diego sparked my interest in political theory and, indeed, there is no doubt that my interests and work reflect what he taught me. I must also express my gratitude to those who have also at various times made significant contributions to my intellectual development. I want to thank my thesis vi advisor at U.C. San Diego, Fonna Forman, who first guided and introduced me to the activity of serious intellectual work. I would also be greatly remiss not to recognize Babette Babich, Michael Feola, and, of course, Peter Euben, who though I studied with at Duke more briefly was a great inspiration and example. Thanks must also go my colleagues—particularly those who took part in the Political Theory Writing Symposium—whose thoughtfulness, insight, and enthusiasm have inspired and motivated me in our work together at Duke. I would like especially to thank Darren Beatty, Aaron Roberts, Dominique Déry, Malina Swiatek, Matthew Cole, Alexandra Oprea, Will Wittels, Ray Mercado, Luc Perkins, Samuel Bagg, and Ana Guzman. Finally, I want to express my very great appreciation to Duke University, the Department of Political Science at Duke, and the Kenan Institute for Ethics, all of whom generously provided both financial and institutional support for this work. Without their support this project could certainly not have been completed. Lastly, I would like to thank my family for trusting and believing in me while I pursued this project. I would like especially to express my love and gratitude to my children, Lavi and Ila, who kept me grounded in real life and tolerated the mysterious babble I spoke during dinners or drives to school when they asked me what I was writing about. Though they may not understand my work, it is enough for them to know that they are what give it meaning. vii Chapter One: Introduction ~ Hannah Arendt's Political Judgment The Question of Political Judgment Political judgment is an intrinsic element of all forms of human life with others, and good judgment, although preeminently instrumental is one of the greatest human goods. While there are many other goods that one might rank above it, including peace, justice, virtue, happiness, or liberty, all of these depend in the long run on good political judgment to bring them into being and sustain them. When we elect political leaders, it is good judgment more than anything else that we hope they will exercise: while their political ideology or party affiliation may be a factor or even the key factor in securing our vote, their ideological position will be worthless to us if they lack the judgment to bring that political vision into reality. Moreover, given the increasing interconnectedness, complexity, and centralization of modern societies and economies, the ecological challenges of our times, and the massive destructive power in the hands of our regimes, political judgment today is perhaps more important than ever before. Yet, despite the obvious importance of such judgment, we have a very difficult time understanding exactly what it is. Very often we point to examples of good judgment, as for example in the actions of Lincoln, Mandela, or Martin Luther King, and even more often complain about instances of bad judgment too innumerable to need mentioning; yet, it is difficult for us to put our finger on exactly what made one person effective, while so 1 many others seem to fail. It is clearly not due to one person simply having more knowledge, since two people may have roughly similar information of a given set of circumstances and still arrive at better and worse judgments about the matter in question. Good judgment seems rather to rest on a certain kind of insight into circumstances and an ability to summon up just the right response to that insight: a kind of wisdom or "common sense," that while potentially sharpened by greater knowledge is still something separate from it—a kind of skill or ability to see not only more broadly but more deeply. This is the subject which this dissertation aims to address—or at least to begin addressing, since the topic vastly exceeds the bounds this project. How then can we define good judgment?i Following Kant we might define judgment as the ability to subsume particulars under "general rules."ii While this is a iA growing body of literature over the last several years has begun to develop around the question of the nature of good judgment. See for instance Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment, University of Chicago Press: Chicago (1983); Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia (1983); Howard Caygill, Art of Judgment, Basil Blackwell, Inc: Cambridge, MA (1989); Allessandro Ferrara, The Force of Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Columbia University Press: New York (2008);Hans-Georg Gadamer; “Appendix: Letter by Professor Hans-Georg Gadamer.” Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia (1983); “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy,” “On the Possibility of a Philosophical Ethics,” The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of his Later Writings, Richard E. Palmer, editor and translator, Northwestern University Press: Evanston, IL (2007); Truth and Method, 2nd, Revised Edition. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, trans. Continuum: New York (1975); Klaus Gunther, The Sense of Appropriateness: Application Discourses in Morality and Law, John Farrell, trans. SUNY Press: Albany, NY (1993); Low-Beer, F. H., Questions of Judgment, Prometheus Books: Amherst, NY (1995); Rudolf A. Makkreel, “The Role of Judgment and Orientation in Hermeneutics,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 34: 1-2 (2008), pp. 29-50; Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, IN (1988); Peter J. Steinberger, The Concept of Political Judgment, University of Chicago Press: Chicago (1993); Charles Taylor, "Explanation and Practical Reason," The Quality of Life, Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, eds. Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York (1992); "Rationality," Philosophical Papers, Volumes 2, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge (1985); Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good is It? How can We Know?, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ (2005);Leslie Paul Thiele, The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative, Cambridge University Press: New York (2006). ii Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A132/B171. 2 simplistic and very abstract account, it captures our basic intuitions about the matter. The most obvious case of such judgment in political life is a judge's ruling in court, deciding whether the particular case before him can be "subsumed" under some law or precedent. However, judgment, when conceived in the arena of politics, seems to extend further than this. When we talk about the proverbial relationship between theory and practice, we are discussing judgment. The fundamental question about this relationship, however, has always been what constitutes "theory," what constitutes "practice," and how are they related?iii But regardless of how we define them, at the very least we seem to have to understand judgment as, in some sense, the establishment of a of relationship of our mental activities with our activities in the actual world. This last characterization, however, is so abstract that it does not give us a great deal of purchase on our question. An analytic approach to this question can perhaps help us to orient ourselves in a general way but it does not give us much to go on. Thus, in what follows I will take another approach, examining the work of a thinker who devoted her life's work to concretely understanding the true nature of this relationship: Hannah Arendt, whose theory of political judgment, I believe, may be perhaps the most significant consideration of the topic since Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Arendt believed that understanding the nature of political judgment and the sources of its validity required a dramatic rethinking of what theory and practice are, and how they are related to each other. An examination iii For excellent discussions of the various ways the relationship between theory and practice has been understood see Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx, University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame (1967); Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Expanded Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton (2004), pp. 3-4, 17-22; Richard J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity, University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia (1971), pp. ix-xii. 3