David Antonini - Public Space and Political Experience - An Arendtian Interpretation-Lexington Books (2021)

Public Space and
Political Experience
Public Space and
An Arendtian Interpretation
David Antonini
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Contents
Introduction 1
1 Modernity and the Need of Political Experience 9
2 Arendt’s Phenomenological Concept of Action, Part I 29
3 Arendt’s Phenomenological Concept of Action, Part II 47
4 Arendt’s Political Concept of Action, Part I: Revolution 69
5 Arendt’s Political Concept of Action, Part II: Civil
Disobedience 91
6 Political Speech as Horizontal Political Experience:
Judgment and Opinion Formation 117
Conclusion 147
Bibliography 153
Index 157
About the Author 163
v
Introduction
It would be difficult to overstate the timeliness of Hannah Arendt’s thought

to present global political circumstances because of the eerie similarities
between contemporary circumstances and the time period in Europe during
which Arendt lived and wrote. Though few would suggest we are witnessing
a resurgence of totalitarian governments in the degree to which they resorted
to terror and violence in the twentieth century, the past five years has none-
theless seen a resurgence of right-wing populism from the Brexit vote in the
United Kingdom to Donald Trump’s election in the United States. Though
these are the most visible examples of right-wing movements for observers
of Western politics, such movements are not limited by geography: Erdogan
in Turkey, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Duterte in the Philippines indicate that
the rise of right-wing populist sentiment is a global phenomenon, leav-
ing political theorists and historians scrambling to interpret these turbulent
political circumstances. Indeed, the rise of such populist movements has led
some to postulate whether the very project of democracy is dying before
our eyes.1 Moreover, within the current global political context, especially
within so-called liberal democracies, to assert that, for the average citizen,
public discourse about matters of shared concern is regarded as toxic or as
an exercise in partisan bickering is uncontroversial. What this might indicate,
following an Arendtian insight, is that we currently have no sense of a shared
world together and have become alienated from that which binds us together:
a common world. The primacy of a horizontal, political relation wherein we
speak to one another and not at or against each other is in urgent need of
articulation and for this, I submit, we urgently need the thought of Hannah
Arendt.
One of her most prevalent explanations for why there is a deep failure
to recognize the commonality of our world is that modernity is chiefly
1
2 Introduction
characterized by a turning away from that which is common and toward

ourselves. Thus, if it is true that contemporary citizens do not recognize
anything like a shared world, if we are estranged from that which makes it
possible to have a unique perspective at all, then our deep hostility toward
one another in the political realm is unsurprising. In other words, if our
unique perspectives cannot be assumed to be about something shared and
common, then all we have are multifarious private perspectives that are not,
politically speaking, about anything. We each of us individually take our
private perspectives to constitute the totality of what counts as “real” and
remain isolated in that perspective; there is nothing seen as common that
can function to enliven public debate. In the absence of this commonality,
each perspective is free to treat itself as the only “legitimate” one that ought
to be considered. Reflecting upon the conditions that present themselves
in mass society, Arendt envisions a situation in which “men have become
entirely private, that is, they have been deprived of seeing and hearing oth-
ers, of being seen and being heard by them. They are imprisoned in the
subjectivity of their own singular experience.”2 I contend that one of the
most urgent challenges citizens face if we wish to retain any meaningful
sense of shared life together is to rethink what it means to speak and act
together politically.
Given this background and context, the main line of argumentation for this
book takes as its founding premise that modern subjects interpret and experi-
ence the political as somehow alienating or other—as a form of experience
that is not fundamental but is only significant as a means to some further end.
It is common in late modern societies to think of the political as subservient
to economic and social ends, and to make it so. Citizens are alienated from
the political insofar as there is nothing common that binds them together.
Without a common world between them, they cannot be situated in human
plurality, one of the conditions Arendt stipulates as fundamental to human
existence. There is nothing against which modern subjects can experience
themselves as distinct and, consequently, they remain free to treat their
private subjectivities as the totality of what counts as real. The political
is experienced as instrumental because the category of process dominates
modern subjects’ interpretation of their experience. That is to say, politics
is conceived of as participation in the same repetitive processes: process
begets process and politics is not thought of as a realm of human significance.
Perhaps the most prevalent example of politics as a repetitive process is seen
in the endless campaign and electoral cycles wherein one election supposedly
ends and the next morning campaigning for the next one begins. In conjunc-
tion, these problems of alienation and instrumentality comprise the political
predicament that modernity poses. This is the background against which any
sense of meaningful political experience must be understood.
Introduction 3
This book addresses two major problems in light of this alienated and
instrumental concept of politics: the erosion of distinctly political experience
in modernity and the attempt to show how such experience can be recovered.
By erosion I mean both the deterioration of the “public space,” a political
concept that can be found in the thought of Hannah Arendt, and the general
impoverishment of political discourse. I argue, with Arendt, that political
experience is recoverable through articulating a concept of the public space.
In six chapters, I present an argument that builds upon Arendt’s concept of
the public space where each chapter is a necessary step in a trajectory toward
understanding how the public space can be maintained amidst times in which
citizens are alienated from political life.
Generally speaking, the concept of the “public space” or “public sphere”
as it is also referred to, is central to democratic and liberal political theory in
the twentieth century.3 Moreover, the concept of the public space is especially
prominent in the political thought of Hannah Arendt as well, though Arendt’s
thought does not fit neatly into any particular school of thought within politi-
cal theory. Indeed, one might argue that her political thought, beginning with
the work on totalitarianism, is a consistent attempt to recover the public space
from its loss in modernity and to show how it can be created, preserved, and
maintained. I seek to follow that very path through Arendt’s thought, using
the concept of the public space as a locus of interpretation. In other words, I
seek to show, through the interpretation of several Arendtian texts, how this
concept, though undergoing shifts in emphasis, remains one of the central
motifs throughout her thought. According to how Arendt developed this
concept, my book contains six major chapters and I divide it according to the
following interpretive development: (1) the necessity of the public space is
demonstrated through showing how it has been lost—its necessity is shown
through the presence of its absence; (2) the possibility of recovering the pub-
lic space is shown through a reading of Arendt’s concept of action as new
beginning; (3) the opening up and reclamation of the public space is shown
through a reading of Arendt’s work on revolution and civil disobedience;
(4) the maintenance and preservation of the public space is shown through
reading Arendt’s work on judgment and opinion where the claim is that
political speech is the capacity needed to keep the public space in existence.
Ultimately, I hope to show that the progression from necessity and recov-
ery to creation and preservation is a useful schematic for understanding the
development of the public space in Arendt’s thought. As a whole, my major
objective is to show that political experience is a possibility within the prob-
lematic trends of modernity and that this possibility can only be established
through a philosophy of the public space. My project is, therefore, at once
an interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s political thought and an opportunity to
understand how her thought can help to revive a distinct sense of political life
4 Introduction
that is urgently needed by contemporary citizens. The rest of the introduction

serves as a preview and outline of the major arguments of each chapter while
also showing how each is connected to the next.
Chapter 1 demonstrates the philosophical salience of the notion of the
public space by showing the presence of its absence in modernity. I draw
on Arendt’s critique of modernity in one of her major works, The Human
Condition, to identify the two major problems that undermine citizens’ orien-
tation toward political experience—world alienation and the logic of process.
The former refers to modern citizens lacking a world shared between them
that they hold in common. The latter refers to the sense that modern subjects’
basic orientation to experience requires interpreting it through the category
of process, as a series of means begetting means, if they are to “fit into”
modern conditions. Notably, the logic of process is internal to the modern
development of the activity of laboring, which displaces end-oriented work,
and indeed the category of “end” within work. Furthermore, this does not
allow for the possibility of anything new of human significance to appear in
the world.
In chapter 1, I aim to show that these problems of world alienation and the
logic of process are political. Thus, my basic aim will be to show, first, that
the existential counterpart to these problems is the demise of what Arendt
calls “human plurality”: a fundamental condition of human existence that is
realized in human beings appearing to one another in a world held in com-
mon. Second, I will show that these problems must be remedied by a robust
sense of political experience. Chapters 2 and 3 show how political experi-
ence appears as a possibility against the background of Arendt’s critique of
modernity by attending to the features of her phenomenological concept of
action in The Human Condition. Following an important trend in the sec-
ondary literature, I will refer to her concept of action as a “constellation”
concept, which is to say that it is not a determinate concept, organizing the
material it approaches in advance, but, rather, phenomenological in the sense
that it shows how the different “moments” of action appear in the world.
No moment of action is subsumed under a general concept of what action
is. Rather, action in Arendt combines temporally and spatially separated
moments that are nonetheless intimately connected to each other. Chapters
2 and 3 identify and analyze seven moments of Arendt’s concept of action
in The Human Condition: plurality, the disclosure of the agent in the act, the
web of human relationships, narration, power, the “space of appearances,”
and freedom. I show that only as a constellation concept does action take on
the significance of new beginning in Arendt. The new beginning, ontologi-
cally rooted in human beings’ capacity for action, reveals the possibility of
their freedom to act. I focus upon the performative sense of action, which has
been contrasted in the secondary literature on Arendt with an expressivist
Introduction 5
concept that presupposes the self coming into appearance through the expres-
sion. The performative concept links the actor who appears only in and
through the act with action’s phenomenological character: that it cannot
be understood through a motive or anticipated result but only in its appear-
ance. This allows us to remain focused upon the significance of action as
new beginning. Chapters 2 and 3 therefore show that the inner connections
of action as appearance, performance, and new beginning are crucial to the
demonstration of how political experience is possible in modernity. In sum,
the public space can only be opened up through appearing to one another in
action as free, unencumbered by the categories of means and ends that have
succumbed to the logic of process.
At this juncture—in the transition from chapter 3 to 4—I will need to con-
nect Arendt’s phenomenological concept of action in The Human Condition
to a political concept of action that can demonstrate actual historical instances
of action as new beginnings. Chapters 4 and 5 show that these are found pri-
marily in her book On Revolution and her essay “Civil Disobedience.” The
movement from the phenomenological to the political concepts of action in
chapters 2–5 comprises the longest portion of the book. Here I am engaged
in the strongest interpretation of Arendt’s thought that I can muster in order
to realize my major objectives: demonstrating the possibility and the actuality
of political experience in modernity.
The goal of chapters 4 and 5, then, is to offer a political articulation of
action through an examination of the two historical exemplars that Arendt
herself set forth: revolution and civil disobedience. I will show that Arendt
does have a concept of political action in which the possibility of movement
within the problems of modernity can be seen. Thus I argue that revolution
and civil disobedience are exemplary forms of political action. First, I follow
Arendt’s unique reading of the American Revolution as revolutionary experi-
ence that opened up a new space where freedom could arise. To demonstrate
the true political significance of revolution in Arendt’s sense, I must once
again show that it is a constellation of moments, each of which can be treated
separately so long as their connections are brought into view. Thus the goal
of each section will be to demonstrate the interconnectedness of each moment
with the next. I will extract what I call “the politically salient content” of each
moment so that the structural features of the revolutionary experience come
forth. In this, I aim to counter the tendency of some commentators that read
Arendt through the lens of the retrospective historian. In other words, I link
the political text to Arendt’s method of historical phenomenology, to show
that she unearths the structural features of historical events. On this basis, I
ask what the relevance of these past events is for contemporary citizens.
In this context, chapter 5 turns to her essay on civil disobedience to pres-
ent an exemplar of political action that is not a new beginning in the sense
6 Introduction
of founding a new body politic—as in the case of the American revolution-

ary experience in her interpretation—but that reveals the possibility of new
beginnings within the conditions of an existing modern state. With Arendt,
the proper interpretation of the phenomenon of civil disobedience, which
she witnessed in the period of the American civil rights and anti-war move-
ments, is that it can demonstrate how political action and power appear within
already existing states. It is the action citizens engage in that renews the pub-
lic space in which freedom can arise. Here I will follow a recent reading of
Arendt in which the phenomenon of founding (exemplified in the founding
of the new body politic in her thought on revolution) is, like every instance of
founding, a re-founding. Thus power in Arendt’s sense—the power to bring
into existence the public space where freedom can arise—does not have to
mean the foundation of a new body politic. Rather, acts of civil disobedience
reaffirm the “constituting” power of people as the source of legitimacy of the
political institutions of the modern state. The major argument of chapter 5
will be that civil disobedience is one of the most efficacious forms of political
action for citizens in the modern state.
Nonetheless, I need an articulation of the public space and of political
experience that can demonstrate how the former can remain in existence and
the latter can continue to appear. Put succinctly: whereas revolution creates
the public space and acts of civil disobedience reclaim and renew it, a reader
will be left with the question as to how the public space can remain in exis-
tence beyond the moments of founding and re-founding. In other words, how
is power in Arendt’s sense kept alive during what can be described as noncri-
sis like moments? I therefore articulate a distinction between opening up the
public space and maintaining it and show what the constitutive elements of
the latter within a modern state may be.
This is the task of chapter 6. Here I argue that Arendt’s concept of action
can only be developed into the act of maintaining the public space by rein-
terpreting her own notion of political speech through what defines judgment
and opinion, which are mental acts for her rather than modes of appearing
before others in the condition of human plurality. I can show that judgment
and opinion lend themselves to a notion of political speech because their
very formation requires access to the standpoints of others. Chapter 6 turns
to Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy and two essays from
Between Past and Future, “Truth and Politics” and “The Crisis in Culture.”
Arendt’s lectures on Kant traverse his notion of judgment, yet deploy it for
purposes that are far from his own theory. She takes from Kant the ideas of
enlarged mentality and exemplary validity, which distinguish his notion of
reflective judgment from the determinative judgment that defines his episte-
mology. Reflective judgment allows for the judgment of particulars without
the determinative operation of subsuming them under a given universal.
Introduction 7
It allows for the judgment of particulars qua particulars. Kant restricts this
form of judgment to aesthetic judgment. Arendt finds a political significance
in Kant’s notion insofar as the ideas of enlarged mentality and exemplary
validity are pertinent to the judgment of new beginnings, a judgment that, in
her thought, comes later than the action in which the new beginning springs
forth. Thus judgment in Arendt arises only from the vantage point of the
spectator. I argue in chapter 6 that one can nonetheless transfer the politically
salient notions of enlarged mentality and exemplary validity to the public
space as the necessary constituents of the articulation of opinion and judg-
ment before others. In this way, opinion and judgment come into the same
field as Arendtian action and form proper elements of the “public space” in
which freedom can arise. It is the give and take of judgments and opinions
before others that introduces them into the field of political actors. In arguing
for the distinction between opinion and judgment formation, which Arendt
herself unfolded, and the articulation in speech of opinion and judgment
before others, my aim is to show that these are the ways in which “power” in
the Arendtian sense remains in existence. Thus the major objective of chap-
ter 6 will be to show that speech of this kind maintains a horizontal political
relation between individuals gathered together. In the process of making this
argument, a more or less critical stance will be taken on the liberal conception
of speech as a right rather than a distinct political capacity.
Thus a goal of the final chapter becomes one of the books as a whole: to
take up a critical relation to rights and liberty based political discourses. The
project as a whole is therefore at once a critical and productive endeavor.
In recovering Arendt’s critique of modernity, I lay bare the problems that
must be reckoned with to gain traction and purchase for a rethinking of the
political. I expose the instrumental conception of the political and become
free, with Arendt, to reimagine what it means to be political—not in spite
of modernity but because it has led me to the very point at which one must
begin to think of political experience as something other than an instrumental
endeavor. Throughout the book I will make use of the expression “meaning-
ful political experience” to conjure the idea of a form of experience that is not
reducible to or significant only in relation to another realm of experience—to
economic and/or social existence. To be meaningful, political experience is
set apart from participation in politics for the sake of some further end that
justifies the act of participation itself.
NOTES
1. See Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Random
House, 2018).
8 Introduction
2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1958), p. 58.
3. One of the seminal texts in the twentieth century for the emergence of the con-
cept of “the public sphere” in political theory is Habermas’ Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere (1962).
Chapter 1
Modernity and the Need of

INTRODUCTION
This opening chapter is intended to substantiate two interrelated claims. First,

I will show how, under conditions of modernity, the world is no longer a
shared space for human beings by examining two interrelated phenomena:
world alienation and the logic of process.1 I will demonstrate this following
Hannah Arendt’s critique of modernity in The Human Condition.2 Second, I
will show how the problems represented by such phenomena are political in
nature.
The chapter is divided into four major sections that explicate the critique
of modernity, following Arendt’s diagnosis of the vita activa in the modern
age. First, I clarify the philosophical meaning of “modernity” in order to dis-
tinguish it from the sense of a mere time period. Second, I present Arendt’s
critique of modernity through an examination of the dual phenomena of earth
and world alienation. The aim here is to show how what has become tenuous
in modernity—the presence of a common world—requires that its strength-
ening or recovery must be of a political nature. Third, I further clarify the
political nature of the erosion of a common world by examining the logic
of “process.” The fourth section then connects the problem that I am calling
the logic of process to Arendt’s reading of totalitarianism in the twentieth
century, allowing me to establish how both world alienation and the logic of
process are political problems.
The chapter lays the ground for the central claim of chapters 2 and 3: that
a uniquely human capacity, the capacity for action, is necessary to combat
the problems outlined in the discussion of modernity. The subsequent chap-
ters embark upon the demonstration that political experience needs to be
9
10 Chapter 1
recovered in the form of a public space in which individuals can exercise

their political capacities. As a reader will see, Arendt has a distinct concep-
tion of the public space whose nature is first presented through the phenom-
enological method of The Human Condition. This ensures that it is viewed
neither as an empirical concept nor as the “end product” of some purpose,
but, rather as the manner of being together that corresponds to action as “new
beginning.” Chapters 4 and 5 will turn to Arendt’s later focus on the histori-
cal phenomena that exemplify the public space and show its connection to
the political concept of action that she develops after her phenomenological
treatment of it.
THE HUMAN CONDITION WITHIN ARENDT’S

THOUGHT AND HER CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY
As I read Hannah Arendt, I situate The Human Condition at the center of

her thought because in this text, we find some of the most original articula-
tions of it. Arendt is no systematic thinker; that is undoubtedly true, but I
do want to claim that in The Human Condition, Arendt does approximate
what we might ordinarily think of as a systematic philosophical text, at
least in terms of its structure. The threefold hierarchy of work–labor–action
informs the entire structure and organization of the text. Because my larger
project is situated and grounded in a critique of modernity, and that I locate
such a critique within this Arendtian text, the weight I am placing on it
must be justified. It is justified given the originality of the thoughts present
in the text, especially the concept of action, which will be the focus of the
second chapter. Though prominent scholars like Margaret Canovan and
Seyla Benhabib do suggest the Totalitarianism text is essential to under-
standing The Human Condition—a claim that I certainly cannot deny—I
want to suggest that Arendt’s concerns about the very problems which
emerge in totalitarianism in the twentieth century are rooted in concerns
which Arendt thinks can be traced back much further—traceable to what
she refers to as the modern age. In the reading I am proposing of Arendt,
I am closer to someone like Dana Villa or Linda Zerilli who see Arendt’s
critique of modernity as lying at the heart of her political thought. Because
of the rootedness of these problems in the modern age, beginning with The
Human Condition is necessary. I am taking my cue in this first chapter from
a particular section of The Human Condition titled “The Vita Activa and the
Modern Age.”
“Modernity” for Arendt is a philosophical concept signified by domi-
nant trends in the ways that human beings think about their experience
Modernity and the Need of Political Experience 11
and the world. By “dominant trends” I mean those persisting, enduring

structures of human beings’ experience that can be elucidated through
phenomenological investigation. Indeed, Arendt’s treatment of modernity
is phenomenological, which is to say that she wants to focus on particular
events and ask something like the following: What is revealed through
an analysis of particular historical events that will illuminate the way
the world appears in the modern age? In The Human Condition, Arendt
makes a distinction between the modern age and the modern world:
“Scientifically, the modern age which began in the seventeenth century
came to an end at the beginning of the twentieth century.”3 Thus, clearly,
the modern age, according to Arendt’s analysis, can be dated historically,
according to particular events.
However, what is at issue is modernity more generally, which cannot be
reduced to a historical time period. The critique is indeed grounded in the
trends in thought and experience which emerge out of “the modern age,” and
my claim is that these trends are still part of the world such that they continue
to affect the way world appears to human beings. I use the word “appears”
because Arendt’s critique of modernity is phenomenological, that is, one
concerned with understanding how the world appears to human beings as a
consequence of particular historical events. In her own words: “History is a
story of events and not of forces or ideas with predictable outcomes.”4 What
is significant about events, for Arendt, is that they have a “tangible unex-
pectedness” such that they usher in new ways in which the world appears to
human beings.5 That is, her phenomenological method concentrates on the
appearance of phenomena and how the nature of the relation humans take
up to such appearances is altered as a consequence of historical events.6 As
Parekh summarizes, “Her method is phenomenological—she is interested in
uncovering the structure of our existence by understanding the world as it
appears to us and our being in the world.”7
In particular, Arendt wants to understand how the world appears through a
focus on one specific event: the invention of the telescope. She seeks to clar-
ify how it is that the world appeared in a wholly new light as a consequence
of the invention: humans came to see themselves and their place within the
world entirely different. She is not interested in providing a historical account
of the consequences of the invention of Galileo’s telescope: that would be
simply empirical. The consequences are not merely observable causal effects;
instead, the invention of the telescope is treated phenomenologically in order
to reveal how the world appears as a result of this event. In general, then, one
can characterize Arendt’s method as historical phenomenology, showing how
there are alterations in the way in which the world appears to human beings
as a consequence of historical events.
12 Chapter 1
EARTH AND WORLD ALIENATION
Arendt captures the sheer magnitude of the invention of the telescope by anal-
ogy with the birth of Christ:
Like the birth in a manger, which spelled not the end of antiquity but the begin-
ning of something so unexpectedly and unpredictably new that neither hope
nor fear could have anticipated it, these first glances into the universe through
an instrument [the telescope], at once adjusted to human senses and destined to
uncover what definitely and forever must lie beyond them, set the stage for an
entirely new world and determined the course of other events, which with much
greater stir were to usher in the modern age.8
What so fundamentally altered humans’ relationship to the earth and to the

world was the discovery of “the Archimedean point,” which is to say, a
vantage point from which to view the earth as if standing outside it while
the viewer nonetheless necessarily remains bound to it. This phenomenon is
what Arendt refers to as earth alienation. With the introduction of the concept
of alienation, I arrive at one of the central motifs that characterize Arendt’s
critique of the modern age. According to Kateb: “For Arendt, the spiritual
condition of modernity is marked by loss, which she calls, most generally,
alienation.”9 The reason why Kateb associates alienation with loss is because,
with the invention of the telescope and the discovery of the Archimedean
point, humans had become estranged from that which hitherto had been
familiar to them. Whereas earth-boundedness had generally and implicitly
been one of the most fundamental conditions of human beings, modern sci-
ence called such a condition into question and gave them an entirely new
perspective from which to consider their relation to the earth. The question
therefore is what is really being lost when such a condition of earth-bound-
edness is overcome from the point of view of how the earth “appears.” To
pursue this question with Arendt is to consider a manifold epistemic shift.
One of the fundamental shifts in perspective ushered in by the modern
scientific paradigm is the idea that man can only know what he himself has
made. To know “reality,” then, is to know it according to scientific instru-
ments made by humans. According to this paradigm, nature and the earth
might only be knowable through instruments of our own making. “The
modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo and its chal-
lenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe
of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring
instruments.”10 What the telescope and discovery of the Archimedean point
represent, in short, is a rejection of one of the most basic earthly conditions.
Not only is it an overcoming of humans’ earthbound nature in the sense of the
earth appearing differently as an object, it is also a rejection of the idea that

human beings are part of nature. Because they can view nature as if standing
outside it, they are no longer a part of it, but are, on the contrary, the only
creatures capable of controlling nature. Nature now appears as something
capable of being under the control of human activities. While the proposition
of being able to control nature and overcome it might, in a scientific context,
sound like progress, from an existential perspective, the overcoming repre-
sents a loss in the sense of reality. Dana Villa relates Arendt to Heidegger on
this point: “The real problem, for Heidegger as well as Arendt, is the existen-
tial resentment that drives modern humanity to take itself out of the world, to
ascribe to itself a position from which the world might be mastered, remade,
and disposed of.”11 I can show the “position” Villa refers to not only in The
Human Condition, but also in a later essay from 1963, “The Conquest of
Space and the Stature of Man”: “Without as yet actually occupying the point
where Archimedes had wished to stand, we have found a way to act on the
earth as though we disposed of terrestrial nature from outside.”12
Of course, Arendt had witnessed what she took to be the fulfillment of
earth alienation in the actual capacity of the human being to leave the earth’s
surface and go into “outer” space. The earth can now literally be viewed
from a point outside it. Her opening reflections on Sputnik in The Human
Condition speak to this. However, space exploration is itself, for her, a
consequence of the same scientific outlook that was brought about in the
modern age by the invention of the telescope. Kateb captures the existential
and phenomenological significance thusly: “Earth alienation became literal,
became earth departure, with the commencement of the exploration of space
. . . to be able to do so much, to be able to take leave of the earth, is to signify
a disposition to a general abandonment of the earth as a sufficient place, as
the only home.”13 Adopting a general disposition that results in homelessness
demonstrates the general theme of alienation, bringing my argument to the
other form of alienation closely allied with earth alienation: world alienation.
The concept of “world” in Arendt is closely connected to the human capac-
ity for work, which appears in her tripartite division of the vita activa: labor,
work, and action. For Arendt, the world must be qualified as the human world
because it is constructed by and for human beings. In other words, the world
is not natural like the earth. To become alienated from it means to become
estranged from that which is common to all human beings yet also separates
them from one another. The notion of separation here means that the world
also provides for a sense of human distinctness. Arendt uses the metaphor
of the table to illuminate the point: the world is what enables individuals to
come together but also separates them, just as a group meeting is held in com-
mon by the table, yet the table also preserves the unique identities of those
gathered around it. Moreover, when the group leaves the table, it remains as
14 Chapter 1
a durable structure able to provide a common space once again. By analogy,

the world at once provides unity, distinctness, and perhaps, above all, durabil-
ity, not only as something mortal human beings construct but also as what is
meant to outlast human beings’ mortal lives. Thus in Arendt, the world allows
for the transmission of ways of life from one generation to another. In sum,
the world just is the in-betweenness that provides a common gauge of reality
for the unique perspectives of each individual. To lose the world in the sense
of becoming alienated from it is therefore no small occurrence and is a crucial
ingredient of Arendt’s thinking on modernity.
In step with the procedure of her own critique, she then considers another
phenomenon of the modern age from the perspective of the “event” sig-
nifying a fundamental shift in the appearance of the world. Parallel to the
invention of the telescope in modern science is the rise of Cartesian doubt in
philosophy. Descartes’ philosophical method of doubting in order to arrive
at certain knowledge is no mere artifact from the history of philosophy in
Arendt’s hands. Rather, it is an event in the sense of a fundamental shift in
human beings’ relationship to reality. The fundamental meaning of world
alienation is a turn away from the common world toward the self. This is
what Descartes’ method exemplifies. What is lost in terms of world is gained
in terms of a substantial self in the form of the Cartesian cogito within a
philosophical context. Speaking directly to this point, and simultaneously
distancing herself from Marx, Arendt states:
Even if we admit that the modern age began with a sudden, inexplicable eclipse
of transcendence, of belief in a hereafter, it would by no means follow that this
loss threw men back upon the world. The historical evidence, on the contrary,
shows that modern men were not thrown back upon this world but upon them-
selves . . . World alienation, and not self-alienation as Marx thought, has been
the hallmark of the modern age.14
“The world” is that common element that stands over against and therefore
between individual human beings and provides a sense of reality for them
apart from individual consciousness. In alienation this world of objects no
longer provides a measure of common reality. Canovan perfectly captures
this development in the modern age: “The worldly objects that formerly
stood over against individuals and appeared to all of them were dissolved into
sensations experienced by individuals in the privacy of their own minds, and
philosophers represented human beings as united by nothing but a common
mental structure.”15
Just as with the telescope, what counted as “real” was that which was
encountered through human instruments, so with the philosophical atti-
tude in the modern age what counted as “real” were the mental processes
produced by the activities of human consciousness. For Descartes, the

discovery that “I exist” laid in discerning the contradiction in asserting “I
think” while also simultaneously claiming that “I” do not exist. “Thinking”
or, more generally, observable introspective mental activity became the
mark of reality.
All of this is familiar enough, but for Arendt, this is no mere intellectual
exercise with a set of premises and conclusions. Rather, the philosophical
attitude represented chiefly by Descartes bespeaks a major trend in modern
philosophy more generally, and it is this general trend that ushered in an
entirely new paradigm for thinking about human existence. Modern philoso-
phy had in large part followed the lead and the path set for it by modern sci-
ence. In Arendt’s words: “modern philosophy owes its origins and its course
more exclusively to specific scientific discoveries than any previous phi-
losophy.”16 The connection, then, between earth and world alienation and, in
parallel, between science and philosophy is evident. For my purposes, world
alienation is the more specific concern because of its political implications, as
I will show. I will therefore consider world alienation in further detail, relat-
ing it to Arendt’s articulation of her notion of the human condition.
First, Arendt is careful to distinguish between the human condition and
human nature. “It is highly unlikely that we, who can know, determine, and
define the natural essences of all things surrounding us, which we are not,
should ever be able to do the same for ourselves—this would be jumping over
our own shadows. . . . In other words, if we have a nature or essence, then
surely only a god could know and define it.”17 This position is consistent with
and illuminates further her phenomenological method. It is humans’ openness
and responsiveness to their experience that prevents the attribution to them
of any kind of essential nature. Arendt is therefore not positing any “human
condition” as such, but, rather, describing the human condition as it appears
to human beings.
The Human Condition is concerned with the description of their condition
insofar as humans are active beings. “With the term vita activa, I propose
to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action.
They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic condi-
tions under which life on earth has been given to man.”18 Human beings are
conditioned because they find themselves subject to certain conditions upon
their birth into the world. The conditions are existential in that they are not
mere background conditions but demand a response. Arendt is therefore
explicating the existential conditions to which human beings respond in their
capacities for labor, work, and action: (biological) life, the world, and plural-
ity. Humans labor, quite simply, in order to meet the biological demands of
life that constantly exert their presence on them. “The world,” in this context,
means the human artifice that is constructed by human beings: “It [the world]
16 Chapter 1
is related . . . to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands. . . . To

live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between
those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit
around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the
same time.”19 Insofar as human beings need something in common—some-
thing to share which binds them—they need a world. Specifically, the human
condition corresponding to work is worldliness because human beings need a
home on earth and to be at home means to have some recognizable element
that they can share in common with others. Thus a world is something human
beings construct and work for Arendt is akin to fabrication.
The third and final aspect of the vita activa is action, which corresponds to
the condition of plurality. Plurality is the condition by which “men, not Man,
live on the earth and inhabit the world.”20 Because human beings inhabit
the earth with others who are equal yet distinct, they must act in ways that
distinguish themselves from them. At the same time, they can only appear
as actors by appearing to others in the condition of plurality. Action is never
determined, neither in reference to an end as in work nor according to some
process that must be undertaken to survive, as in labor. Action has a logic of
its own. It is a logic of the “new beginning,” which will be essential to the
notion of the public space and the meaning of the political in Arendt.
In general, my reading of The Human Condition suggests that the more
general description of these capacities can only be understood in reference to
the last chapter of this text, the aforementioned “Vita Activa and the Modern
Age.” In other words, Arendt wants to understand what has become of these
activities within the modern age itself. By “what has become,” I am trying to
understand whether each of these activities retains the characteristics that I
have just described in the preceding discussion or whether particular condi-
tions of modernity have altered the look of these human capacities.
The three constituents of the vita activa that I have summarized here com-
prise a hierarchy in respect of what is most revelatory of what it means to live
a fully human life. Arendt finds that both the activities and the hierarchy are
much altered in modernity, principally because of the phenomenon of world
alienation. One can understand how the function of each activity changes in
modernity by looking at this hierarchy in the context of world alienation. The
modern adage that “man only knows what he makes” reflects the rise of the
human capacity for work to the top of the hierarchy. Homo faber has usurped
the role of man as actor. Arendt presents this alteration in comparison with
the much lesser importance of work by comparison with man as actor for the
ancient Greeks, which she sees as essential to their notion of the polis. Action
in Arendt is “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the
intermediary of things or matter.”21 Because action is not mediated like the
activities of work or labor it captures the direct in-between-ness of human
beings. This is quite critical for the conception of the public space that she
presents in The Human Condition. I am therefore showing in a preliminary
way that a connection exists between what will become the important politi-
cal concept of the public space and her phenomenological conception of the
existential conditions of human being.
Once action is overtaken by work as the most meaningful category of the
vita activa, it is no longer considered the highest capacity. The claim that
“we only know what we make” belongs in the context of the rise of modern
science and modern philosophy. In Arendt’s approach it means knowing
through the instruments humans have made, on the one hand, and through the
productions of their mental processes, which are also a kind of making, on the
other. In both ways man as fabricator or homo faber, as Arendt refers to him,
following Marx, rises to the top of the hierarchy in the vita activa.
What is important for my current purposes is that homo faber then becomes
the paradigmatic lens through which human beings come to understand them-
selves. It becomes the way of responding to the question: What does it mean
to be human? It is the paradigmatic lens for self-understanding for modern
individuals. To be human means to be a fabricator and maker of things; they
understand themselves primarily as makers. However, this might be seen to
clash with the claim regarding world alienation. If work is the activity respon-
sible for the construction of a world, I need to clarify how its rise to the top
of the hierarchy of the vita activa can go together with world alienation. The
answer lies in how the meaning of work changes, and this sets the path for a
further alteration in the hierarchy.
THE LOGIC OF PROCESS AND

THE RISE OF LABORING
Operating according to its own internal logic, work is intelligible in terms of

the ends for which it is undertaken. The means are only intelligible in relation
to the end—the end is that for the sake of which any work is undertaken in
the first place. To be truly recognizable as work, this is the logic according to
which it ought to operate. The strictly purposive character of work does not
of course always obtain, however, in different historical contexts. According
to Arendt, the modern age marks a shift away from the end of work to the
means. This is because the concept of process has invaded the sphere of work
within the vita activa, “In the understanding of fabrication itself the emphasis
shifted away from the product and from the permanent, guiding model to the
fabrication process, away from the question of what a thing is and what kind
of thing was to be produced to the question of how and through which means
and processes it had come into being and could be reproduced.”22 This shift
18 Chapter 1
in emphasis from end to means and thereby to process is illuminated in the

context of science by the focus on the experiment as the process by which
nature is subjected to instruments. In philosophy the reflective turn to the sub-
ject was focused on the mental activities themselves more than their results.
Thus, for Arendt, world alienation coincided with a development in which the
meaning of homo faber changes entirely owing to the reduction in importance
of the qualities of the thing to be produced and their replacement by a focus
on the means or process of production.
For now, I have shown that world alienation is the concept in Arendt that
illuminates the phenomenon of man losing a common shared world and turn-
ing toward the self. When the activity of fabrication becomes concerned only
with means and not ends, the loss of “world” in her sense is the outcome.
Arendt specifies the root of this development. “What changed the mentality
of homo faber was the central position of the concept of process in moder-
nity.”23 For her, the concept of process comes to have dominion in the vita
activa. This notion is essential to her critique of modernity.
One may ask what was to become of work as a human capacity under the
dominion of the concept of process. All of the norms and values associated
with the construction of a world—its durability, its guarantee of a common
reality, and its unifying function—are devalued, which threatens to make
the human activity of work meaningless. In Arendt’s schema of the tripar-
tite division of the vita activa, labor usurps work in the hierarchy of human
activity. Once the concept of process arises as the core of the human activity
of work—that aspect of the vita activa whose condition and result is “the
world”—human self-understanding in this activity affects how they interpret
the world.
In brief, what Arendt means by “the modern age” is now marked by the
category of process becoming the most basic of category of intelligibility by
which human beings interpret their world. Since the dominion in work of
the category of process undermines the significance of work as the fabrica-
tion of a human world, the logic of process is a part of the problem of world
alienation. These claims will require some fleshing out, but the overall claim
is that the logic of process goes together with world alienation as two major
problems in Arendt’s critique of modernity. Therefore I will examine what I
am calling “the logic of process.”
Laboring is that activity human beings are engaged in, in order to meet
the demands of life considered in its biological sense. With Arendt, cycles of
growth and decay are inherent in the very nature of biological life. These are
the conditions that are responded to in labor; laboring therefore never ceases.
The means employed and the processes engaged in during labor cannot cease
because the conditions of life to which humans are responding in labor do
not cease. I will therefore use the term “logic of process,” a term Arendt
does not use, to capture the way in which the means–end relation appropriate
to work as “fabrication” succumbs to a logic of an endless series of means
begetting further means. This logic belongs initially and essentially to the
sphere of labor rather than work, for Arendt, because processes are engaged
in to satisfy demands that may cease temporarily but will ever reappear, to be
satisfied again. To not be engaged in satisfying some demand, then, is to not
be engaged in the activity of labor.
Arendt finds that the laboring activity and the logic of process inherent in
it become the most meaningful framework for thinking of human activity as
such in the modern age. This is significant not only because it displaces the
activity of work by eliminating the criterion of stable and durable ends. The
prominence of the logic of laboring also diminishes the possibility for human
action to appear in the world undetermined, that is to say, without reference
to survival or to what can be called an external end. Arendt will develop
this problem into the prevalent understanding of action in modernity. Once
human activity is viewed through the lens of the logic of process, action
cannot easily appear in the world as new beginning, the notion that will be
essential to the conception of the public space and to the political sphere in
general. I emphasize this idea of new beginning at this point in order to high-
light how, if the logic of process becomes the dominant mode of intelligibil-
ity for human activity, then the possibility of anything new appearing in the
world is undermined. It is in the very nature of a process in Arendt’s sense
to continue uninterrupted, whereas action in her sense is precisely that which
would, minimally, disrupt a process. That action is disruption in relation to
the logic of process is of course essential to the part it plays in her view that
the political is the sphere for combating the major problems of modernity as
she identifies them. For in a world where the primary category of intelligibil-
ity is that of process, not only is action rendered existentially improbable, it
becomes so epistemically as well. By this I mean that the epistemic horizon
by which humans gauge what is possible comes to be dominated by the cat-
egory of process.
For Arendt, the human capacity for freedom is diminished within the
existential and epistemic horizons of the modern age because freedom just
is a human appearing in the world in the form of action as new beginning.
A passage in her “What Is Freedom?” essay states the connection between
freedom and action most directly: “Men are free—as distinguished from pos-
sessing the gift for freedom—as long as they act, neither before nor after; for
to be free and to act are the same.”24 Thus, when the capacity for action is
diminished as a result of the rise of the logic of laboring, so too is the capac-
ity for freedom. In another essay—“What Is History?”—Arendt finds that
freedom is not given the opportunity to appear in the world once two distinct
realms, nature and history, are subsumed under the category of process. To
20 Chapter 1
her, both come to be understood primarily as processes in the modern age.

