Research in Phenomenology 50 (2020) 143–160 Research

in
Phenomenology

brill.com/rp

Hannah Arendt: Socratic Citizenship and

Philosophical Critique

Dana Villa
Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame,
Notre Dame, IN, USA
Dana.R.Villa.9@nd.edu

Abstract

In this essay I trace the relationship between philosophy and politics in Hannah
Arendt’s work, with specific reference to the tension between her Socratic commit-
ments and her appeal to “common sense” or sensus communis. I argue Arendt’s idea of a
“common sense of the world” gives rise to a conception of the public realm that has too
much shape and integrity to fit the often misty and particulate nature of contemporary
reality. This is not the familiar critique of Arendt as a nostalgic Grecophile. Rather, it is
a critique aimed at the phenomenological concept of “world” underlying her analysis.
This concept—derived, but notably different, from Husserl’s and Heidegger’s respec-
tive conceptions—relies on background practices and understandings that are thick
enough to sustain both a common public culture and a shared “sense of the world.” I
suggest that Arendt’s appeal to a sensus communis runs aground of the moral and value
pluralism that both Weber and Berlin have suggested are constitutive features of mo-
dernity. I conclude with some remarks on the relationship between Arendt’s critique
of modernity and Socratic philosophical critique (on the one hand) and Frankfurt
School Critical Theory (on the other).

Keywords

Arendt – Sensus communis – world – Socrates – Frankfurt School – moral pluralism –

Max Weber – critique of modernity – nostalgia for reality – philosophical critique

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144 Villa

In Socratic Citizenship I made an argument for what I called philosophical or

“dissident” citizenship.1 I used Socrates as an exemplar of this type of citizen-
ship, a citizenship that retains a certain (but by no means complete) detach-
ment from the public realm, but which is indirectly (and importantly) political.
This indirect importance is seen in the way Socrates uses dialectic and elen-
chus to slow his fellow Athenians down; to induce a certain puzzlement or per-
plexity about their understanding of the basic moral notions underlying their
(highly political) way of being-in-the-world. It is also seen in the way Socrates
links the achievement of moral integrity to the practice of intellectual integ-
rity. Not participating in injustice—the Socratic principle—is made possible
through the practice of intellectual honesty and the avoidance of avoidable
illusion. Dialectic and elenchus emerge, on this view, not as paths to truth or as
the tools of an expert moral pedagogue, but rather as the means by which the
reigning understandings of such basic moral terms as justice, virtue, piety, and
courage are revealed as fostering injustice rather than justice or virtue.
In the book, I traced the fate of Socrates’ notion of philosophical citizen-
ship in the work of J.S. Mill, Nietzsche, Weber, and Hannah Arendt and Leo
Strauss. The last chapter, on Arendt and Strauss, approached these two think-
ers as champions, respectively, of the bios politikos and the philosophical life.
I suggested that, despite Arendt’s suspicion of the “philosopher’s attraction to
tyranny” and Strauss’s negative view of the demos, there were points in their
work where they both approached the idea of philosophical (Socratic) citi-
zenship. In Strauss, this comes in his less Platonic moments—that is, in those
moments where he disavows any secure possession of the “Truth” of natural
right and limits himself to revealing the dogmatic aspects of the historicist and
“radical historicist” positions.2 In Arendt, the idea of philosophical citizenship
is approached in the essay “Philosophy and Politics” (later published under the
title “Socrates” in The Promise of Politics).3 In the course of this essay, Arendt
presents Socrates as a “citizen among citizens,” one who uses his maieutic-
dialectical skills to deliver his fellow citizens of the truth contained in their
individuals doxa. Socrates forces his interlocutors to abandon unthought prej-
udices and dogmatic presuppositions, the better to articulate their individual
opinion, their own “opening to the world.”
This essay re-opens some issues raised in Socratic Citizenship with regard
to Arendt and how philosophy and politics are related in her work. It appears

1  Dana Villa, Socratic Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

2  Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 9–34.
3  Hannah Arendt, “Socrates,” in Arendt, The Promise of Politics, edited by Jerome Kohn
(New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 5–39.

