Arendt und kein Ende? Representing the political in recent work on Hannah Arendt

Abstract

Arendt on the Political by David Arndt, Cambridge University Press. 2019. pp. x + 282.  $108 (hardcover). $32.99 (paperback or ebook)

Hannah Arendt by Samantha Rose Hill, Reaktion Books. 2021. pp. 232. $19 (paperback or ebook)

An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities by D.N. Rodowick, University of Chicago Press. 2021. pp. 224. $35 (hardcover). $28 (paperback). $34.99 (ebook)

Hannah Arendt: Die Kunst, politisch zu denken by Maike Weißpflug, Matthes & Seitz. 2019. pp. 318. €25 (hardcover)

To parody Goethe on Shakespeare: So much has already been said about Hannah Arendt that it might appear as though nothing more were left to say. But just as the authors of the Sturm und Drang recreated Shakespeare in their own image, Arendt's status as a talisman for different varieties of left-liberal politics, attempts to reframe her work as feminist, and varying assessments of her views on race might lead one to ask: If Arendt is the answer, what was the question again? Nonetheless, since the global resurgence of authoritarian populism as a challenge to self-assured post-Cold War liberal democracy and its own accompanying -isms, Arendt's focus on institutional structures and controls and her critique of an implicitly populist social revolution have found new relevance. Donald Trump's sudden appearance on the political scene and his unexpected election to the presidency have only enhanced her appeal; her classic political-historical study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, entered the New York Times bestseller list on January 18, 2017, just a few days before Trump's inauguration.

In the wake of that watershed moment in American politics came numerous new studies of Arendt with unambiguous connections to recent events. Perhaps the sharpest take on how those phenomena relate to more emancipatory democratic ideals is Adriana Cavarero's Surging Democracy (Stanford UP, 2021; Italian original, 2019), while the most cogent brief account of Arendt's relevance for US-American concerns today is Richard J. Bernstein's Why Read Hannah Arendt Now? (Polity, 2018). Dana Villa's comprehensive Arendt (published in 2021 in a series of Routledge volumes on philosophers and other thinkers) provides a thorough analytical review and comparison with recent strains of political thinking. More popularizing works include Ken Krimstein's graphic novel The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Anne Heberlein's On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt (Anansi, 2021; Swedish original, Mondial, 2020). As if to underscore the political resonance, the word “tyranny” in the English translation of Heberlein's title is substituted for “evil” (ondska) in the Swedish original, an older register of Arendt appreciation or appropriation. While an immediate political danger might have passed, the recent interest in Arendt evokes an ambiguous resonance with virtues that are, for Arendt at least, not always political virtues. In what follows, by comparing four books on Arendt from the time of or inspired by recent national and global political crises, I want to take stock of how the fascination with perceived Arendtian virtues creates a legacy that potentially distorts her thinking on the political. Arendt's acuity of vision and capacity for trenchant distinctions is still very much needed, even if it does not always obtain in attempts to honor that vision.

Politics in Arendt's sense is an activity based on opinion and persuasion, not upon what she understands as philosophical reason. Since there are no higher criteria for evaluating that speech (factual truth is another matter), there are effectively no criteria for political participation except adulthood in the conventional sense. As Arendt writes in her 1959 essay “Reflections on Little Rock,” equality “under modern conditions” is embodied in “the right to vote, according to which the judgment and opinion of the most exalted citizen are on a par with the judgment and opinion of the hardly literate” (204). While it might seem contrary to her way of writing about thinking and judgment in other texts, this statement is for Arendt an affirmation of the political realm as contrasted most controversially in that essay to her assigning primary and secondary education to the sphere of the social, based on selective association, affinity, and preference. Curiously enough, this distinction haunts recent work on Arendt not in competing theories of the political but in differing accounts of the humanities.