“The modern concept of process pervading history and nature alike separates
the modern age from the past more profoundly than any other single idea.”25 I
now turn to her analysis of this problem. To conclude the current discussion,
the dominion of the laboring activity and the concept of process appropriate
to it severely affects the possibility for the space in which freedom can appear
to arise. Arendt may even be read as saying in The Human Condition that
action as a meaningful activity in the vita activa is lost to human beings in
the conditions of modernity that she identifies.
NATURE AND HISTORY AS A PROCESS
In order to provide a preliminary approach to Arendt’s notion of the “space”

where freedom can appear, I can consider the problem in its political sig-
nificance negatively, through the problem of the elimination of this “space”
under what, for Arendt, is an unprecedented form of political rule that
emerged in the twentieth century. This is the phenomenon identified by most
scholars as the event that so fundamentally shaped and influenced Arendt’s
political reflections throughout her life’s work: the rise of totalitarianism in
the twentieth century. This leads me back from The Human Condition to her
first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism,26 for this is where I may
obtain a firm grasp on the concept of process as it relates to her concerns
about the fate of nature and history. I situate the problem of the logic of pro-
cess in this context in order to further illuminate Arendt’s critique of moder-
nity and reveal something of its specifically political nature. The Origins of
Totalitarianism can show that the loss of action as a meaningful capacity
in The Human Condition, where it is treated phenomenologically, appears
against the background of a major political thought. However, Arendt had not
yet fully formulated and developed her concept of action in the earlier work.
The final chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, titled “Ideology and
Terror: A Novel Form of Government,” is particularly important for my pur-
poses. Arendt is concerned with understanding totalitarianism as representing
an entirely new form of government rather than understanding it in relation to
traditionally absolutist forms of rule. She means “to raise the question whether
totalitarian government . . . is merely a makeshift arrangement, which bor-
rows its method of intimidation, its means of organization, and its instruments
of violence from the well known political arsenal of tyranny, despotism and
dictatorships”27 Arendt’s conclusion is that totalitarian government cannot be
understood in relation to these forms of government. Furthermore, it cannot
truly be understood using any of the traditional categories of Western politi-
cal thought. By this she means the basic criteria by which governments have
traditionally been judged: whether they are arbitrary or legitimate and lawful
or lawless. Applying such a framework to totalitarianism fails because “it
defies . . . all positive laws, even to the extreme of defying those which it has
itself established.”28 Were we to apply those criteria, totalitarian government
could be characterized as a condition of lawlessness, but totalitarianism is
not lawless because, according to Arendt, this form of government “claims
to obey those laws of Nature or of History from which all positive laws
always have been supposed to spring.”29 Ironically, for this reason, totalitar-
ian regimes claim an even greater legitimacy than other forms of rule because
their source of authority goes beyond mere human convention, such that they
are “suprahuman.”
The laws of “Nature and History” to which Arendt is referring are under-
stood as being equivalent to laws of motion. Motion is the driving force
behind history and nature, where these concepts are understood as continual
processes, and the laws of motion of nature and history are both eternal and
immutable. In the usual run of things, for example in social contract theory,
the laws made within the political society—positive laws—are said to be
based off of a preexisting set of laws known as the laws of nature. In the
context of totalitarianism, however, there is no gap between the positive
laws and the laws of nature. Rather, on Arendt’s interpretation, the idea of
totalitarian regimes was to enact the law of nature on earth rather than pre-
senting natural law as the moral justification for the positive laws enacted
in relation to it. “Totalitarian lawfulness, defying legality and pretending to
establish the direct reign of justice on earth, executes the law of History or
of Nature without translating it into standards of right and wrong for indi-
vidual behavior.”30 The laws of Nature and History, then, are not considered
as laws needed to provide standards of law and justice. On the contrary,
they are understood as laws of motion—unyielding, unending motion.
Conceived in this light, laws are not considered as boundaries within which
action is permitted, and so as a hindrance to action. On the contrary, the law
itself is motion and men themselves are only carriers of this law. “In the
interpretation of totalitarianism, all laws have become laws of movement.
When the Nazis talked about the law of nature or when the Bolsheviks talk
about the law of history, neither nature nor history is any longer the stabi-
lizing source of authority for actions of mortal men; they are movements
in themselves.”31 The idea of history and nature as movements in them-
selves provides the connection to the concept of process that Arendt later
articulated in The Human Condition. “Process” just is perpetual motion and
repetition going forward. For Arendt, spontaneous human action—action
as new beginning—is precisely the kind of setting into motion by individu-
als that totalitarianism is designed to prevent. As she states in The Human
Condition: “To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to
22 Chapter 1
begin . . . to set something into motion.”32 The language “of setting some-
thing into motion” indicates the undetermined character of action in the
sense of action as new beginning. It indicates the beginning of something
new that itself begins a development in contrast to the motion of process as
continual, immutable motion. One of the meanings of setting into motion
is therefore spontaneity, as Canovan’s statement about Arendt’s thought
on totalitarianism implies: “The ultimate aim of totalitarianism . . . is to
convert human beings into subhuman creatures, all identical, all incapable
of spontaneity, and all equally superfluous.”33 As I will show in chapters 2
and 3, spontaneity is part of the concept of action as “new beginning” that
Arendt develops in The Human Condition. For the present, I am concerned
with what The Origins of Totalitarianism contributes to Arendt’s critique
of modernity.
Arendt’s early political thought is in part an analysis of terror as a major
ingredient of the totalitarian form of government. She identifies terror as
the mechanism that enables the laws of nature and history to move for-
ward unyieldingly. Terror is able to unleash nature and history as forces by
eliminating hindrances to their motion, not least the boundaries provided by
positive laws. It is important that I consider how Arendt views positive, con-
ventional laws in this sense of boundaries. In her view: “Positive laws in con-
stitutional government are designed to erect boundaries . . . between men.”34
Before I attend to the sense in which laws function as boundaries, there is
first a more intuitive and in fact connected function of law: laws sets limits. I
therefore need to consider the way of thinking of positive, conventional laws
as both limits and boundaries, and the distinction between them, in order to
show how the totalitarian form of government speaks to the political nature
of Arendt’s critique of modernity.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt writes: “Lawfulness sets limita-
tions to actions . . . they only tell what one should not do, but never what one
should do.”35 Laws, in this sense, are negative in specifying actions that are
prohibited. They restrict the actions that human beings can engage in. One
can therefore grasp the notion of law as limit. At the same time, that positive
law functions as limit reveals the sense of laws as boundary, too. The concept
of limit is not the same as the concept of boundary, yet the two are internally
connected. The negative sense of law as a limit to action also means that laws
function as boundaries, for they open up a space for action.36 “Boundary” is
a spatial concept identifying that which encloses and may thereby provide a
space of separation. Pressed further, the concept of boundary can be viewed
as constituting the space between beings. We may therefore argue, with
Arendt, that a boundary individuates. “Individuated” is, then, a spatial notion,
suggesting that space must exist between human beings so that they can exist
as individuated beings. In the political context in Arendt’s early thought,
laws provide boundaries, the space between human beings that allows for
action rather than limiting action. She introduces this notion in her discussion
of the ancient Greeks in The Human Condition: “To them [the Greeks], the
laws, like the wall around the city, were not results of action but products of
making. Before men began to act, a definite space had to be secured and a
structure built where all subsequent actions could take place.”37
Prior to elaborating this distinction between “making” and “acting” in The
Human Condition, Arendt found in The Origins of Totalitarianism that it was
precisely this “in-between” space that totalitarian terror sought to eliminate:
“By pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space between
them.”38 This idea of “pressing together” foreshadows the notion of space
that will be fully articulated in The Human Condition. It is a fundamental
feature of Arendt’s political thought, and the one that I am making the center
of my argument. Returning to The Origins of Totalitarianism has allowed a
reader to see that the notion treated existentially and phenomenologically in
The Human Condition already has a political resonance. This later notion of
space has a meaning beyond its connection to the function of laws because in
The Human Condition, Arendt will include laws under the category of “mak-
ing.” This is done to show that what is ultimately responsible for the “space”
in which freedom can arise is not work but action. Nonetheless, returning to
the relation between law and motion in The Origins of Totalitarianism does
provide a preliminary illumination of the political resonance of Arendt’s
thought in The Human Condition. One may consider the “in-between” space
secured by laws in the earlier text in relation to the essential condition of
action in The Human Condition: plurality. Plurality is a fundamental way
that human beings are situated in the world and demands a response from
them in the form of action and speech. Therefore where The Origins of
Totalitarianism identifies totalitarian rule as the form of government that
“destroys the one essential prerequisite of all freedom which is simply the
capacity of motion which cannot exist without space,” one gets a prelimi-
nary sense of the political import of the relation between space and freedom
in Arendt.39 In The Origins of Totalitarianism: “The laws hedge in each
new beginning and at the same time assures its freedom of movement.”40
Arendt’s focus on law, in order to distinguish “freedom of movement” from
the unhindered motion of nature and history, is already attempting to think
the “new beginning.” Arendt brings attention here to how action as freedom
of movement came to be hindered under totalitarian rule. This contrasts two
kinds of motion: freedom of movement and the kind of motion implied in
the processes of nature and history, which is to say, unhindered, unaltered
repetition forward and the “setting into motion” that begins something new.
The “new beginning” infers a sense of development and meaning, not the
mere repetition of the same, which elevates means without “ends.” The latter
24 Chapter 1
is of course the significance of the logic of process in The Human Condition.

Therefore my attention to the meanings of “law” and of “process” in The
Origins of Totalitarianism shows, despite a very significant change in her
thought in the later text, that the thought in The Human Condition is turning
on the political problems of modernity. The difference is that in The Human
Condition action as new beginning and the space of freedom are intricately
connected. It is not laws that are responsible for the space in which freedom
can arise.
I can conclude my discussion of The Origins of Totalitarianism with
the Arendtian thought that totalitarianism sought to eliminate the space for
action by eliminating individuality. Individuals in the sense that Arendt
comes to articulate in The Human Condition are distinct and equal beings
capable of acting and speaking directly to one another. Under totalitarian-
ism individuals were turned into conglomerates or masses. Individuals
themselves were no longer recognizable; individuality was lost in the mass.
Kateb notes how the amassing of individuals itself provided totalitarian
regimes with motion: “the ‘mass-man’ came into ever greater prominence
in totalitarian regimes. . . . The masses, that is, supplied the personnel,
whose unquestioning loyalty and obedience kept totalitarian regimes in
motion.”41 Kateb’s use of the language of motion speaks directly to how
totalitarianism can itself be seen as an unending, immutable process. The
Human Condition continues this thought in finding that the concept of pro-
cess arose in the modern age as the paradigmatic category for understanding
both nature and history.
What I have been able to see by turning to The Origins of Totalitarianism
is that the political implications of Arendt’s critique of modernity haunt the
phenomenological method of The Human Condition despite the fact that she
never develops a distinctly political concept of action and the public space
in that work. Instead, Arendt treats the logic of process along with the prob-
lem of world alienation as part of her critique of modernity. These problems
devalue the human capacity for action as new beginning, setting something in
motion, as such, by threatening what Arendt will now call the space in which
human beings appear to others as actors and speakers.
CONCLUSION
At the outset of this chapter I said I would substantiate two interrelated

claims: that under conditions of modernity the world is not a shared space
that human beings can call home and that in its deepest significance this is a
political problem. To understand why these problems are political in nature,
a disassociation from the ordinary connotations of the term has been required.
That is to say, on hearing the word political or politics I am suggesting that

one often thinks of the electoral and institutional activities associated with
them: voting, running for office, policymaking, elections, and governance.
While these activities are not exhaustive of the meanings of politics or politi-
cal in the everyday sense, they do square with some of the first intuitions
when one encounters the terms. The larger point is that they do not capture
the properly philosophical sense of these terms for Arendt. I am aiming
in this book to describe what the experience of the political is. Following
Arendt, I can now characterize it in the following preliminary way: experi-
ence is political to the extent that human beings have the chance to appear
in speech and action before others in “the public space.” This chapter has
shown how world alienation and the logic of process are dominant structures
of existence in modernity that bring with them the loss of political experience
in this sense.
That is to say, the problems of modernity discussed in this chapter imply
the loss of political experience through which human beings inhabit a world
that functions as a public space in which they can appear before one another
as actors and speakers. The question of the existence and maintenance of
“the public space” is now the key question of this book. Clearly what Arendt
means by the public space cannot simply be an empirically determinable
place. It is, rather, the space of human beings’ appearing to one another in
exercising their political capacities (whose nature is filled out in chapters 2
and 3). This is why Arendt speaks of “the space of appearances.” It is not so
much a particular locale that is in question—although spaces where people
can gather and appear to one another in public are of course necessary to
Arendt’s notion of the political—as it is the possibility of gathering and
appearing before one another in the condition of plurality itself. This appear-
ance in public as distinct individuals is the very minimum that is required for
meaningful political experience in Arendt.
In sum, this opening chapter has served as a statement of the problem with
which I am engaging. I have laid the groundwork that reveals the link of the
political to experience in the rest of the book. What I have aimed to show is
that political experience is lacking and is in danger of being lost in modernity.
What is required is a rearticulation and recovery of political experience. The
need of rearticulation is confronted in part through a thoroughgoing examina-
tion of Arendt’s concept of action as new beginning. This lies at the heart of
the intelligibility of the possibility of the recovery of political experience in
Arendt’s sense. That is to say, the key to Arendt’s conception of action is that it
is uniquely suited to meet the problems of modernity that have been articulated
and explored in this chapter. Chapters 2 and 3 are therefore intended as an expo-
sition and examination of the human capacity for action in Arendt and largely
follows her analysis of action as a human capacity in The Human Condition.
26 Chapter 1
NOTES
1. Arendt never uses the language of logic. I am extrapolating from her own
description of each activity within the vita activa. That is, I am claiming that each
activity has its own logic that is internal to it. Based on the condition to which each
activity corresponds, a certain logic is operative within that domain of the vita activa.
Of particular importance will be the logic of animal laborans, which I will refer to
quite extensively throughout as a “logic of process.” I do not think the language of
logic indicates any kind of unnecessary imposition onto Arendt’s thought because the
claim is simply that each activity operates according to certain norms which allows
the activity to even be recognizable as such in the first place.
2. All excerpts are republished with permission of University of Chicago Press,
from The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt, 1958; permission conveyed through
Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
3. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958), p. 6.
4. Ibid., 252.
5. Ibid.
6. Regarding Arendt’s own view of history, it is important to specify that it will
become clear that for Arendt historical events must themselves be consequences of
human actions. History is never itself the “subject” of a momentous alteration in the
appearance of the world. Although Arendt is focusing here on the consequences of the
invention of the telescope as an historical event, the invention itself begins with Galileo.
7. Serena Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A
Phenomenology of Human Rights (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 6.
8. The Human Condition, 257–58.
9. George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ:
Rowan and Allanheld, 1984), p. 157.
10. The Human Condition, 261 (emphasis added).
11. Dana Villa, “Modernity, Alienation, and Critique,” in Hannah Arendt and
the Meaning of Politics, eds., Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 184.
12. Hannah Arendt, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” in Between
Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 273.
13. Kateb, Politics, Conscience, Evil, 160.
15. Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political
Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 151.
16. The Human Condition, 272.
17. Ibid., 10.
18. Ibid., 7.
19. Ibid., 52.
20. Ibid., 7.
21. Ibid. (emphasis added).
22. Ibid., 304.

23. Ibid., 307.
24. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future (New York:
Penguin Books, 2006), p. 151.
25. Hannah Arendt, “What Is History?” in Between Past and Future (New York:
Penguin Books, 2006), p. 63.
Given the reading of Arendt I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, that is,
placing the critique of the modern age at the center of Arendt’s thought as it is found
in The Human Condition, I think this quotation in particular supports that interpreta-
tion. In other words, though the Totalitarianism text is located chronologically first in
Arendt’s corpus, the trends in thought such as the category of process clearly predate
the events of the twentieth century, as I think is made explicit by this quotation.
26. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books,
1958).
27. Ibid., 460.
28. Ibid., 461.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 462.
31. Ibid., 463.
33. Canovan, Reinterpretation, 60 (emphasis added).
34. Origins, 465.
35. Ibid., 467 (emphasis added).
36. It is Kant who explicitly distinguished between the concepts of limit
(Schranke) and boundary (Grenze). One sees his identification of “boundary” with
space and “limit” with negation in the Prolegomena. “Bounds (in extended beings)
always presuppose a space existing outside a certain definite place, and inclosing it;
limits do not require this, but are mere negations, which affect a quantity, so far as it is
not absolutely complete.” Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics,
ed. Paul Caris (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1926), p. 122. Caygill elucidates
this further: “Kant uses both terms [limit and boundary] as analogies for the extent of
legitimate knowledge. The analogy of limit is derived from the category of limitation,
the third of the categories of quality which is defined as ‘reality combined with nega-
tion,’ while that of boundary is drawn from the properties of spatial intuition which
regard a boundary as marking the enclosure of internal and external spaces.” Howard
Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing, 1995), p. 279.
38. Origins, 466 (emphasis added).
39. Ibid., 466.
40. Ibid., 465.
41. Kateb, Politics, Conscience, Evil, 70 (emphasis added).
Chapter 2
Arendt’s Phenomenological
Concept of Action, Part I
INTRODUCTION
The major objectives of this chapter are, first, to show how Arendt’s phenom-
enological concept of action in The Human Condition presents a remedy for
the problems of modernity explained in chapter 1. Second, I will also have my
eye on the aspects of her concept of action that are pertinent for the question
of how political experience may be recoverable in modern societies. These two
objectives are accomplished together by focusing on Arendt’s concept of action
as new beginning. The chapter substantiates the claim that Arendt’s concept
of action is uniquely suited to meet the challenges posed by the problems of
modernity presented in chapter 1 owing to the articulation of action as new
beginning and as a human capacity that keeps opens up the “public space”
and keeps it in existence. In terms of the larger argumentative narrative of the
book as a whole, this chapter begins to show how the public space and political
experience are a possibility for citizens amidst the problematic trends outlined
in chapter 1.
THE CONSTELLATION CONCEPT

OF ACTION IN ARENDT
I first need to distinguish Arendt’s concept of action from some of the first
philosophical intuitions that come to mind. Broadly speaking, a concept is a
term in philosophy that, beginning with Plato’s forms, one might ordinarily
associate with a universal, that is, an expansive term that is used to identify
particular instantiations of the universal. That is to say, a concept has a
29
30 Chapter 2
number of general or defining features that are used to recognize and classify
different particulars that share those features in some way. Thus, in the his-
tory of philosophy, concepts characteristically serve an important epistemic
function. For example, the general concept of tree has the following features:
tall, leafy, has branches and roots. A number of particular trees might have
their own unique features but to even be intelligible as trees, at a minimum,
they must possess these basic features that would allow any individual to
understand what someone means when they refer to a tree; I would call
this kind of thinking vertical because the particulars are located under the
universal and stand in need of it as the means by which they become intel-
ligible. This is the kind of thinking usually called “subsumption,” understood
as rule-guided thought or “determinant” thought, and I am taking my cue in
this regard from Kant’s distinction between the nature of a concept in his first
Critique and the nature of reflective judgment in the third Critique.1 Against
this kind of thinking stands Arendt’s way of thinking through a constellation
concept.2
To explicate the idea of the constellation concept in context, I claim that
in Arendt action functions as a kind of nexus in a constellation that includes
“off-shooting” features, so to speak, in relation to the moment of action. They
form a kind of web of intelligibility for action without falling under action as
if it were a universal. If anything, the image invoked is more one of horizon-
tality than verticality or the rule-guided, determinant thought whose use in
political thinking Arendt criticizes. That is to say, the logic of subsumption
and its mode of determinacy is not at home when it comes to thinking about
action. To attempt to come up in advance with an idea of political action
that determines in advance what other actions of a political kind will be is
to think according to the logic of work, for her, rather than action. Because
action, for her, is always a new beginning, examples of it cannot be located
prior to the act itself that will provide meaning in advance. That is to say,
action is not an a priori concept. I instead focus on the different moments of
the phenomenon of action as it appears in the world. The advantage of the
constellation concept of action is that, rather than abstracting any feature
of the phenomenon from the whole and making it the organizing term for
other features, the significant features of action belong to the phenomenon
as it appears. The notion of the constellation concept therefore belongs with
Arendt’s phenomenological method. Following Dietz, it can be referred to as
“a sum of multifarious elements” rather than a summary of defining features.3
I will use the expression “moment” as well as “element” because of the tem-
poral dimension of the constellation concept in Arendt. That is to say, the
constellation concept includes spatially and temporally separated but related
components that are essential to the intelligibility of action as new beginning.
Arendt’s Phenomenological Concept of Action, Part I 31
This chapter and the next aim to unfold and explicate the different moments
or elements that comprise Arendt’s phenomenological, constellation concept
of action.
PLURALITY
The first moment or element of Arendt’s concept of action is the one I outlined
in chapter 1 as the existential condition that corresponds to the human capacity
for action: plurality. “Action . . . corresponds to the human condition of plural-
ity, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”4 To
claim that men inhabit the world is decidedly different from what most in the
tradition of political philosophy have claimed.5 To Arendt, many thinkers in this
tradition have dealt with “man” or “mankind” in the abstract. In insisting on the
priority of a plurality of individuals, Arendt sees herself as drawing attention to
the necessarily political character of human beings’ existence. That is, because
human beings exist as individuals in plurality, they respond to their existence
by seeking out ways to distinguish themselves through action. This leads to
Arendt’s claim that plurality itself has the two general characteristics of equality
and distinction. I take the latter of these characteristics to be the most significant
because it illuminates most clearly her explicit statement about the plurality of
individuals and not man inhabiting the earth. That human beings inhabit the
earth in a condition of plurality is specifically a description of distinctness.
To claim that people are distinct is to see the necessity of them having the
capacities for speech and action. In other words, action or speech is how an
individual seeks to differentiate herself as distinct, a differentiating that is
only possible in a plurality of others. Thus, distinctness is not a mere fact of
the human condition but requires an active distinguishing of the individual
from others through action and speech: “Through them [speech and action],
men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct; they are the
modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical
objects, but qua men.”6 Distinctness in Arendt is therefore not a given but
a possibility of human existence and a moment of action. It is important in
this context to clarify, then, that distinctness does not simply make reference
to otherness, that is, something that might be called other simply because
it not like something else; to be other than something else is to be different
or not to be like it. Distinctness in Arendt’s sense implies difference, but
difference that must be actively expressed through the human capacity for
action. Distinctness, then, is not, like otherness, merely something that can be
read off through observation; rather, distinctness refers to appearing as such
through speech and action.
32 Chapter 2
The significance of this condition of distinctness in “plurality” cannot be

overstated in this context because both plurality and distinctness are spatial
concepts, though not in the regular sense of occupying a spatial position.
That is to say, they indicate the space that exists between us when individu-
als speak and act. The existence of “space” in this sense corresponds to the
appearance of individuals to one another in speech and action. For this rea-
son, Arendt calls it “the space of appearance.” Indeed, this “space between
us” indicates the truly political nature of the concept of plurality. Canovan
indicates this when she writes that “being plural, human beings can gather
to form a space amongst themselves, and in that space can see their com-
mon world from different points of view. . . . Human beings . . . are not
simply members of a herd and their plurality makes possible a public space
between them.”7 Thus the concept of plurality as a moment of action is also
essential to the notion of the public space in Arendt. The latter is neither a
given nor a possibility of anything other than plurality as the condition of
action.
Arendt claims that in addition to distinctness the condition of plurality has
the characteristic of equality. Equality here does not have the resonance of a
modern moral or political concept. Rather, equality expresses the condition
that if human beings were not in some sense the same they could neither
recognize one another as human beings nor understand and communicate
with one another. In other words, as a characteristic of plurality equality is
a presupposition of basic human understanding and communication. Hence,
individuals are distinct because each of them has a specific identity but such
distinctness is only revealed through action, and they are equal because they
must be able to understand one another as human. Plurality, in brief, is the
condition whereby not “man” but human beings inhabit the earth as distinct
and equal creatures.
I am treating plurality as the primary moment of the constellation concept
of action not only because it is the specific human condition that corresponds
to action, but also because, as a consequence of this, as I will show, plurality
is the condition of politics. If meaningful political experience is to be recov-
ered, then, taking the Arendtian viewpoint, this can only be done by grasping
the existential human condition of plurality at the heart of political experi-
ence. I will therefore return to it throughout this chapter. In the nature of
constellation concepts, the moments already discussed will return in various
ways in the discussions of other elements. This is particularly true of plural-
ity because of its being the “human condition” of action. I have emphasized
the idea of an active distinguishing of oneself through action and speech as
essential to plurality. A consideration of what this distinguishing consists in
brings up another moment in the constellation concept of action: the disclo-
sure of the agent in the act.
“THE WHO” REVEALED IN ACTION
If humans respond to the condition of plurality by setting themselves apart in

speech and action, the question now is: what or, rather, who is it that is revealed
in appearing before others in this way? Essential here is Arendt’s claim regard-
ing the “self” that is revealed only in action and not prior to it. That is, who
someone is as opposed to what someone is can only be revealed through action
in appearing before others. I will come to the Arendtian category of “what”
someone is below. For now, I emphasize that to appear at all presupposes a
plurality of others to whom one can appear in the first place. Thus, if action
serves an individuating function for human beings, such individuation is only
possible in the presence of others and a reader will come to see that this is
not the presence of others simply as observers but implies the reception of
and response to the speech and action of another, and this is itself constitutive
of “the who,” mitigating the potential impression that Arendt’s thought is in
the tradition of individualistic political theories. Only within the context of a
plurality of other human beings can I appear and reveal “who” I am. “This
revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore when people are with
others and neither for nor against them—that is, in sheer human togetherness.”8
That is to say, “who” someone is lies in the revelation in speech and action
that is inseparable from the existential condition of plurality, and plurality
appears when people are with others in sheer human togetherness. In a sense,
the revelation of the “who” realizes the condition of plurality or brings it to life.
To delve further into this distinction between who and what somebody is,
we need to examine the connection between speech and action. Hitherto I
have simply conjoined the terms in discussing action. Arendt does this too,
but the precise connection between action and speech is crucial for under-
standing the concept of action. Arendt connects the nature of these activities
in this way: action belongs more intimately to the phenomenon of beginning
and speech to revelation. Action in Arendt is a new beginning by which
human beings insert themselves into the world and set something into motion
that had not previously been a part of the world. However, Arendt repeat-
edly suggests that action is and can only be revelatory if it is accompanied
by speech. Speech just is the capacity by which actors reveal who they are.
Action is new beginning and speech is revelation but without the accompani-
ment of speech to reveal the actor there could be no action in Arendt’s sense:
“Speechless action would no longer be action because there would no longer
be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the
same time the speaker of words. The action he begins is humanly disclosed by
the new beginning but it is only new beginning if it is of human significance
and it is only of human significance if it appears as such, which is to say, if it
is the revelation of an actor through speech.”9
34 Chapter 2
I now come to the distinction between who and what someone is, to grasp
just what is at stake in her making this distinction. A reader must understand
why it would be problematic to claim that action reveals what an individual
is as opposed to who she is when she acts. To see what is at stake, it is impor-
tant to get back behind this question to understand what kind of answers
might be given when interrogating what somebody is as opposed to who they
are. With Arendt, to ask after what-ness at all is to ask after the essential
qualities and characteristics of something. Such qualities are attributed to
some core underlying subject who is these things. In other words, there is
an underlying self that displays his or her qualities in action and the self is
these things prior to or irrespective of action. In other words, the concept of
self, presupposed in asking after the what-ness of somebody is a substantial
one, that is, one belonging to the Cartesian category of substance. Of course
Descartes distinguished between “thinking” and “extended” substances, but
the very invocation of “substance” as a category of human being calls to mind
something in which properties and qualities inhere. Viewed from the para-
digm of “substance,” a self is posited and exists prior to any activity that she
undertakes. An implication of this is that a self is a self regardless of how she
appears to others. Thus, the concept of the self that emerges with Descartes
as a substantial one is more of a what than a who.10
In order to further clarify Arendt’s concept of the “self” in speech and
action, I draw on Villa’s “Modernity, Alienation, and Critique” for its use-
ful distinction between the performative and expressivist concepts of self.
In Villa’s thought on the “who,” Arendt is working with the performative
concept in which there is no self over and above any action it engages in as it
appears before others. Two ideas can be gleaned from the performative con-
cept of the self in this context, one existential, the other epistemological: (1)
the self as “the who” only comes to exist in performing actions, and (2) it can
only be known to others before whom the actor appears when acting. Thus
although there is of course a “self” prior to and independently of action in the
space of appearances—as is evident from Arendt’s concept of natality—I am
concerned here with the self that comes into existence in action. (I turn to the
meaning of natality in Arendt below.)
A reader may call the expressivist concept the one that Arendt is trying to
distance herself from. Villa explains it as follows. “The expressivist concep-
tion of self assumes a core self, a basic essential unity of innate capacities
that are expressed, actualized, or concretized in the world of appearances.”11
According to this conception, the self is prior to the act as opposed to being
coextensive with it as the actor in the act. There is a necessary positing of a
self who is seen as the underlying ground of actions.
Continuing with Villa, I argue that the expressivist concept of self is best
thought of from the perspective of animal laborans. This is the self expressed
in laboring as a response to necessity: to psychological and biological needs

and desires. The self in laboring is an expression of those needs and desires.
Moreover, homo faber can be considered as an expressivist concept of self
insofar as the results of making and fabricating, the human artifice, are an
expression of the self as maker and fabricator. The self of action, however,
comes into existence only in the action. The performative self expresses
nothing, but, rather, is the actor in the act. It actualizes the potential for new
beginning that lies in the condition of natality. In Villa’s words “Action,
according to Arendt, provides us with an escape from the inner, determining
multiple self. Freedom, as the spontaneous beginning of something new, is
made possible by the transcendence of needs and psychology that entry into
the public realm enables (because here neither the needs of life nor purity of
motivation are at stake).”12
The performance of actions before others is an achievement whereas the
expression of an underlying self is a kind of projection of a preexisting set
of qualities into a somehow shared human situation. A further dimension of
Arendt’s notion of the “who” revealed in the act is that the performance pre-
cludes self-knowledge or self-transparency in the action, for one is dependent
upon others for the revelation of who one is: the unique identity of the actor
who appears in the act. As Kateb puts it: “It is thus the case that the most
important thing of all—who I am—I cannot know, only others can. I cannot
enter political action in order to know myself; I can only get to know myself
somewhat better, and then thanks only to the political copresence of others.”13
It therefore follows from Arendt’s distinction between “who” and “what”
someone is and from the distinction between performance and expression
that action cannot lead to self-knowledge except in and through the media-
tion of the others to whom one appears, and that it could never be an increase
in knowledge of the self as a person with qualities. Thus Arendt goes so far
as to claim that who an actor is remains hidden from the actor herself: “it is
more than likely that the ‘who,’ which appears so clearly and unmistakably to
others, remains hidden from the person himself.”14 This seems to be essential
to the public and indeed political nature of the Arendtian self, who is looking
less and less like an individualistic self despite the emphasis on the distinct-
ness of the individual in the condition of plurality.
A reader may ask what is gained in relation to the critique of modernity
outlined in chapter 1 from insisting upon the self as performative as opposed
to expressive. First, performance requires an audience or, in other words, a
public. The discernment of a self that is only achieved among others in public
is a specific response to the problem of worldlessness. Moreover, the notion
of the actor revealed to others in the act combats the logic of process. The
suggestion of a self who is only in the act in which one appears before oth-
ers in public indicates that action has the nature of interruption or insertion.
36 Chapter 2
That is, processes are interrupted specifically through action as in the perfor-
mance of one who is. Whereas the self, seen from the perspective of animal
laborans, is one engaged in continual processes seeking to meet the cyclical
demands of life, conceiving of man as actor allows one to envision a kind of
existential breaking off of such processes—not only from processes in labor-
ing activity but also in respect of the logic of process that Arendt has found to
be paradigmatic for human beings’ thinking of both themselves and the world
in modernity. Moreover, the appearance of the “who” is not only an interrup-
tion but also the insertion of a new beginning in the world: “With word and
deed, we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a
second birth . . . its impulse springs from the beginning which came into the
world when we were born and to which we respond by beginning something
new on our own initiative.”15
Thus part of revealing who someone is when they act—the larger focus
of this section of the chapter—is intimately connected to Arendt’s notion of
new beginning and this is captured in Arendt’s continual invocation of the
language of “springing up” that appears in various contexts throughout her
discussion of action. Arendt first articulates new beginning in relation to the
concept of natality, which renders human birth, the nature of human com-
ing into the world, as initium. That is to say, the birth of each of us is itself
the beginning of something new in the sense of undetermined and unprec-
edented: the uniqueness of each new birth. In order to specify this sense of
beginning, in contrast to action as new beginning, Arendt traces the temporal
mode of “natality” to the Latin roots of “beginning” in the political thought
of Augustine. He specifies two meanings of “beginning”: principium, the
beginning of something, and initium, the beginning of someone.16 The crucial
difference is that the beginning of human life (initium) signifies a temporal
break. In other words, in any particular human birth nothing like it has come
before. In other words, each human life is a new beginning because nothing
like it existed before it and nothing like it will ever follow. Arendt abandons
the theological resonance of Augustine’s thought in this text to make an exis-
tential point about the human condition: each human birth is the appearance
of someone unique in the world. On this view, humans themselves are begin-
nings. As such, the capacity for action is the capacity to actualize one’s natal
potential as a beginning: who one is when they act is a new beginning. This
potential is inherent in the human being: “action has the closest connection
with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can
make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capac-
ity for beginning something anew, that is, of acting.”17
I am now in a position to examine the next feature of the constellation
concept of action, what Arendt refers to as “the web of human relation-
ships.” This will illuminate how action appears in the world by showing
how individual actors act “into” the existing world. Performance is not in
a vacuum; instead, when individuals act in Arendt’s sense, they act in the
context of an existing web of human relations. The concept of the web of
relationships will also help to show why it is that the unique identity of actors
remains hidden from them in their act.
THE WEB OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS
Arendt opens her discussion of the web of relationships with the notion of the
“realm of human affairs.” She insists that this is the reality that corresponds
to human beings insofar as they are conceived of as acting and speaking
beings. That is to say, the capacities for action and speech unique to human
beings make possible and create uniquely human relationships “without the
intermediary stabilizing, and solidifying influence of things.”18 The contrast
is with the world of stable and durable objects as the reality corresponding to
the human activity of work. Thus the significance of Arendt’s “web of human
relationships” can be grasped, first, in the understanding that “human affairs”
cannot be reified: human speech and action—the very fabric of human
affairs—are not productive of anything tangible in themselves. Human
speech and action go on directly between human beings as they interact with
one another. The revelation of the unique “who” therefore emerges in the
inter-action of human beings. “This revelatory quality of speech and action
comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for nor against
them—that is, in sheer human togetherness.”19 To be with other human beings
means to exist in plurality as distinct yet equal beings and to regard others
as equally capable of speech and action. Thus, to be “neither for nor against
them” indicates the equality, inherent in the condition of plurality itself, that
is necessary for truly human relationships.
The point, with Arendt, is to insist upon the existence of this unique real-
ity of human relationships that is realized through their capacities for speech
and action, separate from the world of things. Intangible though they may
be, only the relationships between individuals are truly deserving of being
called human. Arendt therefore states that “the realm of human affairs,
strictly speaking, consists of the web of human relationships.”20 In the realm
of human affairs human beings exist “primarily as acting and speaking
beings.”21 The web of human relationships specifies the nature of what hap-
pens as a result of acting and speaking. Like the world of work, the web is
“in-between” human beings, yet there is a crucial distinction: the web is a
subjective in-between as a result of being the effect of direct and un-reified
human interaction through speech and action. The capacities of acting and
speaking themselves constitute the web of human relationships. The point
38 Chapter 2
is made, again, in drawing a contrast with the world of work: “the physical,
worldly in-between . . . is overlaid and, as it were, overgrown with an alto-
gether different in-between which consists of deeds and words and owes its
origin exclusively to men’s acting and speaking directly to one another.”22
Thus, the web is not merely the context in which human beings’ speak and
act, but rather, is constituted by their human capacities of speaking and acting,
which just are the activities that establish human relationships. Arendt does
acknowledge that the content of speech and action in this sense is often about
worldly objects. However, the web of human relationships is no less a distinct
reality. In other words, the disclosure of “the who” in speech and action is
undetermined by the content. “Action and speech go on between men, as they
are directed toward them, and they retain their agent-revealing capacity even
if their content is exclusively ‘objective.’”23
I will now consider further the nature of the relation between the human
capacities under examination and the Arendtian “web.” Of central importance
is the following statement from The Human Condition. “The disclosure of
the ‘who’ through speech, and the setting of a new beginning through action,
always fall into an already existing web where their immediate consequences
can be felt.”24 The connection between the moment of action and the web is
made explicit here. The revelation of the actor through speech and the action
as a new beginning both rise out of and fall into the web of human relation-
ships. That is to say, revelatory speech and action rise out of an already
established context of human relationships and the consequences of the
action fall into and renew the web of relationships. Since the human capacity
for action always has the nature of a new beginning in relation to natality as
initium, the potential for new beginnings, “rising up” means that something
new and unexpected has arisen whose consequences will cut across existing
human relationships and form new ones. Action “rises up” in the sense that
it rises out of the web of relationships and sets into motion something new
that is capable of further development, affecting human relationships in an
unprecedented way and forming new ones. It therefore needs to be stated that
“the new” in Arendt has the sense of something particular and contingent:
emphasizing that “something new is started which cannot be expected from
whatever may have happened before.”25 The consequences of action can nei-
ther be foretold nor controlled because no preestablished goals are formulated
and no control over the consequences is possible.
The logic of new beginning therefore strongly contrasts action with work,
which operates according to a means–end logic where the means, the activ-
ity of work itself, are only intelligible in terms of the end, the object to be
produced. To view action in this way, as something with an antecedent end
or goal, is to strip it of its existential quality of the new beginning “rising
up” out of the web. Moreover, for Arendt, it is precisely the nature of action
as new beginning, which produces no durable products, that has led political
philosophers to devalue it in the Western tradition. In order to counter the
uncertainty of outcome in action, they have insisted on understanding politi-
cal activity according to the logic of making. On this view, one comes up in
advance with a theoretical scheme or ideal of what political society will look
like and the goal of human beings is to undertake measures by which to real-
ize such a scheme. The easiest context in which to see this is classical modern
social contract theory. The contract is made between human beings and all of
its features are described in advance in the works of most of the great political
thinkers of modernity. Although the specifics of the contracts certainly differ,
all of the contracts are made so that political society is conceived as some-
thing fabricated and produced according to a preestablished scheme. The
primary political activity in modern political theory, the social contract itself,
is thought of chiefly as making precisely because the logic of making ensures
a durable object—the political society as such. This is precisely the notion of
the political that wears away at the possibility of meaningful political experi-
ence, for Arendt, since those born into a modern political society cannot then
be conceived of as co-creators of the public realm. It is already “made.” The
substitution of the logic of making for that of acting is therefore essential to
Arendt’s criticism of the predominant tradition of modern political thought.
Importantly, it could be asked: what does the neglect of action or, in other
words, what does the denial of reality to the web of human relationships fully
amount to? This needs to be answered in order to further illuminate the sig-
nificance of the web as a feature of the constellation concept of action. Arendt
insists that a basic error in nearly all of Western political theory is what she
calls materialism: the reduction of the political realm to the concerns of mate-
rial necessity.26 The claim of the political materialist is that the chief aim of
politics is to serve the needs of those being ruled over by a government. The
basic distinction between ruler and ruled, so vital to Western political thought
since Plato in Arendt’s view, is taken to be its paradigmatic subject matter,
and nearly all of the questions it concerns itself with have their foundation in
understanding what the nature of this relationship ought to be. For example,
the question might take the form: What is the best and fairest way a govern-
ment ought to serve the needs of its citizens? Among such needs can be
included material resources such as access to basic necessities—education,
housing, employment, etc. The point is that this basic assumption, which per-
meates a lot of contemporary political discourse, is that politics is the realm
of the relationship between a government and its citizens and is centrally a
matter of understanding that relationship. For example, questions of distribu-
tive justice such as resource allocation are viewed as basic to the political
realm. The issue is not one of disparaging these questions as unworthy of
consideration. Rather, the question is whether politics is reducible to this
40 Chapter 2
frame of reference, which only permits within its purview the relationship
between government and those taken to be “ruled.” The notion of the largely
intangible “web” and its independent reality is central to the political, for
Arendt, because it presents a realm of human experience in which human
beings as actors disclose their identities through speech and action that rise
out of the web of human relationships. “To dispense with this disclosure, if
indeed it ever could be done, would mean to transform men into something
they are not; to deny, on the other hand, that this disclosure is real and has
consequences of its own is simply unrealistic.”27
In transitioning to another moment of action, I acknowledge that Arendt’s
thought clearly underlines the fragility of human affairs. This is evident in
one sense in the inability of action to result in tangible products. Of course
this is one of its virtues as well since it differentiates the realm of human
affairs properly speaking from the world of objects. Arendt distinguishes the
former from the latter while also acknowledging the need for a remedy to the
fleeting nature of “unpredictable and boundless” speech and action. A remedy
is needed for the immediate consequences of action lacking the durability of
things—to provide this rising up of speech and action out of the “web” with
some stability. Without this the “new” could not be a new beginning, for
nothing would result from the moment of spontaneity. I will now consider the
moment of the constellation concept of action that furnishes new beginnings
with a unique form of stability, one that can be seen as a reification of action,
inserting it into the realm of human artifice, but without reducing action to
making. This is the concept of narration.
THE NARRATION OF ACTION
First, the risks of action that narration supplies a remedy for must be laid out.
Although it is undoubtedly true that Arendt is trying to recover the human
capacity for action in The Human Condition, it is also true she is warning
against certain risks that it intrinsically bears. The “Introduction” to The
Human Condition written by Canovan draws attention to this issue:
Arendt is well known for her celebration of action, particularly the passages
where she talks about the immortal fame earned by Athenian citizens when they
engaged with their peers in the public realm. But The Human Condition is just
as much concerned with action’s dangers, and with the myriad processes set off
by human initiative and now raging out of control.28
Canovan’s reading underlines different points of emphasis that are crucial