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Hannah Arendt 145

to me that the central question is not whether Arendt endorses, even episodi-
cally, the idea of philosophical citizenship in her work. Rather, the question is
whether it is possible for her to do so consistently, given her own ontological
premises and her understanding of the specific reality of the political realm. I
shall argue it isn’t. However, I shall also argue that Arendt’s own philosophical
practice is eminently Socratic in nature, infecting us with perplexity by raising
doubts about our reigning table of values and how we define key moral and
political terms.
In the book I pointed out how Arendt’s appeal to the idea of a “common
sense” (or sensus communis) effectively undercuts her more Socratic commit-
ments. The idea of a “common sense”—of a faculty that functions as a kind of
“sixth sense,” fitting our individual sense experience into the intersubjective
or public world shared by all—is, of course, a problematic one. Not only is the
idea itself elusive (its basis seems to be little more than a pun: our common
sense is a common sense). It also seems to give new life to the Nietzschean no-
tion that the “health” of a given form of life ultimately depends upon the pres-
ence of a limited and protective moral-cultural-intellectual horizon. Should
dissolvent rationality (“Socratism,” in Nietzsche’s parlance) be given free rein,
the cultural consequences will be ruinous and the highest values will devalu-
ate themselves.
With her idea of a “common sense of the world,” then, Arendt seems to be
treading on ground similar to that of Nietzsche, tacitly endorsing the idea of a
limited and protective horizon. A case in point is her treatment of the Greek
polis. The “world of the polis” provides what certainly appears to be such a
limited and protective horizon, a common “space of appearances” in which
diverse yet equal citizens share not only words and deeds but also the same
culture, religion, and set of fundamental moral and political presuppositions.
It is within such a limited and finite “world” that Arendt’s political version of
Nietzsche’s perspectivism plays out, with its plurality of different perspectives
on a common or “objective” public world. On the one hand, such a shared,
finite world makes possible the play of diverse perspectives, as they are all per-
spectives on the same thing; on the other, this world is itself constituted by this
same play of plural perspectives. Human plurality finds its richest and most
“objective” expression in this public play of citizens’ different openings upon
their (shared) world.4
I am not suggesting—and neither is Arendt—that, for this play to occur,
the “world” in question must display anything like the degree of moral and
cultural homogeneity we find in ancient Athens. However, it seems clear that

4  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 57.

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the world our “common sense” fits us into relies considerably on the presence
of shared background assumptions, understandings, and practices. As de-
scribed by Arendt in The Human Condition, such a world is possessed of both
shape and integrity—two features that are, to a great extent, functions of such
shared understandings and practices. Thus, while we hardly need to share the
same religious, ethnic, or even linguistic identity to be active (constituted and
constituting) participants in such a world, we do have to share a discrete and
identifiable (“objective”) public culture. In Arendt’s work, the primary exam-
ples of such a public culture are the “worlds” of Athenian direct democracy
and American representative democracy. Each provides an example of a le-
gally and institutionally articulated public realm supported by certain char-
acteristic norms, practices, and background assumptions (e.g., “All men are
created equal”).
Arendt’s analysis of the robust plurality expressed by the active political
life of such a “world” sits uneasily with the value and moral pluralism that
Max Weber (along with such later theorists as Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls)
insisted was a characteristic feature of the modern world. Our world is charac-
terized not only by rapid social and technological change, but also by a variety
of value-spheres—scientific, political, economic, familial, erotic, artistic, etc.
These spheres are in constant tension, if not outright war, with one another,
and they reduce to no common denominator or measure. Add to this value
pluralism (emphasized by Weber and Berlin) the moral pluralism born of a
variety of faith traditions and different “comprehensive” views of the good life
(Rawls) and the result is something that bears little resemblance to the shared
experience of a public world that Arendt describes.5
Given the high degree of value and moral pluralism in contemporary soci-
ety, it seems the best one can hope for is an “overlapping consensus” on the
desirability of the institutions that provide the basic structure of the “domain
of the political” (Rawls). Indeed, the effort to promote a “common sense of
the world” in what George Kateb has called the “misty and particulate” reality
of late modernity would, at the very least, entail the promotion of a value-
hierarchy—a vision of the “good life”—currently not shared by the majority of
citizens. The predisposition of some of her admirers notwithstanding, Arendt

5  See Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by
H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129–156; Isaiah
Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, edited by Henry
Hardy (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 1–19; John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993), 133–153.