In Hannah Arendt on the Political, David Arndt's concern is to establish a clear understanding of what Arendt means by politics by situating her thought both in the context of her contemporaries and in the history of political thought. At the limits of Arendt's search for a “pure concept of the political,” as she puts it (quoted in Arndt 47), Arendt's political thought touches upon the genres and disciplines we think of as comprising the humanities: “non-philosophical literature, […] poetic, dramatic, historical, and political writings, whose articulation lifts experiences into a realm of splendor which is not the realm of conceptual thought” (Arendt, “What is Freedom?” 165; Arndt 47). In this spirit, Arndt's study serves as a valuable, systematic, and thorough reminder that Arendt's understanding of political action is not founded upon, grounded in, or derived from philosophical, ethical, or communicative norms. Her political thinking takes place in the medium of historical experience and factuality, and it expresses itself—as Maike Weißpflug's study also recalls—not in the normative discourse that joins Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Jürgen Habermas but rather in the representation of action. By raiding the storehouse of ideas and images found in the arts, particularly in narrative, Arendt's search for a pure concept of the political takes account of plurality. The impurity of Arendt's concept of the political comes not from a lack of desire to formalize a concept of the political but from the hybridity inherent to her insistence on its aesthetic and literary, that is, non-conceptual, representation. Arndt seems to argue that one can nonetheless refine a concept of the political on the basis of this always hybrid representation. While it remains a point of Arendtian doctrine in Arndt, who has different concerns, Weißpflug's study will elaborate on the hybrid representation of the political in Arendt's literary readings.

Having taken on what is for Arendt a near-impossible task, Arndt executes his plan with considerable aplomb and an equally considerable number of numbered lists. The contrasts he produces in his attempt to build an Arendtian concept of the political make for a reliable guide through the Western tradition and recent political thought. That project alone makes Arendt on the Political an invaluable tool for cross-referencing Arendt's writings with those of her better-known readers (such as Seyla Benhabib, George Kateb, Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves, Peg Birmingham, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Pitkin, and Dana Villa) and theorists or philosophers who have specific affinities to or differences from her thinking, both contemporaries (not just Martin Heidegger and the inevitable Carl Schmitt, but also Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel Foucault, and Michael Oakeshott) and epigones of these modern currents of political and moral thought.

Arndt sees hope for the current political crisis in a rediscovery of “what Arendt called the lost treasure of the American Revolution—the public happiness of political action” (1). This is an Arendtian insight into the contingency and rarity of politics as she understands it: “Politics as such has existed so rarely and in so few places that, historically speaking, only a few great epochs have known it and turned it into a reality” (Arendt, Human Condition 199; quoted in Arndt 74−75). Hope refers to the recovery of this political treasure and implicitly to Arendt's technique of cultural memory, which, as she puts it in her essay on her friend Walter Benjamin, is a kind of diving for pearls, the retrieval of sunken treasure that has transformed with the loss of traditional authority and historical continuity into, as she quotes Shakespeare, “something rich and strange” (“Walter Benjamin” 135−36). The only one of the four works under review that does justice to this task is the study by Weißpflug, whose sensitive reading of Arendt on literature and politics I will come to last.

Arndt's final chapter, on the Declaration of Independence and “the lost heritage of the revolution” (256), foregrounds Arendt's claim that the American founders failed to adapt political concepts such as law and freedom to the character of their political experience, that is, to take that step beyond the conceptual to represent the experience of action and freedom. Arndt underscores Arendt's point that the classical political ideals of isonomia and isegoria, equality under the law and in public speech, are aimed at political participation in a space where such participation is meaningful: no freedom without political space, no political space without freedom. That reflection invites the conclusion that the American founders failed to create such a space at all, programming the conflict of the political and the social that would afflict Arendt's take on the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. That overlap or clash between experience and conceptuality is perhaps how we get essays such as “Reflections on Little Rock,” a critique of federally mandated school integration in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education in which Arendt's rigid division of space into the political, the social, and the private stumbles over the historical experience of others who have developed other forms of response and priorities for action.