to understanding what Arendt is doing in this text as a whole. There are two
dangers or risks that are constitutive of the nature of what it is to act at all
in The Human Condition: unpredictability and boundlessness. That is to say,
the consequences of action can be neither foretold nor contained. Action’s
consequences “are boundless,” Arendt writes, “because action, though it may
proceed from nowhere . . . acts into a medium where every reaction becomes
a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of new processes.”29
Additionally, action is unpredictable because its consequences cannot be
fully known until its completion, and then only to the spectators who are
witness to the full meaning that remains hidden from the actor. I now con-
sider Arendt’s notion of storytelling as a remedy for the unpredictability and
boundlessness of action.30 Since the storyteller is the one who brings out the
full meaning of action in Arendt, storytelling is itself a moment or element of
the constellation concept.
Put briefly, storytelling is the way in which action is preserved in mem-
ory—it is what keeps alive, so to speak, the words and deeds of actors in
the aftermath of the appearance of the actor before others, even long after
the action has ceased and its consequences have been realized. Kristeva
aptly summarizes the relationship between memory and narration in Arendt:
“Action is such only if it becomes memorable. Where does one find this
memory? It is spectators who complete the story in question, and they do so
through thought, thought that follows upon the act. This is a completion that
takes place through evoked memory, without which there is nothing to tell.”31
Storytelling accomplished through evoked memory is the phenomenon that
fully reveals “who” an actor is and the whole significance of the action. This
notion of narrative as the telling of stories about those who “began” the story
is directly linked to the revelatory quality of action itself. “Action reveals
itself only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian,
who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants.”32
I therefore need to consider the conception of the narrator in Arendt as the
one who, in contrast to the actors themselves, has access to this knowledge.
First, actors are immersed in the action and its consequences. By virtue of
being a part of the action, actors cannot have access to its full significance.
This is, again, in contrast with work or fabrication, whose end or goal is ante-
cedent to the activity, so the craftsman or worker must have full knowledge of
the meaning of his or her activity. Conversely, action as new beginning never
admits of antecedent knowledge of the ends. Thus, action as new beginning
is fully intelligible only in the realization of its consequences. Only in its
consequences does one discover what it was that action began. The revela-
tory quality of action is linked to this character of action as bringing about
something unexpected and, indeed, unpredictable: “This unpredictability of
outcome is closely related to the revelatory character of action and speech, in
which one discloses one’s self without ever knowing himself or being able to
42 Chapter 2
calculate beforehand whom he reveals.”33 Thus the conception of narration

is quite consistent with the features of action discussed to this point and is a
necessary moment of the constellation concept.
Narration’s significance must be grasped in connection with the sense of
“the new” in action as new beginning. Arendt’s thought is that preserving
action in memory enables the unexpected and revelatory character of action
to remain intact as inspiration for future action. Although the revelatory
nature of action belongs to the moment of action itself, narration is the
form in which “the new” beginning is preserved. Moreover, although the
narration of the storyteller is a retrospective activity, its significance is fully
captured only in its capacity to extend the action into the future. Narration
“condenses and crystallizes” the meaning of the action and fulfills the inser-
tion into the world of that which had not been there before. The preservation
of “the new” in action through narration is, accordingly, a key moment in
the constellation concept. Its necessity lies especially in the fleeting nature
of action and speech in the sense that goes beyond any objective content
they may have.
I have emphasized how, together with the ontological condition of action
as “new beginning” in natality, action is to be envisioned as an existential
possibility. The narration of action is therefore not only the condition for
revealing action’s full significance and the preservation of what is “past” but
also provides an existential link between past and future in the sense that
action can inspire future action. In this way, then, action is provided not only
with a kind of tangibility and durability that it would otherwise lack, reveal-
ing and preserving its full significance, but that in preserving the meaning of
the new beginning, it serves as inspiration for future actors.
CONCLUSION
I continue the analysis of Arendt’s concept of action in chapter 3. There, I will

discuss the relevance of three further moments of action: power, the space of
appearances, and freedom. I consider power first because, although in this
final section I have shown that narration is deeply important for providing
stability to action, what I have yet to consider is what might be considered
a logically prior element of the constellation concept in the sense that it
belongs to the moment of action itself. Deeply embedded within the structure
of action itself is power. This is a crucial Arendtian thought not only because
she has a unique understanding of power that differs in important ways from
other concepts of power in the tradition of political thought, but also, more
positively, because power itself lies within the human condition of plurality
as the potential togetherness that is actualized through speech and action.
Power, then, is deeply rooted in action because of its connection to the condi-
tion of plurality and consequently, deserves a fairly lengthy treatment due to
its integral role within the overall constellation.
NOTES
1. The well-known passage in Kant’s third Critique is as follows: “Judgment in

general is the ability to think the particular as contained under the universal. If the
universal (the rule, principle, law) is given, then judgment, which subsumes the par-
ticular under it, is determinative . . . But if only the particular is given and judgment
has to find the universal for it, then this power is merely reflective.” Immanuel Kant,
The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), pp.
18‒19.
2. Several sources in the secondary literature use the language of constellation in
reference to Arendt. For example, in a recent article, without providing the full context,
J. M. Bernstein states the following in his use of Arendt: “Part of the human mean-
ing of politics, what I term its existential excess, is provided by the constellation that
connects natality with beginning and beginning with founding.” See J. M. Bernstein,
“Political Modernism: The New, Revolution, and Civil Disobedience in Arendt and
Adorno,” in Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations, eds. Lars
Rensmann and Samir Gandesha (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 61.
Kateb supports this reading, though he uses the term compound. “Arendt’s theory
of the excellence of politics is a compound of elements.” George Kateb, “Political
Action: Its Nature and Advantages,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arendt, ed.
Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 132. What these
readings show is that any discussion of politics in Arendt (or of what she contrasts
the political with) involves connections between a number of elements. Interpreting
her thought therefore requires an examination and even a construction of the connec-
tions involved in the subject matter and the text at hand (action, work, or labor, for
example). Here we are attempting to provide a preliminary clarification of her use of
the constellation concept of action.
3. Mary Dietz, “Arendt and the Holocaust,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Arendt, ed., Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.
96–97.
5. Arendt uses the term “men” throughout her writings, most likely allowing it to
do the work of the German term Menschen, which does not refer to the male gender.
If I follow her in this practice at times, it is because I have not found another way to
express the particular philosophical resonance of the prominent and original notion of
plurality.
6. Ibid., 176.
7. Canovan, Reinterpretation, 111.
44 Chapter 2
9. Ibid., 178–79.
10. Of course there are vast differences in modern philosophy’s conception of the
subject depending upon the philosopher under consideration. Allowing for Arendt’s
critique of modernity and the “turn to the self” she sees ushered in by a figure like
Descartes, I suggest that his concept of the self as a “thinking” substance becomes
paradigmatic for the development of modern philosophy notwithstanding the cri-
tiques it drew from subsequent thinkers.
11. Villa, “Modernity, Alienation, and Critique,” 190.
13. Kateb, Politics, Conscience, Evil, 9.
15. Ibid., 176–77.
16. See footnote 3 on 177 of The Human Condition for the explicit discussion of
Augustine’s distinction between principium and initium. It is unsurprising Arendt
locates such a profound insight in his thought given that her doctoral book was on the
concept of love in Augustine’s thought.
17. Ibid., 9.
19. Ibid., 180.
20. Ibid., 183–84 (emphasis added).
21. Ibid., 181.
23. Ibid., 182.
25. Ibid., 178.
26. It is clear that claims like this, which have as their target the reduction of poli-
tics to material necessity or the activity of laboring, have Marx in mind. Although
Arendt planned a full-length book examining the relationship between elements of
Marx’s thought and totalitarianism, she never completed it. For a thorough explana-
tion of this development in Arendt’s intellectual biography, see Margaret Canovan,
Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), pp. 63–99.
27. The Human Condition, 183, especially footnote 8, on materialism in politics.
28. Margaret Canovan, “Introduction,” in The Human Condition, p. xix.
30. The Human Condition also introduces the capacities of forgiveness and prom-
ising as specific forms of speech and action themselves that can remedy boundlessness
and unpredictability. Promising will take on greater significance in chapter 4, below,
as an inherently political activity, where I will discuss its presence, for Arendt, in the
specifically modern phenomenon of revolution. This is where promising becomes
a distinctly political activity by which human beings bind themselves together in a
manner that extends into the future. I will therefore draw upon her phenomenological
treatment of action in The Human Condition in chapters 4 and 5. Here I am working
forward from the discussion of the intangibility of the web of human relationships
that action brings about, and am concerned with narration as the phenomenon that
introduces something tangible into the consequences of action, thereby also remedy-
ing the risks of boundlessness and unpredictability.
31. Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2001), p. 16.
33. Ibid., 192.
Chapter 3
Arendt’s Phenomenological
Concept of Action, Part II
POWER
Power is intrinsic to the notion of the human capacity for action and is
therefore essential to the intelligibility of the public space, which bears on
the political resonance of the concept of action in The Human Condition.
However, it is also the most perplexing notion in The Human Condition. One
can find its significance appearing in statements like the following: “Power
is what keeps the public realm—the potential space of appearance between
acting and speaking men—in existence.”1 This statement contains many
thoughts that we have not yet elaborated: it introduces the conception of the
public realm as the potential space of appearances, and therefore expresses
the perhaps peculiar idea of keeping a potential in existence, and it makes
power the source of the public “space” in Arendt’s sense. The central claim
is that power keeps the public realm in existence—without “power” the space
for action would not exist. A further peculiarity is that power is described
as both an actuality—power exists only in action itself—and a potential
inherent in the human condition of plurality. Adding to the perplexity is
that power seems to indicate that action in the full sense must be acting in
concert where hitherto the focus on action’s revelatory quality stresses the
individual actor engaged in action as she appears before others. I will need to
clarify as far as I can the puzzle of Arendt’s idea of power. It is vital for my
purpose since it will take my argument from the phenomenological approach
to action in terms of the individual actor revealed in the act to the notion of
acting in concert that will emerge as a political concept in Arendt’s later
work, On Revolution, discussed in chapter 4. In brief, the concept of power
accomplishes this change in focus without, however, losing the elements of
the constellation concept discussed hitherto: distinctness, appearing before
47
48 Chapter 3
others, the revelation of the “who” in the act, and narration. I focus especially
on the twofold notion of power as actuality (that power exists only in action
itself) and power as potential (inherent in the condition of human plurality).
Suppose one considers some immediate intuitions they have about the
meaning of power, especially in a political context. They may unreflectively
presume that power is something gained, possessed, and maintained by an
individual, a group, or a government. Rulers possess power or governments
are granted power by citizens when the latter authorize their rule. On the
individual level, one might say that someone has power over another. On
this view, power functions as a predicate of a subject in the specific sense of
something that can be possessed. This, I think, is the paradigmatic framework
for thinking about power in the political context. To Arendt, this notion of
power appears with the ruler–ruled distinction that is so central to Western
political thought. According to social contract theory more broadly, power
is granted to a government in the first place by the citizens or the ruled; it
is something possessed and transferable, so that it exists politically as the
power of government. Modern concepts of power are of course inextricably
bound up with the discourse of rights and liberties, and with the transfer of
right, and are therefore related to the question of legitimate rule. Even Plato
and Aristotle, though lacking the discourse of rights, agree that the question
of legitimate rule over the ruled is one of the central questions of politics.
Arendt differs. She tracks the focus on the ruler–ruled distinction in politi-
cal theory to an underlying issue. “The commonplace notion already to be
found in Plato and Aristotle that every political community consists of those
who rule and those who are ruled . . . rests on a suspicion of action.”2 The
suspicion of action speaks to its inherent frailty, which Arendt thinks the
tradition attempted to overcome by substituting “making” for action. Thus,
by suggesting that “making” a political society is the basic activity of poli-
tics, power comes to mean having at one’s disposal what is required to rule
over others. Notably, in Hobbes, power is the “might” of the sovereign, as
is seen in the widely known assertion that “covenants with the sword are but
words.”3 Arendt’s concept of power can therefore be viewed as the center of
her rethinking of the fundamentals of political theory, and by extension, for
my argument, as fundamental to the recovery of meaningful political experi-
ence as a remedy for the problems of modernity.
As one might expect, power in Arendt is intimately linked to the human
capacity for action. If action is new beginning, power is how a new begin-
ning “springs up” through the action of individuals. One way in which
Arendt introduces her notion of power is to contrast it with strength.
“While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation,
power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the
moment they disperse.”4 Present here are three central features of power:
Arendt’s Phenomenological Concept of Action, Part II 49
it is that which springs up in action, it is what holds men together when

they act, and it ceases when this togetherness does. Since power is char-
acterized as that which maintains the potential space “between” human
beings for action and speech, it can be fruitfully thought of as “horizontally
relational.” That is to say, power as that which springs up through acting
in concert should not be seen in “vertical” terms but in “horizontal” ones.
Penta has stressed this point: “Power is not power over, as the normal
usage suggests, but power with, because it constitutes essentially the space
of action.”5 In the terms I am arguing, power is the potential of the hori-
zontal relation between people that springs up when they act in concert and
that vanishes when this acting in concert ceases.
To clarify the notion of a potential that exists only in its actualization, one
may recall Aristotle’s distinction between potentiality and actuality as a way
of making sense of movement or change. The Parmenidean notion that only
“Being is” presented the challenge that change or becoming is unreal and
illusory. Aristotle’s potentiality/actuality distinction attempts to remedy this
by suggesting that something can be said to “be” in two ways: potentially
and actually. This overcomes the problem of how being might arise from
non-being or, put more clumsily, something from nothing. Aristotle, in the
Physics, sums up the Parmenidean quandary: “So they say that none of the
things that are either comes to be or passes out of existence, because what
comes to be must do so either from what is or what is not, both of which are
impossible. For what is cannot come to be (because it is already) and from
what is not nothing could have come to be (because something must be pres-
ent as a substratum).”6
Hence, what is not in existence can be understood not as “non-being” but as
potential being, and the problem of how change or motion occurs is avoided.
Aristotle’s way of overcoming the Parmenidean dilemma shows how motion
is possible. It can illuminate the way in which action is cast in terms of
motion in The Human Condition. One recalls Arendt’s statement: “To act, in
its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin . . . to set some-
thing into motion.”7 To illuminate the role of potential in the Arendtian notion
of initiative, one can think of the problem in the following way: the potential
may be thought of as something merely stored up that requires activation by
an outside force to become actualized or, alternatively, the potential moves in
and of itself toward actualization without the aid of some outside force. Given
Aristotle’s philosophical clarification of the concept of potential, a distinction
can be made between a passive and active sense of potential. In Arendt, the
concept of potential carries no implication that the potential moving in and
of itself to its actualization is something “natural.” That is to say, Arendt
uses the notion of potential without the implication of the natural teleology
in Aristotle. Thus a readers needs to hear the word potential in the right way.
50 Chapter 3
Peeters provides a helpful analysis of the issue in “Against Violence, but not
at any Price: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Power.” Power [for Arendt] cannot
be stored and kept in reserve for the future: it must continually emerge anew.
Thus it is also clear that the potentiality of power may not be understood as
an underlying substrate or a pre-given potential being that simply waits for
its realization or actualization (like in the relation of the seed to the plant).8
Thus if potential is thought as substrate or pre-given, then the concept of
potential is passive as opposed to active and one finds the more passive sense
referred to in this quotation from Peeters. The passive potential must either
develop from what is pre-given or be acted upon by some outside force for
its actualization. In the active concept potential is self-actualizing. It will be
no surprise that in Arendt power actualizes itself in action. That is to say,
power is actualization in “springing up” between men in acting and speaking
together. Arendt’s language expresses self-actualization. This also means that
power disappears the moment that men disperse.
Arendt writes, further, that “power corresponds to the condition of plu-
rality to begin with” unfolding further the notion that “men and not Man
inhabit the earth”; the notion of power stresses “the power in togetherness”
that is implicit in the condition of plurality. One might say, then, that power
as potential lies in the condition of human plurality. Penta notes the intimate
relationship between power, plurality, and action: “The localization of power
between, rather than in agents, emphasizes at the same time the essential
ontological condition of plurality, the condition Arendt defends as essential
to the realm of action.”9 Power is the potential for action to rise out of what
we have called the subjective “in-between”: the web of human relationships.
Power as potential is therefore actualized only when men come together and
act in concert. Moreover, according to the active concept of potential, the
actualization of the power potential will take the form of action as new begin-
ning. The new beginning is therefore the concept of action that corresponds
to power as active potential. Where action is conceived as fabrication, this
could not be the actualization of an active potential but only of potential
thought of as a substrate, where the end of action would be predetermined
and a means would need to be introduced to activate the potential in order
to attain the end.
The significance of “power” for Arendt’s concept of action cannot be
underestimated. It is the lynchpin in her analysis because without the power
of people—the power in human togetherness—action as a meaningful human
capacity, is lost. “Without power,” writes Arendt, “the space of appearance
brought forth through action and speech in public will fade away as rapidly
as the living deed and living word.”10 This helps with the conundrum of
the relation between action and speech, on the one hand, and the space of
appearances, on the other: does the former require or create the latter? The
notion of power as potential whose self-actualization keeps the public space

in existence is crucial.
I will now briefly consider power’s relationship to violence, although
it is treated only cursorily in The Human Condition. Her later essay “On
Violence” provides a fuller treatment of the concept of violence that I find
to be consistent with her phenomenological treatment of power. Contrasting
power with violence requires confronting the intuitive appeal of their confla-
tion in political thought. In confronting such an intuition, with Arendt, I dis-
entangle it from one of the more paradigmatic ways of thinking about it and
further understand its situatedness within the larger constellation of action. In
“On Violence” Arendt addresses the appeal of the conflation of power with
violence:
Behind the confusion [the conflation of power with the other phenomena of
force, strength, and violence] is a firm conviction . . . the conviction that the
most crucial political issue is, and always has been, Who Rules Whom? Power,
strength, force, authority, violence—these are but words to indicate the means
by which man rules over man; they are held to be synonymous because they
have the same function. It is only after one ceases to reduce public affairs to
the business of dominion that the original data of human affairs will appear, or,
rather, reappear, in their authentic diversity.11
Here, there is a reiteration of the basic Arendtian critique of the assumption

that the subject matter of politics is the ruler-ruled relationship. Additionally,
a symptom of this assumption is a conflation of different phenomena in
relations between people. For my present purposes, I must focus on the
conflation of power and violence. To Arendt, violence as a phenomenon that
appears in the world always operates according to the categories of means
and ends whereas power is always an end-in-itself. That is to say, violence
requires instruments—the means—to accomplish some goal and stands in
need of justification: the end provides the means with justification. Power,
as the potential implicit in the condition of plurality, stands in no need of
justification because it is an end-in-itself.12 There is nothing that power aims
towards or tries to accomplish and there is nothing prior to power that IT
seeks to accomplish. Obviously, if one insists upon power as something to be
obtained, then one can speak of the means for attaining power, but this is not
power in Arendt. It is either strength or force.
How, then, should one respond to the assertion that governments are made
up of the ones with power and use violence in order to demonstrate such
power? It is a fundamental thesis of anti-statist critiques, for example, that
states or government enforce their power through violence. Arendt acknowl-
edges this viewpoint. “Still it must be admitted that it is particularly tempting
52 Chapter 3
to think of power in terms of command and obedience, and hence to equate

power with violence, in a discussion of what actually is one of power’s
special cases—namely, the power of government.”13 But, here, one needs to
ask whether saying a government has power simply means that it possesses
power. If so, I ask: how does it possess power? The answer in an anti-statist
critique is that a government has power just because it possesses the means
of violence. Young-Bruehl captures the frustration a contemporary reader
may experience when encountering Arendt’s insistence upon this distinction
between power and violence: “Particularly for people like us, who live in
a world where it is routinely assumed that those with the biggest armies or
arsenals, or the ultimate weapon, are the ones with power—or even ‘super-
power’—and where it is assumed that power means the capacity to rule
over others, her distinction is hard to understand and its implications hard to
accept.”14
From another perspective, of course, we might say that governments only
have power because people have invested it with such power in the first
place. A government does not have power like one has access to the means of
violence. As Arendt boldly states: “No government exclusively based on the
means of violence has ever existed.”15 Rather, a government has power only
to the extent that it is recognized as legitimate by the people. Arendt claims
that it is only where power is absent that violence takes its place—only
when governments lack power or the support of the people do they resort to
violence: “Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own
course it ends in power’s disappearance . . . Violence can destroy power; it is
utterly incapable of creating it.”16
Let me be clear that Arendt is not seeking to divorce political discourse
from the state or its institutions. To dismiss the state as integral to understand-
ing political life would be historically ignorant. The question, though, for
Arendt is why the tradition has insisted upon the state as being the essence of
political life and whether there is something more fundamental to the experi-
ence of politics. Figal poses the problem as follows:
She merely wants to contest that the state is the essence of the political, not deny
the political significance of the state. The pivotal point can be formulated as fol-
lows: power is the liveliness, the soul of the political, while the state and every
other prestate organizational form, its body. And while the body might still exist
for a while after the soul has withdrawn from it, while it may even be conserved
with all sorts of devices, it can for all that at best simulate this liveliness for the
superficial observer.17
Even someone who might be regarded as among the most cynical of the
political thinkers of modernity alongside Machiavelli, Hobbes, with his
nearly absolutist form of rule, grounds such rule in a kind of contract that can
be seen as the power of the people granting the state authority. Undoubtedly,
Arendt would be critical of the claim that “covenants without the sword, are
but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”18 This to her is a con-
flation of power and violence but it is nonetheless important to acknowledge
that this challenges some of our fundamental intuitions and basic everyday
discourse about politics. I would not want to suggest that simply because
Arendt has told us that violence and power are different that we must accept
her conclusion. I think what is gained in thinking through this distinction
more carefully in the way Arendt has is that it alerts us to legitimate gov-
ernmental power grounded in some form of citizen consent as opposed to
potential forms of state violence that try to mask themselves as legitimate.
We mustn’t abandon discourse of states having or holding power but we must
also be careful to understand what this truly means when we speak about it.
The clarification of the nature of the phenomena of power and violence
relates to the larger goals of this chapter in this way. Confronting their con-
flation in political thought allows power to be seen in its proper light in the
constellation concept of action. That is to say, problematizing this conflation
allows a reader to properly situate power in what I am calling meaningful
political experience. Political experience means human beings acting and
speaking together in a public space. Power just is what maintains the potential
of this togetherness that is inherent in human plurality. Thus, by grasping that
power is not something that can be possessed like the instruments of violence,
power can be discerned in its proper light in the context of meaningful politi-
cal experience.
With the clarification of power as potential and as self-actualization in
place, I can now consider the moment of action that Arendt calls “the space
of appearances.” This is of course vital for my sense that it is the recovery of
the public space that is the fundamental problematic in respect of what can
be called the “demise” of the political where politics is conceived in the ways
that Arendt criticizes. I have already suggested that power and the space of
appearances are intimately connected in the sense that power keeps the poten-
tial space of appearances in existence and is actualized in the human together-
ness that brings it about. I have yet to consider the space of appearances in its
full significance as an element of the constellation of action.
THE SPACE OF APPEARANCES
Recall the quotation from the beginning of the examination of power. “Power
is what keeps the public realm—the potential space of appearance between
acting and speaking men—in existence.”19 This is the most succinct statement
54 Chapter 3
of the connection between the concept of power and that of the space of
appearances. In this section I seek to illuminate that connection and to begin
the clarification of what the public space means in Arendt.
The space of appearances first arises in the context of Arendt’s discussion
of the Greek experience of politics, to which she frequently alludes in The
Human Condition. What is important in the Greek experience of politics for
Arendt is the polis itself, which she considers to be the space of appearances
in the Greek world because the polis is the reality that comes into being
whenever men speak and act together. The polis does refer to a particular
location such as Athens but, for the Greeks, is much more than just a physical
location. It is the human reality of men appearing to one another in speech
and action. It is the “space” in which I appear as the unique individual that I
am on the condition that others share it with me. Arendt writes of the Greeks
that “they expressed the conviction that action and speech create a space
between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time
and anywhere. It is the space of appearances in the widest sense of the word,
namely, “the space where I appear to others as others appear to me.”20 Thus
“sharing” the space does not mean that it preexists those who enter into it, as
one might share a room, but, rather, that when men come together in action
and speech they realize the togetherness of men implicit in the condition of
plurality.
It is often claimed that Arendt is overly nostalgic in her references to the
ancient Greeks, as though she were longing for a better time when politics
meant much more.21 However, these references to the Greeks function more
as an opportunity to envisage a historical experience of politics that is dif-
ferent than contemporary ones and to articulate that experience in terms
of structural features—above all, the space of appearances—that she can
present as basic to the experience of politics. With Calhoun and McGowan
on Arendt’s reading of the tradition: “Through a selective recovery of the
resources offered by the history of political thought, she sought to rein-
vigorate our contemporary understanding of the possibilities of political
life—and of the impoverishment that an apolitical life would mean.”22 There
is no obvious nostalgia in discovering something that is crucial to political
experience in the Greek polis but articulating it as a structural feature of
political experience as such: the possibility of appearing in public before
others. That Arendt locates such an experience in the world of the ancient
Greeks is not an attempt to transpose a Greek experience into the present.
Arendt is firmly situated in modernity and is not naïve about attempts to re-
envision Greek political life in the present. Rather, she finds in the Greeks
a vantage point from which to develop a critical relation to modernity. As
Figal notes: “it is this idea of an authentically political activity and the dis-
tinction between politics and legislation which belongs together with it that
makes the orientation to the Greeks so attractive for Arendt. For here she
finds the basis and foundation upon which she can diagnose and critique all
the problematic aspects of political life, particularly modern political life.”23
Now, even though there is always the potential for the space of appearances
to come into existence, its existence lies only in its actualization. In moder-
nity, however, the potential itself has become hard to envision because of
the devaluation of man’s capacity for action under the weight of animal
laborans and the logic of process. Nothing less is at stake here than the loss
of human reality because such reality is constituted by the “appearance” that
is essential to there being a world of human significance in Arendt. “To be
deprived of it [this ‘space’] means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly
and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the
world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all.”24 In
other words, this space of appearances is never just a given condition because
one recalls in The Human Condition that the space of appearances dissipates
the moment men are no longer together in the mode of speaking and act-
ing together. This means that in an Arendtian viewpoint, inasmuch as ideal
political theory is committed to something like an ideal of public reason or an
ideal speech situation, this is a mere abstraction, for the space of appearances
must either be kept in existence through acting in concert or be re-actualized
in speech and deed.
Thus what is at stake if this space is merely taken for granted or posited as
an ideal is not only its loss but the loss of freedom itself. The idea of the loss
of the space of appearance is not merely something vaguely referred to but
has a source in Arendt’s own experience with totalitarianism. I have already
shown, in chapter 1, Arendt’s important diagnosis of totalitarianism as the
diminishing of the space of freedom. However, she finds that the diminish-
ing of the public space also has roots in liberalism. Figal keenly observes
this point: “Whether one willingly hears it or not, according to Arendt’s
diagnosis, modern liberalism, where the human being is degraded from a
homo politicus to an animal laborans et consumens, is a necessary condi-
tion of totalitarianism.”25 It is not difficult to accept this if one considers that
the devaluing of the public space as an important political phenomenon is
undoubtedly foreshadowed in the classical social contract theories of moder-
nity. Moreover, the liberal state has been the form of politics under which
human beings are primarily treated as mere consumers. Arendt’s view is that
this means a diminishing of the public space as the space where freedom can
arise. Totalitarianism may or may not follow from the tendency inherent in
the liberal form of politics to undervalue the public space, but the totalitarian
form of politics is the one in which the loss of the public space is fulfilled. On
Villa’s reading, Arendt came to reconsider the relationship between moder-
nity and totalitarianism in The Human Condition:
56 Chapter 3
The result of this reconsideration (most fully worked out in The Human
Condition) was a qualified indictment of the Western tradition—not in any way
for “causing” the totalitarian disaster, but for fostering a conception of political
community which all but effaced the basic phenomenon of human plurality.
When Arendt connected this devaluation of human plurality with what she
considered to be the “world-destroying” forces of the modern age, she came to
the conclusion that totalitarianism was something less than the total aberration
it appeared to be.26
Rather than finding that politics must be the space in which human freedom
can arise, liberalism seems to claim that individuals need be made free from
politics and not free for it. That is, individuals ought to be insulated from
politics to the extent that they do not allow it to interfere with their own per-
sonal pursuits. Liberalism, in one form or another, just is the political theory
that emerges and takes hold in modernity, and one can see that the concep-
tion of freedom it offers squares with Arendt’s concept of world alienation.
Although the extent to which totalitarianism suppressed human freedom was
unprecedented, in agreement with Arendt, the roots of such suppression are
indeed already present in the liberal conception freedom as “freedom from”
politics. Arendt asks her readers, in a somewhat ironic tone: “Is it not true,
as we all somehow believe, that politics is compatible with freedom only
because and insofar as it guarantees a possible freedom from politics? This
definition of political liberty as a potential freedom from politics is not urged
upon us merely by our most recent experiences; it has played a large part in
the history of political theory.”27 A major problem of modernity is that what
has defined man is not meaningful action but the extent to which he can
consume and produce—“contribute to society” is the phrase one often hears.
Finally, I need to clarify an important distinction between the public
realm proper and the space of appearances. The latter is a phenomenological
concept that grasps what exists prior to any concrete institutional manifesta-
tion of a public space. That is to say, appearing to one another as distinct
and equal is a condition for any specific political organization of human
beings to be possible. Thus, the realization of plurality is prior to its concrete
articulation in political structures: “The space of appearances comes into
being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and
therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm
and various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the
public realm can be organized.”28 In On Revolution and other works Arendt’s
phenomenological concept is developed into a political concept. However,
the phenomenological treatment of the space of appearances is vital since it
rearticulates acting and speaking as fundamental human capacities in relation
to the problems of modernity. The Human Condition seeks to show how basic
human capacities have been altered, and as a result, how their appearance
changed in the modern age.
Benhabib provides a notable response to the distinction between the phe-
nomenological and institutional meanings of the concept of space. She finds
that Arendt is not always careful in her use of terminology, leaving a reader
unsure as to which concept she is referring to: “It has been rarely noticed
that Arendt frequently runs together the phenomenological concept of ‘the
space of appearances’ with the institutional concept of the ‘public space.’”29
There is an occasional lack of clarity in Arendt’s terminology. However, the
distinction between the space of appearances and the public realm is the one
that needs to be made here. As Villa points out: “It [plurality] is the sine qua
non of the public realm itself, understood as the institutionally articulated
public space where diverse citizens meet and discuss their common affairs.”30
This provides the clarification that the public realm is what Benhabib called
the public space. I take the language of space never to lose the connotations
that appear in Arendt’s phenomenological approach because it is the space
of appearing to one another in acting and speaking. The distinction between
the phenomenological notion of the public space and its development as a
political concept is the basis of my division between chapters 2 and 3 and
chapters 4 and 5. The latter will show how the space of appearances takes
on the concrete forms of the public realm within specific historical contexts.
Above all, in On Revolution the space of appearances is articulated as a
political concept in which it becomes the space of public deliberation that
precedes and occurs in the foundation of a new body politic. Here appear-
ance, speaking and acting with others, is the manifestation of human freedom
as political speech and action.
FREEDOM
The final moment or element of the constellation concept of action that I will
attend to here is freedom. This concept is implicit in the previous discussion
on the performative concept of action, but it is not taken up as directly in The
Human Condition as it is in Arendt’s essay “What Is Freedom?” from her
larger collection of essays titled Between Past and Future.31 Discussions of
freedom in The Human Condition seek to disentangle it from the tradition’s
identification of freedom with sovereignty. What Arendt finds problematic
is freedom identified as some kind of “self-rule” wherein human beings
have control over their actions. On Arendt’s view, of course, this is not so
because the consequences of action can be neither foretold nor controlled.
Thus, Arendt is working through both the modern moral and political tradi-
tions’ attempts at understanding freedom and contrasting those attempts with
58 Chapter 3
her own phenomenological treatment of the appearance of freedom. “What