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is no communitarian. However, with her notions of a sensus communis and a

shared experience of a common world she comes dangerously close to a com-
munitarian position she otherwise eschews.
Thus, it is one thing to suggest, as did Tocqueville, that “individualism” and
privatization have produced alienation from the public world; another to sug-
gest that this world could be reintegrated or rendered more “objective” either
by means of increased political participation or the cultivation of a “common
sense” that has long been in retreat. As Hegel well knew, the preconditions
for anything like the “beautiful freedom” of the Greeks are long gone. This is a
lesson Arendt seems to have only partially assimilated. Hence her normative
ideal of an integrated public world in which a Socrates or Socrates-like figure
could induce reflective perplexity and critical questioning without at the same
time undermining the dominant public culture and its specific reality.
I am not making the familiar charge that Arendt, like much of the German
philosophical tradition after Kant, suffers from an acute case of nostalgia for
the Greeks, or that she thinks the Athenian public sphere can somehow pro-
vide a model for our own. While she clearly loves the Greeks, she nowhere
proposes to resurrect their institutions or practices in the present day. In The
Human Condition she describes the Greek understanding of the public realm
for contrastive purposes only, as a means to highlight the questionable nature
of our own understanding. Not only is our public sphere one in which debate,
discussion, and decision tend to be limited to small groups of elites. It is also
one in which the matters treated concern less the “preservation and augmen-
tation” of the public-political world itself (what we in America would broadly
refer to as Constitutional issues), but rather such social issues as health care,
education, tax rates, and social security.
Arendt is clearly on solid ground when (in The Human Condition and On
Revolution) she points out how “oligarchic” representation and bureaucratic
administration have usurped much of the space previously occupied by citizen
debate and deliberation. And I think she is also right in her analysis of the way
the “rise of the social” and socio-economic categories of thought have under-
mined the clarity of the distinction between public and private realms.
She goes wrong when she assumes that the basic phenomenological char-
acteristics of the Greek public realm are or can be the same for us. Some of
them—human plurality, the medium of opinion, institutionally articulated
spaces for debate and deliberation—clearly are features of any public realm
worthy of the name. However, others—including the idea of a public “world”
in which what is “seen and heard by all” constitutes reality—clearly are not.
The fact that our public reality is more multi-dimensional, fluid, and radi-
cally perspectival than anything Arendt could possibly endorse signals not a

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nostalgia for the Greeks, but rather a nostalgia for reality (in the sense of some-
thing solid, lasting, “objective,” and the same for all).
This last remark sounds vaguely postmodern in nature and may remind
some of the work of figures like Baudrillard or Deleuze. My point, however, is
not that everything is always already “virtual,” or that we live in a world in which
“there are no facts, only interpretations.” The wholesale re-writings of history
that formed the basis of totalitarian ideological fictions should be enough to
warn us away from such pseudo-Nietzschean generalizations. However, there
are in Arendt traces of a phenomenological essentialism, an essentialism ul-
timately rooted in the idea that the origin possesses a fuller, more authentic
reality than what comes after (which always appears as derivative or as a “fall-
ing away from”).
This sensibility is apparent not only in Arendt’s many classical references,
but also in her endorsement of the Burckhardtian idea that the beginning is
like a “fundamental chord” that sounds “through the whole history of Western
thought.” And it is apparent in her approving citation of Plato’s remark in the
Laws that “the beginning is like a god which as long as it dwells among men saves
all things.”6 This “return to the origin” sensibility, imbibed from both Husserl
and Heidegger, is what gives many of her phenomenological descriptions—of
the public realm, political action, and the human condition itself—a strong
normative spin. Thus, while the descriptions themselves are deployed primar-
ily for the sake of contrast and clarification, they also have a way of conflating
the “is” (or, in this case, the “was”) with the “ought.”
Bearing this criticism in mind, it seems fair to say that both Hegel (who
saw in Socrates’ introduction of the principle of individual conscience the be-
ginning of the end of Athens’ beautiful freedom) and Mill (who saw Socratic
dialectic as a vehicle for undermining the tyranny of custom, convention,
and received ideas) offer a more adequate and truthful account of Socrates’
revolutionary impact than Arendt does in “Philosophy and Politics.” The dis-
solvent impact of Socratic dialectic on the reigning Athenian values implied
nothing less than a transvaluation of values. This is something Nietzsche fully
grasped and, of course, bemoaned. The fact that Arendt either (a) attempts to
turn Socrates into a “citizen among citizens” who tries to “make friends” of his
overly agonistic Athenian peers (her position in “Philosophy and Politics”); or
(b) confines the dissolvent impact of Socratic thinking to “emergency situa-
tions” in which the conscientious individual sees all those around him car-
ried away by prejudice or ideological enthusiasm (her position in the essay