These distinctions among social, political, and private spaces seem to trouble Samantha Rose Hill, whose biography of Arendt appeared in 2019 in the Reaktion Books series. Overall, Hill's book is an informative and coherent narrative of Arendt's life and key ideas. Hill's account relies heavily on Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography For Love of the World, first published in 1982 (2nd ed. 2004), while incorporating a select few other sources. As a brief biography, Hill's book does its job admirably. Nonetheless, the text is marred by some howlers, including a reference to Heidegger's joining the “National Socialist Democratic Party” (40−41) or a reference to David Ben Gurion as Prime Minister of Israel—at the Biltmore Conference in 1942, before the state of Israel existed. More importantly, there is some orthographically and conceptually mangled German, most prominently as concerns Arendt's distinction of public, private, and social spaces: “In German, she translated these spaces into raumen [sic], or ‘rooms’” (139). The question of space and spaces is crucial for Arendt's way of thinking. However, mainly because of a lack of attention to Arendt's practice of drawing sometimes controversial distinctions, Hill does not do justice to this question. (Neither does D.N. Rodowick as I shall explain later.)

As mentioned above, the distinction among the public, the social, and the private is the central organizing principle of “Reflections on Little Rock.” There, it does the work ordinarily reserved at that time not just for Southern segregationists but for the liberal moderates Martin Luther King Jr. addresses in “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” Arendt locates the education of children in the space of the social, the realm in which one chooses one's company freely, and warns that federally mandated school integration forces developments beyond the pace of social evolution. Hill seems to go out of her way to make a point out of what could have been just another phase in the biographical narrative. While she refers to “many scholars” who “have addressed Hannah Arendt's work on race” (151) or her “racialized language” (221), these scholars are unnamed. One very citable example would have been Kathryn Sophia Belle's study Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (as Kathryn T. Gines, 2014), which appears only in the 17 “Selected Books about Hannah Arendt” at the end of the volume. However, problems arise here not because Hill neglects the question of race but because she deals with it in a way that does justice neither to Arendt's point of view nor to the clash of her concepts with American political and social experience, the crux of understanding the political for Arendt.

Hill's treatment of the complex issues raised by “Reflections on Little Rock” is singularly maladroit. After referring to attempts to rescue Arendt's essay or reconcile it with progressive social concerns, Hill writes the following: “For Arendt, the rhetoric of equality is dangerous to democratic political life, and she consistently argued that men would only ever be equal in the sense that they were unequal. She wagered that even if social, economic and educational equality were achieved in the United States, it would increase discrimination against black people” (152). Readers of Arendt will recognize some important themes here, such as the distinction between equality and sameness; or that between social and political equality, a distinction Hill makes two pages before; or the idea of unintended consequences of good intentions. However, the failure to contextualize Arendt's argument about compulsory federal integration results in a passage that is so confused and contradictory in itself that it is hard to evaluate for accuracy: “In dismissing equality from politics, Arendt saw no distinction in the plight of oppressed peoples who were excluded from the realm of public appearances. And in doing so, one might argue, she overlooked the particular conditions of oppression to argue in favour of a universal good, one that is founded on discrimination” (152). This passage seems to conflate Arendt's version of American federalism and her pessimism about the exertion of federal power with the cynical evocation of states’ rights by segregationists, but its opening claim that Arendt “dismiss[es] equality from politics” is simply wrong.

On the question of equality, even in “Reflections on Little Rock,” Arendt is categorical; she states that “equality as such is of greater importance in the political life of a republic than in any other form of government” and (with Alexis de Tocqueville) that “equality of opportunity and condition, as well as equality of rights, constituted the basic ‘law’ of American democracy” (“Little Rock” 200). The very distinction between the political and the social that is central to that essay and the source of its controversy collapses here as Hill confuses social equality with political equality. What that “universal good, founded on discrimination” might be remains undefined and would perhaps resist any definition, as the political is for Arendt by definition plural, not aimed at the realization of a universal good.