Is Freedom?” then substantiates this notion of freedom.32 I seek to read this
essay as a further elaboration of the constellation concept of action in The
Human Condition.
First, freedom must be disentangled from the concept of power in The
Human Condition. If Arendtian power had to be defined in a few words, one
could say that power is a relational potential corresponding to the human
condition of plurality, which is realized between people when they act and
speak together. Power can be characterized as a potential of human beings
as those with the capacity to speak and act and as actualized where they
speak and act together. Freedom, however, is what arises in the phenomenon
of acting and speaking before others itself. Freedom is the phenomenon of
action as new beginning. I note, then, that Arendt is not concerned with the
notion of freedom of the will and, indeed, distances her thought from the
identification of freedom with the will. Freedom, to Arendt, is the actual
initiation of new beginnings. Clearly the concepts of power and freedom
are entwined as different aspects of the one phenomenon in action as new
beginning.
For her, one of the most egregious conceptual errors in the history of phi-
losophy in general and the history of political thought in particular has been to
divorce the concept of freedom from the realm of politics. The concept truly
belongs in the political realm, in her view, not as a property of the will. In her
words: “the philosophical tradition . . . has distorted, instead of clarifying, the
very idea of freedom such as it is given in human experience by transposing
it from its original field, the realm of politics and human affairs in general, to
an inward domain, the will, where it would be open to self-inspection.”33 The
point that Arendt is making is that there is no experience of freedom to be
had through philosophical introspection, that is, in attempting to ascertain the
freedom of the will. For her, this attempt to look inward for freedom instead
of outward to its manifestation in action is itself evidence of world alienation.
A reader recalls that one of the crucial claims she makes about modernity
is that human beings have become alienated from a common shared world
and concerned largely with the self. One sees evidence of this in the so-called
problem of freedom in late modern philosophy and in the attempt to recon-
cile freedom of the will with causal necessity. Kant was of course the major
philosopher of modernity who separated these realms in order to preserve
human freedom. Subsequent thinkers in the European tradition would attempt
a reconciliation of these realms given the seeming abyss Kant had opened up.
For Arendt, however, none of this is the proper focus for understanding the
phenomenon of freedom. “The field where freedom has always been known,
not as a problem to be sure, but as a fact of everyday life, is the political
realm. . . . For action and politics, among all the capabilities and potentialities
of human life, are the only things which we could not even conceive without
at least assuming that freedom exists.”34
It is a general truth that philosophy has assumed that morality can only
exist under the presupposition of freedom. For Arendt, however, the home
of freedom is politics. In fact, she claims, inner freedom, which is how she
understands the freedom of morality, is only recognizable as inner freedom
if one first experienced freedom in its manifestation through interaction with
others: “it seems safe to say that man would know nothing of inner freedom if
he had not experienced a condition of being free as a worldly tangible entity.
We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with oth-
ers, not in the intercourse with ourselves.”35 The necessity for the experience
of freedom is the crucial claim being made here. One sees that Arendt draws
freedom into the constellation concept of action and its character of revelation
before others. The capacity for revelatory action corresponds to the condition
of plurality and there is no freedom, for Arendt, without the actualization of
this capacity. Thus, the claim is above all that action as a human capacity
corresponds to the presence of others and freedom as the actualization of
this capacity is only recognizable in human togetherness. Arendt’s concept
of freedom, then, is connected to the concept of the space of appearances
because this alone is where freedom can arise.
I have presented Arendt’s concept of freedom as the manifestation of
human beings’ capacity for action as new beginning. Perhaps the most vivid
articulation of this occurs where Arendt calls freedom “the freedom to call
something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not
even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly
speaking could not be known.”36 This strongly highlights freedom’s con-
nection to the new beginning. The “Freedom” essay, then, underlines that
freedom properly conceived is neither freedom of the will nor the freedom
to choose among a finite set of options, but, rather, essentially a political
concept connected to human beings’ capacity for action as new beginning.
This is, of course, in contrast to paradigmatic ways of thinking about free-
dom in moral philosophy, which has articulated freedom in terms of voli-
tion. Indeed, Arendt claims that what one often refers to as free will is not
free, properly speaking, because one is really only referring to their capac-
ity to choose between different options and whatever choice one makes will
therefore ultimately be determined by a motive. On this view, one side of
action is the motive and the other side is the intended effect. Arendt is not
denying that motives and intended effects play a role in action but this is
not so for action as freedom. “Action, to be free, must be free from motive
on one side, from its intended goal as predictable effect on the other. This
is not to say that motives and aims are not important factors in every single
act, but they are its determining factors, and action is free to the extent that
60 Chapter 3
it is able to transcend them.”37 Here, it is clear that Arendt is also dismissing

the concept of “self-determination” as inconsistent with free action. This
notion of self-determination looms large in common ways of thinking of
freedom. Its philosophical emergence can be traced to Kant’s conception of
freedom as autonomy. Autonomy, literally meaning “self-law,” identifies
freedom with sovereignty and, in Kant, specifically with the self-imposition
of moral principles. Arendt introduces a different conception of the prin-
ciple in her phenomenological treatment of freedom.38 However, there are
ways in which the notion also allows one to see freedom’s place in the
constellation concept of action.
A principle shows how action as freedom appears in the world, demon-
strating its phenomenological import. Again, one needs to hear this word
in the right way and not, for example, construe it as a principle of moral-
ity. Odd though it may seem, the Arendtian principle comes from without.
Action is free, she claims, when it “springs” from a principle.39 Here, she
has in mind something quite general in nature that does not prescribe
any specific action. For instance, in “What Is Freedom?” she gives the
example of “love of equality.” Principles of this kind inspire action but
do not determine it. Action that fulfills the meaning of freedom in Arendt
therefore arises out of and in response to a principle. It is not some effect
that is caused by the principle. If it were, the action would at once cease to
be free. One can point to particular manifestations of a principle in action.
However, these particular acts do not exhaust the principle. “In distinction
from its goal, the principle of an action can be repeated time and again,
it is inexhaustible, and in distinction from its motive, the validity of a
principle is universal, it is not bound up to any particular person or to any
particular group.”40 Thus, something like love of equality could easily
cut across cultural and historical contexts, or different times within the
same cultural and historical contexts, to inspire action. Admittedly, with
Arendt’s concept of a principle, a reader might wonder to what extent
one actually sees examples of this playing out in the context of specific
political actions. One might worry, in other words, that Arendt’s account
is overly formal and lacks content. To allay these concerns, at the end of
chapter 5 on civil disobedience, I provide a specific example of the con-
temporary Black Lives Matter movement as an example of an Arendtian
political principle.
Finally, an Arendtian principle only exists in the action itself—in the
performance, not in its consequence or motive but solely in the action itself.
Moreover, freedom only appears in the world for Arendt when the principle
inspiring the act is made manifest in it. The following lines provide the pre-
cise connection between action, freedom, and principles: “Freedom or its
opposite appears in the world whenever such principles are actualized; the
appearance of freedom, like the manifestation of principles, coincides with

the performing act. Men are free—as distinguished from their possessing the
gift for freedom—as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free
and to act are the same.”41
A principle, then, has this connection to the constellation concept of action.
If freedom demonstrates that action appears in the world, a principle demon-
strates the particular way in which it does. The principle will therefore take
on greater significance in the explicitly political concept of action that I begin
discussing in chapter 4. Here, I have limited the discussion to how it connects
to the constellation of action.
I have aimed above all to show that freedom in an Arendtian sense must
find its home in politics, that is, in the public space of action where acting in
concert appears in the world. As we have seen, freedom and action are one in
the same: both are human capacities that correspond to the conditions of plu-
rality and natality. If, as Arendt asserts, “to be free and to act are the same,”
then freedom must be the manifestation of new beginning (natality) and it
must be how individuals respond to the condition of plurality, that is, acting
in such a way to appear as distinct and set something in motion.
ACTION: AGONAL VERSUS DELIBERATIVE
I now briefly consider an issue that is commonly raised in the secondary lit-
erature on Arendt in order to show how my attention to her critique of moder-
nity and the constellation concept of action may overcome this dilemma.
The dilemma is over two concepts of action found to be in tension with
one another in her thought, and which one of the two she largely maintains
throughout her work. The distinction at issue is one between the “delibera-
tive” and the “agonal” concept of action. As Lederman has pointed out: “The
literature on Hannah Arendt suggests two major interpretations of her con-
ception of politics. There is no doubt that at the center of her understanding of
the political is the concept of action, in the sense of acting and speaking in the
public sphere. Different commentators, however, emphasize different aspects
of this concept, and of the way it should be understood in the context of the
other concepts and themes of Arendt’s thought.”42 One concept, the agonal, is
that which is emphasized in The Human Condition, especially with respect to
Arendt’s references to the Greek polis and in her discussion of the revelation
of “the who” in action. The other concept of action, taken to be emphasized
especially in her discussion of power and in her later work On Revolution,
claims that action must always be action in concert, which takes the form of
public deliberation. Thus, one concept focuses on the revelation of the unique
identity of the individual whereas the other is concerned with collaborative
62 Chapter 3
action. One will find that this is not a tension in her thought so much as two
complementary features of the same concept of action. I have repeatedly
stressed that action is a constellation concept with multifarious elements that
cannot be subsumed under anything that might be referred to as the concept
of action. This would be thinking of action according to a determinant under-
standing, as if to say there is one thing called the agonal and another referred
to as the deliberative, whereas in Arendt there are moments as opposed to
subsumable properties of action. I will briefly engage with the supposed “ten-
sion” in Arendt’s concept in order to show how the agonal moment of action
must be situated in relation to the critique of modernity.
The agonal concept of action usually located in The Human Condition

appears wherever Arendt states something like the following: “In acting
and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal
identities.”43 This statement appears to indicate an individualist concept of
action that is more in line with the agonal spirit of the Greeks that Arendt
affirms. The agonal spirit is the idea that, for the Greeks, the public realm
was a space in which one sets themselves apart from others as if competing
for the fame and honor of one’s peers. The individualist nature of this kind of
action is not lost on Arendt. “No doubt this concept of action is highly indi-
vidualistic, as we would say today. It stresses the urge toward self disclosure
at the expense of all other factors.”44 Arendt therefore appears to be aware
of how her statement sounds to modern ears. The question is the extent to
which Arendt carries these ideas about the Greeks over into her own thought:
whether action for her is a performance before others for fame and glory—a
competition. The usual criticism here is that this is an overly aestheticized
concept of action and detracts from the necessarily deliberative character of
political speech and action. As I have shown, Arendt does place emphasis on
a kind of performative action in The Human Condition but in my view this
is not at the expense of the deliberative form of action. She emphasizes both.
As I have argued, it is her critique of modernity and her emphasis on plurality
that leads her to highlight the individuating function that action as new begin-
ning accomplishes. In my view, the debate has decontextualized The Human
Condition, which cannot be removed from its relation to modernity and the
objective of articulating how the hierarchy of human activities within the
vita activa has fundamentally altered in the modern age. Once it is seen that
action as a human capacity is devalued and “process” has become the primary
category of intelligibility for human activity, the emphasis in Arendt on indi-
viduation in action looks quite different than the standpoint of an individual-
istic political theory. In this context, the idea of action as new beginning is the
way forward because with Arendt’s unique idea of “the new” the emphasis is
on how action allows for something unexpected and revelatory to appear in
the world. “The new” is a phenomenological description of how action not

only stands out against “the world” of objects and “the processes” of labor—
it cannot be subsumed or made sense of within those categories of human
activity—but also renews the web of human relationships. I am emphasizing,
once again, that “the new” is a particular which is unintelligible according
to the existing frames of reference. Though this capacity for new beginning
is ontological, rooted in the condition of natality, in the context of moder-
nity, its possibility for actualization had diminished. Thus, the urgency with
which it needs to be recovered and rearticulated can be made apparent. In my
view, therefore, the agonal moment of action is important for understanding
how Arendt’s presentation of this human capacity responds to the critique of
modernity that is formulated in The Human Condition.
The deliberative moment of action will come into focus in chapter 4 at
the point where I locate an exemplar of meaningful political action in On
Revolution. This is a shift in emphasis rather than a change in concept, how-
ever. What I offer in moving from chapters 2 and 3 to 4 and 5 includes an
account of the development of the concept of action from its more agonal
moment to its deliberative moment in an explicitly political form.
CONCLUSION
Chapters 2 and 3 have articulated Arendt’s constellation concept of action as

a response to the problems of modernity outlined in chapter 1, especially the
erosion of a common world and the devaluation of political experience. This
erosion means, notably, that individuals in modern societies have become
alienated from engaging in the fundamental and essential aspects of political
life. Specifically, this is a failure to engage in the public space that Arendt
calls the space of appearances, where people exercise the political capaci-
ties of speech and action, rooted in the condition of plurality. I have shown
that Arendt emphasizes the capacity for coming together in such a way that
a space opens up for freedom to arise. I have traced a path through multiple
moments of the concept of action that appears in the phenomenological-
historical method that Arendt employs in The Human Condition. The aim has
been to demonstrate that each moment is intrinsically related to the others and
none is reducible to or subsumable under any other one. In this way one can
avoid some of the tensions that appear in readings of her works that separate
aspects of the constellation concept. Such readings turn them into oppositions
such as that between the agonal and the deliberative concepts of action.
Another advantage of keeping in clear sight Arendt’s critique of moder-
nity, her phenomenological method, and her constellation concept of action is
the light this throws on her orientation toward the way in which the different
64 Chapter 3
moments of action appear in the world. This brings into view the experiential
nature of action, in contrast to an analytic isolation and theoretical grouping
of its determinate features, and therefore emphasizes the nature of action as a
response to the world alienation that corresponds to the erosion of a common
world. My approach can speak to the urgent need of recovery of a meaningful
form of human experience that has been devalued in modernity and that, in
following Arendt, I find to be political in the sense upheld by her notions of
plurality and new beginnings.
What has been achieved, then, is threefold. (1) I have seen how movement
is possible in relation to the suspension of human possibilities in world alien-
ation, thanks to the capacity for and nature of action. (2) I have shown that
the constellation concept of action brings into view the uniquely Arendtian
political idea of action as new beginnings. (3) I have shown that new begin-
nings can rise out of the web of human relationships wherever people come
together to speak and act directly to one another in the space of appearances.
My discussion has therefore drawn out an important sense of “the new” that
is inherent the very meaning of human being for Arendt. The ontological
rootedness of the human capacity for new beginnings in natality, together
with the actualization of this capacity in the space of appearances, shows
how a world of uniquely human significance is possible. The entirety of the
constellation concept of action counters the problems of world alienation and
the logic of process.
My overall objective in this book is to articulate the concept of the public
space and demonstrate its central importance for the recovery of the political
in modernity. I have begun this by showing how, for Arendt, the public space
is not identical to that of the public realm, but, rather, the latter is constituted
in and through the public space as the space of appearing before one another
in speech and action. Nonetheless, this does not present us with a distinctly
political sense of “appearance,” nor, then, with a robust sense of the public
space as the essential constituent of politics. This lacuna is overcome in
Arendt’s own development of a distinctly political concept of action in later
writings. The movement and progression of the chapters might therefore use-
fully be thought of in the following terms.
Chapter 1 has demonstrated the need and so the necessity of the public
space by showing the presence of its absence in modernity. Chapters 2 and 3
have demonstrated the possibility of the public space through a recovery and
articulation of the highest capacity of the vita activa: action as new begin-
ning. Chapters 4 and 5 will demonstrate the actuality of the public space
in the concrete exemplar of a recognizable political form of action as new
beginning: the American Revolution. However, the content of chapters 2 and
3 carries forward as a way of “defamiliarizing” this well-known historical
phenomenon, so that one can grasp its essential political features according to
Arendt’s historical-phenomenological method and avoid falling into the trap

of viewing her analysis as a nostalgic backward glance to a lost moment of
“founding” the new body politic.
NOTES

2. Ibid., 222.
3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1962), p. 129.
4. Ibid., 200.
5. Leo J. Penta, “Hannah Arendt: On Power,” The Journal of Speculative
Philosophy, Penn State University Press. Vol. 10, No. 3 (1996), pp. 210–29 (emphasis
added).
6. Aristotle Physics, in “The Basic Works of Aristotle,” ed., Richard Mckeon
(New York: Modern Library, 2001), pp. 233; 191a26–32.
8. Remi Peeters, “Against Violence, but Not at Any Price: Hannah Arendt’s
Concept of Power,” Ethical Perspectives; Journal of the European Ethics Network.
No. 2 (2008), pp. 169–92.
9. Penta, 214.
11. Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York:
Harcourt, 1971), pp. 142–43.
12. A useful way to think of this is through the distinction between acting and
making. In the context of making, where an antecedent end must be secured, a kind of
violence must be done to nature in order to extract the resources necessary to construct
whatever the end might be. Action, conversely, never operates according to this logic;
instead, action operates according to a logic of new beginning and power “springs
up” between men. Arendt makes this point in her essay “What Is Authority?” “It is
of greater relevance in our context, however, that an element of violence is inevitably
inherent in all activities of making, fabricating, and producing, that is, in all activities by
which men confront nature directly, as distinguished from such activities as action and
speech, which are primarily directed towards human beings.” Hannah Arendt, “What Is
Authority?” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 111.
13. Ibid., 146.
14. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2006), p. 90.
15. On Violence, 149.
16. Ibid., 155.
17. Gunter Figal. “Public Freedom—The Strife of Power and Violence. On
Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Political,” in For a Philosophy of Freedom
and Strife: Politics, Aesthetics, Metaphysics, trans. Wayne Kline (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1998), p. 51.
66 Chapter 3
18. Hobbes, Leviathan, 129.

21. For an excellent discussion of this issue that provides important insights into
Arendt’s relation to the Greeks, see J. Peter Euben, “Arendt’s Hellenism,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), pp. 113–29.
22. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan, “Introduction,” in Hannah Arendt and
the Meaning of Politics, eds., Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis:
23. Figal, 51.
25. Figal, 52.
26. Dana Villa, “Introduction,” in Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the
Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 9
(emphasis added).
27. “What Is Freedom?,” 148.
29. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (London: Sage
Publications, 1996), pp. 126–27.
Benhabib herself, in an endnote affixed to this precise quotation, is critical of
Canovan for failing to distinguish between the public realm and the space of appear-
ances, but as far as I can tell, according to this quotation, Benhabib makes the same
conflation of the phenomenological and the institutional concepts. As I indicate
above, though she appears quite aware of the distinction, she uses the language of
public space instead of public realm.
30. Dana Villa, “Critique of Identity to Plurality in Politics,” in Arendt and
Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations, eds. Lars Rensmann and Samir
Gandesha (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 97.
31. Excerpt(s) from BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE by Hannah Arendt, copy-
right © 1954, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1963, 1967, 1968 by Hannah Arendt.
Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a
division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
32. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future (New York:
Penguin Books, 1977).
33. Ibid., 144.
35. Ibid., 147.
36. Ibid., 150.
38. The Arendtian notion of a principle achieves its fullest expression in relation
to the political concept of action, which I turn to in Chapters four and five.
39. One will recall similar language being used in Arendt’s description of power
as something that “springs up” between men. It is language which is used frequently
by Arendt, which I take to be synonymous with something like “new beginning.”

41. Ibid., 151 (emphasis added to last line).
42. Shmuel Lederman, “Agonism and Deliberation in Arendt,” Constellations.
Vol. 21, No. 3. (2014), p. 327.
44. Ibid., 194.
Chapter 4
Arendt’s Political Concept

of Action, Part I
Revolution
INTRODUCTION
This chapter and the subsequent one function together in taking up the phe-
nomenological concept of action developed in the previous two chapters and
tracing Arendt’s development of it into a political concept. To transition from
a phenomenological concept to a political one means shifting from a general
description of action and its various moments as they appear in the world
to an analysis of how those same moments achieve a political articulation,
which is to say showing how Arendt’s phenomenological-historical method
allows for the development of a political concept of action. “Political,” here,
refers to a horizontal public space and the exercise of political capacities that
are constitutive of it. I find that this concept of the political emerges from
Arendt’s interpretation of two historical phenomena: revolution and civil
disobedience. In the present chapter, my method is to trace an interpretive
path through Arendt’s On Revolution in order to emphasize what I will refer
to as the politically salient content that is present in her analysis of revolu-
tion.1 My overall purpose is to continue to build up the concept of the public
space. I will carry this “politically salient content” forward into the final
chapter of this book, where the concept of the public space achieves its full-
est expression.
My general objectives, then, in these next two chapters are twofold: (1)
To show how in Arendt revolution and civil disobedience are exemplars of
political action that combat the problems of modernity outlined in chapter 1.
(2) To demonstrate that revolution and civil disobedience reveal the political
significance of the phenomenological concept of action outlined in chapters
2 and 3.
69
70 Chapter 4
THE MEANING OF THE REVOLUTION
Arendt’s reading of the American Revolution presents a philosophical inter-

pretation of “revolution”: a constellation concept consistent with that of
action. One recalls that the constellation concept has a number of irreducible
moments that overlap and connect with one another in crucial ways. Arendt
reads the American Revolution both as a reaching back into the colonial
experience and as reaching forward into the future. That is to say, what she
presents is an “entire” experience and not only a chronological moment in time
when the Americans won a war. Accordingly, one needs to resist associating
“revolution” with the thought of merely fighting a war. Her interpretive his-
torical method recovers the “spirit” of the Revolution, a recovery that requires
phenomenological investigation as opposed to a merely historicist reading that
might, for example, suggest that empirical descriptions of actions and events
could exhaust the meaning of the Revolution. This part of the chapter will
elucidate the individual moments of the revolutionary experience and their
interconnectedness: from the Constitution to the separation of powers.
As with political concepts such as power, action, and freedom, Arendt
presents a rethinking of the meaning of revolution. First, revolution in Arendt
must be contrasted with rebellion in terms of the ends each is seeking. “The
basic misunderstanding lies in the failure to distinguish between liberation
and freedom; there is nothing more futile than rebellion and liberation unless
they are followed by the constitution of the newly won freedom.”2 That is to
say, rebellion is negative while revolution is positive: one is freedom from
while the other is freedom to participate in. The problem with the concep-
tual conflation of rebellion and revolution is that it conceals the appearance
of anything new appearing in the world after rebellion. Moreover, rebellion
could be thought of as the return to an earlier time and thus simply as restora-
tion. To be conceived of and recognizable as revolution, it must be followed
by a “constitution.” To Arendt, this is both the constituting of a space for
freedom and a constitutional document. This is the truly unique aspect of
the American experience for her: its Constitution. I will return to this in the
next section of this chapter, but I emphasize first that the constituting of a
space where freedom can appear is the signifying mark of revolution, and
that such a space is constituted through the very act of individuals coming
together. Thus the connection between action as new beginning and revolu-
tion as founding a new space for freedom is that revolution is, by its very
nature, a new beginning: “Crucial to any understanding of revolutions in the
modern age is that the idea of freedom and the experience of a new beginning
should coincide.”3 From Arendt’s perspective, even more revelatory of the
new beginning inherent in the revolutionary experience is that the colonists
themselves were unaware of the unprecedented nature of what they were
Arendt’s Political Concept of Action, Part I 71
engaged in. Recalling that in her concept action is unexpected, unanticipat-

able, and, as a consequence, new, a reader is not surprised to find that the plan
for the constitution of a new space for freedom was not an intention prior to
the colonists’ actions. The colonists took themselves to be engaged in acts of
liberation and it was only in the midst of such liberatory action that, “they
began to constitute the space of appearances where freedom can unfold its
charms and become a visible, tangible reality.”4 Once again, the action “rises
out of” an existing web of human relationships and the actor is revealed in
the action, which, as a new beginning, will fall back into the web of relation-
ships, altering it in an unprecedented way. The conclusion to draw regarding
political action is that the space of freedom emerges in and through the acts
of liberation the colonists were engaged in but the intention of liberation is
not as such responsible for that emergence.
The distinction between rebellion and revolution can be pressed further
thanks to the following striking passage, which draws the contrast and speaks
directly to the nature of revolution:
passion for public or political freedom can be so easily mistaken for the per-
haps much more vehement, but politically essentially sterile, passionate hatred
of masters, the longing of the oppressed for liberation . . . [which] has never
resulted in revolution since it is incapable of grasping, let alone realizing, the
central idea of revolution, which is the foundation of freedom, that is, the space
where freedom can appear.5
The passage first shows how the conflation of revolution and rebellions is
nearly inevitable, and then articulates Arendt’s central notion that the mean-
ing of revolution is action in which there is the foundation of freedom as “the
space where freedom can appear.” Here the founding of the public space
as the space of freedom is made the essential meaning of revolution. In my
view, Arendt is presenting an exemplar of political action—revolution—in
terms of the phenomenological descriptions of action that I reviewed in The
Human Condition. Moreover, the salient political point is that in the shadow
of overthrowing a government, as in rebellion, something must come into
existence to take its place; it cannot merely be an overthrowing. In addition
to overthrowing an illegitimate government, a new political form is put in its
place on the basis of the “constitution.” All of this transpired in the American
revolutionary experience.
The constitutional aspect of governmental structure is by no means
restricted to the American context. Historically, a constitutional form of gov-
ernment is one that is a “limited” form of government where the constitution
serves as a check on the powers of the government to prevent their abuse.
This is of course consistent with the general and prevailing understanding
72 Chapter 4
of the Constitution in the American context, which is to say that its Bill of
Rights is often cited as one of its more significant features. However, this is
not so for Arendt because the Bill of Rights is not one of the most salient
features of the revolutionary experience. It is essentially a list of those rights
with which the government cannot interfere and therefore serves a merely
negative function. In contrast, for my argument, the emphasis upon “the new
beginning” is the most relevant feature. Therefore Arendt writes that “the lib-
erties which the laws of constitutional government guarantee are all negative
. . . they are indeed not ‘powers of themselves, but merely an exemption from
the abuses of power’; they claim not a share in government but a safeguard
against government.”6 To interpret constitutional government only from the
perspective of those rights it protects is to do so according to the framework
of liberation not revolution. The work of liberation, while necessary as a
precursor to revolutionary acts, does not capture the political meaning I am
seeking. Within social contract theory, especially Locke, nothing would seem
more commonplace as the function and purpose of a constitution and, indeed,
of politics itself, where “the political” is reducible to disputations over rights
and a constitution specifies those rights the government cannot infringe upon.
I am referring to the dispute over the extent to which government ought
or ought not to interfere with the rights of its citizens. From an Arendtian
perspective, to insist upon this issue of interference is to miss the true sig-
nificance of the American revolutionary experience—to ignore what was at
stake, the political salience of the experience: the possibility for the appear-
ance and experience of freedom and not mere liberation from government.
Political experience is not about freedom from interference, but freedom to
participate: to enact a space that arises through acting and appearing as free.
The American Revolution, if examined from the perspective Arendt takes up,
can demonstrate this.
The revolutionary experience she purports to recover has moments that are
uniquely political even if the revolutionary spirit may not have outlived its
inception. The loss of this spirit is evident when the Constitution is taken up
and regarded as a procedural document or blueprint. Nevertheless, I argue a
sense of it can be recovered that speaks more urgently to its political nature;
I must therefore show how the Constitution, according to Arendt, has a sig-
nificant dual meaning.
THE CONSTITUTION
Arendt underlines that there is equivocality in the very meaning of “constitu-

tion” because it “means the act of constituting as well as the laws or rules of
government that are ‘constituted.’”7 The first sense is the more important one
in the American context because, following Thomas Paine: “A constitution

is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government.”8
Constitution as an act, investing the government with authority and legiti-
macy, is crucial for understanding what is essential in the American context.
Undoubtedly, given their experience under the crown in Britain, the American
founders recognized a need to place limits on government, and this was so
obvious to them as to almost be common sense. Accordingly, this is not what
was at stake in the minds of the founders: “When they declared their inde-
pendence from this government . . . the main question for them certainly was
not how to limit power but how to establish it, not how to limit government
but how to found a new one.”9 What I wish to underline here is that Arendt
is not only speaking of founding a government but is emphasizing the “new,”
and therefore her notion of action as new beginning, showing again how the
revolutionary action of the “founders” captures the sense of the new that
action must have if there is to be movement in modernity. In constituting the
government, as the colonists did, they were directly involved in the appear-
ance of power in Arendt’s sense: constituting is exemplary for the emergence
of power present in the relation between individuals when they act together.
The power of people springs up in the very gathering together and appearance
of individuals to one another, and is antecedent to any recognized organiza-
tion of the public space. Villa keenly articulates the political salience of what
is added here to Arendt’s discussion in The Human Condition of the space
of appearances: “A space for action may ‘come into being whenever men
are together in the manner of action and speech, and therefore predates and
precedes all formal constitution of the public realm,’ but it fails to become ‘a
house where freedom can dwell’ until this constitution takes place.”10 Villa’s
words show precisely how Arendt’s phenomenological concept is developed
into a political one in On Revolution.
Recalling that the Revolution is an entire experience for Arendt, I note that
the constituting of a government by the people results in the Constitution of
the entire union, but that the constituting act reaches back into the colonial
experiences of public happiness and freedom. Each of the individual colonies
had an experience of the kind of freedom that would be opened up in the
framing of the Constitution because each had created its own constitution
prior to the outbreak of the war. Arendt draws attention to the words of John
Adams that presciently capture the sense of the revolutionary spirit that she
is underlining: “the revolution was effected before the war commenced,”
not because of any specific revolutionary or rebellious spirit but because the
inhabitants of the colonies were “formed by law into corporations, or bodies
politics,” and possessed “the right to assemble . . . in their own halls”; it was
“in these assemblies of towns or districts that the sentiments of the people
were formed in the first place.”11 Adams states directly that the revolution had
74 Chapter 4
been under way prior to the outbreak of fighting or violence and, accordingly,
one would do well to dissociate revolution from the phenomenon of war. The
point is that revolution, interpreted from the political perspective of the open-
ing up of a space where freedom could appear, was already an experience the
colonists were familiar with in the constituting of governments in the colonies
and appearing in public to be seen and heard by others in order to deliberate
together; this is referred to as public happiness. To Arendt, the term public
happiness had entered into discourse in America in the eighteenth century.
She takes this to refer to the sheer delight one experiences in taking part in
and having a share in the actual creation of a form of government—in a very
active sense, constituting government. This expression of public happiness is
contrasted with private happiness but, for Arendt, it also exemplifies the spirit
of the revolution that did not outlive its inception.
I highlight this distinction because it bespeaks the truly political nature of
the Revolution. “Private happiness,” an intuitively appealing interpretation of
the “pursuit of happiness,” consists in the pursuit of economic success within
one’s private endeavors that are supposed to be insulated or protected from
politics as a public endeavor. Consistent with the conception of happiness as
a private pursuit is the relegation of “the public space” to edifices—the halls
and chambers of government where laws to protect the right to the pursuit of
happiness are made on behalf of citizens by representatives. This is not happi-
ness that can appear in public as Arendt conceives it. The distinction between
private and public happiness gets at the very heart of the political meaning of
a constitution in the Arendtian sense, as Villa clarifies: “According to Arendt,
a constitution is an arrangement by means of which a group of individuals
constructs a space for action . . . The essential function of a constitution is not
simply the safeguarding of rights and liberties, important as these are, but the
creation and preservation of such a space.”12 To be “happy” in a robust sense,
one needs to appear before others to speak and act; this sense of happiness
from willing participation in public affairs is the meaning of “public happi-
ness.” For Arendt, it captures both the spirit of the colonial constitutions and
the framing of the Constitution. I am drawing on this view of the American
experience as demonstrative of what this book is calling meaningful political
experience.
To try and draw out a further dimension of the meaning of constitution for
Arendt, one can see that her concept of power further illuminates the spirit
of it insofar as the power of people is inherent in the very act of constitut-
ing a public space. In other words, power is constituted by individual actors
gathering together to appear to one another and act in concert, and remains
as long as they are together. That is to say, gathering together or convening
is an essential moment of Arendt’s constellation concept of power once she
develops it in the political concept of action. Thus, the very act of convening
and coming together prior to any specific deliberative speech has significant
political salience, especially regarding the pre-revolutionary colonial assem-
blies. This recalls the crucial Arendtian claim from The Human Condition
that the space of appearances—that in this context refers to colonial assem-
blies—exists “wherever people gather together.”13 A reader will recall that
power is an ever-present potential for Arendt, rooted in the human condition
of plurality, and its actualization occurs through speech and action before
others. Following Arendt, one can see the phenomenon of power-constitution
clearly in the context of the colonists’ deliberation about the terms of their
individual constitutions: the ones appearing within each of the original colo-
nies that existed under English rule. These are deliberative acts and, as such,
are exemplary of power.
As any student of American history knows, Jefferson’s Declaration of
Independence served as a firm statement that England no longer had author-
ity over the colonies. Thus, with Arendt: “The aim of the state constitutions
. . . was to create new centres of power.”14 Here one can infer the double
register of constitution: the constituting power, evidenced by the colonists’
deliberation about the terms of their state governments, resulted in the cre-
ation of constitutional documents. This also portrays a connection between
two moments of action in The Human Condition: narrativity and power. The
material, written constitutions are in the same vein as the “stories” that func-
tion as the preservation of action as the fleeing deed, recalling that the action
itself cannot produce anything tangible and lasting. One may observe, then,
that in Arendt’s interpretation of the historical trajectory of the revolution-
ary experience, it exemplifies how power “springs up” and is actualized out
of the potential inherent in human plurality. In this exemplar, power was
actualized through the act of constituting new governments in the colonies,
and such power gained tangibility and stretched into the future in the form of
constitutional documents. To sum up, the constituting power lies in the act
of people gathering together—it “springs up” in their words and deeds and
appears in the world as long as they continue acting together in concert. The
action itself that appears when people convene, deliberate, and act in concert
becomes tangible and lasting in the written documents. The point I am seek-
ing is that power is conceptually integral to any understanding of the political
act of constitution.
Next, I turn to the Declaration of Independence as the next moment in the
consideration of the revolutionary experience, for it functions in Arendt as
a monument to the entirety of that experience. Further interpretation of this
well-known historical event will sharpen the focus on the larger objective of
this chapter: drawing out the political content of the revolutionary experience
in order both to show Arendt’s development of a political concept of action
and to underline that the idea of the “public space” is essential to it and is, in
76 Chapter 4
its broadest reaches, essential to politics as meaningful political experience.

Thus, once again, I am isolating the steps of a particular historical trajectory
in order to draw out the moments of Arendt’s constellation concept of politi-
cal action and to show how the revolutionary experience is an exemplar of
this concept.
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
Prior to the formation of the new republic and the writing of the Constitution,
Jefferson declared in writing that the crown in England no longer possessed
and would no longer be recognized as having legitimate authority over the
colonies. Arendt interprets this document not simply as an appearance within
the historical trajectory of the founding of the new republic but as an exem-
plification of the revolutionary spirit in colonial America that pre-dated the
actual outbreak of war. That is to say, there is a kind of temporal tension in the
moment of the Declaration: it not only reaches “forward” into the actuality of
the new republic but also reaches “backward” into the revolutionary spirit: as
a moment in the constellation of the Revolution it is itself exemplary of politi-
cal action. As one can see, the Declaration unites its two temporal features:
“No doubt there is a grandeur in the Declaration of Independence, but it con-
sists not in its philosophy . . . [so much] as in its being the perfect way for an
action to appear in words. And since we deal here with the written, and not
with the spoken word, we are confronted with one of the rare moments in his-
tory when the power of action is great enough to erect its own monument.”15
Several things are important for my purposes. First, there is the point that
the Declaration is the “perfect way for action to appear in words.” A reader
recalls the tight connection between action and speech from The Human
Condition: most action takes the form of speech. With the Declaration, this is
what one might call an acute moment of action as speech. In its form as the
written word, the Declaration stated and preserved the action of the colonists:
it at once rejected the authority of the crown and spelled out the right of the
colonists to deliberate publicly about their own affairs. In other words, the
action given voice was the very possibility of participating in politics that,
under English rule, the colonists were being deprived of. Second, the expe-
rience of public happiness was brought to the fore in another form in this
Declaration. Third is the deeply important claim that the Declaration was “an
action that erected its own monument.” Recall the intangibility that inhabits
the fleetingness of action: its inability in and of itself to produce durable
products. The remedy for this in The Human Condition is that storytellers and
historians are needed to preserve the true significance of action. However, in
the case of the Declaration, one observes a rare moment in which action and
its preservation coincide. That is to say, the action as a new beginning in the
form of declaring the right to self-government also preserves that right by
acting as a “monument” for future generations. This monument allows the
revolutionary spirit not to be forgotten, sending it forth to future generations.
The point I am emphasizing is that the present, past, and future all congeal in
this act of declaration. This “sending forth” of the revolutionary spirit is pal-
pable in the reflexive ease with which contemporary Americans cite the well-
known “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” clause from the Declaration.
Of course, Arendt laments how quickly the revolutionary spirit seems to have
been forgotten. Accordingly, how these lines are cited is not evidence that
the revolutionary spirit has endured and that they are cited so frequently in
the context of “private happiness” speaks to the loss of the spirit contained
in Declaration as a monument. Because the central concern of my book is
the problem of the recovery of meaningful political experience, being able
to understand the idea of the Declaration as this “monument” provides the
reader with an example of what allows for the fragility of the public space to
be overcome, and this is a crucial moment in the “steps” toward that recovery.
I have reached a point in the chapter where some important points have
emerged in relation to the larger objectives. First, I have clarified the mean-
ing of revolution as the opening of a space where freedom can appear. The
opening of this space cannot be clarified apart from the act of constitution or
that act by which the colonists convened and deliberated about the terms of
their colonial constitutions. This is evidence of how the Revolution itself is
a reaching back into the colonial experience. Moreover, I have shown that
constituting-power is exemplary of the kind of freedom Jefferson gave voice
to in his writing. Turning now to the next moment in the constellation concept
of revolution, I argue that constituting-power through action and speech is
inseparable from the action that signifies the true end of revolution: found-
ing a space where freedom can appear. First, I will consider the activity of
founding itself, before considering a special sense that this political act has.
THE ACT OF FOUNDING
Unique to the Constitution is its activity as “founding” freedom in a particular

sense. I need to emphasize, then, what the nature of this founding act is that I
am calling the appearance of freedom within the context of founding a body
politic. “Founding freedom” is still the opening of a space of appearances
where freedom can appear because foundation, for Arendt, is synonymous
with such an opening. What the founding opened up was the possibility for
a new body politic. The centrality of “founding” is revealed in the collective
memory of Americans’ political and historical culture, where it is retained
78 Chapter 4
in the expression “founding fathers,” who seem to inspire an almost sacred

reverence. With Arendt, of course, the genuine political meaning would lie
in the memory and clear understanding of founding qua founding, not the
recollection of the individual founders. From her perspective, I recognize that
the true political significance of what was bestowed to later generations is the
very possibility of appearing in the public space—what I referred to above as
the act of convening. Of course, it can be objected that beyond founding, the
new nation itself had to be preserved through institutions of government and
laws. Nonetheless, the act of founding contains what is of most significance:
“The very fact that the men of the American Revolution thought of them-
selves as ‘founders’ indicates the extent to which they must have known that
it would be the act of foundation itself . . . which eventually would become
the foundation of authority in the new body politic.”16
To pursue this further, the founding act is significant for revealing a direct
connection between the political and the phenomenological concepts of
action. Bernstein captures this connection succinctly: “Founding is the most
direct transcription of Arendt’s conception of natality and beginning into a
political, collective register . . . Political founding is . . . the collective cor-
ollary of the existential fact of natality and the character of action to begin
something.”17 Bernstein presents a crucial relationship between the elucida-
tion of action as new beginning and the elucidation of political action as
founding: founding a body politic corresponds in Arendt to the actualization
of natality in action. He also specifies what the nature of founding is and why
it should be considered “the most direct transcription of natality.”18 Because
founding is the beginning and opening of something new, it functions as an
instance of the direct translation of the phenomenological concept of action
from The Human Condition into a political concept. More than this, founding
is the activity the colonists engaged in to respond to the condition they found
themselves in—not only the historical condition of having broken with the
monarchy but also the existential condition of plurality. Founding is the par-
ticular mode of activity by which the individual men of the revolution bound
themselves together. Thus, though one can say that founding is the opening
of the space where freedom can appear, such a space is always an in-between
that binds individuals together. Founding, then, is a binding together of indi-
viduals in plurality through the establishing of a space between them. The
activity of binding is crucial and is an essential moment in the constellation
concept of the founding activity. Next, then, I must reflect on how “binding
together” takes on political significance through the act of promising. That
is to say, following Arendt’s practice of developing constellation concepts,
I will show that in relation to founding, “promising” now takes on a vital
political meaning. The founding that opens a space for freedom is also the
political act of promising
FOUNDING AS PROMISING
I open the consideration of promising by recalling from The Human