6  Hannah Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age” in Arendt, Between Past and Future (New
York: Penguin Books, 2006), 18.

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“Thinking and Moral Considerations”), signals an unwillingness to own up to

Socrates’ world-historical importance and to the radical impact of his relent-
lessly negative thinking.
Arendt has clear affection for her “model thinker” Socrates, an affection that
stands out even more sharply when she compares him to his erstwhile student,
Plato. In Arendt’s telling, the trial and death of Socrates proved to Plato (once
and for all, as it were) that persuasion and dialogue were insufficient, and that
the coercive power of Truth, wielded by philosopher-tyrants, was the only
thing that could possibly make the polis safe for philosophy. Plato is for Arendt
the model authoritarian thinker, a philosopher who wanted to escape the “fu-
tility, boundlessness, and uncertainty of outcome” born of plural opinions for
the sovereign freedom embodied by the philosophical “artist of character.” The
latter masterfully applies his transcendent standards of truth and human be-
havior to less-than-rational human material at hand. What Arendt calls the
“traditional substitution of making for acting” starts here, and its baneful con-
sequences are felt throughout the Western tradition of political philosophy, a
tradition which almost uniformly identifies freedom with some form of either
individual or collective sovereignty.7
It is because philosophers yearn for the quiet of a pacified (and undemo-
cratic) public realm that they think Truth should take the place of opinion,
and rulership take the place of isonomia, or no-rule. This is what underlies not
only Plato’s, but also Hobbes’s, Rousseau’s, Marx’s, and Nietzsche’s “attraction
to the tyrannical”—an attraction Arendt viewed as a kind of déformation pro-
fessionelle afflicting the class of “professional thinkers.” It is because Arendt
wanted to absolve Socrates—the “purest thinker of the West”—of any such
Platonic afflictions that she presented him (in “Philosophy and Politics”) as
a kind of philosopher-therapist, and subsequently (in “Thinking and Moral
Considerations”) as an exemplar of how thinking liberates judgment and pro-
duces conscience as a “by-product.”8
At this point we must ask why Arendt so closely associates philosophy with
authority rather than equality and with tyranny rather than democracy. I have
already gestured to some of the reasons: Greek philosophy’s desire for a paci-
fied public sphere over the tumult of Athenian democracy; its allegiance to a
singular “Truth” rather than to plural opinion; and its conviction that philo-
sophical self-rule—the sovereignty of reason over the other parts of the soul—
should be the basis of (and provide a model for) political authority and true

7  Arendt, Human Condition, 220–229.

8  Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations” in Arendt, Responsibility and
Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 159–189.