Whether or not one agrees fully with Kathryn Belle's plausible conclusion that Arendt “affirm[s] a negative image of Blackness that persists in the white imagination” (Gines 129), Arendt's position needs to be more carefully considered, contextualized, and contested. Arendt's treatment of Blackness in political, social, educational, or any kind of space needs to be foregrounded, especially as Arendt's encounters with the civil rights and Black Power movements elicit more reactive statements on her part, particularly in On Violence (1970), rather than an opening on Arendt's part to the Black experience in the United States. Understanding “why Arendt now” should take her recalcitrance on these issues into account, especially as “now” is not just a time of radical and violent right-wing resurgence but also the era of Black Lives Matter. Rather than seeing Arendt simply as an astute diagnostician of fascism or a champion of the liberal constitutional order, to “think with Arendt against Arendt,” as Richard Bernstein proposes in this context, might provide a more interesting version of current political and social phenomena (Bernstein 52). At the same time, there is hardly consensus on what it means to think with Arendt, as her name is taken to endorse very different versions of her project.

D.N. Rodowick's An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities deploys the Arendtian account of education as belonging implicitly to social space while seeming to claim political value for that space on Arendt's terms. If David Arndt offers a painstakingly precise, comparative account of Arendt's concept of the political, the kind of solution Rodowick imputes to Arendt for the political crisis of our own time is not, on her terms, political. He ascribes to Arendt the “implicit yet persistent suggestion that an education in the humanities is the only appropriate response to the crisis in culture that concerns her” (xv) and develops that thought in a consideration of the humanities that seeks to make conversation and teaching about judgments of taste, an “education in judgment,” the necessary response to the crisis with which he is concerned. However, attentive readers of Arendt will note that this crisis is not the crisis with which Arendt was concerned. It is neither the crisis of tradition, nor the crisis of education, nor the crisis of culture.

By the time one arrives at the fifth of Rodowick's six chapters, “Politics and Philosophy, or Restoring a Common World,” on Arendt's essays “Philosophy and Politics” (written 1954) and “Truth and Politics” (first published 1967), this concern with the crisis of our times is apparent, in particular with the fake news and alternative facts that, for Rodowick, characterize the political class rather than simply marking the nature or the risks of politics: The “principally prevaricating politicians” contribute to the creation of a “factual world” marked by “lies, damn lies, and deep fakes” (117). This concern with the crisis of our own times unfortunately has a distorting effect on Rodowick's reading of Arendt from the beginning. Rather than make a distinction between Arendt's thinking and what he sees as a suitable response to our crisis, Rodowick elides or collapses Arendt's main distinctions, in particular, between private, social, and political spaces. This collapse is marked symptomatically and semantically by the use of two terms Arendt conspicuously criticizes in her political thought: education and philosophy. I will address his use of “philosophy” first.

Toward the end of An Education in Judgment, references to Arendt's desire for a new kind of political philosophy become more frequent and more essential to the text's argument. In her 1964 interview with Günter Gaus, Arendt identifies a hostility to politics that marks philosophy since Plato, a point she made in the much earlier “Philosophy and Politics.” Since Rodowick notes this as a tension between philosophical truth and politics in that essay, his statements that, in “Philosophy and Politics,” Arendt is “searching for a new political philosophy, that is, a politics that arises from and in a practice of philosophy that directs its attention to the myriad interconnected actions of humans engaged in their daily affairs” (113) and that she “asks for a new political philosophy that arises out of thoughtful attention to the fact of human plurality” (115) are surprising. He also imputes to Arendt—affirmatively from his point of view—a body of work that “shrinks the distance separating philosophy and politics” (Rodowick 114). Anyone familiar with Arendt's work—including that 1954 lecture—knows that Arendt's distinction between political philosophy and political theory is not merely a frivolous use of semantics. As she writes in “Truth and Politics,” a tyranny of “truth” (her scare quotes) would be “as tyrannical as other forms of despotism” (246). In “Philosophy and Politics,” philosophy is opposed to politics not accidentally but inherently. The “tyranny of truth” is Arendt's name for the claim of philosophers, beginning with Plato but including the entire tradition until Kant, that “eternal truth […] is to rule the city” (Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics” 78). Her refusal of claims that philosophical concepts or ideas supersede communication and persuasion, the work of politics, is what makes her not a philosopher but a political theorist. In the 1964 interview with Gaus, she refuses even his attempts to label her a philosopher: “The philosopher stands in relation to nature in the same way as all other human beings. When he thinks about [nature], he speaks in the name of all of humanity. But he is not neutral in relation to politics. Not since Plato!” For this reason, Arendt tells Gaus, she has “said [her] final farewell to philosophy” (“der Philosophie endgültig Valet gesagt”). Rodowick's insistent use of “philosophy” to designate Arendt's project is also not just a semantic difference; it indicates other category mistakes and terminological slippages that, in spite of his sensitivity to the Arendtian problematic, undermine his treatment of Arendt and the humanities.