Condition that action requires a remedy because of its nature as both unpre-
dictable and boundless, producing no tangible objects. As I have argued,
narration functioned as the remedy there, but even in The Human Condition
Arendt placed emphasis on promising as the remedy for the unpredictability
of action—not promising as such, but mutual promising. The following
passage, which connects several of the phenomenological features of action
together, introduces the problematic of promising: “We mentioned . . . the
power generated when people gather together and ‘act in concert’, which
disappears the moment they depart. The force that keeps them together, as
distinguished from the space of appearances in which they gather and the
power which keeps this public space in existence, is the force of mutual
promise or contract.”19 These lines indicate the gravity of promising for
Arendt. To grasp its importance for her, one needs only to recall the central-
ity of “contracts” in Western political thought, certainly modern political
thought. The contract is, in its essence, a mutual promising, which is to say
a binding together of individuals through their word. To Arendt, binding
oneself in mutual promising to one’s word, amidst the unpredictability that
is inherent in the realm of human affairs, is the condition for remaining
together in the future and the ability to do so.
The influence the contract has had on the Western tradition of political
thought is undeniable. Crucial for Arendt’s concept of mutual promising
is the discernment that modern political thinkers have made a distinction
between two kinds of contract. Examining this distinction will sharpen my
focus on promising as a central political activity for modernity. Classical
social contract theory, especially Locke, underlines not only the contract
specifying the relationship between a government and its citizens but also
an original contract established between individuals that form society. In
On Revolution Arendt writes: “we must recall that in theory the seventeenth
century clearly distinguished between two kinds of ‘social contract’: One
was concluded between individual persons and supposedly gave birth to soci-
ety; the other was concluded between a people and its ruler and supposedly
resulted in legitimate government.”20 The distinction can usefully be thought
of in terms of a horizontal and vertical contract, respectively. Arendt regards
the horizontal contract favorably because it is more illustrative of the political
meaning of the experience of founding. In her view, the vertical contract is,
historically, the one that has been taken up the as the paradigm for thinking
about politics, yet one of the paradigmatic thinkers of this tradition, Locke
himself, thought enough of the distinction to recognize and give it a voice in
his work. Following a general diagnosis of how the tradition has regarded
80 Chapter 4
the contract, Arendt thinks readers must be vigilant against thinking of the
primary political relationship as that between rulers and ruled. In the context
of revolution, regarding it as the primary political relationship perpetuates the
confusion of revolution with what was merely a rebellion to secure negative
liberties and protection from political life. Against this, the political relation-
ship that ought to be regarded as primary is the one between individuals as
they exist in the condition of plurality acting and speaking together. Of course
Arendt cannot leave the horizontal contract in the condition of uniting for the
creation of society. It must absorb the fullest possible political significance of
mutual promising and contract.
Thus for her, promising in this horizontal context is connected to all the
other political phenomena of the new beginning. First, it corresponds to the
human in-between as such since promising goes on between individuals.
Horizontality captures the sense in which there is a mutual give and take and
this mutuality indicates the equality implied in the contract: “The mutual con-
tract by which people bind themselves together in order to form a community
is based on reciprocity and presupposes equality.”21 Conversely, the ruler-
ruled relationship seems characterized by an inherent inequality that locates
power on one side and obedience on the other. Playing very keenly on this
distinction, Arendt shows that what is gained in one type of contract is lost in
the other. If what is created in mutual promising is power between individu-
als, in the contract between rulers and ruled where the primary activity is that
of consenting, it seems as though power is lost. Whereas the contract between
ruler and ruled protects individual rights and thus ensures a kind of freedom
from others, in mutual promising and binding, isolation is given up because
I am speaking of the freedom to promise (with) one another. The point is
clear: promising and not merely consenting ensures the human togetherness
inherent in politics.
Moreover, promising is, inherently, a prospective activity: to promise is to
safeguard against something that could or might happen in the future. In the
context of founding the republic, the founders needed a way to ensure that
the power they had created could remain intact; promising was an action that
could ensure such power remained alive: “power comes into being only if
and when men join themselves together for the purpose of action, and it will
disappear when, for whatever reason, they disperse and desert one another.
Hence, binding and promising, combining and covenanting are the means
by which power is kept in existence.”22 “Keeping power in existence” can
be thought of as a way to send power forward into the future and thus, the
thought is that power can be renewed again and again, rising out of the web
of human relationships.
I have been emphasizing promising as a form of political action, but prom-
ising is also given tangibility in the form of the Constitutional document
because it laid bare the specific terms of the promise through which the indi-
viduals of the newly formed republic would live together. To reiterate, the
Constitution is not merely a contract between a government and its people; it
is itself a promise specifying the bonds between individuals—horizontal and
not vertical in the sense of a contract between rulers and those whom they
rule over. This deserves repeated emphasis because of classical liberalism’s
insistence that securing negative rights and liberties is of utmost importance
as the subject matter of political theory.
One final consideration about promising deserves my attention in order to
bring out its strongest implications as a political activity. It is instructive to
think in terms of the popular expression “My word is my bond.” What is truly
entailed in this expression is evident if one understands instances when one’s
word is not truly one’s bond. It is helpful to contrast what Arendt means with
a well-known example from Kantian moral philosophy, which has emerged
as one of the most paradigmatic for thinking about promising. For Kant, what
is at stake when I falsely promise is that I cannot universally will the maxim
implied in such an action. That is, the very activity of promising explicitly
entails that they will be kept and to universally will that everyone not keep their
promises is a contradiction in terms—the act of promising undermines itself.
Ultimately, although the implications of Kantian morality have a necessarily
intersubjective component, the truth is that one can realize the contradiction
inherent in a lying promise in complete isolation. In other words, the immoral-
ity of a lying promising, though entailing social consequences, is determinable
in the dialogue between “me and myself”—what Arendt calls thinking, one of
the three mental activities she later considers in The Life of the Mind.
The goal of this allusion to Kant is to provide a point of dissimilarity so
that a reader can more easily see the political implications of promising
for Arendt and how they are necessarily political. That is to say, what is
at stake if one were to falsely promise is no mere contradiction in thought.
Rather, when I promise, I put my identity on the line, as Bernstein has
emphasized:
Saying the words “I promise” abruptly places me in an emphatic spiritual rela-

tion to my speaking partner: I am bound to her by my future being bound to
her. Promising words, by so binding and bonding, stake the self . . . Promising
lifts me out of the equivocalities of my heart into a space I share with others.
Hence, if my word is my bond, then it is that which gives promising its terrify-
ing character, its character of locating me, presenting me in a social relation to
others that I am no longer free to dispose of as I please.23
Bernstein is effective in bringing out the true force of promising as a politi-

cal phenomenon: when I promise, I immediately enter into a relation by
82 Chapter 4
which my words can no longer only have implications for me. The thought
that one’s “self” is staked through promising therefore throws light on and
strengthens the idea that Arendt’s concept of the self is a performative one, as
a reader saw in the discussion of Villa in chapter 2. Bernstein’s interpretation
fully brings out how the “self” in view here is not an underlying one that gains
expression in the action. His words underline that I am forging a self that is
bound into the relation to others in and through promising. Thus, promising
is not a mere utterance of speech to be taken lightly. Promising is a particular
modality of political action that human beings engage in when they live in
community with others. However, not all promises have this kind of gravity.
I am articulating the nature of the promise once it is undertaken in a political
context. It is this promising that necessarily entails the horizontal relation to
others in which one’s word is one’s communal bond. To Arendt, the found-
ing moment of the revolutionary experience exemplifies this promising. This
also shows that there is something much stronger in her thought than mere
nostalgia for the promising made by the “original” founders. The point is
that promising is an inherently prospective activity and its significance for
political action understood as keeping the public space in existence is highly
relevant for the concept of the public space that I am seeking to recover.
Having considered the significance of founding as promising, another
moment of the revolutionary experience comes into focus and rises to promi-
nence in the political articulation of action: the moment of principle. In brief,
the realization of a principle occurs in and through the very act of promising
as a political act. Stated more broadly, Arendtian political action just is the
embodiment of a principle that inspires the action in the first place.
THE PRINCIPLE OF “PEOPLE POWER”
Chapter 3 introduced the concept of the principle that inspires action within
the discussion of freedom as a moment of the constellation concept of
action. I indicated there that the principle is most significant in the consid-
eration of action as a political concept. A general principle such as “love of
equality” inspires but does not determine action and is manifest only in the
performance of action, as one observes in the following passage from the
“What Is Freedom?” essay: “Freedom . . . appears in the world whenever
. . . principles are actualized; the appearance of freedom, like the manifesta-
tion of principles, coincides with the performing act.”24 For Arendt a prin-
ciple was inherent in the revolutionary action of the American Revolution:
“The principle . . . which came to light . . . when the foundations were
laid—not by the strength of one architect but by the combined power of the
many—was the interconnected principle of mutual promise and common
deliberation.”25 Several moments of the revolutionary constellation emerge

together in this crucial passage indicating the tight interconnectedness of
three moments: convening in the “combined power of the many,” promising,
and deliberation.
In the historical context of the Revolution, one can also say that the original
embodiment of this principle is located in the pre-revolutionary town halls
and assemblies because these activities of public deliberation and consti-
tution-making are ones in which the principle is manifest. However, there
needed to be a way in which this principle of “people-power” could be fully
revealed, preserved, and consolidated instead of simply distributed through
many individual centers of power spread through each of the colonies:
“What the American Revolution actually did was to bring the new American
experience and the new American concept of power out into the open . . . it
would have hardly survived without the foundation of a body politic designed
explicitly to preserve it; without revolution, in other words, the new power
principle would have remained hidden.”26 The action of founding on the part
of the revolutionaries shows the principle that inspired their action and brings
out its meaning: that power is to be understood in the horizontal sense as
springing up between individuals—this is power with one another and cannot
be conceived as the power of one person over another. This is the meaning
of the principle that becomes manifest in the actions of convening, deliberat-
ing, and promising. Canovan brings this meaning to the point of a definition:
“When men begin to act, their action displays the principle that animates it,
and the principle that was manifested in the American Revolution was the
principle of ‘mutual promise and common deliberation’”27 Moreover, Arendt
underlines that the revolutionary spirit inherent in the principle is to endure
and be sent forth to future generations; such enduring and sending forth is
only possible if the spirit is preserved.
As a reader has seen to this point, the uniquely American feature of
the Revolution that has continually reemerged through this chapter is its
Constitution. I turn to it again in order to consider the import of preserv-
ing the revolutionary spirit in the action of founding. If the revolutionary
spirit was given written form in the Constitution itself, it was vital to avoid
reifying it. That is, in the manifestation of the principle that preserves it, in
the Constitution, there must be not a mere documentation, but a preserving
in order to inspire anew. That is to say, in its function as preserving, the
Constitutional document provides the foundation and structure for subse-
quent generations to engage in politics with one another. It acts as a kind of
institutional framework for the possibility of political action springing up
while at the same time acting as a reference point for the revolutionary spirit,
which endures in the document. Waldron offers the following keen observa-
tions in this context:
84 Chapter 4
It [the Constitution] consists . . . in a willingness on the part of all concerned

to treat this event (the founding) and this body of law (the constitution), rather
than any of the other acts and proposals which might crop up from time to
time, as the starting point and point of reference for all subsequent politics . . .
Respect for an established Constitution does not mean treating it as sacrosanct
and beyond change; but it means treating it as the object of change and aug-
mentation, rather than simply purporting to begin again every time we suppose
ourselves to have accumulated more wisdom than our ancestors.28
Waldron illustrates the necessity of having a basic frame of reference for

the possibility of free political action. In the American experience, this is its
Constitution. This frame of reference contains the very revolutionary spirit of
the principle that inspired the act of founding but does so in a way that allows
the principle to be used to inspire action again and again, never as mere rep-
etition of the same thing. The action of founding is a new beginning but not
the new beginning. Thus what I am thinking of as the revolutionary spirit
contained in the constitutional document speaks of the need for the document
not simply to record a past or determine a future but to inspire and to function
as a general but focal frame of reference for the freedom of political action.
In reflecting on the Constitution and its function as this frame of refer-
ence, a connection can be made to a moment of the constellation of action
in The Human Condition. I have in mind the narration that gives tangibil-
ity and duration to action. However, unlike the concept of narration in the
earlier text, the Constitution also gathers to itself a function of “world” in
Arendt: a tangible in-between about which human beings speak and act.
Put more clearly, the American Constitution, either implicitly or explicitly,
is always present as kind of a horizon of meaning for political action arc-
ing from the past into the future. It provides a horizon of intelligibility for
political experience because it contains the revolutionary spirit of the power
principle. I can make this connection because the worldly character of the
Constitution is described by Arendt in the following important passage
describing the distinction between power and law: “The seat of power to
them [the framers] was the people, but the source of law was to become the
Constitution, a written document, an endurable objective thing, which, to
be sure, one could approach from many different angles . . . but which nev-
ertheless was never a subjective state of mind. It has remained a tangible
worldly entity of greater durability than elections or public-opinion polls.”29
In this way, the political elucidation of the Constitution can be traced to
an aspect of Arendt’s concept of worldliness from The Human Condition:
“Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without
changing their identity, so that those who are gathered around them know
they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly appear.”30
This phenomenological description can be almost seamlessly connected

to the political interpretation of the Constitution in On Revolution, cited
above, because the Constitution just is “the worldly reality” that appears
to all. I emphasize the uniqueness of the perspectival positions, expressed
in the notion of approaches from many angles that are nevertheless never
simply a subjective state of mind, insofar as each occupies a position in
relation to “the object,” here the Constitution, yet the latter provides the
moment of unification for the perspectives, a unity that is ensured to those
who approach it because the different positions are about the same object.
Thus one can see clearly that worldliness in this context does not have the
same sense as the objective world of things that is the product of a fabrica-
tion process in the realm of homo faber in The Human Condition. Waldron
brings out a crucial distinction that is pertinent to grasping the nature of the
political realm in Arendt: “For politics . . . the in-between is not physical
but normative: it consists of rules not barriers, practices and commitments
not impediments.”31 The “in-between” that is normative, then, appears as
a basic frame of reference that guides and structures political action. In
emphasizing the worldliness of the Constitution I have adopted an inter-
pretive strategy whose objective is to increase the reader’s understanding
of how a principle is preservable and can be used to inspire actors anew. I
call attention to it in order to bring out the broader implications of Arendt’s
notion of principle, showing how the Constitution is an “exemplar” of the
manifestation and preservation of the principle and allowing the concept of
the principle to be carried beyond the historical example.
To this point, I have traced a path through the American revolutionary expe-
rience, examining analytically separated, yet synthetically linked moments of
that experience. Following Arendt’s historical-phenomenological method,
I have covered territory ranging from the double sense of “constitution” in
the act of founding, where I focused on the power of people, to the political
interpretation of the constitutional document as the preservation of the prin-
ciple of mutual promise and common deliberation together with the spirit of
its inspiration: the way in which the principle may have a hold on the future.
At each juncture, the aim has been to draw out the politically salient content
contained in each moment in the historical trajectory of the revolutionary
experience. I am therefore using the expression “politically salient” for the
content of the thinking that takes each moment of the Revolution as speaking
to the possibility of the public space and its necessity for meaningful political
experience. The path I have been tracing finds its culmination in the consid-
eration of a facet of that is basic to the structure of constitutional government,
and that takes on a unique meaning in the American context—in such a way
that the institutions of government themselves are drawn into Arendt’s politi-
cal concept of freedom.
86 Chapter 4
SEPARATION OF POWERS
The separation of powers is a basic ingredient of the constitutional form of

government, but has a unique significance in the American context. Three
separate yet coequal branches of government exist: the legislative, executive,
and judicial. The framers of the Constitution designed an intricate system of
checks and balances by which one branch could not overstep the authority of
any other. These are no doubt familiar themes, but in turning to the writings
of the founders, Arendt interprets the separation of powers in a new light.
The separation of powers is often portrayed as a way to limit power but, in
Arendt it becomes a mechanism by which to increase and check power simul-
taneously. As one knows, the separation of powers is particularly important
for understanding the relationship between the individual American states
and its more centralized, which is to say, federal government. Perhaps the
most polarizing issue confronting the American founders was how to strike
the right balance between the state governments and central government. It
was the inability properly to craft this relationship that caused the original
Articles of Confederation to fail: “The defect of the Confederacy was that
there had been ‘no partition of power between the General and the Local
Governments’; and that it had acted as the central agency of an alliance rather
than as a government; experience had shown that in this alliance of powers
there was a dangerous tendency for the allied powers not to act as checks
upon one another but to cancel one another out, that is, to breed impotence.”32
There are several important aspects of Arendt’s reading of the separation of
powers that are brought out in this passage. First is the distinction between
a government and alliance. In a philosophical context one can trace such a
distinction to Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle suggests the relevant difference
between a government or state and an alliance in the following passage:
But a state exists for the sake of a good life, and not for the sake of life only
. . . Nor does a state exist for the sake of alliance . . . It is clear then that a state
is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention
of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange. These are the conditions without
which a state cannot exist; but all of them together do not constitute a state . . .
The end of the state is the good life.33
In other words, if the state exists for the sake of mere life, it only pro-
vides a kind of protection and security for its inhabitants, but the state
does nothing to foster a common bond between the people. Moreover,
the state existing for the sake of the good life means that citizens ought
to have a share in government, communicating with one another about

the most virtuous life. Although Arendt does not employ the concepts of
“state” or “virtue,” given the American dilemma regarding how to craft
the relationship between individual states and the central government,
this speaks to the continued relevance of Aristotle’s political thought.
Additionally, Arendt’s words, above, indicate the problem in the Articles
of Confederation: that the separation of powers between the government
and the states was being conceived as a mere limitation on power instead
of a mechanism by which to create more. Although checking power can
connote limitation, it is not a mere limit because the limit is at one at the
same time an augmentation. Arendt also recognized the strong influence
of Montesquieu on the founders: an insight that weighed heavily on their
thinking is “that only ‘power arrests power’, that is, we must add, with-
out destroying it, without putting impotence in the place of power.”34 In
other words, power is kept in check only by power. Power is shared in a
horizontal sense by the states and the government. That is to say, in the
same way that power is shared between individuals when they speak and
act together, power is shared between the states and the government. This
sharing of power, horizontally located between the states and the govern-
ment, reveals the new principle of power transposed into another context.
This requires a bit more fleshing out.
One might ordinarily think that power can only be kept in check by
laws, but in articulating the problem in this way we reify power as if it
were something to be possessed by the states or by the central govern-
ment. Think of the common expression that “the government or the state
is abusing its power.” This is not power from Arendt’s perspective, but
some other phenomenon like strength or, most likely, violence. Power in
Arendt is checked only by other institutions of power. To have as many
sites of power as possible that check each other is an attempt to safeguard
against a monopoly of violence or force. As McGowan specifies: “The
power of many, flowing from the plurality of interactions among the plu-
rality of actors, is the only bulwark against the violence of the one.”35 The
point is to have many sites of localized power that are distinct yet equal.
The separation of powers between the states and the government, spelled
out in the Constitution, is an essential moment of the revolutionary experi-
ence—not only in its codified form but also in the larger political significance
it bears for human beings’ experience of politics. A reader can now grasp
how the system of government that had been in place under the Articles of
Confederation could be remedied. Instead of a loose collection of individual
states that could be viewed as no more than an alliance, there now existed a
88 Chapter 4
principle for power to be shared between the states and the central govern-
ment. This is the power principle expressed as the principle of the separation
of powers by which power is checked and maintained not through force or
violence but by the creation of new power. The power of the states is not
cancelled out by the existence of the central government because it does not
derive its power from them. Arendt refers here to Madison: “His point . . .
was that the very establishment of the Union had founded a new power source
which in no way drew its strength from the powers of the states, as it had not
been established at their expense.”36 The “founding of a new power source”
draws the reader’s attention once more to the “new” beginning in action,
articulated here as founding. Once more, the relevant political thought has
been drawn out of Arendt’s attention to the historical developments.
It will now be instructive to consider how this entire treatment of the
American Revolution allows it to be viewed as exemplary of political action
as such. What I have sought to do hitherto is extract the politically relevant
content from each moment of the revolutionary experience in order to be able
to draw the reader’s attention to the necessity of the public space. To sum-
marize the path thus far, in its various moments the American Revolution
demonstrates all of the following for Arendt: the constitution of power, the
foundation of a space for freedom, the preservation of power for future gen-
erations, the expression of that power through action inspired by a principle,
and how such action takes the form of promising. I now turn to my next
chapter, whose goal is to show how all of these moments, rather than being
restricted to the act of founding the new body politic, and thereby relegated
to the past, reappear in a political phenomenon within the body politic: civil
disobedience.
NOTES
1. Excerpt(s) from ON REVOLUTION by Hannah Arendt, copyright © 1963,

1965 by Hannah Arendt; copyright renewed © 1991 by Lotte Kohler. Used by per-
mission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of
Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
2. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Pelican Books, 1977), p. 142.
3. On Revolution, 29.
4. Ibid., 33.
6. Ibid., 143.
7. Ibid., 145.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 148.
10. Dana Villa, The Fate of the Political: Arendt and Heidegger (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 38.
In this quoted passage from Villa, he extrapolates this connection with quoted
material from both The Human Condition and On Revolution.
11. On Revolution, 118 (the single quotation marks indicate direct statements from
Adams).
12. Villa, The Fate of the Political, 38 (my emphasis).
15. Ibid., 130 (italics mine).
16. Ibid., 204.
17. Bernstein, “Political Modernism,” 61.
18. Ibid.
19. The Human Condition, 244–45 (emphasis added).
21. Ibid., 170.
22. Ibid., 175.
23. Bernstein, “Political Modernism,” 63 (emphasis added to ‘a space I share with
others’).
24. “What Is Freedom?” 151.
26. Ibid., 166–67 (emphasis mine on “would have remained hidden”).
27. Canovan, Reinterpretation, 223 (my emphasis) Within this quote, Canovan is
quoting Arendt from On Revolution, 214.
28. Jeremy Waldron, “Arendt’s Constitutional Politics,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), pp. 212–13 (emphasis added to “as the starting point and point of reference for
all subsequent politics.”).
29. On Revolution, 157 (emphasis added).
31. Waldron, “Arendt’s Constitutional Politics,” 204 (my emphasis).
33. Aristotle, Politics, in “The Basic Works of Aristotle,” ed. Richard Mckeon
(New York: Modern Library, 2001), pp. 1187, 1188, 1189 (1280a30–36, 1280b30–39).
35. John McGowan, “Arendt’s Utopian Vision,” in Hannah Arendt and the
Meaning of Politics, eds. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis:
Chapter 5
Arendt’s Political Concept

of Action, Part II
Civil Disobedience
INTRODUCTION
It is crucial to underline that the founding of the new body politic, exempli-
fied by the American Revolution, cannot be the only exemplar of political
action as new beginning because I am seeking to show the broadest possible
implications of Arendt’s political concept of action. Part of my concern here
is that contemporary political circumstances in liberal states do not allow for
a wholly new form of political action to take hold, which is what would be
required for a revolution to found a space for freedom and a new body poli-
tic. Instead, civil disobedience can be engaged in to recover the public space
rather than needing to found an entirely new one as in the case of revolution.
This chapter, then, presents Arendt’s thought on civil disobedience and pro-
vides a reader with a resource for considering the possibility of reclaiming
the space for freedom. That is to say, the phenomenon of civil disobedience,
rightly interpreted, demonstrates how political action and power appear
within an already existing state with some kind of constitutional framework.
In the American context it reaffirms the principle of people power inherent in
the Revolution. With Arendt, I interpret the act of disobedience as follows:
civil disobedience is an act engaged in by a group of individuals who are
reclaiming the horizontal contract and the power inherent in it because the
terms of the Constitutional promise have been violated by those in govern-
ment. I now turn to Arendt’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” which appears in
her collection of essays Crises of the Republic.1 As usual, Arendt’s thought
begins with a distinction that orients the reader’s thought toward a fully
political interpretation of the phenomenon.
91
92 Chapter 5
DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

AND CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION
Disobedience can be illuminated negatively by separating it from a phe-

nomenon with which it is often conflated: conscientious objection. Both
phenomena involve the question of a citizen’s relation to the law in a society
of consent, that is, the extent of the right of citizens to disobey or resist laws
held to be unjust. Exemplary historical figures of disobedience have been
found in Socrates and Thoreau, both of whom were commonly thought to be
disobeying the law through moral opposition to an unjust law, yet the oppo-
sition could only be legitimate to the extent that they were willing to accept
the punishment of breaking the law. For Arendt: “Their conduct is the joy of
jurists because it seems to prove that disobedience to the law can be justified
only if the lawbreaker is willing and even eager to accept punishment for his
act.”2 Along with her, I affirm that the true nature of the phenomenon of civil
disobedience has not been understood when these historical figures are taken
as examples. Socrates and Thoreau were not civil disobedients. If anything,
they were conscientious objectors. Arendt persists in the viewpoint of On
Revolution by stating that civil disobedience is an act engaged in by a group
(not an individual) and is an expression of the power inherent in the condition
of plurality and because of this “we must distinguish between conscientious
objectors and civil disobedients.”3 Conscientious objection is a moral phe-
nomenon related to an individual’s conscience whereas civil disobedience is
a political one related to the power of a group to act together.4 This distinc-
tion does a lot of work in Arendt’s interpretation. Accordingly, I will engage
with the reasons she makes the distinction. For Arendt, acts of conscience
are not political by their very nature because they are engaged in by solitary
individuals. Conscience is the silent inner dialogue one is engaged in when
deciding between different courses of action and is a species of the mental
activity of thinking.
For Arendt, to be political, action must reckon with the opinions of a plu-
rality of others. In reckoning with conscience, one concerns herself not with
the world but with the self—whether she can be an integrated self who is not
lost in contradiction like the Kantian liar who cannot will a maxim consis-
tently. To interpret disobedience as a function of conscience is, accordingly,
symptomatic of the world alienation of modernity as concerned with the self
and not the world. In addition to conscience being unpolitical by nature, the
commands it issues are expressed “in purely subjective statements” such
as the Socratic dictum that “it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.”5
Arendt interprets this as an expression that Socrates intended to apply to
himself as Socrates rather than as a blanket statement of morality. In contrast:
“Politically . . . what counts is that a wrong has been done; to the law it is
Arendt’s Political Concept of Action, Part II 93
irrelevant who is better off as a result—the doer or sufferer.”6 In other words,

the personal integrity of the individual—whether he is at one with himself—
is not a concern in a political context.
Here the division between the political and moral is illuminated by the
notion that the rules of conscience issue edicts against action and cannot act
as sources of inspiration for action: “They do not say what to do; they say
what not to do. They do not spell out certain principles for taking action;
they lay down boundaries no act should transgress.”7 It is crucial, however,
that Arendt does provide a practical qualification regarding the distinction
between the moral and the political because such a personal, moral quan-
dary—what is here called conscientious objection—can become political if
there are enough individuals who take up the issue, that is, if enough indi-
viduals are in agreement about what is at stake. This is a vital point because
it highlights the necessarily public character of political action: “No doubt
this kind of conscientious objection can become politically significant when
a number of consciences happen to coincide, and the conscientious objectors
enter the marketplace and make their voices heard in public.”8 When a con-
cern demands such a public view, conscience is no longer the deciding factor
among the actors because conscience is not a political capacity in that it does
not reckon with human plurality. Arendt’s central contention is that once the
issue has entered the public space and is susceptible to a plurality of perspec-
tives, it is opinion that matters and not conscience.
Opinion formation is a political capacity that Arendt develops in an essay
titled “Truth and Politics,” where she explores the historical and philosophi-
cal connection between the titular concepts. Opinion formation is at the heart
of her conception of disobedience because disobedient actors themselves “are
in fact organized minorities, bound together by common opinion.”9 What this
boundedness consists in can be made sense of by tracing her development of
opinion formation and establishing its connection to civil disobedience in the
present context. This is needed because disobedience and opinion formation
are both political capacities that are firmly situated within human plurality
and, as such, distinct from the private operation of a moral capacity like
conscience.
In “Truth and Politics” Arendt is concerned about the coercive role of truth
claims that seem to cut against the in-between spirit of the political realm:
factual truth, like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and
precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very essence of political life. The
modes of thought and communication that deal with truth, if seen from the
political perspective, are necessarily domineering; they don’t take into account
other’s people’s opinions, and taking these into account is the hallmark of all
strictly political thinking.10
94 Chapter 5
Here, the contrast between truth and opinion is made sharply and demon-
strates Arendt’s commitment to the claim that opinions, because they do not
claim to be the final word, constitute the fabric of political discussion in the
public space. Moreover, in the same essay she claims that mere opinions,
things that one simply “holds” because one has a right to, are not the relevant
thought. Instead, her focus is on opinion formation, requiring that one take
into account the perspectives of others, or what Arendt calls representative
thinking: “Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by consider-
ing a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind
the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them.”11 It is
essential to Arendt’s understanding of civil disobedience that a vocal minor-
ity concerned about questions of constitutional legitimacy engages in the
formation and sharing of opinions about the concern confronting them. In the
essay on civil disobedience Arendt calls this “quality opinion,” which is quite
distinct from the opinion of the majority: “The point . . . is that we are dealing
. . . with organized minorities that are too important, not merely in numbers,
but in quality of opinion.”12 The quality of the opinion is ensured precisely
because one engages in the kind of representative thinking Arendt identifies
in “Truth and Politics.” I will develop the conception of opinion formation
in the final chapter, where it will assume a prominent role in connection with
the capacity for judgment, but the allusion to the earlier essay has shown
us how disobedient acts and the opinions constitutive of them highlight the
essentially public nature of such acts.
THE POSITIVE CONTENT OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Having shown the way in which Arendt opens up her interpretation of

civil disobedience by demonstrating what it is not, I now turn to the phe-
nomenon itself in order to trace how Arendt’s interpretation draws out its
uniquely American appearance. This is vital to grasping the exemplarity of
the phenomenon in my reading of Arendt. She identifies civil disobedience,
the action and its content, in the context of what one might call a crisis of
legitimacy: “Civil disobedience arises when a significant number of citizens
have become convinced either that the normal channels of change no longer
function, and grievances will not be heard or acted upon, or that, on the con-
trary, the government is about to change and has embarked upon and persists
in modes of action whose legality and constitutionality are open to grave
doubt.”13
The politically salient content here is that, in cases of civil disobedience,
the actions of the government are troubling in respect of their constitutional
significance. Nothing less is at stake in civil disobedience than the entire
agreement between a government and its citizens: the agreement embodied

in the Constitutional document as evidence of the mutual promising of the
American people. Arendt therefore identifies acts of civil disobedience as
uniquely American because of their analogy with the act of founding. In
other words, following Montesquieu and his concept of “the spirit of the
law,” Arendt identifies civil disobedience as that action that captures the spirit
inherent in the principle of the U.S. Constitution.14 She explicitly makes the
claim that “although the phenomenon of civil disobedience is today a world-
wide phenomenon . . . it is still primarily American in origin and substance
. . . not, perhaps, in accordance with the statutes, but in accordance with the
spirit of its laws.”15
For this, I revisit social contract theory’s repeated emphasis on the act of
consent, especially in the Lockean version. With Locke the mark of the law’s
legitimacy is taken to be the active consent of the citizens to it. The way in
which this conception is taken up into Arendt’s interpretation of civil disobe-
dience lies in her stress on the way in which the phenomenon concerns the
citizen’s relation to the law. Even to consider civil disobedience as disobedi-
ent, one must assume that a citizen’s relationship to the law is a consensual
one. That is to say, to actively dissent must mean that some kind of agreement
is being violated. The agreement just is the idea of the consensual relation-
ship that is taken to be a hallmark of legitimate constitutional government.
Of course, the consent of legitimate government so celebrated in the pages
of Locke’s Second Treatise is, in the history of political thought, something
taken to be a mere fiction. In contrast, in the American experience consent is
no fiction. Once more Arendt gathers the notion of the “spirit” of the law out
of the historical trajectory of the Revolution: “the point is that it [active con-
sent] was no mere fiction in the American prerevolutionary experience, with
its numerous covenants and agreements, from the Mayflower Compact to the
establishment of the thirteen colonies as an entity.”16 Thus, one can point to
historical exemplars of the kind of contract Arendt calls the horizontal con-
tract in the prerevolutionary experience. This can be done in order to show
that the horizontal contract that appeared in the context of the founders and
the one appearing in the Constitution is not only held in common between the
two phenomena but is essential to the nature of the new body politic.
The view that this horizontal contract is not an actuality for individuals
born into an already existing society was precisely the objection to which
Locke responded in his Second Treatise. As is well known, he formulated
the problem in terms of tacit consent: “The difficulty is, what ought to be
looked upon as tacit consent, and how far it binds, that is how far any one
shall be looked on to have consented, and thereby submitted to any govern-
ment, where he has made no expressions of it at all.”17 One might argue that
this inevitably becomes the optimal way of understanding how individuals
96 Chapter 5
in a supposedly consent-based society might agree to its laws. The reproach

against Locke, however, is that this is obviously no consent at all. Locke rhe-
torically poses the objection himself in a negative formulation: “It is impos-
sible of right, that men should do so [consent], because all men being born
under government, they are to submit to that, and are not at liberty to begin
a new one.”18 It cannot be denied that upon birth into the world, individuals
enter an already existing society and there must be some way to reckon with
this reality. In other words, as Arendt rightly recognized, even if tacit consent
is conceptually unsatisfactory in terms of voluntariness: “A kind of consent is
implied in every newborn’s factual situation; namely, a kind of conformity to
the rules under which the great game of the world is played in the particular
group to which he belongs by birth. We all live and survive by a kind of tacit
consent.”19 Arendt rightly captures the existential dimension of the situation.
It is precisely because of the inevitability of tacit consent that one approaches
the Arendtian insight into the nature of consent as it relates to civil disobedi-
ence. To express consent in a constitutionally based framework, that is to
say, to consent actively, one must dissent. In one of the most remarkable
statements of the essay on civil disobedience, Arendt writes: “Dissent implies
consent, and is the hallmark of free government; one who knows that he may
dissent knows also that he somehow consents when he does not dissent.”20
Knowing that one can actively dissent in the form of civil disobedience is
essential to an Arendtian interpretation of the significance of the new body
politic. Civil disobedience is consistent with and, indeed, reinvigorates the
spirit of American law by actively reaffirming the principle of people-power
inherent in the Constitution. The point is that if consent is to be understood
as a truly voluntary activity—which, indeed, it must be if it is to be consis-
tent with the very concept of consent—then the citizen must be capable of
bringing into question the very terms of her consent (the Constitution). The
intelligibility of dissent (in the form of civil disobedience) lies in its giving
expression to consent. Bernstein elucidates the point:
What this means is that the tacit consent we must give to the laws and norms
governing our everyday lives, the consent entailed by our participation in and
benefiting from life in a representative democracy, while truly a form of con-
sent, does not on its own match the terms for legitimacy represented by the
existential and theoretical truth of contract theory. In this situation, consent can
become truly voluntary if and only if we have the power of dissent. So dissent
keeps consent alive, giving it back its actuality.21
A reader will recall that dissent in the form of civil disobedience must be
understood as a response to situations in which “the government is about to
change and has embarked upon and persists in modes of action whose legality
and constitutionality are open to grave doubt.”22 Arendt’s words specify that
disobedience relates to the original terms of the constitutional agreement and
not necessarily to specific statutory laws. If disobedience is a manifestation
of the spirit inherent in the founding act, then it makes sense that the content
of disobedient acts will necessarily be related to the constituting power of
the people—the original terms spelled out in the Constitution by which they
bound themselves together. Bernstein reaffirms this point when he states that
“civil disobedience always concerns the constitutional order itself, either its
augmentation or its restoration.”23
I now examine further how disobedience is a manifestation of the spirit
of American law. The claim is that the free voluntary association of human
beings, gathering together, creating power, and maintaining that power
through mutual promising are precisely the activities in which the founders
were engaged. Binding together through promises is what Arendt referred
to in On Revolution as the uniquely American experience of power. This
political activity of promising was the original mark of legitimacy for the
government of the new body politic. Thus, those engaged in acts of civil dis-
obedience are reaffirming and reclaiming the legitimacy of which they have
always been the source. This reclaims legitimacy when in some way or other
the government has violated the terms of the promise that is the essence of the
Constitution: “‘The spirit of the laws’, as Montesquieu understood it, is the
principle by which people living under a particular legal system act and are
inspired to act. Consent, the spirit of American laws, is based on the notion
of a mutually binding contract, which established first the individual colonies
and then the union.”24
What is more, and this is a highly consequential implication for my
understanding of “founding,” drawn out by Bernstein, if disobedience is a
reaffirmation of the people’s constitutional power, then, with Bernstein, all
founding is re-founding. Thus re-founding as civil disobedience is itself the
reclamation and reopening of the public space that is crucial for political
experience, which is not a simple after effect of an origin but is itself a re-
founding. Bernstein clarifies the Arendtian insight about dissent:
In making dissent the cornerstone of her theory for consent, Arendt is doing
nothing more than making explicit what is already implicit in her revolutionary
theory. . . . If consent is bound to the moment of founding, then every act of
consent presupposes a dissent made good . . . Said differently, if all founding is
only a beginning and not the beginning, authentic founding entails refounding.
Refounding is the truth of founding.25
It is with this very recognition of dissent as refounding that a form of political

action intrinsic to the body politic is realized. Civil disobedience is a meaningful
98 Chapter 5
form of political action for those who are concerned with the reaffirmation and
reclamation of their constitutional power and such action is needed when those
in government have failed to recognize the power that legitimates them.
A reader might well ask at this point to what extent civil disobedience
is, first of all, recognized as action that is tied to the question of legitimacy.
Moreover, is disobedience a live option within existing political states?
Several reasons seem to speak against it being so. Disobedience can often be
co-opted by ideological pursuits not truly concerned with individuals’ opin-
ions. In this case, disobedience fails to be truly recognizable as disobedience.
At the same time, it has been cut off from its tie to legitimacy. Moreover,
there is the already articulated concern that disobedients are viewed, from the
outside, as mere criminals. Finally, perhaps of greatest concern is that within
contemporary, liberal states, there exists a strong tendency to think of politics
itself as some realm defined by administrative and bureaucratic processes,
a tendency that only encourages apathy and results in a deficit of political
imagination. Under these conditions, civil disobedience becomes misunder-
stood and harder to imagine existentially.
Following the trajectory of Arendt’s essay, one can observe how the
historical context of the 1960s and 1970s America made it easier to envi-
sion disobedience as a live option because disobedience emerges, on her
interpretation, in response to crises of constitutional legitimacy. The prob-
lem in contemporary American political circumstances is that the notion of
crisis itself has been cut off from the question of legitimacy and has become
normalized instead of only appearing in exceptional circumstances. I have
in mind, specifically, the tendency of political commentators to regard the
Republican-controlled Congress during the Obama presidency as “lurching
from one crisis to the next” or President Trump seemingly manufacturing a
“crisis” on his Twitter account every morning during his presidency. “Crisis”
becomes normalized in this way and allows for the belief in the efficacy of
political action to be undermined, given that the urgency of crisis in its rela-
tion to the problem of legitimacy is diminished. How, then, to remedy such a
condition? Since the larger philosophical concern in this discussion remains
the extent to which individuals can, ultimately, engage in and have experi-
ences of meaningful political action, my focus here remains on envisioning
how disobedience might be considered a live option. To Arendt: “Although
civil disobedience is compatible with the spirit of American laws, the dif-
ficulties of incorporating it into the American legal system and justifying it
on purely legal grounds seems to be prohibitive.”26 In other words, one might
claim that it cannot be made legal to break the law. However, after reading
Arendt, this is an overly simplified perspective because, as one has seen, dis-
obedience is not about mere law breaking; it arises in response to questions
of constitutional legitimacy.
Arendt’s interpretation of a specific historical event will give a reader a

sense of an exemplary moment of civil disobedience, and can show how
disobedience is an existential possibility for contemporary citizens. Arendt
analyzes the failure of the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the legality of
the Vietnam War, and this would seem to speak most urgently in favor of
civil disobedience if as contentious an issue as the legality of a foreign war
was turned away by the highest court. The court’s reasoning for refusing to
consider the question of the war’s legality was based upon what is called
“the political question doctrine,” and though Arendt denies the legitimacy of
such reasoning, she recognizes it as a “loophole” through which the court can
avoid hearing particularly troubling constitutional question. That the court
used such a doctrine to deny the case a hearing allows us to examine the
separation of powers in relation to civil disobedience. The “political question
doctrine” refers to cases before the court “according to which certain acts of
the other two branches of government, the legislative and the executive, ‘are
not reviewable in the courts.’”27 The doctrine, then, was used by the court as
a premise for not calling into question the legality of the war in Vietnam as
the court’s “authority depends on prudence, that is, on not raising issues or
making decisions that cannot be enforced.”28 This scenario confronts readers
with a striking instance of the confrontation between two branches of the gov-
ernment: the presidential power as commander-in-chief of the military and
the Supreme Court’s power of reviewing the constitutionality of laws. Arendt
sees the refusal to take up the case regarding the legality of the war as a fail-
ure of the proper role of checks and balances. In this instance, the efficacy
of civil disobedience is brought into sharp focus because it can be conceived
as an attempt to restore the proper balance of power between the branches
of government. Such a restoration of the powers through an act of disobedi-
ence would be a response to a situation in which “the government is about to
change and has embarked upon and persists in modes of action whose legality
and constitutionality are open to grave doubt.”29 The refusal to take up the
case, though questionably justified in terms of what one might call political
expediency, is actually a primary instance of a violation of the horizontal,
Constitutional promise between citizens. This leads to conjecture about the
possibility that “the establishment of civil disobedience among our politi-
cal institutions might be the best possible remedy for this failure of judicial
review.”30 The point for Arendt is that disobedience ought to be recognized
as a viable legitimate institution alongside other forms of voluntary associa-
tion. That is, civil disobedience needs to be granted constitutional protection.
Indeed, if Arendt is right that disobedience is the manifestation of the spirit
of American law, perhaps it is the association most deserving of this recogni-
tion. I take this into consideration because Arendt herself pointed toward the
need of a mechanism by which civil disobedience could be granted a kind
100 Chapter 5
of legitimacy that is already given to other forms of voluntary association. If

such a mechanism were in place, then civil disobedience would be in a sense
sanctified as a meaningful form of political action for the citizenry to engage
in. The general point is that civil disobedience is, precisely, a form of volun-
tary association. The emphatic point is that it is the most important form of
the freedom of voluntary association within the constitutional body politic.
ARENDT AND CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY
In this section I consider the relation between Arendt’s thought and demo-
cratic and political theory more generally. I will use this to clarify her thinking
on the nature of the disobedient act that she saw as requiring constitutional
protection. This will also allow my argument to gain traction in understand-
ing the nature of meaningful political experience as it relates to the formation
of and maintenance of the public space through political action. If one takes
Arendt’s position seriously regarding the implementation of a legitimate
constitutional space for civil disobedience, then I think one has a glimpse of
the kind of constitutional democracy Arendt would advocate. Let us briefly
consider what this would look like. I am not suggesting that Arendt had a
well worked out theory of constitutional democracy. However, she does pro-
vide some insight into how something like it might function. My focus here
is on how a stabilizing force like a constitution can exist alongside a some-
what disruptive force like disobedience. That is to say, I would claim there
is a tension at the heart of political life between the desire for deliberative
consensus and the desire for individual expression of unique perspectives.
From an Arendtian perspective, it is clear that any constitutional framework
must come to grips with the condition of human plurality or the variety of
perspectives that will necessarily arise from within the polity. Thus, I frame
the seeming opposition as follows: stability provided for by constitutions
could potentially be in tension with the contentious spirit arising from the
distinctness inherent in human plurality. Civil disobedience is the lynchpin
that connects these two opposing sides, as Smith states: “the activity that best
embodies the way we can hold together these two elements—the desire for
limited constitutional government and the need for vital, active, and participa-
tory contestation—is civil disobedience.”31 This, according to Smith, would
be an Arendtian conception of functioning constitutional democracy capable
of reckoning with human plurality.
The stability provided for by constitutions and laws is a theme consistent
throughout Arendt’s writings. In The Human Condition, laws provide bound-
aries to try and guard against the boundlessness of action: “laws which pro-
tect and make possible the physical identity of a people’s political existence,
are of such great importance to the realm of human affairs precisely because
no limiting and protecting principles arise out of the activities going on in
the realm of human affairs itself.”32 Or, in On Revolution: “To the men of
the eighteenth century, however, it was still a matter of course that they
needed a constitution to lay down the boundaries of the new political realm
and to define the rules within it.”33 I provide these quotations in order to
demonstrate how laws and, specifically, constitutions function as boundaries,
providing for stability that can ensure a kind of institutional structure and
housing for political action. Thus, these stabilizing functions are clear, but
Arendt’s concern, additionally, is the tendency of laws, traditions, customs,
and norms themselves to either become reified into unquestioned dogma or,
more dangerously, to be reified by political leaders wishing to maintain the
status quo. Against this reification is Arendt’s insistence that laws and the
constitution constantly require maintenance and contestation. In Smith’s
words: “Constitutional continuity is preserved only through continual contes-
tation by diverse sets of actors, thus ensuring the dynamic appropriation and
revision of constitutional norms, principles, and practices.”34 This captures
how continuity and contestation can be conjoined because continuity is only
possible because of the constant work of political action, specifically in the
form of disobedience. To demonstrate this, I provide the following Arendtian
insight (although action is not here specifically identified as disobedience):
“Political institutions, no matter how well or how badly designed, depend for
continued existence upon acting men; their conservation is achieved by the
same means that brought them into existence. Independent existence marks
the work of art as a product of making; utter dependence upon further acts to
keep it in existence marks the state as a product of action.”35
This is a vivid declaration of the Arendtian perspective on the marriage of
action and preservation of political institutions like a Constitution. Instructive
within this quotation is the contrast between making and acting. As a result
of this distinction, “Constitution” avoids being rendered as a mere object
of respect or reverence for citizens to look back on nostalgically or from a
merely positivist perspective. Instead, because a “Constitution” is always
dependent upon further action, a reader can understand how action functions
to preserve institutions of political power. Importantly, preservation is not
work upon some object, but, rather, is an expression of power inherent in
human action. It does not, then, have the resonance of restoration, that is, of
merely returning to an earlier form. Instead, preservation of the Constitution
is akin to reinterpreting it according to changing circumstances. Disobedience
attempts to re-envision the constitutional framework in light of the spirit of
that framework’s laws. Accordingly, disobedience seeks to bring the letter
of the law into line with a spirit that insists upon the power of people as the
source of legitimacy.
102 Chapter 5
The “power of people” highlights the more deliberative moment of