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freedom. At a more general level, Arendt makes these associations because

she, like Heidegger, viewed much of Western philosophy as betraying the voca-
tion of thinking by turning itself into a “science of grounds”—that is, into some
form of metaphysics or foundationalism.
I don’t think any of these reasons are entirely wrong. They testify to the very
real tension between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa. However, taken
together, they have the effect of disqualifying much if not all philosophical crit-
icism of politics and the public realm, largely by impugning the anti-political
motives underlying such criticism.
Perhaps this disqualification is deserved. After all, even thinkers as explic-
itly post-metaphysical and pro-democratic as Rawls and Habermas have been
charged with being too “philosophical” and with displacing or sublimating pol-
itics in their respective theories. However, taking this disqualification seriously
has the unintended effect of banishing all but so-called immanent critique,
implying (as it does) that non-immanent critique flows from either a dogmatic
utopianism or the desire to view things sub specie aeternatatis.
On this issue, Arendt’s hermeneutics of suspicion receives unexpected sup-
port from Strauss, whose Natural Right and History is dedicated to the prop-
osition that it is only by getting out of the “cave” of history and discovering
the standards implicit in “nature” that we are able to escape relativism and
rise above the prejudices of our own time and place. By claiming that politi-
cal thought remains forever confined by its doxastic context, while political
philosophy ascends from opinions about political things to knowledge of them
and the standards required for correct judgment, Strauss emphatically con-
firms Arendt’s suspicion that Western political philosophy has been a series of
attempts not just to leave the cave, but to position itself as occupying a stand-
point allegedly beyond time, chance, and the relativizing effects of human
plurality.9 Such a standpoint would be a transcendent one (provided by the
Ideas, archai, or “First Principles”) and could “legitimately” claim prior author-
ity over all “merely positive” laws, practices, and institutions.
Arendt’s critical genealogy of Western political philosophy’s anti-
democratic and anti-political agenda would seem to place her, almost by de-
fault, in the camp of “immanent critique.” Immanent critique does not seek
“true standards” beyond time and chance in order to criticize and reform po-
litical institutions and practices in the here and now. Rather, it self-consciously
deploys society’s own standards of fairness against it, the better to show how
specific institutions and practices run directly counter to these reigning ideals
and standards. The most famous example of immanent critique is, of course,

9  Strauss, Natural Right and History, 124.

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Marx’s turning of the ideology of the “fair exchange of equivalents” against the
capitalist-market society that gave birth to it. In Das Kapital Marx reveals how
the “fair” exchange of one commodity (the worker’s labor-power) for another
(his daily wage) is, in fact, a structurally unjust one, predicated on the conceal-
ment of the fact that it is precisely the worker’s “commodity,” labor-power, that
produces not just the value equivalent of the capitalist’s investment in wages,
but also the “surplus-value” that is the basis of the whole process of unlimited
capitalist accumulation.
Putting her portraits of Socrates aside for the moment, we must ask our-
selves whether Arendt’s criticism of modern capitalism, science, and technol-
ogy in The Human Condition resembles, at least formally, the type of immanent
or contextual criticism practiced by Marx. The answer, clearly, is no. The whole
point of the last chapter of The Human Condition is to question the modern
age’s reigning hierarchy of values, a hierarchy that turns the classical one up-
side down by not just by glorifying the productivity of the animal laborans,
but also by making life itself the summum bonum. On the face of it, The Human
Condition appears to be a textbook example of what Frankfurt School theo-
rists like to call “totalizing” or “rejectionist” critique; that is, a form of critique
whose sheer breadth and inclusivity renders its normative basis more than a
little dubious.
Indeed, from what normative standpoint can one issue a critique that,
at times, comes close to indicting the entire modern age? The conservative
Catholic can appeal to the anti-modern presuppositions that support the
Church’s dogmatic commitments, just as the Straussian can appeal to the “true
standards” available (supposedly) to unaided reason that has made the dialogi-
cal ascent from (plural) opinions to (singular) truth. Arendt, however, explic-
itly disavows the bogus authority provided by such metaphysical back-up. Her
criticism of the modern age is rooted neither in the authority of a tradition nor
in a disembodied Reason allegedly free of all taint by power or prejudice. Yet
her criticism is clearly philosophical, rather than immanent, in character. The
question, then, is: in what sense is Arendt’s critique philosophical?
The answer is that her criticism is, broadly speaking, Socratic in character—
albeit not Socratic in the sense of either “Philosophy and Politics” (the philoso-
pher as civic therapist or mediator) or “Thinking and Moral Considerations”
(although, as we shall see, it bears more in common with the latter than
the former).
So, what does Socrates’ philosophical criticism consist in? Contra Strauss
and Eric Voegelin, it does not consist in contrasting the “truth” of nature and
natural law (physis) to the “opinion” embodied in custom, convention, or posi-
tive law (nomos). Nor does it consist in an “education in virtue.” In the Apology