While these uses of “philosophy” indicate a certain pattern of misprision of Arendt's conception of the political—a misprision that marks this study from the beginning—the main conceptual interloper in Rodowick's account is of course the term “education.” He attempts to counter “the erosion of the possibility of politics,” as he sees it, through an (imaginary) philosophy-recuperating version of Arendt, whose task is “to ask philosophy to rededicate itself to one of its most ancient responsibilities, which is care of the polis through education in judgment” (Rodowick 113). An education in judgment has to do with conversations in public space modeled on “the public performance of thinking (call this teaching)” (27), which Rodowick associates with Socrates. The current crisis in politics reflects a lack of or falling away from such education, and “the crisis in culture and the crisis in education are synonymous with the loss of a common world” (116).¹ Such passages are typical of Rodowick's style, which equates rather than distinguishes. Arendt sees such exemplary acts of thinking as pre- or para-political since “teaching by example” is the only way philosophy can influence action “without violating the rules of the political realm” (“Truth and Politics” 243). However, Arendt writes, because philosophical truth is not taken seriously enough today, “even this rare chance of having a philosophical truth politically validated has disappeared” (“Truth and Politics” 244). Arendt also has in mind not the Socratic elenchus itself (a case of thinking as distinct from acting) but only Socrates’s acceptance of the death sentence. “Care of the polis through education in judgment” is therefore problematic enough as a response to today's crises, much less as a responsibility of philosophy, but this task defines the book's agenda. “Care of the polis”—by whom? one might ask. If judgment is modeled by public teaching in the form of the Socratic dialogue, the answer is still Plato. The polis must first be educated if it is to be saved.

This agenda becomes clearer when education in judgment is linked to citizenship. If citizenship means the right to full political participation, then Rodowick sees judgments of taste not as influencing action but as deciding who enters the political realm in the first place. The goal of the education in judgment that takes place in “intersubjective conversations about taste, or, better, in disagreements about meaning and value in literature, art, or philosophy” (Rodowick 27) is to establish shared standards for participation in those very disagreements through “criteria for defining what it means to be a thoughtful and responsible citizen in local and global communities of human existence” (27). The mix of citizenship and humanity, the local and the global, and, implicitly, the political and the notion of community should alert the reader that this is at best an unorthodox reading of Arendt, but the real question perhaps concerns the limits of community.

In Rodowick's model of “local and global” communities and lifelong education, the community seems to have neither spatial nor temporal limits beyond which social space would become political space. Even if Rodowick means education as a non-authoritarian practice, a conversation among equals, some of whom are nonetheless exemplary teachers, it is not just the space of education (for Arendt, whether as thinking or Wissenschaft, outside of politics) that is at issue here but the time of education. In view of the proposition that education is a response to crisis, the omission of any careful consideration of Arendt's “The Crisis in Education” (1954) is remarkable. Like “Little Rock,” “The Crisis in Education” is built around distinctions between childhood and adulthood, which now include authority and natality, conservation and destruction, and the old and the new. Education, says Arendt, is for children; it ends with the age of effective adulthood. In “Little Rock” as in “The Crisis in Education,” Arendt holds that human children mature at a certain age into human adults and that the idea of education, which is based on authority and ends at that conventional age of adulthood, is alien to the sphere of politics, which is based on freedom, natality, and the accident of sharing the same space. Read against “The Crisis in Education,” Rodowick's claim that Arendt's response to crisis takes the form of more education suggests that a response to crisis could be, for Arendt at least, apolitical, but it is the very distinction between education and political action that is most elusive in his study.

