Hannah Arendt AND POLITICAL THEORY Challenging theTradition Steve Buckler Hannah Arendt and Political Theory BBUUCCKKLLEERR PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd ii 3311//0033//22001111 1111::2266 BBUUCCKKLLEERR PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd iiii 3311//0033//22001111 1111::2266 Hannah Arendt and Political Theory Challenging the Tradition Steve Buckler Edinburgh University Press BBUUCCKKLLEERR PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd iiiiii 3311//0033//22001111 1111::2266 © Steve Buckler, 2011 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13.5 Goudy by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3902 1 (hardback) The right of Steve Buckler to be identifi ed as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. BBUUCCKKLLEERR PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd iivv 3311//0033//22001111 1111::2266 Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Thinking and Acting 14 3 Theory and Method 37 4 Theorising Dark Times: The Origins of Totalitarianism 57 5 Theorising Political Action: The Human Condition 82 6 Theorising New Beginnings: On Revolution 104 7 Political Theory and Political Ethics 126 8 The Role of the Theorist 154 Bibliography 172 Index 178 BBUUCCKKLLEERR PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd vv 3311//0033//22001111 1111::2266 BBUUCCKKLLEERR PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd vvii 3311//0033//22001111 1111::2266 Chapter 1 Introduction My assumption is that thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings. I’ve taken an epigraph from . . . [Karl Jaspers]: ‘Give yourself up neither to the past nor to the future. The important thing is to remain wholly in the present’. That sentence struck me right in the heart, so I’m entitled to it. Hannah Arendt 1964 In an interview broadcast on West German television in 1964, Hannah Arendt, by then a famous political thinker, insisted that she did not regard herself as a ‘philosopher’ and had no desire to be seen as such: her concern was with politics. She was not even happy with the suggestion that what she did was ‘political philosophy’, regarding this as a term overloaded with tradition. She preferred what she took to be the less freighted epithet of ‘political theorist’. There is, Arendt argued, a fundamental tension between the philosophical and the political; and the historical tendency to think about the contingent and circumstantial business of politics from a philosophical point of view, seeking to speak about it in terms of the universal and the eternal, has had unfortunate consequences. In the light of this conviction, Arendt said she wished to look at politics ‘with eyes unclouded by philosophy’ (Arendt 1994: 2). The aim of this book is to explore the implications of this statement as they make themselves felt in Arendt’s work and to suggest that they underwrite a distinctive, potent and consistently challenging way of theorising politics. Arendt was an unorthodox political theorist. Her work divided critical opinion and has continued to do so since her death in 1975.1 At issue here is not only what Arendt said but also how she said it. Although she taught at major universities, Arendt always maintained something of a distance 1 BBUUCCKKLLEERR PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd 11 3311//0033//22001111 1111::2266 hannah arendt and political theory from academic life and was no respecter of its established conventions. She wrote in an eclectic style, involving a mixture of idioms and she did not shy away from investing her work with elements of paradox and perplexity. It is a stylistic mix that for some has been a source of profound insights, for others, simply baffl ing. In view of this, it is surprising that in the extensive critical literature on Arendt relatively little sustained attention has been given to the question of what her unorthodox style betokened in terms of method – to what Arendt believed political theory to be for and how, in the light of this, it should be undertaken. There has been a good deal of comment on the substantive content of Arendt’s thought: her analysis of totalitarianism; her conception of politics and political action; her view of revolution; and her later writings on the life of the mind. There has also been much comment on her place in rela- tion to other thinkers or themes: Arendt and Jewish thought; Arendt and German philosophy; Arendt and feminism. But little sustained and explicit attention has been given to the methodological issues that her work raises. In another sense, perhaps, this gap in the literature is a little less sur- prising. Although she refl ected and wrote extensively on the question of thinking and its relation with politics, Arendt’s methodological commit- ments are neither immediately nor easily identifi able and her remarks on the subject were occasional and elusive. It is perhaps easier, initially, to say what Arendt was not trying to do. It is clear that she was not, in any accepted sense, a social scientist. The traditional appeal to empirical fi nd- ings and explanatory hypotheses characteristic of social science amounts, as Arendt saw it, to a ‘behaviourist’ approach that falsely reduces political conduct to the measurable and the predictable. It is a standpoint that fails, she argued, to capture the authentic nature of politics, which she thought of as an intrinsically spontaneous and unpredictable engagement. It also colludes, she believed, with a propensity in the modern world for conduct to become increasingly routine. It is, in this sense, a form of social analysis that answers to, and helps perpetuate, tendencies inher- ent in modern mass societies, plagued by what she termed ‘the rise of the social’, for the primacy of material and technological interests, combined, correspondingly, with an increasingly managerial state, to render life routine and aspirations conformist. In these circumstances, ‘behaviour has replaced action as the foremost mode of human relationship’ (Arendt 1958: 41). We tend now to behave increasingly in the way that social scientists falsely assume we inevitably behave: ‘the trouble with modern 2 BBUUCCKKLLEERR PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd 22 3311//0033//22001111 1111::2266 introduction theories of behaviourism is not that they are wrong but that they could become true’ (Arendt 1958: 322). Equally, as noted above, Arendt distanced herself from the philosophi- cal tradition: ‘I have said goodbye to philosophy once and for all . . . I studied philosophy but that does not mean I stayed with it’ (Arendt 1994: 2). There was, for Arendt, a distinction to be drawn between philosophy, on the one hand, and political theory, as she thought of it, on the other. It was a distinction that she wanted to draw as part of a conscious attempt to write against the tradition that saw refl ection on politics as a branch of philosophy. This was a tradition, she thought, which had resulted in ways of thinking about politics that abstracted away from its real and particular character as a practice, seeking to dictate to it, as it were, ‘from above’. On the traditional philosophical view, as Arendt saw it, the chaotic worldly realm presents a problem to be resolved through refl ection upon abstract principles that would provide a recipe for eternal harmony. This tradition can be traced back to Plato, who sought to show ‘how we can bring about in the commonwealth that complete quiet, that absolute peace, that . . . constitutes the best condition for the life of the philosopher’ (Arendt 1982: 21). It is a tradition which potentially renders the contingent and ‘noisy’ business of politics superfl uous. The tradition, since Plato, can be seen as constituting ‘various attempts to fi nd theoretical foundations and practical ways for an escape from politics altogether’ (Arendt 1958: 222). It was for this reason that she regarded the philosophical standpoint as one that threatened to cloud her vision. So Arendt was concerned to distinguish what she was doing from more conventional philosophical approaches, but she was reticent about char- acterising her own method. It will be the contention here that despite this reticence on the subject, Arendt adopted a distinctive and identifi able method. I will argue also that an understanding of this method allows us to see in her work a deep consistency, by which I mean that her meth- odological standpoint is not only manifest throughout the body of her writings but also shows a modal consistency with what she takes to be the character of the political as a central experience that needs to be thought about on its own terms. This in turn makes itself felt in the substantive treatments Arendt offers of the key experiential elements of politics, treatments that prove consistently non-reductive. Her unorthodox style, then, is far from capricious and in fact betokens an attempt to think about politics in a manner that encapsulates a fi delity to the political itself in all its contingency and humanity. 3 BBUUCCKKLLEERR PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd 33 3311//0033//22001111 1111::2266