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Socrates unironically states that he does not know how to provide such an
education nor even what virtue positively consists in. Yet if Socrates the philo-
sophical critic is not a dispenser of “truth” (à la Plato) or an educator in virtue
(à la Aristotle), then what is he?
Here we are thrown back on the three similes Socrates used to describe him-
self: he is a “gadfly” (Apology), a “mid-wife” (Sophist), and an “electric ray” or
stinging fish (Meno). As a gadfly, Socrates arouses the “large and lazy horse” of
Athens to thought; as a mid-wife he helps purge the Athenians of their unex-
amined prejudgments; and as a stinging fish he “paralyzes” them with his own
perplexity about that nature and meaning of basic moral terms. He does not
teach them how to think, nor does he provide some version of the truth to take
the place of the prejudices he has helped them discard.
The unpacking of these three similes forms the heart of “Philosophy and
Politics” and it is clear that Arendt, in her portrait of Socrates as a “citizen
among citizens,” sees them as working together in something like the sequence
I’ve just presented. The civic part of Socrates’ “philosophical citizenship” con-
sists in arousing his fellow citizens to thought and maieutically aiding them in
the articulation of their individual doxa (as contrasted with rote repetition of
the received ideas of the majority—what we misleadingly call “public opin-
ion”). However, I would argue that the genuinely philosophical moment comes
when he induces perplexity about things that previously seemed self-evident
or beyond question. Socratic philosophical criticism begins with the “stop and
think”—the ceasing of all doing—that issues from such perplexity.
Now, as we moderns are aware, the office of “gadfly” can be filled by many
non-philosophical figures, including the investigative journalist, the cultural
critic, and even the university professor. Similarly, the office of “mid-wife” can
be filled by a variety of teachers, mediators, or “discussion facilitators” who
prod us, more or less expertly, toward self-clarity and clarity of expression.
The function of the “stinging fish,” on the other hand, can be filled only by the
philosopher—that is, by someone who experiences actual perplexity—and not
just righteous indignation or “holier than thou” moral disgust—when it comes
to society’s fundamental moral assumptions and reigning table of values.
This is a preliminary answer to the question of what makes Socratic critique
philosophical rather than dogmatic or “merely” immanent in nature. Socratic
critique raises questions but does not answer them; it dissolves the solidity of
the grounds upon which much of our daily lives—as both citizens and private
individuals—is based. Socrates’ suggestion that the avoidance of injustice is
more important than the greatness praised by Pericles in his Funeral Oration is
a departure so radical that it must have struck his interlocutors as tantamount
to turning the moral world upside down (the Gorgias supplies good evidence