The second form of crisis Rodowick mentions refers to Arendt's 1960 essay “The Crisis in Culture.” In that essay, Arendt treats some very contemporary cultural issues while integrating them into her perennial story about judgment and action, which I will sketch below indirectly in addressing Rodowick's version of it. She advances neither a theory of beauty (beauty is self-evident, she says) nor a theory of culture per se. Instead, she deals with the process of judgment in which people orient themselves toward art objects as a means of constituting community. Arendt's clearest opening to culture on political terms comes as she writes, “Culture and politics […] belong together because it is not knowledge or truth which is at stake, but rather judgment and decision, the judicious exchange of opinion about the sphere of public life and the common world, and the decision what manner of action is to be taken in it, as well as to how it is to look henceforth, what kind of things are to appear in it” (“The Crisis in Culture” 219−20). This first moment of the parallel between aesthetic and political judgment concerns things and appearances. The second moment concerns a community of people who “can feel that they belong to each other, when they discover a kinship in terms of what pleases and displeases.” Arendt continues: “From the viewpoint of this common experience, it is as though taste decides not only how the world is to look, but also who belongs together in it” (220; my emphasis). The principle of association and affinity comes to the fore here, as this “kinship” is a form not of negotiating plurality but of self-disclosure and group identification through the objects present in public spaces.

The conjunction of the “what” and the “who” in parallel acts of judgment leads Rodowick to the kind of move that typifies his study: the obliteration of the “as though” and the consequent assertion, in this case, that taste is simply and directly political, constituting “a solidarity of sensibility, a company of critics” as “a kind of polis” (55), thereby making politics analogous to criticism not in how it depends on acts of judgment but in how it constitutes itself—education is after all, for Rodowick, the “care of the polis.” The notion of the care of the polis comes out in Rodowick's discussion of “The Crisis in Culture” in the idea of curation, here meaning decisions about what belongs to the public cultural sphere, as an activity relevant for the political. Decisions about belonging in public and political space appear in Arendt as a propaedeutic exercise for politics, but not its essence, which is marked by the givenness of who is present and the capacity to think on behalf of those who are absent. In this context, the problematic resonances of the historically recent term “curation” and its more recent expansion into all areas of life (“curated” playlists, restaurant menus, holiday experiences…) are lost on Rodowick, who seems determined to see aesthetic education as compatible with political pluralism, action, and freedom as Arendt understands them.² In this case, curation is the decision not only about what belongs but also about who belongs in that space, a decision that he views as ultimately rooted in concepts of a humanity and community or communities yet to come that will strike some readers as non- or even anti-Arendtian.

Being humani generis is for Rodowick, again in contrast to Arendt, not a given characteristic of people but the achievement of or at least progress toward an only potential humanity, and so it is a matter of humanity not as human beings (Arendt's distinction between “der Mensch” or “die Menschheit” as the subject of philosophy and “die Menschen” as the subject of politics) but as a quality.³ Rodowick's elaboration of this question begins with Kant's question “Was ist der Mensch?” and proposes that Arendt sets out to answer it. Reading Arendt, one might want to agree, as she refers to the “public-political realm” as the space in which “men attain their full humanity, their full reality as men because they not only are […] but appear” (“Philosophy and Politics” 87). However, Rodowick reads becoming human in a deliberate deviation from Kant not in terms of the finite rational animal but as an entelechy—education is once more primary—toward which one develops. As the first of eight theses laid out in chapter 2 has it, “One is not born human; one must strive to become human” (26). The primacy of development or becoming in Rodowick's “perfectionist reading of Kant” (71) also suggests why, at the other end of his ruminations, education has something to do with natality in the conventional sense as birth and growth. For Rodowick, the developmental process is open and open-ended—the human being is according to the title of the final chapter “An As Yet Undetermined Animal”—and so the educational process is also potentially endless, yet it always aims purposefully at the actualization of a humanity not in the common world of politics but as the condition for the possibility of the political or at least as its conditio sine qua non.