Arendt’s thought on action more generally, but the phenomenon of civil
disobedience allows readers to see both the agonal and deliberative moments
of action. Here I am referring back to the final section of chapter 3, above,
where I considered the supposed tension between two “models” of action in
Arendt’s thought. There I indicated how, due to its nature as a constellation
concept, it is possible to avoid subsuming action under any particular model
or a priori conceptualization of action. I take civil disobedience to be some-
thing that can further illuminate this point. Disobedience, though reaffirming
the power principle inherent in the Constitution, does undoubtedly have a
contestatory spirit, as Smith indicated above. This contestatory spirit is an
inevitable aspect of politics as that realm of human experience distinguished
by its having to reckon with human plurality—equal yet distinct voices.
Thus, though disobedience is a necessarily public, political phenomenon
dependent on groups of individuals acting together, this does not mean that
acts of disobedience result in consensus or agreement. I would claim that it is
very much a virtue of Arendtian political thinking to recognize the potential
for conflict inherent within the political form of human experience because
of the performative acts of distinct and equal individuals. Specifically, in the
context of this discussion of civil disobedience, I am thinking of the sharing
of distinct perspectives by individuals about the crisis in constitutional legiti-
macy that confronts them.
I am in no way purporting to claim that political life must take the form
of some kind of competition among opposing interests, especially because it
is opinions that are at stake in civil disobedience and not interests.36 That is
to say, in a very existential sense, it is the desire to appear and be seen and
heard by one’s peers that marks the conditions for politics. Such appearing
before and with others might not result in deliberative consensus, but without
the possibility of appearing, public space cannot be opened up. Such appear-
ing results in the formation of one’s identity—a point emphasized in chap-
ter 2—as one is seen and heard by others. In this context Calhoun notes the
importance of political action to provide a performative function, that is, the
opportunity to reveal “who” one is in the Arendtian sense. This is in contrast
to a thinker like Habermas who, according to Calhoun, would just as soon
bracket individual difference for the sake of reaching agreement:
It [the bracketing of differences among individuals] makes politics much more

a matter of deliberation on policy and much less an occasion for performative
world making or disclosure of individual identity. In addition, this bracketing of
differences also undermines the potential of public discourse for self-reflexivity.
This plurality of participants, who appear precisely as different from each other,
is a crucial spur to reflection on the identity of each and the significance of their
interrelationships.37
Calhoun is effective in bringing out the connection between both moments of

action, that is, the agonal and deliberative. One sees the emphasis upon “plu-
rality of participants,” a necessary condition for action, as well as “disclosure
of individual identity,” another crucial moment of action. I can argue without
contradiction that though it may be individuals who initiate action, the space
of action is necessarily in public with others. Thus, a concept like power—the
appearance of human togetherness—is not at odds with the agonal expression
of individual words and deeds. Rather, power holds together individual actors
as they appear before one another to voice individual opinions or to deliberate
together. As Calhoun and McGowan note: “The public sphere exists to offer
the occasion for self-revealing discourse as much as for achieving consensus
or even reciprocal understanding.”38 The point is not to foreclose or circum-
scribe what the nature of the public space or political life ought to be like. In
this vein, Arendt is not committed to a concept of “the public space” or “the
public sphere,” but to public space itself in the sense of the in-between space
that arises through the coming together of equal and distinct individuals, a
space whose form is not a priori recognizable. Civil disobedience as disobe-
dient, then, captures an agonal moment of action but, as an act only possible
with others in public, it has a crucially deliberative moment.
In sum, what I have aimed to show is how disobedience is a form of
political action intrinsic to an established body politic whose beginnings
lie in the spirit of revolution, especially in an American context. Indeed, as
a reader has seen, disobedience is nothing other than the manifestation of
the power principle inherent in the Constitution. Consent is given an exis-
tential reality through acts of dissent. I am speaking of a form of consent
that is in strict contrast with the notion of a contract between citizens and
government, which Arendt refers to as “the vertical version of the social
contract.”39 The paradigmatic example of this is in Hobbes’s philosophy,
where each individual transfers most of her natural rights to an absolute
sovereign for protection and security. The vertical contract notion always
reintroduces a sovereign who rules over his or her subjects. The horizontal
contract between people is to be viewed as the proper and truly exemplary
form of political contract. Disobedience reclaims that horizontal space
between people and occurs most often when those in government have
broken the terms of the promise that is the Constitution. When this has
happened a situation of vertical contract has taken over. As a consequence,
power has again been misconstrued as something possessed by political
leaders instead of the source that legitimates them in the first place. Put
104 Chapter 5
succinctly, disobedience acts as the reclamation of the power that legiti-

mates government.
BLACK LIVES MATTER AS A FORM OF

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN 2020
Before proceeding to the final chapter of this book, I think it will be helpful
for a reader to have a concrete example in front of them that shows the reso-
nance of Arendt’s political thought to our contemporary political moment.40
Black Lives Matter emerged in the summer of 2020 as a continuation of the
history of political protest in the United States and more specifically as a
continuation of the legacy of the abolitionist and civil rights movements.
Black Lives Matter itself, in its various instantiations, is often not directly
a form of civil disobedience in the sense Arendt suggested as engaged in
direct law breaking; it often might be thought of more usefully as a march,
demonstration, or protest in which permission is secured from authorities
to engage in such action. Nonetheless Black Lives Matter protests are some
of the most obvious forms of political action alive in the American polity
today, mirroring the same types of exemplary political actions we associate
with civil rights protests of the 1960s. Therefore, what I think would be
helpful for a reader is to show how this specific political movement embod-
ies specific Arendtian concepts: freedom, principles, and new beginnings. I
think it is appropriate in this specific chapter on civil disobedience because
it demonstrates citizens engaged in political action within an already exist-
ing state, which is the larger goal and context of this chapter in the argu-
mentative narrative of the book as whole. In this section, I’ll be revisiting
some content covered in previous chapters in order to provide the proper
context for this specific example. At times, I’ll be repeating content I have
already covered but I think that is necessary to give the reader the proper
context.
To begin, I’d like to ask: how, amidst a global pandemic that in late May
2020 had reached the grim milestone of 100,000 American deaths, could it be
possible for a political movement to reach heights not seen since its inception
in 2013? How during this moment—during one of the worst public health cri-
ses in American history—could a political movement simultaneously spawn
thousands of protests across the country from predictably reliable major cities
to small rural white majority towns formerly known for white supremacy?
Yes, the visibly brutal nature of the murder of George Floyd for all to see cer-
tainly seemed to suggest that this time was different, but could anyone have
predicted that during this moment in our country, Black Lives Matter would
become a global political phenomenon seemingly over night?41 It is because
of what Hannah Arendt would call the utterly miraculous nature of political
action that I suggest we need her thought to properly answer these questions,
specifically her conceptualization of political action as a new beginning that
allows freedom to appear in the world in the form of a principle.
While its status as the name of a political movement and its ubiquity as a
slogan to be uttered in the face of continued black suffering is undeniable, I
contend that we need a political concept to think through what Black Lives
Matter is. In other words, I want to try and answer the following ques-
tion: how can we make sense of how this phrase—these three words—has
emerged so precipitously to become an enduring feature of American politi-
cal life? While I am not denying the obvious—that Black Lives Matter has
persisted as a movement because black men have continued to be killed
by police—I think there is some philosophical work to be done regarding
precisely why this specific choice of words—Black Lives Matter—has reso-
nated so powerfully with the public. I contend that Hannah Arendt’s concept
of a principle can best help illuminate how Black Lives Matter is and will
continue to be so successful in fighting back against oppression.42 In short,
Black Lives Matter is best understood as an Arendtian political principle
and that the very meaning of the principle is embodied in the political act
of protest.
Recall that one of the most original aspects of Arendt’s political thought is
her concept of action as new beginning and I’d like to briefly contextualize
her account of action within the larger argument of The Human Condition.
Reflecting on the meaning of the very title of the book, Arendt is careful to
distinguish between the human condition and human nature: “It is highly
unlikely that we, who can know, determine, and define the natural essences
of all things surrounding us, which we are not, should ever be able to do the
same for ourselves—this would be jumping over our own shadows . . . In
other words, if we have a nature or essence, then surely only a god could
know and define it.”43 It is humans’ openness and responsiveness to their
experience that prevents the attribution to them of any kind of essential
nature. Arendt is therefore not positing any “human condition” as such, but,
rather, describing the human condition as it appears to human beings.
Moreover, the major argumentative framework of The Human Condition is
concerned with the description of our condition insofar as humans are active
beings: “With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental
human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each
corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been
given to man.”44 Human beings are conditioned because they find themselves
subject to certain conditions upon their birth into the world and the conditions
are existential in that they are not mere background conditions but demand a
response. Arendt is therefore explicating the existential conditions to which
106 Chapter 5
human beings respond in their capacities for labor, work, and action: (bio-
logical) life, the world, and plurality. Humans labor, quite simply, in order
to meet the biological demands of life that constantly exert their presence on
them and they work in order to construct a world.45 Insofar as human beings
need something in common—something to share which binds them—they
need a world.
The third and final aspect of the vita activa is action, which corresponds to
the condition of plurality. Plurality is the condition by which “men, not Man,
live on the earth and inhabit the world.”46 Because human beings inhabit
the earth with others who are equal yet distinct, they must act in ways that
distinguish themselves from them. At the same time, they can only appear
as actors by appearing to others in the condition of plurality. Action is never
determined, neither in reference to an end as in work nor according to some
process that must be undertaken to survive, as in labor. Action has a logic of
its own; it is a logic of the “new beginning,” which is essential to the meaning
of the political in Arendt.
Arendt first articulates new beginning in relation to what she considers
an ontological condition of human existence, natality, which renders human
birth, the nature of human coming into the world, as initium. That is to say,
the birth of each of us is itself the beginning of something new in the sense
of undetermined and unprecedented: the uniqueness of each new birth. In
order to specify this sense of beginning, in contrast to action as new begin-
ning, Arendt traces the temporal mode of “natality” to the Latin roots of
“beginning” in the political thought of Augustine. He specifies two mean-
ings of “beginning”: principium, the beginning of something, and initium,
the beginning of someone.47 The crucial difference is that the beginning of
human life (initium) signifies a temporal break because in any particular
human birth nothing like it has come before. In other words, each human life
is a new beginning because nothing like it existed before it and nothing like
it will ever follow. Arendt abandons the theological resonance of Augustine’s
thought to make an existential point about the human condition: each human
birth is the appearance of someone unique in the world. On this view, humans
themselves are beginnings. As such, the capacity for action is the capacity to
actualize one’s natal potential as a beginning: who one is when they act is a
new beginning. This potential is inherent in the human being: “action has the
closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning
inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer
possesses the capacity for beginning something anew, that is, of acting.”48
According to Arendt, then, action is new beginning, and such action interrupts
and inserts itself into the world and in doing so, action reveals who someone
is as opposed to what they are; this is a crucial distinction. For Arendt, politi-
cal action must reveal who someone is as opposed to what they are because
of its very nature as beginning something new. If action only revealed what
we are, it would be revealing something essential about us and that would
imply the presence of some prior characteristic that wouldn’t require action
to be revealed. Conversely, who someone is emerges through action as a kind
of performance before others. With the language of performance to describe
action, we can connect Arendt’s concept of action to her concept of freedom.
This is so because, for Arendt, freedom can only be understood through the
performance of an act itself, not by its motive or consequences.
Recall that Arendt argues that it is a general truth that philosophy has
assumed that morality can only exist under the presupposition of freedom.
For Arendt, however, the home of freedom is politics. In fact, she claims,
inner freedom, which is how she understands the freedom of morality, is
only recognizable as inner freedom if one first experienced freedom in its
manifestation through interaction with others: “it seems safe to say that man
would know nothing of inner freedom if he had not experienced a condi-
tion of being free as a worldly tangible entity. We first become aware of
freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse
with ourselves.”49 The necessity for the experience of freedom is the crucial
claim being made here; there is no freedom, for Arendt, without the actual-
ization of our capacity for new beginning. Freedom is how action appears in
the world when human beings act together to begin something new and it is
“the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which
was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which
therefore, strictly speaking could not be known.”50 This strongly highlights
freedom’s connection to the new beginning and shows that freedom, properly
conceived, is not freedom of the will as, for example, when a moral principle
supplied by reason guides the will. Instead, a principle for Arendt shows how
action as freedom appears in the world and thus, one needs to hear this word
in the proper manner and avoid the intuitive appeal of thinking of a moral
principle. The concept of a principle is integral to the meaning of Arendt’s
concept of freedom and she introduces a way of thinking about a principle
that is inherently political.
Odd though it may seem, the Arendtian principle comes from without.
Action is free, she claims, when it “springs” from a principle. Here, she has
in mind something quite general in nature that does not prescribe any specific
action. For instance, she gives the example of “love of equality.” Principles
of this kind inspire action but do not determine it. Action that fulfills the
meaning of freedom in Arendt therefore arises out of and in response to a
principle and is not some effect that is caused by the principle because, if it
were, the action would at once cease to be free. One can point to particular
manifestations of a principle in action; however, these particular acts do not
exhaust the principle. “In distinction from its goal, the principle of an action
108 Chapter 5
can be repeated time and again, it is inexhaustible, and in distinction from its
motive, the validity of a principle is universal, it is not bound up to any par-
ticular person or to any particular group.”51 Finally, the Arendtian principle
only exists in the action itself—in the performance, not in its consequence or
motive but solely in the action itself. Moreover, freedom only appears in the
world for Arendt when the principle inspiring the act is made manifest in it.
The following lines provide the precise connection between action, freedom,
and principles:
Freedom or its opposite appears in the world whenever such principles are actu-
alized; the appearance of freedom, like the manifestation of principles, coincides
with the performing act. Men are free—as distinguished from their possessing
the gift for freedom—as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free
and to act are the same.52
Having discussed the relevant political concepts in Arendt, in the following

section, I now seek to show how Black Lives Matter can best be thought of
using this Arendtian perspective. My argument is that Black Lives Matter is
best understood as a political principle that inspires political action.
BLACK LIVES MATTER AS A POLITICAL PRINCIPLE
Arendt argues that freedom is best captured by the performing act itself—not
in the motives giving rise to the action. Such freedom, then, is experiential
for Arendt and can only be captured as one engages in the action itself. More
precisely, the very actions themselves—protesting, disrupting, marching—
demonstrate the meaning of the principle as a public performance: that the
world must acknowledge that black lives matter by being forced to confront
them in the streets and on their television screens on a daily basis.
Now, one might argue that the assertion that Black Lives Matter as a chant
uttered in unison by those who march is itself a call for policy changes like
reorganizing police departments or making it easier to prosecute police offi-
cers who engage in extrajudicial killings. And of course those who utter the
phrase when protesting want to see these things done; the marches and pro-
tests on their own are not enough and will be considered significant and mean-
ingful if they accomplish specific legislative or policy victories. Moreover, I
would be foolish to deny such things: of course political protest is impactful
if it results in concrete changes to the lives of those engaging in them and
specifically in this context, black people will know their lives actually matter
when those in positions of power enact laws and policies that demonstrate
a commitment to those lives. Nonetheless, to suggest the meaning of Black
Lives Matter is exhausted by the legal victories it achieves is to reduce poli-

tics to law and policy making. In other words, such a suggestion diminishes
the experience of freedom and the principles that are made manifest in the act
of protest itself, not in the consequences resulting from the act.
The significance of political action is captured not only in the policy
objectives it achieves but is also captured when hundreds of thousands of
protesters emerge simultaneously in public together to protest. This sense of
politics as emergent captures the idea that political protest is a phenomenon
that appears in the world as a new beginning that was not there the day
before. These protests were a new beginning as they disrupted our daily lives
and brought the Black Lives Matter movement into the public consciousness
to a level hitherto unseen. Those protesting allowed freedom to appear in
the world in two different ways: to a public that watched them unfold and to
each other as free—as human beings capable of beginning something new
and engaging in political action that was not part of our world. As I myself
reflect on how life in the early summer of 2020 was consumed by daily news
of the pandemic with daily death counts and case numbers, I can think about
how these protests changed public perception so quickly and that, if you
were paying attention to the news, it was as if Black Lives Matter had trans-
formed public consciousness overnight. This very kind of reflection—that I
do not think I am alone in sharing during those days in June—is what Arendt
has in mind when she writes: “It is in the nature of beginning that something
new is started which cannot be expected from whatever came before. This
character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.”53 And
this participation in something that is a new beginning allows those involved
to experience freedom, not just somehow possess freedom as a capacity or
a right.
Similar to the Occupy Wall Street protests that seemed to emerge and
capture public consciousness so quickly in 2011, Black Lives Matter has
accomplished the same feat in 2020. The meaning of Occupy Wall Street,
as a political principle, was exemplified through the very act of occupy-
ing public space that such protesters were claiming belonged to them: the
occupation of the space and the occupants’ appearance in public was an act
aimed at reclaiming that space for citizens and projecting a different kind of
power relation between citizens. Similarly, Black Lives Matter, as a political
principle, has its meaning exemplified in the act of protest, not only to those
engaged in the protest themselves but also to onlookers who cannot help but
see black lives as demanding recognition—as human beings that matter—as
they appear in public spaces simultaneously day after day and night after
night. Put more concretely, political action exemplifies the very meaning
of the principle itself because politics for Arendt is about the appearance
of freedom in the world to others and the experience of freedom for those
110 Chapter 5
involved in the action. It is precisely for these reasons that I suggested at the
beginning of the essay that we need Hannah Arendt’s thought to make sense
of this political moment, that is, because her concept of a political principle
captures the significance and meaning of this political phenomenon so well.
Black Lives Matter achieved a rare moment for political protest in 2020
when it captured American political consciousness even amidst a global
pandemic. It brought millions of new followers into its ranks to participate
in protests and marches around the country. Looking back even just a few
short months later, that moment and its continued resonance is quite remark-
able in a world in which nihilistic despair might seem like the only option
given the nature of a pandemic; nonetheless, Black Lives Matter gives us
hope that political action is still a possibility and that human beings can
begin something new even amidst a global public health crisis as Arendt so
beautifully wrote: “The new always happens against the overwhelming odds
of statistical laws and their probability . . . the new therefore always appears
as a miracle.”54
CONCLUSION
One of the larger goals of this book is to show how modern individuals
might be capable of engaging in forms of political experience that are not
immediately alienating or somehow viewed as a means to some further end
and the previous example of Black Lives Matter shows specifically how this
can be achieved. It is in direct contrast to conceptions of politics that are
merely instrumental that I seek to put forward what I have been repeatedly
calling meaningful political experience. Moreover, I am thinking especially
of individualist conceptions that view the securing of negative liberties and
protection of rights as the dominant discourse of political theory. In both the
present and previous chapter, I have sought to show Arendt’s development of
her phenomenological concept of action into a distinctly political one. Central
to this endeavor was a recovery of the spirit of the American Revolutionary
experience and its various moments. Recovering its spirit is crucial since it
allows my argument to avoid a mere nostalgic longing for the heroic deeds or
actions of what many refer to as “the founding fathers.” Instead, the recovery
of this spirit of the revolution has shown the possibility for renewal within
the body politic. By renewal, I refer to acts of promising between individuals
that exemplify the primacy of the horizontal contract between individuals that
is perhaps the single most important kernel of the revolutionary experience.
I have shown how the reclamation of this horizontal contract is achievable
through acts of civil disobedience that respond to crises of constitutional
legitimacy. The significance of revolution in Arendt’s sense and, especially,
of civil disobedience as historical exemplars of political action are in the

foreground as I move into the final chapter. The political concepts of these
chapters carry forward as I seek to substantiate the concept of the public
space. I am particularly concerned with the horizontality of the “contract” that
is essential for meaningful political experience. Horizontality is an important
concept and image that portrays the crucial political aspect of in-between-
ness “in which people are with others and neither for nor against them—that
is, in sheer human togetherness.”55 Horizontality and not verticality firmly
situates political experience between human actors in a condition of plurality.
The final chapter will build on the portrayal of the historical exemplars of
political action by showing how two further political capacities maintain the
public space: opinion formation and judgment. I must bring these capacities
into my conception of meaningful political experience because much more is
needed to articulate the nature of speech and action citizens are engaged in as
they interact horizontally. That promising is the modality of political action
capable of reclaiming the public space when questions of constitutional
legitimacy arise has been shown. This reclaiming takes the form of civil
disobedience. However, crises of constitutional legitimacy are not thought
to constitute normal but exceptional political circumstances. Responding to
such crises through reclaiming the horizontal space between human beings is
the task of the disobedient act, but left underdeveloped to this point is how
political experience unfolds within an already constituted public space—a
space that has been reclaimed either through disobedience or brought into
being through the gathering together of political actors. That which maintains
as opposed to reclaiming or creating the public space is continued debate and
dialogue. In other words, sharing political judgments and the give and take of
opinions constitute what it means to maintain the public space and this will
be the focus of the final chapter.
NOTES
1. Excerpts from “Civil Disobedience” and “On Violence” from CRISES OF

THE REPUBLIC by Hannah Arendt. Copyright © 1972, 1971, 1970, 1969 by
Hannah Arendt and renewed 1999, 1998, 1997 by Lotte Kohler.
2. Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” in Crises of the Republic (New York:
HBJ Publishing, 1970), pp. 51–52.
3. “Civil Disobedience,” 55–56.
4. Arendt is here engaged with a perennial question in the tradition of political
thought. The conflict between the good citizen and the good man has a long his-
tory and different thinkers have insisted there is a necessary distinction between the
two because the demands of politics and morality are wholly different; others have
112 Chapter 5
insisted, like Aristotle, that one can only be a good man in a good city. Arendt’s
decidedly stark conceptual distinction between the moral and political stems from
her own experiences with totalitarianism, particularly on account of what she learned
in its aftermath and from the Eichmann trial. As is well known, Arendt observes that
Eichmann did not appear to be some grossly wicked man, but instead, a remarkably
thoughtless individual. It is this condition—thoughtlessness—that allows for the
kind of “evil” Arendt thinks Eichmann revealed during his trial. That Eichmann and
the German people more generally were capable of the thoughtlessness required to
enable them to yield to a force like the Third Reich is evidence, for Arendt, that the
moral cannot be viewed as providing any kind of standard for the political realm. The
Eichmann trial undoubtedly marks a pivotal moment in Arendt’s life because of the
influence it had on the direction of her thinking. It led her to contemplate the very
nature of thinking. In several texts and essays Arendt poses the following well-known
question (formulated in slightly different ways in different places). “Could it be the
activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass
or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be
among the conditions that make men abstain from evil doing or even eventually ‘con-
dition’ them against it?” “Introduction,” in The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt,
1977), p. 5. For an extended reflection on the relationship between morality and the
activity of thought itself, see Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,”
in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kuhn (New York: Schocken Books,
2003), pp. 159–89.
5. The expression “purely subjective statements” comes from ibid., 62.
6. Ibid., 62–63.
7. Ibid., 63.
9. Ibid., 56.
10. Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future (New York:
Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 236–37.
11. Ibid., 237.
12. “Civil Disobedience,” 76.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 76–77. It might be tempting to dismiss the disobedient as a traitor or
troublemaker, but doing so requires one to turn a blind eye to something that was
constitutive of the founding of the American Republic: “To think of disobedient
minorities as rebels and traitors is against the letter and spirit of a Constitution whose
framers were especially sensitive to the dangers of unbridled majority rule.” Numbers
are crucial to any act of civil disobedience because the action can never be a solitary
one. The distinction between the majority/minority is crucial and Arendt is careful
to show that disobedience is always an act engaged in by a minority of individuals
against a majority. As Arendt quickly notes, the label of “criminal” or “traitor” is
applied when the disobedient resorts to violence. Whether disobedience must refrain
from any violence at all is not a question I will grapple with. I think, from Arendt’s
perspective, given her emphatic distinction between power and violence, she thinks
disobedience ought to remain nonviolent in order to affirm the power inherent in the
act. That is, the power inherent in the act of disobedience always relies on numbers
of people, whereas violence relies on instruments.
16. Ibid., 85.
17. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), p. 64.
18. Ibid., 54.
20. Ibid., 88 (my emphasis).
21. Bernstein, “Political Modernism,” 72.
23. Bernstein, 73.
25. Bernstein, 73.
27. Ibid., 100.
28. Ibid., 101.
29. Ibid., 74.
30. Ibid., 101.
31. Verity Smith, “Hannah Arendt on Civil Disobedience and Constitutional
Patriotism,” in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, eds.
Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Kennan (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2010), p. 106.
34. Smith, 110.
36. Because of a danger of reading Arendt as suggesting that political life is about
competing interests, we have to be especially vigilant in how we understand the
agonal moment of action. Importantly, we need to be careful not to see her as advo-
cating a kind of identity politics. The “fiercely agonal spirit” that Arendt attributes
to the Greeks in The Human Condition often invites the opportunity to misread her
on this point. Of course, she locates in the ancient Greeks a historical moment that
emphasized the polis as the site of heroic deeds—a chance to outshine one’s peers
in the light of the public. However, one does not need to read her in these moments
as merely waxing nostalgic about Greek political life. Arendt finds in the Greeks an
emphasis upon appearance and, as a consequence, she recognizes the Greeks under-
standing of the worldliness of political life. To appear presupposes others to whom
one can appear; in other words, to appear is to appear in public in order to express
one’s care for the world that is common to all. Indeed, one of the meanings of public
refers to “the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from
our privately owned place in it.” The Human Condition, 52.
37. Craig Calhoun, “Plurality, Promises, and Public Spaces,” in Hannah Arendt
and the Meaning of Politics, eds. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis:
114 Chapter 5
38. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan. “Introduction,” in Hannah Arendt and
the Meaning of Politics, eds. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis:
40. The contents of this section will appear as a standalone article in Southwest
Philosophy Review in March 2021.
41. To clarify, Black Lives Matter initially emerged as a hashtag and as the
subsequent name of a political movement in response to the acquittal of George
Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2013. It then gained more trac-
tion and seemed to become part of our shared political vocabulary in 2014 with the
police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. In the years since, police killings
of unarmed black men have sadly only continued in their frequency in major cities
across the United States and Black Lives Matter continued to gain prominence and
traction in response to these killings. With the recent murder of George Floyd at the
hands of police in Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter has reached a seminal moment
in its existence with not only countless protests emerging in cities and small towns
nationwide, but also the phrase itself has (perhaps regrettably) become a branding
operation of major corporations with ad campaigns frequently featuring “BLM” in
commercials or advertisements. While this latter development may be unfortunate
leading many to doubt that any of these companies truly understand the meaning of
the movement, this nonetheless shows just how ubiquitous the impactful three-word
declaration has become—from nascent political movement to corporate brand. No
one would deny that in the summer of 2020—amidst a global pandemic no less—
Black Lives Matter has now entered our political vocabulary and our political life
as an enduring feature and reminder of the continued suffering of black lives in this
country.
42. Hannah Arendt has a controversial relationship to the concept of race espe-
cially as it relates to racial tensions in the United States in the twentieth century.
Many scholars are critical of her views on the topic, especially as it relates to her
essay “Reflections on Little Rock (1959),” which was written about the forced inte-
gration of public schools at the time. The essay has not generally been well received
and Arendt has received criticism for her short-sightedness and failure to appreciate
the unique complexities of racial tensions and history in the United States. I would
be remiss to write about Arendt and Black Lives Matter and not acknowledge what
many regard as a blind spot in her thinking. Nonetheless, for purposes of the present
section, I in no way seek to defend or blame Arendt for those views. The present work
can stand on its own in the deployment of particular Arendtian concepts as helpful
in thinking about present political circumstances without rendering a judgment about
Arendt’s personal views on race. The most well-known book on this general topic
is from: Kathryn Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indian University
Press, 2014).
44. Ibid., 7.
45. The concept of “world” has a technical meaning in Arendt, derived in large
part from Heidegger’s phenomenological concept. In The Human Condition she
writes, “It [the world] is related . . . to the human artifact, the fabrication of human
hands. . . . To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is
between those who have it in common” (52).
46. Ibid., 7.
47. See footnote 3 on 177 of The Human Condition for the explicit discussion of
Augustine’s distinction between principium and initium. It is unsurprising Arendt
locates such a profound insight in his thought given that her doctoral book was on the
concept of love in Augustine’s thought.
48. Ibid., 9.
50. Ibid., 150.
51. Ibid., 151.
52. Ibid., 151 (emphasis added to last line).
54. Ibid., 178.
55. Ibid., 180.
Chapter 6
Political Speech as Horizontal

Judgment and Opinion Formation
INTRODUCTION
The aim of this final chapter is to substantiate the claim that speech is a
form of political action capable of maintaining and keeping the public space
in existence.1 My central contention is that speech is the political capacity
needed consistently to realize and maintain human plurality—an ever-present
human potential, but one not always realized under the condition of world
alienation. Arendt stated in The Human Condition that “many, and even
most acts, are performed in the manner of speech.”2 I must press further in
understanding what political speech consists in such that the horizontality of
political experience is realized. In my view, to engage horizontally requires
citizens speaking to one another about political phenomena that confront
them and rests above all on two political capacities: judgment and opinion.
I explicate here how judgment and opinion become the foremost modalities
of political speech.
My major line of argumentation is as follows. Since I will be present-
ing judgment as a form of political speech, I begin by considering how the
capacity for judgment became an issue in Arendt’s thought. I turn to essays
in Responsibility and Judgment in order to show the relationship between
thinking and judgment.3 Arendt’s view in the essay “Thinking and Moral
Considerations” is that to judge properly one must engage in the thinking
necessary for judgment to properly engage with its object. Then, I will dem-
onstrate how judgment became an issue for Arendt in her early experience
of totalitarianism. She made a dramatic return to the question of judgment
after her phenomenological turn, as a result of her observation of the trial in
Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, as I show in. I then turn to the text in which
judgment is thematized and elaborated as a political capacity: The Lectures
117
118 Chapter 6
on Kant’s Political Philosophy.4 My objective is to show that the notion of

political judgment that emerges in the Lectures develops a philosophical
conception of judgment in the political context. However, it gets tied to a
conception of spectator judgment. This is a problem because the spectator
exists outside the public space of speech and action since he or she comes
after the action. Nonetheless, I can extract the notions in this text that are
salient for my purposes: the notions of enlarged mentality and exemplary
validity. I will then be in a position to examine why judgment and opinion
are necessary modalities of political speech in Arendt’s thought. This is
done towards the end of the chapter where I draw heavily on recent work
by Linda Zerilli.
Although Arendt does not explicitly state this necessity, I argue that to
have the strongest conception possible of the public space and to maintain the
public space in existence, judgment and opinion, both of which she discusses
at length, must become forms of speech. It is therefore important to distin-
guish between opening up (i.e., creating) and maintaining the public space.
Though other forms of speech such as deliberating or promising are necessary
for opening up the public space, the exchange of judgments and opinions
in the form of continued debate and dialogue is, I argue, what maintains an
existing public space.
I will show that the rudiments of this line of thinking are present in
Arendt’s essays “Truth and Politics” and “The Crisis in Culture.”5 I will
then substantiate the view through the distinction between the formation of
judgments and opinions, on which Arendt has written, and their performative
articulation in speech. “Judgment” in this chapter therefore refers not only
to the reflective processes of enlarged mentality and representative thinking,
present in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, but also to a judgment
that is itself offered through speech in the public space. In sum, judgment
is both a capacity for reflective engagement with an object and a modality
of political speech. The focus on the performative articulation of judgment
allows me to substantiate the experiential aspect of the political in the public
space that is the central concern of this book.
THE EMERGENCE OF JUDGMENT AS