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Hannah Arendt 153

to that effect). The point here is not conversion to a new table of values but
suspension of political activity through the creation of a space and a time for
thought away from the hubbub of the assembly and the agora.
At first glance, The Human Condition seems to do little more than turn the
Socratic “transvaluation of values” upside down, restoring the values of the
Funeral Oration (greatness, glory, political action) to their rightful, politics-
on-top, place. Yet as we know, Arendt had little patience for such “turning op-
erations.” Even when performed by such giants as Marx and Nietzsche, they
manifested (in her view) a certain type of thoughtlessness: an inverted Hegel
(Marx) is still Hegel, just as an inverted Plato (Nietzsche) is still Plato.10
But rather than viewing The Human Condition as an attempt to invert
Socrates and (thus) restore the values that animated the “beautiful freedom” of
the Greeks, we should view it in the terms she herself suggested—namely, as
an attempt to “think what we are doing.” The parallel with Socrates is clear. Just
as Socrates wanted to slow his fellow Athenians down in their restless pursuit
of opportunities to display their political (and martial) virtu, so Arendt wants
to slow we moderns down in our restless (but similarly unthinking) pursuit of
economic expansion and scientific-technological revolution, the fruits of both
being decidedly mixed.
Socrates saw the virtually demonic energy driving the Athenians’s pursuit
of imperial greatness and attempted—unsuccessfully, to be sure—to rein it
in, at least a little. Similarly, Arendt saw the relentless dynamism manifest in
capitalism’s “creative destruction” and scientific-technological revolutions as a
kind of runaway train, hurtling, if not toward oblivion, then at least toward the
creation of a world no longer capable of providing a “home for mortal men.”
Capitalism’s transformation of everything lasting and durable into ephemera
fit only for consumption combines with modern science’s “earth alienation” to
create a world in which all that is solid really does melt into air.
My characterization of Arendt’s critical project in The Human Condition
is—despite its pedigree in Arendt’s own Preface—subject to two obvious
objections. The first is that the book as a whole has been received less as an
attempt to induce thought about modernity’s trajectory than as a call to ac-
tion and a return to the bios politikos. No less an Arendt scholar than Richard
Bernstein has singled out its “inspirational” quality as The Human Condition’s
most important living legacy—a verdict seconded (albeit for somewhat
different reasons) by those who champion her “agonistic” conception of politi-
cal action.

10  Arendt, Between Past and Future, 35–37.

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The second objection is that the entire topos of the “critique of modernity”
is itself more than a little dubious. To be a “critic of modernity” is, as the ex-
amples of both Nietzsche and Heidegger evidently confirm, to abandon the
vocation of philosopher for that of cultural-political reactionary. This is one
of the reasons why influential recent interpretations of Arendt’s thought such
as those by Margaret Canovan and Seyla Benhabib have sought to shift the
critical focus away from The Human Condition, the better to assert the nor-
mative priority of The Origins of Totalitarianism in Arendt’s oeuvre.11 For both
Canovan and Benhabib, Arendt is less a “great anti-modernist” (Kateb) than
she is a “reluctant modernist” who—misgivings about modernity’s trajectory
notwithstanding—was nevertheless on the side of those who desired to see
the “unfinished project of modernity” brought to completion.
Neither objection can be dismissed out of hand, but I believe both serve to
diminish rather than enhance Arendt’s stature as a thinker. To foreground the
“Action” chapter of The Human Condition, whether for its inspirational or ago-
nistic character, is to miss the central point of the book: to think what we are
doing. Similarly, to draw a cordon sanitaire around the “critique of modernity”
and declare it the home of reactionaries, theocrats, or “young conservatives”
alone is to radically circumscribe philosophical questioning and, in effect, to
declare that the only permissible form of criticism is some variation on im-
manent critique. What I have called her “nostalgia for reality” notwithstand-
ing, Arendt no more wants to go back to Athens—with its slavery, patriarchy,
and endless wars—than Foucault wants to return to a world of “sovereign” (as
opposed to disciplinary) power. In both thinkers, the premodern is deployed
as a way of making the less appetizing dimensions of the modern age stand
out in sharper relief. But neither thinker believes there is a reality prior to the
modern age that we could or should aspire to “go back to” (the shared fantasy
of all reactionary thinkers).
A lot hinges here, obviously, on how one goes about defining modernity,
“the modern age,” and “the modern project.” Habermas and his followers iden-
tify the “modern project” with the non-positivistic Enlightenment—that is,
with the critical use of reason and the spread of liberal or liberal-democratic
deliberative institutions based on universalist moral premises. This identifi-
cation is in large part a retrenchment following what second and third gen-
eration Frankfurt School thinkers now view as the unfortunately totalizing or

11  Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks: Sage
Publications, 1996); Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political
Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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rejectionist critique offered by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of