Rodowick's citation, in his conclusion, of the conservative columnist David Brooks on the need for more, better paideia (education in the classical sense as linked to the development of maturity) is perhaps more telling than he thinks. There is a kind of negative principle of authority here: not education as to how the common world is, as Arendt saw the task of education, in preparation for the freedom and equality of inevitable—not aspirational—adulthood, but the refusal of political enfranchisement through its reduction to paideia or Erziehung, the term for childrearing and primary and secondary education Arendt uses in the German original version of “The Crisis in Education” and, applied to Rodowick, something perhaps closer to Friedrich Schiller's “ästhetische Erziehung der Menschheit.” Since, according to Arendt, education is rooted only in an authority that precludes political adulthood, it cannot be part of a political response to a crisis, even if that means breaking with our own cherished notions concerning the centrality of education to political life and action.⁴

In “What is Authority?” Arendt writes that, after the historical crisis that has put an end to authority, “[i]t could be that only now will the past open up to us with unexpected freshness and tell us things no one has yet had ears to hear” (“What is Authority” 94). Maike Weißpflug attempts to understand this communication in terms of the media and genres referred to by David Arndt, the core of the humanities that Rodowick's philosophical account of the humanities largely avoids, the “non-philosophical literature, […] poetic, dramatic, historical, and political writings” that reach beyond the conceptual realm (Arendt, “What is Freedom?” 165). Where Rodowick defined his own task as being to “rebalance philosophically the relation between aesthetics and politics in Arendt's account of judgment, especially as a practice of curation, world-building, and ethical revision” (Rodowick xvii), Weißpflug returns to the Arendtian concept of world as that which is given between and among people as a frame of reference and a space of the experience of freedom. On this account, philosophy is not the solution for politics. Rather, Weißpflug argues, political thought presents a therapeutic proposition for philosophy, to cure it of its abstraction and link it, especially through narrative literature, to the experience of freedom. This move recalls that philosophy is for Arendt part of the complex of the humanities, not a magisterial science that needs to be recuperated in order to save politics.

Early in her study, Weißpflug emphasizes Arendt's figure of the Perlentaucher, the pearl diver who seeks an “alternative Ideengeschichte” (Weißpflug 29), and its relationship to Walter Benjamin's concept of montage. Weißpflug presents her own readings, including “Little Rock,” as a sympathetic working-through (perhaps still on the model of therapy) of Arendt's praxis of thinking politically.

As the second of the three major sections of Weißpflug's study demonstrates, Arendt's thinking of the particular through appearances redefines what the humanities are good for. The representation of “world” in Arendt's sense (not Kant's Weltbürger or, as Arendt calls it, Weltbetrachter) through “storytelling” (Weißpflug uses the English term) assumes that the political is constituted narratively (Weißpflug 196). If we follow Arendt's curious idea that even language-based works of art have and preserve the splendor, the “beauty, that is to say, radiant glory” associated with action (“The Crisis in Culture” 215), then the kernel of experience preserved as memory can—like the work of Benjamin's historical materialist—be recovered in remembrance as if this were a kind of aesthetic act. But the judgment here is not of taste. Rather, it is the identification and recovery of “world,” a relation in which people are present together but with space that both divides and unites them, which Arendt calls “interest” from inter-esse, to be between. In discussing Arendt's readings of Homer, Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Bertolt Brecht, Weißpflug addresses and revises critiques of Arendt's style of reading as she shifts their focus, for example, from Melville's Captain Vere, the mouthpiece of Arendt's praise of the “lasting institutions” of the American Revolution (On Revolution 81), to the eponymous hero of the novel, Billy Budd. The final subsection, entitled “Erzählen als Urteilen,” incorporates Walter Benjamin's thinking and argues for Arendt's proximity to her friend's sensibilities and way of reading, attributing to Arendt not the reduction of politics to aesthetic judgment but, with Benjamin, the desire to politicize aesthetics. Whether that project quite jibes with Arendt's remarks on politics as a limit to aesthetic judgment in “The Crisis in Culture” is another question. Weißpflug performs the great service of reminding us that Arendt's version of narrative and criticism comes out of a radical tradition and that Arendt is not simply “a midcult Mitteleuropean media performer, an intellectually more respectable version of Ayn Rand,” as Jenny Turner describes the low opinion of Arendt taken by unnamed serious philosophers in Arendt's lifetime (Turner). That such a perceptive and incisive consideration of Arendt and the humanities comes in a dissertation in political theory (moreover one written at a technical university, the RWTH in Aachen) should give professional humanists something to reflect upon.