A PROBLEM FOR ARENDT
Here I discuss the general function of judgment in Arendt as it first appears in

her writings. The problematic of judgment occupied her thought from the begin-
ning and shows up, first, in a moral context, in her experience with totalitarian-
ism. She found that the structure of thinking that is preparatory for judgment
had been undermined. The totalitarian phenomenon itself represented a failure
Political Speech as Horizontal Political Experience 119
of judgment in the sense of the capacity to judge particulars without simply

subsuming them under general rules. Moreover, thinking is necessary in order to
move beyond general rules and open a space to judge a particular as particular.
In a later text, “Thinking and Moral Considerations” (1971), Arendt clarifies the
relationship between these two capacities to show that thinking dissolves preju-
dices and opens a space for judgment: “The purging element in thinking . . . is
political by implication. For this destruction has a liberating effect on another
human faculty, the faculty of judgment . . . the most political of man’s abilities.”6
The failure of judgment, then, resulted from a failure to think.
Arendt considered thinking to be the capacity for an inner dialogue which
she refers to as the “two-in-one”: that silent inner dialogue one is engaged
in when alone. “To be with myself and to judge by myself is articulated and
actualized in the process of thought, and every thought process is an activity
in which I speak with myself about whatever happens to concern me.”7 This
thinking activity could not be outwardly observed among seemingly ordinary
German citizens living under the Nazi regime insofar as even those who were
not necessarily complicit in the Nazi atrocities did not actively resist Nazi
rule. Such a lack of resistance, though not on par with complicity, indicates
the lack of the thinking needed to resist. Instead, ordinary Germans engaged
in the type of unreflective thought that merely adheres to prejudices—the
kind of thinking necessary for ideology and terror to thrive. From Arendt’s
perspective, in a condition of thoughtlessness, that is, failing to dissolve
prejudices, the basic capacity for makings judgment—in particular the judg-
ment, “this is wrong”—went astray in the face of the Nazi regime. Arendt
states unflinchingly in “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” (1965–66) that
morals were “suddenly . . . revealed in the original meaning of the word, as
a set of mores, customs and manners which could be exchanged for another
set with hardly any more trouble than it would take to change the table man-
ners of an individual or people.”8 Arendt found it entirely plausible to con-
clude this from what had transpired in Nazi Germany. Her position was that
a more robust conception of morality was quickly deflated and one cannot
safely assume any kind of a priori moral standard in the Kantian vein that
can reliably guide one in their interactions with others. The tradition of moral
philosophy in the West had its foundations pulled out from under it following
the political disasters of the twentieth century. If the totalitarian phenomenon
truly shows that there is a strong potential inherent in moral standards to
break down in the face of crisis, this collapse brings into sharp focus the need
to be able to think of judgment as more than just the capacity for subsuming
particulars under given standards.
One may recognize in this view the distinction in Kant between determinate
and reflective judgment. As Arendt states in “Personal Responsibility under
Dictatorship” (1964): “only if we assume that there exists a human faculty
120 Chapter 6
which enables us to judge rationally . . . and . . . which is not bound by stan-
dards and rules under which particular cases are simply subsumed, but on the
contrary, produces its own principles by virtue of the judging activity itself;
only under this assumption can we risk ourselves on this very slippery moral
ground with some hope of finding a firm footing.”9 The need to conceive of
judgment as more than mere rule application illuminates the significance of
this capacity for Arendt. She first confronted its failure in the deeply personal
experience of living under the Nazi regime. The point is that the importance
of judgment was first illuminated in the context of a moral failing. The deeper
problem with which Arendt was engaged was: how are human beings able to
make judgments in the aftermath of totalitarianism? She won’t suggest that
they cannot make judgments, but must be willing to modify what it means to
think and judge in the absence of a priori standards or norms. The absence of
such standards is “a catastrophe in the moral world only if one assumes that
people are actually incapable of judging things per se, that their faculty of
judgment is incapable of making original judgments, and that the most we can
demand of it is the correct application of familiar rules derived from already
established standards.”10 Thus, one must above all confront the deeply impor-
tant connection between the capacities of thinking and judgment. For Arendt,
a failure of judgment presupposes a failure to think and she discovered the
paradigmatic figure of thoughtlessness in Eichmann.
As is widely known, one of the pivotal moments of Arendt’s life and
thought was her attendance at the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann
in 1961. One recalls the probing question confronting Arendt that “imposed
itself” on her as a result of the encounter with Eichmann, which she formu-
lated as follows in “Thinking as Moral Consideration” (1971): “Could it be the
activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come
to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could
this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil doing
or even eventually ‘condition’ them against it?”11 A discussion of the failure of
moral judgment as it appears in Arendt’s writings must touch upon the event of
the Eichmann trial, which marks a pivotal shift in her thought toward a consid-
eration of the mental faculties of thinking, willing, and judging after the earlier
focus, fully thematized in The Human Condition, on the vita activa.12 The
attention I give here to Arendt’s critique of the Eichmann phenomenon will
contribute to my understanding of the role of judgment as a political capacity.
THINKING, JUDGING, AND EICHMANN
Since I am focused on what Eichmann represented for Arendt in terms of an

emergent political phenomenon that required understanding and interpretation,
not on whether she accurately portrayed the details of the Holocaust, I will not
delve into the debates regarding her Eichmann book, particularly those con-
cerning the accuracy of her historiography and her own difficult relationship
with the larger Jewish community at the time. Arendt thought that the man
she observed during the trial of Eichmann was not a radically evil one but
was, instead, someone lacking the capacity to think in what Arendt calls the
“two-in-one”: the silent inner dialogue one engages in when alone. Arendt
follows Socrates in considering thought as the “two-in-one.” Although this
seems to be a capacity everyone would make use of, it seemed to Arendt,
based on Eichmann’s responses to the questions he was asked in his trial, that
he actually lacked this capacity. Quite simply, it seemed that Eichmann had
never stopped to ask himself about the nature of his actions. Even a momentary
pause either in his responses in the trial or in his actions in the past would have
meant that Eichmann had at least tried to think. “The only specific characteris-
tic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial . . . was
something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic
inability to think.”13 The salient point revealed in examining Eichmann is that
the capacity for thinking cannot be taken for granted.
Kohn recognizes how, for Arendt, “Eichmann stood out from the vast
historical context she had explored in The Origins of Totalitarianism . . . as
a particular man, an ordinary, normal man, a ‘buffoon,’ and as such an alto-
gether unlikely perpetrator of evil.”14 However, he was not a mere “cog in the
machinery” of background thoughtlessness under totalitarianism who could
be absolved of responsibility. The virtue of the legal trial is “that this particu-
lar institution rests on the assumption of personal responsibility and guilt.”15
Eichmann’s thoughtlessness on display at the trial sharpens a reader’s focus
on the relationship between thinking and judgment: not to think is to lack
the ability to clear away prejudices that inhere in the unreflective thinking
of dogmatic ideology. In a posthumously published text, “Introduction into
Politics,” which discusses the connection between prejudice, thinking, and
judgment, Arendt incisively states that:
The danger of prejudice lies in the very fact that it is always anchored in the
past—so uncommonly well-anchored that it not only anticipates and blocks
judgment, but also makes both judgment and a genuine experience of the pres-
ent impossible. If we want to dispel prejudices, we must first discover the past
judgments contained within them, which is to say, we must reveal whatever
truth lies within them.16
The “dispelling of prejudices” is the task of thinking that is necessary if judg-

ment is properly to engage with the object—the phenomenon—before it without
defaulting to prejudices. If Eichmann could not think for himself, then he could
122 Chapter 6
not properly judge and, thus, was either merely following orders or retreating to
prejudices that hindered his capacity to judge. Accordingly, for Arendt, the phe-
nomenon of Eichmann captures just how dangerous the twin failures of judging
and thinking are. This is so not only in the obvious sense of the human atrocities
Eichmann participated in, but also in the sense that one cannot safely assume
that the capacity to think is consistently operative in their fellow human beings
when the temptation to succumb to ideological thinking is present.
What all of this indicates regarding judgment in Arendt’s thought is just
how important the operation of the mental capacities became for her. I am
not arguing of course that this is a return to the traditional vita contemplativa
after her emphasis on the vita activa, but, rather, that mental capacities will
become a prominent ingredient of the third form of the vita activa presented
in The Human Condition: speech and action in the condition of plurality. The
encounter with Eichmann shifted the direction of her thought dramatically
toward reflection on the nature and structure of judgment. Clarification of the
nature of the relation between thinking and judgment in her thought indicates
that without the capacity for thinking to clear away prejudices, the capacity
to engage in judgment declines. Having shown that judgment was present in
her writings from the beginning, in confronting the nature of totalitarianism,
and how the Eichmann phenomenon sharpened her focus on judgment, I am
now in a position to consider how judgment comes to be directly thematized
as a political capacity.
Judgment emerges as a political capacity in her Lectures on Kant’s
Political Philosophy, where it becomes the capacity to elicit meaning from
past events.17 This view is developed in relation to the notion of the specta-
tor, who has the privilege of a standpoint that allows her to think in the place
of others who were present in the past. Zerilli calls attention to the political
salience of the spectator position: “The position of the spectator is associated
with a form of rooted but impartial seeing; it is not the view from nowhere but
the view from somewhere enlarged by taking account of other views.”18 Thus,
judgment in this sense is performed from the vantage point of a spectator as
opposed to the actor in the public space. Some have taken this to represent a
tension in Arendt’s thinking.19 An individual judges from outside the public
space as a spectator, whereas the animating thrust of Arendt’s thought as a
whole is to recover political experience in the public space. The concept of
judgment in her earlier writings is thought to represent the standpoint of an
actor, whereas the concept of reflective judgment expounded in the Lectures
is thought to have shifted the entire focus to a spectator’s standpoint. If one
takes her account of judgment from the Lectures to be paradigmatic for her
thought as a whole, there is a gap between the space of action and the figure
of the spectator, one that apparently cannot be overcome. They do not seem to
come together in all the important public space in which freedom can appear.
The question is therefore why Arendt would place the emphasis that she does
on spectator judgment if spectators, by definition, exist outside the public
space. I will address this tension in Arendt’s thought in the discussion of the
Kant Lectures in the following two sections. I will show the significance of
spectator judgment in Arendt so that I can then transport this significance out
of the spectator position into the public space.
SPECTATORS AS RETROSPECTIVE JUDGES
In Arendt’s thought, one operates in the mode of a spectator to the extent that
one retrospectively judges the meaning of past historical events as exemplary
for those in the present. On this view, the spectator exists outside the public
space. This is the notion of the spectator presented in the Lectures on Kant’s
Political Philosophy. My interpretive strategy here is to extract the politically
salient notion of enlarged mentality and exemplary validity from the Lectures
and to transport them as features belonging to the judgments and opinions of
actors inside the public space.
Spectator judgment is needed to discern the meaning of past events for
Arendt. D’Entreves finds that Arendt developed this notion once she con-
fronted the problem that none of the traditional or contemporary categories
of political understanding could be used to classify the catastrophic events of
the twentieth century:
Arendt’s concern with judgment as a faculty of retrospective assessment that

allows meaning to be redeemed from the past originated in her attempt to come
to terms with the twin political tragedies of the twentieth century, Nazism and
Stalinism. Arendt strove to understand these phenomena in their own terms,
neither deducing them from precedents nor placing them in some overarching
scheme of historical necessity.20
D’Entreves calls a reader’s attention here to the need of judgment without

precedents. To judge in this manner is to judge a particular as particular.
Following Kant’s Critique of Judgment, as Arendt does, it is the ability to
judge reflectively as opposed to determinately. Thus she finds a model for
political judgment in the Kantian notion of aesthetic judgment. Precisely this
kind of judgment was needed in the political context because no concepts
were available that could make sense of the totalitarian disasters. The distinc-
tion between determinate and reflective judgment featured prominently in
Kant’s critical philosophy. For him, moral and epistemological judgments
are determinate whereas aesthetic judgments must be reflective. In his well-
known distinction: “Judgment in general is the ability to think the particular
124 Chapter 6
as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, principle, law) is
given, then judgment, which subsumes the particular under it, is determinative
. . . But if only the particular is given and judgment has to find the universal
for it, then this power is merely reflective.”21 Thus one can immediately see
that one reason for the appeal of Kantian aesthetic judgment for Arendt is his
articulation of a mode of judgment where no universal (concept) is given, and
one has to reflect upon the particular as particular and allow for the universal
to emerge out of this reflection. The lack of available concepts that could
make sense of the political disasters during her lifetime made Kant’s notion
of reflective judgment attractive for her thought in response to such problems.
Nonetheless, even lacking existing rules or concepts, there must be some
basis upon which judgment is made if it is not to be arbitrary. Kant’s philoso-
phy is useful here because in an aesthetic judgment such as “X is beautiful,”
one is not merely asserting an idiosyncratic preference but expecting others
to accept it. The basis for others accepting the judgment is not that beauty is
a concept under which particular instances may be subsumed. Rather, when
one judges a beautiful object, she is doing so from the standpoint of others
and the possible judgments they would make about the same object. Nedelsky
usefully clarifies this point using the example of a picture: “Thus when we
claim that the picture is beautiful (instead of just that I like it), we make a
subjective judgment that has a quasi-objective quality to it. We are saying
that others who bring their judgment to bear on the picture will also find it
beautiful, if they are truly . . . judging.”22 In other words, the basis for my
expectation that others will accept my judgment is that the very operation of
reflective judgment presupposes a reference to the standpoint of others, that
is to say, the very formation of the judgment is constituted by their stand-
points. Herein lies the political nature of reflective judgment for Arendt: it is
the public character of reflective judgments in referencing the standpoint of
others that indicates their political resonance. D’Entreves captures the appeal
for Arendt:
She credits Kant with having dislodged the prejudice that judgments of taste
lie altogether outside the political realm, since they supposedly concern only
aesthetic matters. She believes, in fact, that by linking taste to that wider manner
of thinking which Kant called an “enlarged mentality” the way was opened to a
revaluation of judgment as a specific political ability, namely, as the ability to
think in the place of everybody else.23
“Thinking in the place of everybody else” implies not only the public char-
acter of such judgment but also the sense of impartiality that accompanies it.
Impartiality is the mode one operates in as a spectator: freed from one’s own
private standpoint, one can see the larger meaning within a particular event
or phenomenon. The larger meaning I have in mind is not only that one is
judging from other standpoints, but also that, for Arendt, it is the spectator
who has the capacity to discover exemplarity in particular events of the past.
Exemplarity or exemplary validity is the mode of validity that reflective
judgments have in Kant. By virtue of her impartiality, Arendt’s spectator is
capable of “picking out” exemplary political phenomena. To be exemplary is
to have general emphatic significance for others. Exemplars are decidedly not
conceptual in nature, in the sense of subsumptive thought, because they are
always a particular event or phenomenon that, in its particularity, is capable
of providing not universal but general significance. In her Lectures on Kant’s
Political Philosophy, Arendt underlines this point: “[O]ne may encounter or
think of some table that one judges to be the best possible table and take this
table as the example of how tables actually should be: the exemplary table . . .
This exemplar is and remains a particular that in its very particularity reveals
the generality that otherwise could not be defined. Courage is like Achilles.”24
One can see, then, that the generality of the exemplar also has a value status.
Although the judgment that an item is a table would be an example of an
epistemological judgment, the point is that exemplars nonetheless mediate
between universals and particulars such that, in this illustration, a particular
table is being judged to serve as exemplary of what one might think of as
the essence of a table. The final sentence of the quotation is the salient judg-
ment for my purposes: Achilles is exemplary of courage and is an instance
that humans expect others to accept because they are judging as if standing
in their place. In addition, as D’Entreves points out, Arendt interprets Kant
as saying that reflective judgment allows for exemplarity to emerge out of an
entire historical event: “For Arendt this notion of exemplary validity is not
restricted to aesthetic objects or individuals who exemplified certain virtues.
Rather, she wants to extend this notion to events that carry a meaning beyond
their happening, that is to say, to events that could be seen as exemplary for
those who came after.”25 In sum, the Kantian notions of enlarged mentality
and exemplary validity are structural features of the aesthetic judgment of
taste. These features also allow it to serve as a model for political judgment
that I can carry forward in returning to the central task of this chapter: show-
ing how judgment and opinion formation become central among the political
capacities needed to maintain and keep the public space in existence.
THE NOTION OF OPINION AS POLITICAL

SPEECH IN THE PUBLIC SPACE
I can now make good on the claim that judgments and opinions are political
capacities and modes of speech for actors in the public space. Arendt scholars
126 Chapter 6
are not in fact in agreement that judgments and opinions are forms of speech
and, consequently, forms of action. However, taking my cue from the state-
ment in The Human Condition that “many, and even most acts, are performed
in the manner of speech,” I argue that opinions and judgments must be forms
of speech in Arendt’s thought if the public space is to be consistently main-
tained.26 In other words, continued debate and dialogue through the articula-
tion of judgments and opinions in political speech maintain the public space.
This articulation must be distinguished from the formation of the judgments
and opinions, that is, from the processes such as enlarged mentality and repre-
sentative thinking that are also necessary if speech is to be properly political.
It is upon the distinction between formation and articulation that I am resting
my argument that judgments and opinions can be thought of as speech. That
is to say, they can be articulated in the presence of political actors in the
public space. A movement is required from the reflective processes neces-
sary to form judgments and opinions to the articulation of them in speech in
the public space. Moreover, maintaining an existing public space in Arendt’s
sense, through the continued exchange of opinions and judgments, is neces-
sary to combat the world alienation of modernity. In brief, I am arguing that,
while action as new beginning, the kernel of Arendtian political thought,
together with the various modalities of action, has been shown as necessary
to open up or create the public space, it is the maintenance of it—keeping it
in existence, in other words—that political speech ensures. Political speech,
then, through the exchange of opinions and judgments is the maintenance of
the public space.
Two crucial essays from the text Between Past and Future concern me
here: “The Crisis in Culture” and “Truth and Politics.” I interpret these essays
as unfolding Arendt’s thought on how judgments and opinions are modes of
political speech for citizens engaged with one another in the public space.
Opinions and judgments are not entirely separate modalities of political
speech because it is judgment in its reflective capacity that enables one to
form opinions. As a reader has seen, Arendt refers to judgment in its reflective
capacity as either representative thinking or enlarged mentality, these being
the mental processes of forming a judgment or an opinion. I seek to show how
they can take an articulated form as speech in the public space.
First, I must consider the nature and significance of opinion formation in
“Truth and Politics.” This essay presents the problem of opinion in relation
to the philosophical tradition’s view of it as an inferior mode of discourse
compared with truth. Here it just is the formation of opinions that requires the
reflective capacity of judgment. The essay unfolds a complex philosophical
and historical interpretation of how the concepts of truth and politics relate
to one another. In particular, Arendt seeks to understand whether something
like a desire for truth, that is, a desire to be correct or right is at odds with
the spirit of debate and discussion that animates political life. She indicates
philosophical hostility toward political life beginning with Plato, especially
his image of the cave in The Republic. Arendt interprets this allegory to
show that Plato thought the political realm was inferior to the philosophical
realm outside the cave due to the nature of the speech in the political realm:
speech as opinion. To Plato, opinions are unstable, relative, and changing,
and cannot be thought to constitute anything real or lasting. Thus, he portrays
the realm of shadows being projected to the prisoners in the cave as one of
mere appearances and thus illusory. The goal of philosophical life is to find
ways to leave this realm for something more stable, enduring, and permanent.
Nonetheless, Plato insists that the philosopher must return to the cave to try
to convince the fellow prisoners of his newly found truth. The relationship
between truth and opinion—and, consequently, the antagonistic relationship
between the lives of politics and philosophy—is represented
so vividly . . . in the cave allegory, in which the philosopher, upon his return
from his solitary journey to the sky of everlasting ideas, tries to communicate
his truth to the multitude, with the result that disappears in the diversity of
views, which to him are illusions, and is brought back down to the uncertain
level of opinion, so that now, back in the cave, truth itself appears in the guise
of the . . . “it seems to me”—the very doxa he had hoped to leave behind once
and for all.27
This narrative about Plato’s cave runs through Arendt’s writing. Its significance
in this essay is to show that even if opinions are being represented by Plato
as mere appearances like the shadows on the cave wall, their grip on human
beings cannot be left behind. The exchange of opinions is the activity constitu-
tive of politics and for that reason needs to be protected and insulated from the
nature of truth as force, especially the kind of rational truth that Arendt inter-
prets Plato as locating within the philosophical realm. Moreover, for Arendt,
empirical, factual truth can also be of a coercive nature in that it “peremptorily
claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate and debate constitutes the
very essence of political life.”28 This is a bold proclamation about the essence
of political life. Villa emphasizes the notion of plurality that informs her view:
“She attempts to break the stranglehold of rational truth on political thought by
rehabilitating opinion, the plurality-based faculty persistently maligned by the
tradition.”29 For Villa, a reader must always return to the condition of human
plurality as the central kernel of Arendt’s political thought. Plurality is the con-
dition human beings confront as individuals that are distinct and equal. They
seek to reveal this inherent distinctness through speech about who they are and
can only be recognized as distinct by presupposing an equality in which they
regard one another as capable of doing the same.
128 Chapter 6
For Arendt, then, offering distinct perspectives through speech is incon-

sistent with the idea that truth is the goal or terminus of political speech:
“The modes of thought and communication that deal with truth, if seen from
the political perspective, are necessarily domineering; they don’t take into
account other people’s opinions, and taking these into account is the hallmark
of all strictly political thinking.”30 In other words, one is not seeking to be
correct through political speech, at least not peremptorily. Truth may emerge
in and through debate, but is not a necessary condition of it. Rather, when
one offers a political perspective through speech, this reflects the inherently
distinctive condition of the speaker. In claiming that “debate is the essence
of political life,” Arendt means the contribution of unique perspectives
about a common world. Of course, one needs to be immediately wary of
simply associating “the contribution of unique perspectives” with the right
to “express one’s opinion.” The right to freedom of speech is inconsistent
with an Arendtian conception of politics insofar as it leads to the thought that
opinions are things that the speaker merely “holds” because she has a right to
them, and that any opinion is as valuable as another. What seems to emerge
from the liberal notion is the view that opinions are of equal worth by virtue
of the empirical fact that anyone can hold and express an opinion. Arendt’s
focus, on the contrary, is on the development of quality opinions, and she
wants to understand what is actually involved in their formation. Before
articulating an opinion in speech, one must take care to ensure the opinion is
properly political, and this requires engaging with the perspectives of others.
A reader can gain an understanding of Arendt’s notion of “opinion forma-
tion” through her recognition that “taking these [other people’s opinions]
into account is the hallmark of all strictly political thinking.”31 This is in
stark contrast with the individualist conception of opinions as things merely
possessed by right. Indeed, having or holding an opinion in the Arendtian
sense presupposes that an opinion has been formed through the consider-
ation of the standpoints of others. Arendt argues in “Truth and Politics” that
political thinking is “representative”—just as she argued in the Kant Lectures
where she deployed the Kantian notion of enlarged mentality. In discussing
the Critique of Judgment in the Kant Lectures, Arendt states that “one can
‘enlarge’ one’s own thought so as to take into account the thoughts of oth-
ers. The ‘enlargement of the mind’ plays a crucial role in the Critique of
Judgment . . . The faculty that makes this possible is called imagination.”32
On my construal, the concept of enlarged mentality presented here and the
notion of representative thinking discussed in “Truth and Politics” are of a
very similar nature. “Representation” is the process whereby I re-present to
my mind the opinions of others who are no longer present, and involves the
use of our imaginative capacity. The opinion one merely holds in the absence
of considering other viewpoints is without merit from a political perspective,
for it has failed to recognize the demands of existing in the condition of

plurality. Human imagination, in general, just is the capacity to make pres-
ent to my mind that which is no longer there. As Arendt is aware, Kant had
first underlined this in the first Critique epistemology, where imagination is
key in grasping the nature of cognizing objects. Its political significance for
Arendt emerges from grasping the role of the imagination: “Imagination,
Kant says, is the faculty of making present what is absent, the faculty of
re-presentation.”33 With Arendt, without imagining how the world appears
to others from their distinct perspective, essential to opinion formation, the
opinion fails to be truly political in nature. In “Truth and Politics” imagining
the opinions of others who are absent must be contrasted with other mental
phenomena such as empathy:
This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those
who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different per-
spective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel
like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being
and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not.34
These words reveal what Arendt has in mind in two crucial respects. First,
one might believe that thinking from the standpoint of others means giv-
ing up their own perspective so that they can better appreciate how things
seem to others—what we might call “open-mindedness.” However, this
appreciation could be construed as simply adhering to others’ views without
integrating them into their own. It requires an individual to give up one’s
unique perspective by which they see the world. Second, the popular expres-
sion “putting oneself in another’s shoes,” a form of empathy, is decidedly
different from the representation required for opinion formation. Retaining
my unique perspective is necessary to the process of representation, and
empathic identification with others cuts this off. The distinction between the
mental processes of Arendtian representative thinking, on the one hand, and
open-mindedness and empathy, on the other, is not sharp from one point
of view, yet it is decisive: focusing on why representative thinking is truly
political and these other mental processes are not is at stake. If the distinct
perspective is not maintained in the formation of opinions, then that pro-
cess cannot be political. In sum, grasping the notion of opinion formation
in Arendt requires keeping in view the characteristics inherent in plurality:
distinctness and equality.
As I have shown, Arendt means something political in nature by the for-
mation of opinions. However it is the articulation of opinion in the presence
of others that is the salient political moment, even if, as I shall show below,
physical presence is not required to form an opinion. The distinction allows
130 Chapter 6
a reader to see that although the presence of others in situ is not necessary to
opinion formation, which is a mental process. I need to resolve this apparent
inconsistency. I underline that forming an opinion requires having spent time
engaging with others in some way that situates human beings within plurality.
With Arendt, “even if I shun all company or am completely isolated while
forming an opinion, I am not simply together only with myself in the solitude
of philosophical thought; I remain in this world of universal interdependence,
where I can make myself the representative of everybody else.”35 The salient
point is that the formation requires some kind of encounter with and access to
a standpoint other than one’s own: this is the larger political significance of
“public” in Arendt. As D’Entreves stresses, “the validity of political judgment
depends on our ability to think ‘representatively’ . . . And this ability, in turn,
can only be acquired and tested in a public forum.”36 This can mean a wide
array of media or settings that could be considered “public.” Arguably, digital
formats are the most prevalent source of opinion formation for contemporary
citizens. Nonetheless, I put emphasis on the need of opinion being situated in
the speech of humans before one another if the public space of appearances
is to be maintained. For this, I turn to the point that the opinion formed, even
while alone, is not a finished or final product because the reason one forms
an opinion is to reengage with others to test it. This process is open-ended.
The re-engagement with others to test the formed opinion is what I have
in mind when I make the distinction between forming opinions, on the one
hand, and articulating opinions as an act that requires gathering together in
the presence of others, on the other hand. There is of course the articulation
of opinions in nonverbal ways in writing a blog or a newspaper editorial.
Nonetheless, the spoken articulation of opinions before others is necessary
if power in her specific sense is not to be lost. For this, actors must appear
together in the distinct sense of being seen and heard. One recalls Arendt’s
profound insight about the nature of power in The Human Condition: “power
springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment
they disperse.”37 These words enunciate the significance of being with oth-
ers in order to act politically. My concern about political speech as action
therefore follows this Arendtian insight about power as a human capacity
whose realization is the core of political experience. My view is that political
speech as a form of action keeps power in existence and, as a consequence,
maintains the public space.
My view is that being present with others to articulate opinions is neces-
sary to Arendtian power, even while other forms of political articulation,
especially electronic or digital, are features of the public forum. These crucial
avenues for the articulation of political opinions do not prevent and may be
a part of the loss of power when individuals, in her words, “disperse.” From
an Arendtian perspective, power is not a political phenomenon that can be
rendered intelligible if individuals are alone when they articulate their opin-
ion, even if they obviously have access to others’ opinions in a manner that
can still be construed as public. It seems to me, then, that gathering together
with others to articulate one’s political opinion is a condition for keeping
Arendtian power in existence.
A final consideration about political speech as opinion deserves my
attention: the kind of validity associated with it. To be considered valid in
the political sense, opinions must be formed through engagement with the
distinct perspectives present in human plurality. Moreover, opinions, once
formed, must be tested and shared with others. This means that validity is
intersubjective in Arendt both in terms of the formation of opinions and in
the sense that validity arises out of horizontal political engagement with
other citizens. There is no final goal of reaching agreement. Debate and
discussion about a common world comprise an end-in-itself for Arendt
and no agreement or consensus is required to emerge as a result of these
activities. This is not a minor consideration. It allows Arendt to distance
herself in important ways from more proceduralist accounts of the public
space.38 Its salience for my project is that it allows me to remain focused on
political experience through debate and discussion by citizens regardless of
whether consensus emerges. In short, with Arendt, “debate constitutes the
very essence of political life.”39 I take the focus on debate in “Truth and
Politics” to allow for my emphasis on the articulation and defense of one’s
political opinions, given but not identical with the processes necessary for
their formation.
In sum, my reading of “Truth and Politics” has shown, first, that Arendt
introduces the notion of opinion as a political phenomenon in contrast with
truth claims. Second, she recovers a sense of opinion beyond the notion of
a mere idiosyncratic, private position that one “holds.” Opinion is a politi-
cal phenomenon because it must recognize the standpoints of others. Third,
I have presented opinion as a form of political speech where the goal is not
to be right but, instead, to try to share a world with others. In a time when
political debate can often be repellent these three features of political opinion
in an Arendtian vein are crucial for contemporary citizens.
JUDGMENT IN THE PUBLIC SPACE
I now turn to the role of judgment in the public space. As indicated in note
12 below, in the absence of the third volume on judgment that would have
completed Arendt’s Life of the Mind, many turn to her Lectures on Kant for
her notion of judgment. Although we have done so, too, this is not sufficient.
I turn to her essay “The Crisis in Culture,” then, for the reflections in her
132 Chapter 6
writings on the capacity of judgment that considers it in its specific operation

as a capacity needed for political interaction. This will help me to develop
further the idea of horizontal political experience, below. As with opinion,
one must distinguish between the formation of judgment and its articulation
in speech. Both are political in nature but, in my view, only the articulation
of judgment in speech captures the experiential register of the political I am
seeking. The movement from judgment formation to political speech follows
the same path as opinion. One first engages in the process of enlarged mental-
ity to ensure that the verbal articulation of judgment—the articulation of its
content—reflects a prior engagement with perspectives other than one’s own.
One recalls that Arendt found a model for political judgment in Kant’s
aesthetic judgment of taste. She summarizes the reason for this extrapolation
in “The Crisis in Culture.” “Kant insisted upon a different way of thinking,
for which it would not be enough to be in agreement with one’s own self, but
which consisted of being able ‘to think in the place of everybody else,’ and
which he therefore called an ‘enlarged mentality.’”40 The ability of judgment
to transcend private interests and require the viewpoints of others is why it is
political in nature for Arendt. While Kant himself was interested in aesthetic
judgments having a priori validity, Arendt distances herself from all a priori
considerations, for the process of “thinking in the place of everybody else”
raises the question of how far this capacity can be expected to extend. In other
words, just how many “standpoints” does one need to consider in making a
political judgment? The question is relevant despite the evidently contextual
nature of reflective judgment, which excludes fixed rules or guidelines for
making it. Arendt qualifies the process of judging from the standpoint of oth-
ers as follows:
Hence judgment is endowed with a certain specific validity but is never univer-
sally valid. Its claim to validity can never extend further than the others in whose
place the judging person has put himself for his considerations . . . it is not valid
for those who do not judge or for those who are not members of the public realm
where the objects of judgment appear.41
Here Arendt’s use of Kantian enlarged mentality is supplemented by empiri-

cal considerations, which is to say that one only judges from the perspec-
tive of those whose standpoints one can reasonably be expected to access.
Nedelsky has explained the shift that occurs in Arendt’s adoption of Kantian
aesthetic judgment as the basis for political judgment by stating that in the
standard interpretation Kant is “talking about a transcendental realm, where
there are no real conversations among actual people.” For Kant, “common
sense is shared among all people by virtue of their having the same basic
human faculties,” thus it is universal. In contrast, “Arendt grounds judgment
in an appeal to a common sense that is shared by virtue of sharing an actual

community. When we form our judgments in the process of imagining try-
ing to persuade others, it is the perspectives of real others that is involved.”42
Imaginative engagement with other perspectives is therefore more limited
than the standard Kantian interpretation would have it. Nonetheless, this limi-
tation is also what makes judgment political in correspondence with the open-
ended phenomenon of opinion formation and articulation, expounded above.
When Arendt states that “judgment is endowed with a certain specific valid-
ity,” it raises anew the question of validity in relation to judgment.43 This is a
contentious concept in Arendt’s thinking on political judgment for those con-
cerned about her insistence that reason is not the properly political capacity.
When reason is the central political faculty, the point of political discussion is
to reach consensus or agreement—to be right in some sense. Insisting against
reason as the chief political capacity raises the concern that politics becomes
the site of arbitrary debate and endless conflict with no way to gauge whose
claims are better than others. The Arendtian response is that judgment offers the
best hope of responding to human plurality. Zerilli speaks directly to this point:
Understood as a political concept, plurality is something of which we need to

take account when we decide what will count as part of our shared or common
world. Judging is the activity that enables us to take account of plurality in this
distinctly political sense . . . Such judgments are by nature intersubjective and
reflect the plurality of ways in which the world can be seen and understood.44
This notion of intersubjectivity in the political realm broadens the concept

of validity so that it does not have a strictly epistemological resonance. For
Arendt, this broadening is necessary as a result of plurality and its demands
upon human beings. Because of Arendt’s existential starting point for think-
ing about the political, one must rethink what constitutes political debate.
From an Arendtian perspective, the conditions of natality and plurality must
always be present in thinking about political life. For my current concerns,
this means that the question of validity within the political realm itself moves
in the direction of the existential. Zerilli elucidates: “By making plurality
the condition of, rather than the problem for, intersubjective validity, Arendt
shifts the question of . . . political judgment from the epistemological realm,
where it concerns the rational adjudication of knowledge/truth claims, to the
political realm, where it concerns . . . practices of freedom.”45
In this one sees the philosophical shift that occurs when Arendt rethinks
plurality in contrast to the value of pluralism, as it is referred to from a more
liberal perspective. There is a shift away not only from the epistemological
stance but also from pluralism as a value to plurality as a condition of our
134 Chapter 6
existence. In other words, though one might affirm pluralism as a value that
ought to be upheld insofar as the very composition of contemporary liberal
states gives rise to seemingly innumerable perspectives, from an Arendtian
perspective, tolerance of viewpoints different than one’s own is not enough—
not only must one tolerate different viewpoints but one must also actively
seek to incorporate and weave them into one’s own. Zerilli acutely recognizes
the importance of this distinction: “The issue . . . is not simply the existence
of plural opinions but the capacity to take them into account, to acknowledge
them as potentially revealing of something in the world, when forming one’s
own opinion or judgment.”46 Indeed, perspectives other than one’s own are
constitutive of what it means to form a political judgment. This is the mean-
ing of confronting human plurality in the political space. It is not merely
tolerating the variety of perspectives that arise as a necessary fact of public
life. Rather, plurality as the condition of political life needs to be recognized
as a requisite condition for having a concept of political life at all. Arendt
declares that the operation of judgment inherently reflects the condition of
plurality: “Judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which . . .
sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass.”47 If in judging one needs to
see the world from multiple perspectives, then this is precisely the sense in
which one attempts to be with others in the world: the very operation of judg-
ment lifts one out of the private condition into contact with those whom one
shares a world.
Thus far, I have shown that Arendt affirms the role of judgment as a
capacity that can serve to situate plural subjects together in a common world.
Individuals come to share a common world through a practice of judgment
that imaginatively engages the perspectives of others and reflects upon
whether particular phenomena or events must be a part of a world they share
with them, that is, whether they could serve as examples for others. A politi-
cal phenomenon has exemplary validity only insofar as it is can be something
that others would accept while there is no guarantee that they will. The lack
of guarantee lies in the very nature of a political judgment and takes the
form of persuasion as Arendt states in “The Crisis in Culture”: “They [taste
judgments] share with political opinions that they are persuasive; the judg-
ing person—as Kant says quite beautifully—can only ‘woo the consent of
everyone else’ in the hope of coming to an agreement with him eventually.”48
These words demonstrate the distinction between necessarily reaching agree-
ment and hopeful persuasion. Zerilli draws on the Kantian insight about the
peculiarity of persuasion as “wooing”:
Aesthetic and political arguments are arguable . . . but in a particular way. They
belong to the interlocution Kant calls streiten (to quarrel or contend) rather
disputieren (to dispute), that is, the kind of interlocution that, if it generates
agreement, does so on the basis of persuasion rather than irrefutable proofs.

Whereas disputieren assumes that agreement can be reached through the
exchange of arguments constrained by the rules set out by conceptual logic and
objective knowledge (as with determinate judgments), streiten occurs when
concepts are lacking and agreement cannot be reached through the giving of
proofs (as with reflective judgments). And yet, despite the absence of the objec-
tive necessity of an agreement reached by proofs, the debate lives on, for each
judging subject makes an aesthetic claim that posits the agreement of others and
attempts to persuade them of her or his view.49
This passage sheds light on the nature of political judgment as persuasion.

The last line of the passage deserves particular emphasis. Zerilli states that
an aesthetic (and implicitly political) claim “posits the agreement of others.”
Positing the agreement of others in the judgment itself is an anticipatory
attempt to make a claim others will accept. There is a justified assumption
that they would accept the judgment when its formation presupposes seeing
an object from the standpoint of others who are also seeing it. This shows
that the judgment is not merely a relative, idiosyncratic viewpoint. For politi-
cal debate in the public space to proceed, it must do so under the assumption
that judgments are not merely private opinions and that political actors have
taken care to form judgments that are truly political in nature, which is to say,
capable of persuading others. Beyond forming judgments, to truly persuade
others, political actors must then offer those judgments in the presence of
their peers if, as Zerilli states, debate is to “live on,” or, with Arendt, one
can hope to persuade them “eventually.” In my view, debate only lives on
if horizontal power between political actors remains in existence. The phe-
nomenon of persuasion becomes a part of my argument that not only is there
judgment formation but also the articulation of judgment in speech. Political
judgment takes the form of persuasion, which can of course be written or
spoken. Nonetheless, in my view, for what I am calling horizontal political
experience, a practice of political judgment is necessary in which one is pres-
ent with another who is capable of responding in kind.
As Arendt states in The Human Condition, “Action and speech need the sur-
rounding presence of others.”50 That is to say, although the articulation of judg-
ments can take form in the written word, it is only when another can respond
in the give and take of speech in the presence of her peers that the public
space can be maintained. I use “give and take” to convey the political experi-
ence of speaking to someone else and that person being able to respond in the
moment—not at a point in time after the fact. For example, though one can be
persuaded through reading the written word or can respond through writing her
own persuasive speech, such activities, which are most likely done when alone,
occur within a qualitatively different register of human experience. They do
136 Chapter 6
not get at the experiential notion of speech as something performed. Moreover,

reading or writing a persuasive piece of writing does not capture the political
sense of persuasion as spoken word that I am drawing out of Arendt’s thought.
The key point is that the political is irreducibly bound up with the power
present within human plurality. With Arendt, “human power corresponds to
the condition of plurality to begin with.”51 The strongest realization of power
in this sense is when we are engaged in the give and take of judgments in
being gathered together with others. Nothing guarantees that political debate
in others’ presence will play out in the way described, but the commitment to
engage in the process is, for Arendt, an essential human commitment to being
together because it is in this way that power is maintained. For my purposes,
the commitment to political debate in the public space through the exchange
of opinions and judgments is the meaning of horizontal political experience.
Moreover, in relation to my larger concern, these commitments are needed for
the public space to be maintained and to remain in existence. That is to say, the
operation of these capacities constitutes the continued life of the public space.
Thus, in my view, emphasis on “the debate living on” in the reception
of Arendt represents a crucial distinction between her idea and an ordinary
conception of political debate and discussion. This implies that, even if one
fervently believes she has considered the standpoints of others, formed the
judgment in the relevant way, and articulated that judgment in the presence of
others, nothing guarantees that they are bound to accept it given that concep-
tual proof is not available. This is no doubt a difficult and unsettling thought,
as one probably wants to regard those who cannot accept their well-formed
judgment as simply irrational. If political judgments were based on universal
concepts, then concluding that other interlocutors are irrational might be war-
ranted; however, precisely because determinate concepts are not involved in
the judgment, irrationality is not a conclusion that one can reach regarding
the judgments and opinions of others if they have not followed a “rational”
procedure of argumentation to the same conclusion. Following Zerilli on this
point:
What she disputes is the idea that our agreement follows necessarily from our
acceptance of certain arguments and principles of argumentation. Arendt takes
up Kant’s insight that we can well follow and even accept the arguments brought
to defend a judgment without having to accept the conclusion. Disagreement . . .
is possible, although neither side is making a mistake or failing to grasp that a
particular judgment is well supported.52
Despite this clarification of the nature of what it means to engage in politi-

cal debate, there is no difficulty in imagining someone asking why things as
fundamental as her beliefs about politics are not simply correct and someone
else’s wrong. To be able to understand and respond in this context requires

nothing less than a reorientation about how one thinks about politics, and
this indeed is the Arendtian impulse. To be able to live and be with others in
the public space, one must be willing to embrace the disagreement that will
inevitably arise and not bemoan other interlocutors as rational failures akin
to, for example, those who can’t follow the logic of a syllogism.
Embracing disagreement is not, however, a call to approach political life as
competitors in battle. Rather, embracing it is to begin a reorientation toward
understanding what political disagreement actually consists of. For example,
consider the following common refrain in political debate: “How can you not
see the point I am making? It is so obvious.” Here, the verb see is instructive
since one is looking at the same object—the common human world—but
from a viewpoint that cannot possibly be inhabited by anyone else. Thus,
not seeing another’s point will inevitably arise due to the very nature of the
human condition, which is to say that “not seeing” is not irrational but exis-
tential in nature.
At this point, one may be searching for a more specific example of what
it means to “embrace the disagreement that inevitably arise” as I have just
stated or one may be wondering how far this embracing ought to extend. In
other words, it seems entirely reasonable for someone to ask the following
questions: do I really have to embrace morally repugnant or hateful opinions?
Do I really have some kind of obligation to listen all points of view, even ones
that intentionally misrepresent the truth? In an age of willful lying on behalf
of Donald Trump and his supporters, what obligation do I have to listen? The
first thing I want to say in response to these questions is that if you’re looking
for neat and clean answers, Arendt’s thought is unsatisfying and it is undoubt-
edly true that there are going to be limits to how far we can go if we push
her concepts. Nonetheless, I’d like to provide a brief response here because I
think these are extremely important questions.
The first response would be that I do think we have some resources to
respond to these worries within Arendt’s thought. White-supremacist hate
speech, for example, does not on its own even recognize human plurality as
the starting ground of politics, that is, that human beings are equal and distinct
creatures. This is not a moral demand that others must recognize but simply
a fact of our existence that makes political discussion in Arendt’s sense pos-
sible in the first place. If the very orientation of a political position like white
supremacy is such that it precludes certain other opinions from even counting
as legitimate in the first place, then from Arendt’s perspective, the Arendtian
exhortation to enlarged or representative thought is not owed to them because
they refuse it to us based upon the very premise of their orientation. In other
words, for the white supremacist, the world is not shared in common between
plural individuals and they are refusing to acknowledge the existential
138 Chapter 6
demands human plurality places on them. Like Arendt who says we must be
able to judge Eichmann as evil, no matter how banal that evil had become,
we must also be willing to judge those who refuse to even acknowledge that
politics is the site of difference among equals. Debates about who gets to be
part of human plurality rather than the things that confront human beings as
they are situated in human plurality itself is a deeply serious problem but is
not in and of itself the political question in Arendt. It is undoubtedly true as
I have indicated at various times throughout this chapter that certain commit-
ments—like the one to plurality itself—must be made and certain conditions
must be in place if Arendtian politics has any chance of succeeding.
The willful liar, however, is a different and more complicated situation.
We are currently living through a time in which the denial of factual reality
has reached the level of banality. We are no longer shocked or even care
when politicians or their supporters lie—even if we have empirical evidence
of such lies. “Factual reality,” one might say is simply another thing to be
debated like other political issues. We have become numb or apathetic to
lying and not in the normal way that we have always associated politicians as
being “crooked.” We have always been skeptical of the politician as the kind
of archetypical figure not to be trusted and who is only self-interested but
having reached the point that a large portion of the American public is deny-
ing factual events they see with their own eyes and ears gets us to the kind
of totalitarian propaganda Arendt was all too familiar with. Recall the telling
lines from Origins when she writes, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is
not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the
distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the
distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought), no longer
exist.”53 And thus the question remains: do the demands of human plurality
extend to the willful liar?54
First, one should be reminded that even as she champions opinion as the
proper modality of political speech and not truth, she does not deny that
opinions themselves do take their bearing from facts and events. She writes,
“Moreover . . . facts and events—the invariable outcome of men living
and acting together—constitute the very texture of the political realm.”55
But if the “facts and events” are not even agreed upon anymore, what are
we to do? The first thing to say is that simply “fact-checking” someone
with a statistic, video, or image will not solve this problem. In our current
moment, it seems many are ready to rest content with a fact-check of “the
other side” and move on. Moreover, fact-checking itself presupposes some
objective reality against which can check our fact and the loss of this shared
world is precisely the problem of political modernity! We, as plural human
beings, do not have a world we share in common that can serve to animate
public debate. Fact-checking unfortunately passes over a deeper question:
how have we gotten to a point when facts and truth don’t matter or have
public significance? How have we reached a point when the revelation that
the president knew how dangerous a pandemic was and lied about it to
the American public simply doesn’t matter? My response, though perhaps
unsatisfying, has to do with how we are thinking about and conceiving of
politics. If factual events are simply ammunition for one side to one up the
other, we’re hopelessly lost.
However, if we’re instead interested in asking how individuals have
reached a point where facts don’t matter, then it need not be hopeless. Our
impoverished conception of politics as the site of competition for privately
interested individuals is the wrong starting point. The question is: how can
we have a vibrant public space where facts, when revealed, do have public
significance? The question is not: is this true or not? Rather the question is, if
this is true, why does it matter? The public debate about a fact’s significance
among a plurality of opinions is what is missing from an Arendtian perspec-
tive. Zerilli puts it thusly: “One might say that as important as it is to expose
lies and demand truth from those claim to speak in our name, we also need to
be able to do something political with those truths, to be able to make them
into publicly acceptable facts—and this involves the ability to make judg-
ments and acknowledge them publicly.”56
Moreover, as far as I’m concerned, the need to engage in representative
or enlarged thought and to try and understand how those we inhabit the
world with have reached a point where denying facts is the norm is urgently
required. How did they reach that point and how can I understand it? We must
be willing to understand why, for others, a fact is not just a fact (it could have
been otherwise after all) and then be willing to explain the political signifi-
cance of a fact, that is, as a piece of shared data that allows us to take our
bearings in the world together. As long as we remain trapped in the duality of
ideological thinking that presents itself in American political discourse, we
fail to even approach politics in an Arendtian spirit. If facts are just things
to bludgeon our opponents with, then we’ll never get back the shared reality
that makes politics in Arendt’s sense possible, that is, a space in which facts
themselves are not debatable but their public significance is.57
PERFORMATIVE POLITICAL SPEECH AS

