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...

Toward the end of her life, Arendt’s attention was focused very much on the study of the mind and mental faculties, culminating in her final, unfinished trilogy The Life of the Mind (1981). This has given some the impression that, following her early move away from philosophy toward politics, she later moved away once again from political questions toward a concern with the mental life. If this were so, then it might seem perverse to pursue the issue of Arendt’s approach to political theory through a consideration of what she had to say about thinking, about matters that she took...

The first two aspects of Arendt’s revision to the relation between thinking and the public realm enumerated in the previous chapter – the need for political thinking to be sensitive to the irreducibly plural character of the political, and the recognition of the fact that the latter constitutes a realm where thinking is, in the strictest terms, ‘good for nothing’ – establish the need for an approach capable of answering to the public realm, what we can characterise as an approach that, at least from the point of view of the tradition, incorporates an epistemological mediation. The idea of thinking...

In referring to dark times, where our capacities both for thinking and acting are compromised, Arendt makes the point that they are not new or rare; but our sense of them now comes in the context of totalitarianism, the horrors of which are unprecedented, showing us just how dark times can be (Arendt 1968a: ix). The experience of totalitarianism, as we have noted, was central to the development of Arendt’s political thought, just as it was to the course of her life. She encountered first hand, and as a consequence of totalitarianism, two phenomena that she came to believe were...

The experience of totalitarianism leads Arendt to reproblematise our situation, our capacities and possibilities, with a renewed sense of their fragility and with a modified sense of the modalities through which we understand and re-present them to ourselves theoretically. What will not do here, she thinks, is another comprehensive theory of human nature. The ruptures and fragilities that recent experiences have brought to light undermine an enterprise of this sort; and commensurately, to persist in such an enterprise promises only to provide us with another reified self-conception that is likely to prove as inadequate in the face of the realities...

Our recent realisation of the vulnerability to domination inherent in our depoliticised society prompts, for Arendt, a search for examples, albeit fleeting ones, where the modern age has seen a re-emergence of freedom. In a context where we do not appear to be able to generate a reliable forum in which freedom can be enacted, where the extraordinary can arise consistently in the ordinary course of things, we need to look to the rare events that mark an upsurge of the authentic capacity for action. We may find these, she thinks, in the distinctively modern phenomenon of revolution: revolutions are...

The approach that we have seen Arendt taking in her major engagements in political theory, an approach which, at least from the point of view of the tradition that she seeks to oppose, is novel in the mediations that it displays, generates a question central to an understanding of her thought: the question of political ethics.¹ The key issue here is whether and in what sense Arendt’s political theory can incorporate an ethical component. It is commensurate with her anti-traditional approach that she does not appear to offer a political ethics of a conventional sort: she does not offer, that...

In keeping with her method more generally, Arendt’s conception of political ethics draws us back to the experiential field of politics itself and invites us to engage theoretically in a manner proximate with the contingent realm of appearances. The fact that this constitutes a form of intellectual resistance to both pre-political and supra-political criteria for establishing ethical precepts applicable to the public realm does not, however, entail the abandonment of any critical vocabulary. What is implied here is an immanent critical voice, demonstrating a greater modal proximity to the political itself, the kind of proximity that we have seen to...