The third and shortest major section of Weißpflug's study takes up the question of thinking within limits, as Arendt puts it in her correspondence, “limitiert denken lernen” (quoted in Weißpflug 234), a position from which Weißpflug joins a specifically Arendtian version of Heidegger's “Welterschliessung” to the question of the Anthropocene. Arendt's narrative in The Human Condition of the dream of technical mastery and individual, human insignificance in the modern world appears here in a defense of the humanities as a remedy for such fantasies of control. Weißpflug also articulates a theory of Arendtian worldliness that includes nature—not as a real or deeper interpretation of Arendt but, on the textual level, in the ambivalence of her own understanding of the human–nature relationship. In a fascinating mix of Arendt's readings of Alexandre Koyré, Karl Marx, and others, Weißpflug shows how Arendt's Vita activa (which is more than just a German version of The Human Condition) can connect with and critique current models of ecological concern. She finds precisely in the tension between spatially limited and unlimited models and kinds of action the possibility that nature itself can enter the political stage and become a political actor (Akteur 267). She locates any possible political normativity neither in an ethical position of the observer nor in an imagined future discursive community of human beings on whatever scale but rather in a “normativity of opening” (268) and a plurality of narratives of the Anthropocene.

This normative openness and plurality connect natural sciences, humanities, and public participation (“öffentliches Engagement”) with each other under the aegis of Arendt's mediatization (not mediation) of the political through the products of the arts, not master narratives or centralized norms. The kind of work being done in science and technology studies using Arendt as inspiration or foil (for instance, by Sheila Jasanoff) is not cited here except through an allusion to the “participatory turn” that breaks down the barrier between experts and the general public (271), but it is clear that science here is already political and therefore, for Arendt, open to the means and media of the humanities. Weißpflug's study is itself so rich in detail, so thorough in its treatment of Arendt and her world, and so thoughtful in its consideration of the possibility of the humanities that one could easily take it to a desert island—or a fallout shelter—and have some sense that Arendt speaks to us today precisely through the question of the humanities as a form in which we understand ourselves in our plurality and our world in all its complexity.

The kind of teaching by example to which Rodowick refers pertains for Arendt not so much to the philosopher (as I note above, Arendt says that nobody takes philosophers seriously enough anymore) but to examples that “derive from history and poetry” and invoke the mimetic and representational properties of art in order to “teach or persuade by inspiration”: Courage means to be like Achilles, kindness means to imitate Jesus of Nazareth or St. Francis, and so on (“Truth and Politics” 243−44). One sees in Arendt how teaching becomes political insofar as its nature changes in the political realm from authority to persuasion, but also how politics and the humanities intersect around rhetorical and literary forms and practices.

That competing accounts of the humanities should be a significant part of the response to the political question “Why Arendt now?” says more about the value of the humanities today than do attempts to tease out the relevance of the cultural values that have always been the Achilles heel of humanist apologetics. Arendt's refusal of the label of philosopher implies a criticism of the values-based approach that would elevate truth or other measures—goodness, beauty, sweetness and light, for example—to the position of arbiters of the political (see “The Crisis in Culture” 200−201). The tension between thinking and acting that marks the relationship between philosophy and politics is productive, but freedom, that is, the possibility of action, is always primary.