MEANINGFUL POLITICAL EXPERIENCE
I have taken “The Crisis in Culture” and “Truth and Politics,” to be the most
fruitful of Arendt’s essays for considering the notion of political action as
speech in the public space. In this final section, I summarize what is most
politically salient in the contribution they make. This will illuminate the
140 Chapter 6
function of political speech within the larger horizon of the possibility of

political experience that is central to the book as a whole.
I have shown that exemplary validity, intersubjective validity, opinion
formation, enlarged mentality, and reflective judgment comprise the con-
cepts that, considered in conjunction, allow a reader to reimagine what it
means to speak together politically. Political speech need not be relegated to
a right one possesses or something one hears only from those elected on their
behalf. Speech as merely a right or a rhetorical tool of politicians is not the
only option available for thinking about speech as a human capacity. Speech
as a political capacity has become devalued, especially amidst contemporary
political circumstances. By this I mean that within the broad framework of
right’ based discourse, any discussion of speech is immediately absorbed into
one about freedom of speech as a right. Such political discourse loses sight of
speech as principally a political capacity in the Aristotelian sense: that which
makes human beings political creatures. It is primarily thought of, instead, as
a right that individuals possess. Of course, in the framework of constitutional
protection, freedom of speech is among the most cherished rights, but this is
not Arendt’s focus. Discussion that revolves around a right that needs to be
protected so that as many voices as possible are heard is a political concern
of deep importance. However, if individuals restrict themselves to this frame-
work of the protection of rights, they pass over the prior question of what it
means to speak politically at all. In a posthumously published work titled The
Promise of Politics, Arendt draws a reader’s attention to the salient difference
between speech as a right and as a capacity:
The key thing [about freedom of speech] . . . is not that a person can say what-
ever he pleases, or that each of us has an inherent right to express himself just
as he is. The point is, rather, that we know from experience that no one can
adequately grasp the objective world in its full reality all on his own, because
the world always shows and reveals itself to him from only one perspective,
which corresponds to his standpoint in the world and is determined by it. If
someone wants to see and experience the world as it “really” is, he can do so by
understanding it as something that is shared by many people, lies between them,
separates and links them, shows itself differently to each and is comprehensible
only to the extent that many people can talk about it and exchange their opin-
ions and perspectives with one another, over against one another. Only in the
freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which
we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.58
I have shown that Arendt brings her concept of plurality to bear on the
human capacity for speech: speech is revelatory of one’s partial perspec-
tive on a world shared with others. In speaking politically, nothing less is at
stake than the very existence of the common world. If political experience
is located between human subjects in the plural, then speaking with and to
one another further develops the political image of horizontality that I have
consistently emphasized. The notion of political speech as performed is
crucial. Focusing on performance as opposed to the content of speech cap-
tures the sense of the political I am seeking: it better allows individuals to
enter into the experiential domain of the political. One can get at this more
closely if one considers the concept of validity that comes to the fore if one
moves away from thinking that validity applies to the end result or product
of a political debate. If, on the one hand, one asks how valid is the conclu-
sion that has emerged from a political discussion about a topic, the question
of validity is located in the end or goal of discussion but not the discussion
itself. If, on the other hand, we ask “how valid were the activities of politi-
cal debate we engaged in?” the validity is now focused on the act of debate
and not its presumed end. In other words, the question of validity pertains
to whether or not political actors imaginatively engaged the perspectives
of others and not whether a conclusion emerged that everyone can agree
to. Within the frame of political experience, then, the focus is on speech
as performative such that the performance itself captures the experiential
register. Thus, speech is “political” to the extent that the methods employed
when forming the speech are political, and the question is not whether the
content is antecedently determined to be so. Speech is valid to the extent that
its performance is revelatory of one’s imaginative or representative engage-
ment with perspectives other than one’s own. Reconsidering the concept of
validity therefore reveals the reversal in priority from a focus upon the ante-
cedent content of political speech to the representative or enlarged thought
required for its formation together with its actual appearance in the context
of people gathering together.
In observing this reversal, human beings are no longer restricted to the
narrow confines of an instrumental conception of political life such as the
one that is dominant within rights’ based political discourse, in which par-
ticipation in politics might only be considered a means to some further end,
rather than as a realm of experience sufficient unto itself. Instrumentalist
conceptions regard political action as necessary to the extent that some fur-
ther goal can be achieved, as in those discourses that regard the protection of
rights or securing of liberties to be paramount. Underlying the discourses that
privilege these goals is an assumption regarding politics as the site of com-
peting, privately interested individuals, where they can assert their claims for
protection. This assumption passes over the condition of plurality that must
be reckoned with if political life is to be meaningful. It is in the very nature
of speaking politically to require perspectives other than one’s own, and this
immediately pushes back against individualistic and instrumental tendencies.
142 Chapter 6
In short, political speech is constituted by and revelatory of human plural-

ity—constituted by it since one must engage others’ distinct perspectives for
speech to be political, and revelatory of it because through the performance
of political speech one reveals one’s distinct place in the public space among
others. Herein lies the salient conclusion: among all the forms of political
action available to contemporary citizens, speech offers the best hope for
never losing sight of human plurality. By the very mode in which they oper-
ate, the formation and expression of judgment and quality opinions offer
citizens the best opportunity for confronting phenomena that are new and, as a
consequence, particular. Presented with the particularity of new phenomena,
political speech demands that human beings engage the plurality of perspec-
tives that are part of their common world. Thus, one is forced neither to sub-
sume new phenomena under familiar concepts nor to regard the experience
of them as merely relative. Seizing upon the Arendtian insight that plurality
renders human existence political, speech in the form of judgment and opin-
ion vis-à-vis a world in common realizes plurality and maintains the public
space wherein a diversity of perspectives can be seen, heard, and debated.
Only in maintaining this space does the irreducibly political form of human
experience remain meaningful.
NOTES
1. A significant portion of this chapter appears as a standalone article and can be

found in “Re-thinking Opinion and Judgment as Political Speech in Hannah Arendt’s
Political Thought,” The Pluralist. Vol. 15, No. 2 (June 2020), pp. 25–44.
2. The Human Condition, 178. Though this quotation provides the textual basis
of my interpretation that speech is a form of action, in briefly revisiting that text, one
finds that Arendt separates speech and action to the extent that “the affinity between
speech and revelation is much closer . . . just as the affinity between action and begin-
ning is closer.” Raising the connection between speech and action is important as
throughout the section on action in The Human Condition, Arendt conjoins and makes
a point of specifying two phenomena she refers to as “word and deed.”
3. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kuhn (New York:
Schocken Books, 2003).
4. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
5. “The Crisis in Culture” and “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future
(New York: Penguin Books, 1977).
6. Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Responsibility and
Judgment, ed. Jerome Kuhn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), p. 188.
7. Hannah Arendt, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” in Responsibility and
Judgment, ed. Jerome Kuhn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), p. 99.
8. “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” 50.

9. Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” in Responsibility
and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kuhn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), p. 27.
10. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, ed.
Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), p. 104.
11. “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 160.
12. See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1977). Arendt
only lived to complete the first two volumes of this text, “Thinking,” and “Willing.”
The third volume, “Judging,” was planned but never finished because of Arendt’s
death in 1975. Scholars have speculated as to what the volume would have said
regarding a coherent “theory” of judgment. Her Kant Lectures have been used as
a rich source of philosophical content and clues as to what the volume on judging
would have contained.
13. “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 159 (emphasis added).
14. Jerome Kohn, “Introduction,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome
Kuhn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), p. xv.
15. “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” 57.
16. “Introduction into Politics,” 101 (emphasis added).
17. Arendt gave the lectures on Kant in 1970 at the New School for Social
Research during a seminar on Kant’s Critique of Judgment.
18. Linda Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015), p. 180.
19. D’Entreves, for example, states emphatically that: “It would appear, therefore
. . . Arendt’s theory of judgment incorporates two models, the actor’s—judging in
order to act—and the spectator’s—judging in order cull meaning from the past.”
Mario Passeserin D’Entreves, “Arendt’s Theory of Judgment,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), p. 246. Ronald Beiner, the interpreter and editor of Arendt’s Lectures on
Kant’s Political Philosophy, states in a similar vein: “The question is whether (and
to what extent) judgment participates in the vita activa or whether it is confined,
as a mental activity, to the vita contemplativa—a sphere of human life that Arendt
conceived to be, by definition, solitary, exercised in withdrawal from the world and
from other men.” Ronald Beiner, “Interpretive Essay,” in Lectures on Kant’s Political
Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 139.
My own position regarding these kinds of claims is not that they are without merit, but
that the need to approach Arendt’s thought searching for something like a “unified”
theory of judgment is the wrong place to start. A more fruitful approach examines
how and why Arendt’s thought underwent the shifts that it did without needing to
expect, a priori, something like a “unified” theory to emerge from the start. I take
the phenomenological character of her thinking and its responsiveness to political
phenomena like Eichmann to be inconsistent with the search or demand for an over-
arching theory of judgment in her writings.
20. D’Entreves, “Arendt’s Theory of Judgment,” 246–47 (emphasis added).
21. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), pp. 18‒19.
144 Chapter 6
22. Jennifer Nedelsky, “Judgment, Diversity, and Relational Autonomy,” in

Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, eds. Ronald
Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 2001), p. 106.
23. D’Entreves, “Arendt’s Theory of Judgment,” 250.
24. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 77.
25. D’Entreves, “Arendt’s Theory of Judgment,” 251.
27. Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” 232–33.
28. Ibid., 236–37. The scope of this claim is not as wide as it might first appear.
Arendt concedes in this same essay that factual truth is indeed a necessary ingredient
for a healthy political life. Things like empirically verifiable facts provide common
material and basis upon which political opinions are formed: “Moreover . . . facts and
events—the invariable outcome of men living and acting together—constitute the
very texture of the political realm.” in “Truth and Politics,” 227. Thus, it is not truth
as such that is problematic, but rather, it is the assumption that a priori, one’s opinion
on a given issue is the final word. D’Entreves also provides valuable insight about
this matter, guarding against the thought that truth as such does not have a place in
the political realm for Arendt: “The relationship between facts and opinions is thus
one of mutual entailment: if opinions were not based on correct information and the
free access to all relevant facts they could scarcely claim any validity . . . In sum, both
factual truth and the practice of truth-telling are essential to political life” in “Arendt’s
Theory of Judgment,” 257.
29. Dana Villa, “Thinking and Judging,” in Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays
on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999),
p. 95.
30. Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” 237.
31. Ibid.
32. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 42–43.
33. Ibid., 79.
34. “Truth and Politics,” 237 (emphasis added).
35. “Truth and Politics,” 237.
36. “Arendt’s Theory of Judgment,” 253–54 (emphasis added).
38. Critical contemporary literature in political theory regards the Rawlsian
account of the public space or public sphere as one that is proceduralist. I interpret
proceduralist to mean the attempt within ideal political theory to construct political
concepts that can serve as templates or models that seek to define in advance what
the structure, content, and goal of political debate ought to be. Rawls’s concept of
public reason is the paradigmatic example of this in contemporary political theory.
Zerilli succinctly addresses the problem with such an approach from an Arendtian
perspective: “For what is sustained in what Rawls called the ideal of public reason
is a way of thinking about political debate that circumscribes from the start what can
so much as count . . . as a legitimate public object of judgment in the first place.”
Linda Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2015), p. 162. Moreover, the Rawlsian proceduralist account emphasizes

reason, following the Kantian practical strain, as the salient political capacity. In
other words, Rawlsian political thought emphasizes Kant’s concept of reason from
the second critique, which is determinate, and not the concept of reflective judgment
that Arendt emphasizes as essential to political judgment. In Political Liberalism,
Rawls states the following about his political constructivism: “The first feature [of
political constructivism] . . . is that the principles of political justice (content) may be
represented as the outcome of a procedure of construction (structure) . . . The second
feature is that the procedure of construction is based essentially on practical reason.”
See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996),
p. 93.
39. “Truth and Politics,” 236–37.
40. “The Crisis in Culture,” 217.
41. Ibid.
42. Nedelsky, “Judgment, Diversity, and Relational Autonomy,” 108–09.
44. Zerilli, “We Feel Our Freedom,” 165.
45. Ibid., 166.
46. A Democratic Theory of Judgment, 141.
49. Zerilli, “We Feel Our Freedom,” 170.
50. Ibid., 188.
52. Ibid., 170.
53. The Origins of Totalitarianism, 474.
54. I want to acknowledge that this is a deeply difficult problem to try and think
through, one that I am not sure Arendt’s thought has the resources to address on its
own. Because she is resistant to grounding political debate in reason or rationality as
those in more ideal strains of political theory tend to do, what we are left with is a
kind of ever-present political reality to grapple with. The virtue of this is that it con-
fronts readers with the existential realities citizens confront in everyday discussions
about politics and the frustrations they encounter. The downside is that it seems to
permit the avowed liar a seat at the table, so to speak, but without recourse to simply
accusing such individuals of a failure of rationality—which I think has been shown
does not represent the full picture of what is going on—then we’re instead left with
attempts to confront the liar’s refusal to accept the facts and events of the world
through debate and dialogue rather than fact-shaming.
55. “Truth and Politics,” 227.
56. Zerilli, “A Democratic Theory of Judgment,” 142.
57. For a particularly timely and excellent analysis of this general problem, see
the following essay Linda Zerilli, “Fact-Checking and Truth-Telling in an Age of
Alternative Facts,” Le foucaldien. Vol. 6, No. 1 (2020), pp. 2, 1–22.
58. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, ed.
Jerome Kuhn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), pp. 129–130 (emphasis added).
Conclusion
My primary concern throughout the foregoing chapters has been to present a

philosophy of the public space through the articulation of what I have called
meaningful political experience—a concern both for the possibility for the
recovery of meaningful political experience and for the forms it might take. I
have argued that Arendtian political thought can best articulate the rudiments
of a concept of the public space in which meaningful political experience is
possible. The challenges that modernity poses for this are great, as shown in
chapter 1. A reconstruction of the conception of the public space in which
political experience is possible, like the one attempted here, must be done,
in my view, against this background: something like Arendt’s critique of
modernity. The latter has allowed the argument to become an exercise in
philosophically de-familiarizing how one thinks about politics and the ways
in which human beings interact politically. That is to say, the problem of the
political that I have wrestled with is a worthwhile one precisely because of its
structural embeddedness in the conditions of modern existence.
Specifically, the modes of thought and being that have emerged in moder-
nity have convinced contemporary citizens that politics is a worthwhile
pursuit only as a means of securing access to some other realm, social or
economic. For example, one might think that to be political is to engage
in an activity that ensures that a policy one endorses will be supported by
those elected on her behalf. To think politically is to do so strategically or
instrumentally using means and ends categories, for example in deciding
which party one identifies with, so that one’s interests can be represented.
This strategic or instrumental mode of thinking shows the concept of process
at work in the conception modern subjects have of themselves as political
actors. What could be more obvious than participating in politics to secure
oneself better economic and social conditions? My argument has not sought
147
148 Conclusion
to diminish the significance of social and economic problems. Rather, I have

sought to problematize the intuition that politics is only meaningful in rela-
tion to or in pursuit of social and economic goals. With Arendt, I have shown
that there is a form of experience that is distinctly political and that it cannot
be reduced to instrumental reasoning or activity. This is the sense of meaning-
ful political experience that I have emphasized throughout the book.
Chapter 1 revealed the major problems that have posed significant chal-
lenges to modern subjects being able to engage in political experience in a
meaningful way. These were the loss of a common world and the ascendancy
of the category of process for interpreting experience. Following Arendt in
seeing the existential ground of rethinking the political as being human plu-
rality, I have shown that both the loss of a common world and the abstract
concept of process undermine the ability to realize human beings’ existence
within the condition of plurality. The problems Arendt set forth present a
sobering reflection upon the political predicament ushered in under modern
conditions. While I have offered no definitive solution to the overarching
problems of modernity, I’d like to reflect upon how the unfolding of this
project could indicate a path forward as regards the political predicament.
I have shown, first, that a phenomenological approach to the problem
allowed Arendt, uniquely, to show that the “new beginning” is essential to the
political conception of action: how action can appear in the world is in begin-
ning something new. The concept of the public space began to take shape in
chapters 2 and 3 on the basis of this notion of the new beginning. Focusing on
each moment of the appearance of action enabled me to establish the crucial
link between appearance and the public space: the public space is the space of
appearance in the condition of human plurality, not in the sense of a physical
location, but as the very possibility of appearing before one’s peers. This is
what is of crucial political significance. The phenomenological approach to
moments of action like power and freedom avoided the failure of an a priori
analysis of political concepts of this kind, which would have left me devoid
of an understanding of what their human significance was. I followed with the
argument that freedom or power appears only in the performance of political
action. The emphasis upon the performative conception of action, as distinct
from a focus upon the planning of action and its outcomes, captures the
experiential quality that must be attached to any concept of the public space
if it is to be a space of freedom (new beginnings). Thus, a crucial step in the
argument was made in showing the phenomenological ground and the various
moments of “action” in Arendt.
Once the structural elements of political experience were in place, I was
able to show them within specific historical moments that were exemplary
for the notion of new beginnings in the public space. In chapters 4 and 5, my
elucidation of revolution and civil disobedience did not simply present them
Conclusion 149
as past actions that Arendt admired, but as exemplary political actions that, in
my discussion, added substance to the concept of the public space. Each form
of political action not only presented exemplars of appearance in the public
space and performative action but also answered the pressing questions of
how and in what specific ways this appearance and performance might come
about. A major conclusion of chapter 5 was that for contemporary citizens
concerned with the proper functioning of constitutional democracies, civil
disobedience provides a politically efficacious form of action. It exemplifies
principles of a modern conception of the political that are easily let go of in
the conditions of modernity outlined above, especially the loss of a common
world and the instrumental relation to the political sphere. That it exemplifies
them through their (re)enactment presents, I would argue, salient political
content, which not only overcomes a tendency to formalism discerned by
some in Arendt’s political thought, but is also genuinely exemplary in that
it allows one to consider analogous moments in the contemporary political
context. For example, the political phenomenon of “BlackLivesMatter” is not
a textbook instance of civil disobedience, which in any case would leave it
as a particular subsumed under a universal, without the significance of new
beginning and exemplarity. “BlackLivesMatter” renews the exemplification
of political principles through (re)enacting them. It is in and through appear-
ing in public—in demanding to be seen and heard—that blacks are insisting
that their lives matter too and that this mattering is itself a political issue in
contemporary America. First, for their lives to matter, others must see and
hear them as they appear through performative acts. Second, for their lives
to matter makes life a political concept, not merely the general, uncompre-
hended notion that all lives matter. The exemplarity of “BlackLivesMatter”
lies in its assertion of what it means for the injustices of the social, economic,
and legal spheres to be countered. It is action in the public space: political
action. Moreover, it renews the political principles of freedom and equality in
the modern polity in the only way possible: not merely through seeking social
and economic benefits but through appearing before others in the Arendtian
public space. The example not only demonstrates Arendtian political thought
embodied in an exemplary political action but also illustrates the transition
from the phenomenological to the political concept of action through, first,
emphasizing the meaning of appearance before others, and, second, recover-
ing the notion of a principle. This notion formed the basis of the transition
from the fourth to the fifth chapter. Where revolution and civil disobedi-
ence represented the actual historical instances of the exemplary action of
a new beginning in which a principle is renewed, for Arendt, I suggest that
“BlackLivesMatter” has the significance of exemplary action today.
Chapter 6 attempted to develop Arendt’s concept of the political in a direc-
tion that she did not quite take. Here I took up her interpretation of speech
150 Conclusion
as action and introduced it into her own reflection on the formation of opin-
ion and judgment. In this way, I argued that together with and beyond the
formation of opinion and judgment, their articulation in the public realm is
essential to the maintenance of the “public space” where freedom can arise.
By way of conclusion to the book, I will consider further how this develop-
ment of Arendt in the book’s final chapter can respond to the obstacles posed
to meaningful political experience in modern societies. As I write these words
in 2020, it seems to me that the problem of the loss of a common world that
haunts modernity is even more pertinent in the contemporary context, spe-
cifically the American context. Political debate and discussion today is toxic
because it is not something welcomed or encouraged but, on the contrary, is
to be avoided lest one reveal which “side” they’re on, as though the options
of being either a conservative or liberal fulfilled the meaning and possibility
of the political. The frame that is presupposed in nearly every political dis-
cussion, before one even utters a word, is the duality of left and right—one
must belong to the left or right side of the political spectrum. Even allowing
for a range of ideological consistency within these “sides,” the assumption is
that whatever speech one utters, it will reveal to which party she belongs or
to which ideology she adheres. The possibility that one’s speech itself could
be revelatory of who one is in the Arendtian sense is held off since another is
likely to stop listening before an opinion has been fully articulated. This is the
first stumbling block toward recognition of there being anything like a shared
world. It is an impoverished conception of political speech.
Furthermore, in the current age of the Internet and social media, despite the
potential it seems to represent for increased communication across borders
and oceans, these developments have only further diminished the conception
of what it means to speak politically. Re-tweeting, “liking,” or responding to
a comment from within the private confines of home or from a smartphone
nestled in one’s palm does nothing to cultivate a common world. On the con-
trary, it only reinforces the sense that precisely because one “holds” an opin-
ion, she is immune from further discussion or debate, which, I have argued,
constitutes the lifeblood of maintaining the public space. I cannot deny the
increasing likelihood that digital forms of communication will continue to
exert their influence over human beings’ lives. However, against the prob-
lems they bring, which are widely recognized if not well thought through,
the gathering together of political actors shows up as a qualitatively different
experience that we might need now more than ever.
To press further in reimagining and reinterpreting what is meant by politi-
cal speech means that, with Arendt, I argue one must think the political dif-
ferently and resist the temptation to fall back upon common prejudices about
what politics is. To underline an Arendtian notion of what it is to speak politi-
cally is to resist the notion that it is merely to articulate a pre-established set
Conclusion 151
of beliefs consistent with a particular ideology or party credo. In the latter,

speech is modeled upon the means–end category outlined above in the instru-
mental model of political opinion. Someone identifies with this or that group,
by which one can assume she must have a particular set of interests and
desires that the larger group to which she apparently belongs has. Political
speech is reduced to a predetermined range of considerations that one may
assume in advance will be articulated by the political actor in her interaction
with others. These can be summarized as her preferences as a voter. What I
have sought to show in reconstructing Arendt’s concepts of action, power,
and speech in their performative significance is that human beings may reveal
who they are, rather than what they are, through the act of speech itself. Who
one is as a political actor emerges in and through speech itself rather than
speech being a predictable expression of well-worn political identities. In
insisting upon the distinction between the formation and the articulation of
both judgments and opinions in Arendt’s thought, I have sought to underline
the need to rethink speech as a form of action in the public space that pre-
serves the latter.
This provides a reader with a preliminary purchase on what is needed to
ground a richer experience of the political as the sphere, following Arendt, in
which human freedom rooted in the condition of plurality arises. I have laid
the ground for further discussion and enrichment of a performative concept
of political speech and the political actor. This will allow for a development
of the concept of the public space as a condition for strengthening public
discourse.
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———. A Democratic Theory of Judgment. University of Chicago Press: Chicago,
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Index
action, in Arendt, 9, 15–17, 31–32, Aristotle, 48–49, 86–87. See also power,
47–48; as agonal and deliberative, Arendt’s conception of
61–63, 75, 102–3; as new beginning, Articles of Confederation. See
19, 21–24, 29–30, 33, 35–36, 38–42, separation of powers
48, 50, 58–59, 62–64, 70–71, 73, Augustine: on natality and new
78, 105–7, 148; political meaning beginning, 36, 36n16, 106
of, 69, 71, 103–4, 107, 109, 130;
risks constitutive of, 40–42. See also Benhabib, Seyla: on The Human
freedom; narration; new beginning; Condition in Arendt’s thought, 10;
plurality, condition of; power, on the space of appearances, 57
Arendt’s conception of; web of Bernstein, J. M.: on constellation
human relationships concepts in Arendt, 30n2
Adams, John, 73–74 Between Past and Future. See “The
American Constitution, Arendt’s Conquest of Space and the Stature
interpretation of, 70–74, 80–81, of Man”; “The Crisis in Culture”;
83–85, 91; Smith on, 100–102. See “What is Freedom?”; “Truth and
also founding, act of; separation of Politics”
powers Black Lives Matter, 104, 104n41;
American Declaration of Independence, from an Arendtian perspective, 105,
Arendt’s interpretation of, 75–77 108–10, 149
American Revolution, Arendt’s boundary. See law, negative and positive
interpretation of, 70–73, 82–85, 88,
91, 95, 110; colonial experience and, Calhoun, Craig: on Arendt and
71, 73, 75, 77–78. See also public nostalgia, 54; on political action in
happiness Arendt, 102–3
animal laborans, 9n1, 34, 36, 55. Canovan, Margaret: on The Human
See also self, the Cartesian (or, Condition in Arendt’s thought, 10;
expressivist) and Arendtian (or, on risks constitutive of action, 40; on
performative) conceptions of world alienation in Arendt, 14
157
158 Index
Cartesian doubt. See world alienation, Floyd, George, 104

Cartesian doubt and founding, act of, 77, 82, 97; Bernstein
“Civil Disobedience,” 91 on, 78; Canovan on, 83. See also
civil disobedience, 69, 91; Bernstein civil disobedience; promising
on, 96–97; contemporary relevance “What is Freedom?,” 57–60, 82
of, 98, 104, 110–11; as distinct from freedom, Arendt’s conception of, 19, 23,
conscientious objection, 92–93; as 35, 55–56, 58–59, 61; as distinct from
exemplary political action, 148–49; liberation, 70–72; falsely conceived
tacit consent and, 95–96; tension at as sovereignty and/or free will,
the heart of political life and, 100– 57–60; principle and, 60–61, 82–83,
103; uniquely American significance 107–8. See also founding, act of
of, 94–97, 95n14, 103; Vietnam War
and, 99. See also Black Lives Matter Habermas, Jürgen, 102
concept, 29–30; as a constellation, 30, “What is History?,” 19
30n2, 70 history. See phenomenological method;
“The Conquest of Space and the Stature totalitarianism
of Man,” 13 Hobbes, Thomas, 48, 52, 103
conscience. See civil disobedience, as homo faber, 35, 85. See also modernity,
distinct from conscientious objection Arendt’s critique of; process, logic
constitution, 70–75, 77, 100–101. See of; work
also American Constitution, Arendt’s human condition, 15, 31–32, 36, 42, 47,
interpretation of; Waldron, Jeremy 105–6. See also vita activa
Crises of the Republic. See “Civil The Human Condition: action in, 38,
Disobedience”; “On Violence” 40–41, 41n30, 49, 61–63, 79, 100,
“The Crisis in Culture,” 118, 131–32, 102n36, 105, 135; alienation in, 11,
134, 139 13; in Arendt’s thought, 10, 20n25,
The Critique of Judgment, 123–25, 127 23–25, 29; concept of process in, 21;
The Critique of Pure Reason, 129 narration in, 84–85; power in, 130;
space of appearances in, 54–58, 75–
debate. See speech, as political action 76; speech in, 126, 135; vita activa
Dietz, Mary: on constellation concepts in, 15–17, 20
in Arendt, 30; on the state in
Arendt’s thought, 52 “Introduction into Politics,” 121
earth alienation, 12–13. See also world Jefferson, Thomas, 75–77

alienation judgement, in Arendt, 117–18, 122n19;
Eichmann, Adolf, 117, 119–22 Passeserin D’Entreves on, 123–25,
enlarged mentality, 128–30, 132, 139 130; as a political capacity, 122–26,
equality. See plurality, condition of, 132–36; thinking’s relationship to,
equality and distinction and 119–22; Zerilli on, 122, 133–36. See
exemplary validity, 125, 133 also enlarged mentality; exemplary
validity; Kant, Immanuel
facts, political significance of, 136–39;
Zerilli on, 139 Kant, Immanuel, 58; determinate and
Figal, Gunter, 52, 54–55 reflective judgement in, 30n1, 119,
Index 159
123–25, 127–28, 132, 134, 136; narration, 40–42, 75–76, 84

on distinction between limit and natality, 35–36, 38, 63, 78, 106
boundary, 22n36; on morality, 60, nature. See totalitarianism
81. See also enlarged mentality; Nedelsky, Jennifer: on aesthetic
exemplary validity judgment in Kant, 124, 132
Kateb, George: on constellation new beginning, 36, 38, 63, 109
concepts in Arendt, 30n2; on earth
alienation in Arendt, 12–13 Obama, Barack, 98
Kristeva, Julia, 41 Occupy Wall Street, 109
opinion: as a political capacity,
labor, 15, 18–19 93–94, 126–31. See also enlarged
law: in the Greek polis, 23; negative and mentality
positive, 22n36, 22–23 The Origins of Totalitarianism, 10, 20,
The Lectures on Kant’s Political 22–24, 121, 138
Philosophy, 118, 120n12, 122n19,
122–23, 125, 127, 131 Paine, Thomas, 73
Lederman, Shmuel: on agonal and Passeserin D’Entreves, Mario: on truth
deliberative action in Arendt, 61 in politics, 127n28
Life of the Mind, 81, 120n12, 131 Peeters, Remi. See power, Arendt’s
limit. See law, negative and positive conception of
Locke, John, 72, 79, 95–96 Penta, Leo J. See power, Arendt’s
lying: in contemporary political life, conception of
138–39. See also promising “Personal Responsibility under
Dictatorship,” 119
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 52 phenomenological method, 11, 30;
Madison, James, 88 history and, 11. See also concept, as
Marx, Karl, 14, 17, 39n26 a constellation
materialism. See Western political Plato, 29, 48, 127
theory, Arendt’s critique of plurality, condition of, 15–16, 23, 31,
McGowan, John: on Arendt and 33, 50, 87, 106; beyond the liberal
nostalgia, 54; on political action in value of pluralism, 133–34; equality
Arendt, 103 and distinction and, 31–32. See also
memory. See narration space of appearances; web of human
modernity, Arendt’s critique of, 1–3, relationships
10–11, 18–19, 24–25, 54–57, 63–64, the political, Arendt’s conception of, 3,
147–48, 150; vita activa and, 16–18, 63–64, 69, 80, 85, 92n4, 92–93, 100–
20. See also phenomenological 102, 102n36, 127, 136–42, 138n54;
method as experiential, 9–10, 25, 29, 32, 39,
modern philosophy, 14–15; mental 53, 74, 97, 111, 117, 130, 135–37,
processes and, 14–15, 18. See also 141, 147–51. See also action, in
homo faber Arendt, as new beginning
modern science, 12–13, 15; populism, 1
experimentation and, 18. See also power, Arendt’s conception of, 42, 47,
homo faber 49–50, 58, 75, 87–88; American
Montesquieu, 87, 95, 97 revolutionary experience and,
160 Index
73; Peeters and Penta on, 49–50; space of appearances, 23–25, 47, 53,
political action and, 130–31, 136; 55–57, 59, 64, 73–75; Benhabib on,
as potential and as actuality, 48, 50; 57, 57n29; Canovan on, 32, 57n29;
violence and, 51n12, 51–53 Greek experience of politics and,
process, logic of, 2–3, 9n1, 17–19, 21, 54–55; Villa on, 73–74
24, 35–36, 55, 64, 141, 147–48. See speech, 31, 33; as political action, 76,
also totalitarianism 117, 126, 130–31, 138, 140–42, 149–
The Promise of Politics, 140 51. See also judgement, in Arendt;
promising: Bernstein on, 81–82; in a opinion; plurality, condition of; web
political rather than moral register, of human relationships
41n30, 78–83, 97, 111. See also civil the state. See Dietz, Mary
disobedience
public happiness, 73–74 telescope, invention of, 11–12;
public space, 3, 10, 25, 32–33, 47, 51, 53, Descartes’ cogito and, 14–15. See
55–57, 64, 71, 85, 97, 102–3, 131n38, also earth alienation; modern science
142, 147–48, 151; maintenance of, thinking. See judgement, in Arendt,
111, 118, 125–26, 150 thinking’s relationship to
“Thinking and Moral Considerations,”
race: in Arendt’s thought, 105n42 117, 119–20
Rawls, John: public reason and, Thoreau, David, 92
131n38 totalitarianism, 20–24, 55–56, 118–20,
Republic, 127 138; Canovan on, 22; Kateb
Responsibility and Judgment, 117. on, 24. See also The Origins of
See also “Thinking and Moral Totalitarianism
Considerations” Trump, Donald, 1, 98
revolution, 69–70, 73; as distinct from “Truth and Politics,” 93–94, 118, 127,
rebellion and liberation, 70–72, 80; 127n28, 131, 139
as exemplary political action, 70–71,
76–77, 148–49. See also American Villa, Dana, 127; on The Human
Revolution, Arendt’s interpretation Condition in Arendt’s thought, 10;
of; constitution on performative and expressivist
On Revolution, 47, 56–57, 61, 69, 79, conceptions of the self, 34–35
85, 92, 97, 101 violence. See power, Arendt’s
conception of, violence and
Second Treatise on Government, 95–96 “On Violence,” 51
self: the Cartesian (or, expressivist) vita activa, 9n1, 15–17, 105–6, 122.
and Arendtian (or, performative) See also modernity, Arendt’s
conceptions of, 33–35, 34n10, 82 critique of
separation of powers, 86–88
Smith, Verity. See American Constitution, Waldron, Jeremy: on Arendtian
Arendt’s interpretation of constitutional democracy, 83–84
Socrates, 92, 121 web of human relationships, 37–38, 50
“Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” Western political theory, Arendt’s
119 critique of, 39–40, 48, 58; classical
Index 161
liberalism and, 55–56, 81; modern work, 15–18; as distinct from action,
political thought and, 56; social 38, 41; as distinct from human
contract theory and, 39, 48, 55, 72, relationships, 37–38
79–80, 95
white supremacy, 104, 137 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth: on power and
world, concept of, 13–16, 106n45 violence in Arendt, 52
world alienation, 13–14, 18, 24, 64, 92;
Cartesian doubt and, 14–15; Villa on, Zerilli, Linda M. G.: on The Human
13. See also process, logic of; world, Condition in Arendt’s thought, 10;
concept of on Rawls and Arendt, 131n38
About the Author
David Antonini is a lecturer in philosophy at Clemson University. He received

his PhD in philosophy from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale in 2018.
He specializes in social and political philosophy, specifically the thought of
Hannah Arendt. He has published several articles on her thought in venues
such as Southwest Philosophy Review, Eidos: A Journal for the Philosophy of
Culture, and The Pluralist. At Clemson, David teaches introductory courses,
courses in the history of philosophy, and social and political philosophy.
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It would be difficult to overstate the timeliness of Hannah Arendt’s thought

characterized by a turning away from that which is common and toward

that is urgently needed by contemporary citizens. The rest of the introduction

of founding a new body politic—as in the case of the American revolution-

2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

Modernity and the Need of

This opening chapter is intended to substantiate two interrelated claims. First,

recovered in the form of a public space in which individuals can exercise

THE HUMAN CONDITION WITHIN ARENDT’S

As I read Hannah Arendt, I situate The Human Condition at the center of

and the world. By “dominant trends” I mean those persisting, enduring

EARTH AND WORLD ALIENATION

What so fundamentally altered humans’ relationship to the earth and to the

earth appearing differently as an object, it is also a rejection of the idea that

a durable structure able to provide a common space once again. By analogy,

produced by the activities of human consciousness. For Descartes, the

is related . . . to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands. . . . To

THE LOGIC OF PROCESS AND

Operating according to its own internal logic, work is intelligible in terms of

in emphasis from end to means and thereby to process is illuminated in the

her, both come to be understood primarily as processes in the modern age.

NATURE AND HISTORY AS A PROCESS

In order to provide a preliminary approach to Arendt’s notion of the “space”

is of course the significance of the logic of process in The Human Condition.

At the outset of this chapter I said I would substantiate two interrelated

That is to say, on hearing the word political or politics I am suggesting that

22. Ibid., 304.

THE CONSTELLATION CONCEPT

The significance of this condition of distinctness in “plurality” cannot be

“THE WHO” REVEALED IN ACTION

If humans respond to the condition of plurality by setting themselves apart in

in laboring as a response to necessity: to psychological and biological needs

THE WEB OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

THE NARRATION OF ACTION

Canovan’s reading underlines different points of emphasis that are crucial

calculate beforehand whom he reveals.”33 Thus the conception of narration

I continue the analysis of Arendt’s concept of action in chapter 3. There, I will

1. The well-known passage in Kant’s third Critique is as follows: “Judgment in

it is that which springs up in action, it is what holds men together when

notion of power as potential whose self-actualization keeps the public space

Here, there is a reiteration of the basic Arendtian critique of the assumption

to think of power in terms of command and obedience, and hence to equate

THE SPACE OF APPEARANCES

her own phenomenological treatment of the appearance of freedom. “What

it is able to transcend them.”37 Here, it is clear that Arendt is also dismissing

appearance of freedom, like the manifestation of principles, coincides with

ACTION: AGONAL VERSUS DELIBERATIVE

The agonal concept of action usually located in The Human Condition

the world. “The new” is a phenomenological description of how action not

Chapters 2 and 3 have articulated Arendt’s constellation concept of action as

Arendt’s historical-phenomenological method and avoid falling into the trap

1. The Human Condition, 200.

18. Hobbes, Leviathan, 129.

40. “What Is Freedom?,” 151.

Arendt’s Political Concept

THE MEANING OF THE REVOLUTION