Enlightenment (1947).
By identifying rationalization solely with the increasing domination of in-
strumental reason, Adorno and Horkheimer made it appear that the legacy
of the modern age was the “turbid fusion” (Habermas) of reason and power.
The result—a “totally enlightened globe in which disaster reigns trium-
phant”—was persuasive, Habermas argued, only so long as one failed (like
Adorno and Horkheimer) to distinguish instrumental from communicative
rationalization.12 The latter is the benign and progressive process through
which “non-discursive” sources of legitimacy (religious belief, custom, tradi-
tion, etc.) gradually lose their unquestionable authority. The outstanding and
“communicatively rational” result is that validity claims regarding the truth or
rightness of norms, laws, policies, and institutions now have to be redeemed
discursively, through the giving of reasons and the “force of the better argu-
ment” in a democratic and egalitarian public sphere.
The formula “modernity=rationalization=the domination of instrumental
reason” is Weberian in origin. Habermas’s emendation of this equation (through
the addition of communicative rationalization) is Weberian in inspiration as
well, a fact he readily acknowledges in The Theory of Communicative Action.
The Weberian backdrop of virtually all Frankfurt School theorizing has obvi-
ous and important consequences for how one construes “modernity” and the
idea of a “critique of modernity.” For whether one departs from the standpoint
of the first generation (Adorno and Horkheimer) or the second (Habermas),
the argument about modernity becomes essentially an argument about rea-
son and rationalization. Seen through this lens, any critique of the modern age
that chooses a different point de départ is either muddle-headed, “normatively
confused,” or—worst of all—opposed to reason and the progressive-secular
heritage of the Enlightenment.
One reason why Arendt’s criticism of the modern age counts as philosophi-
cal rather than sociological or “theoretical” is that she does not couch it in terms
of the Weberian paradigm. She approaches modernity not in terms of rational-
ization and its discontents, but rather in terms of the fate of a public world
whose durability and integrity has been radically undermined by accelerat-
ing cycles of production, consumption, and technological change. The central
question for her concerns the specific reality of the public world—its laws,
institutions, norms, and practices—and the ability of this reality to survive
intact in an increasingly flux-filled world. This is what gives the argument of

12  Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationaliza-
tion of Society, translated by Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).

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The Human Condition a distinctively ontological character. Deliberative prac-

tices and rationality are part of this public reality, but they do not define it
(Arendt’s “public realm” is not Habermas’s “public sphere”). Nor can the ex-
pansion of these practices—the primary goal of all “deliberative democrats”—
guarantee the durability of the public realm’s central institutions, let alone
their integrity, in face of the myriad forces (cultural, sociological, economic,
and technological) currently undermining them.
It is a banality to observe that the shared historical experience underlying
Arendt’s work and that of the Frankfurt School is that of totalitarian domina-
tion. However—and I think this is crucial for understanding the difference be-
tween Arendt’s philosophical analysis of modernity in relation to Habermas’s
more sociological one—Arendt viewed the totalitarian phenomenon in terms
of a wider, pan-European historical and geographical framework. In The
Origins of Totalitarianism she emphasized the European roots of totalitarian
movements and ideology, tracing the development of European imperialism,
racism, and anti-Semitism.13 She also gave equal weight to both the Nazi and
Bolshevik versions of totalitarianism—a fact that made her persona non grata
in Marxist and marxisant circles for many decades.
In contrast, the Frankfurt School’s approach to totalitarianism and the pa-
thologies of modernity was (and is) framed almost entirely in the terms pro-
vided by Weber’s master narrative of rationalization. The result is a narrow
focus upon the ironies of the rationalization process itself, viewed against the
backdrop of an ongoing struggle between the forces of reflective or commu-
nicative reason (on the one hand) and those of irrationalism or a “colonizing”
instrumental rationality (on the other).
Viewed from the standpoint of Arendt’s pan-European perspective, the
Weberian metanarrative about rationalization shrinks in importance, taking
its place as one factor among many in the broad historical-political constel-
lation that made totalitarianism possible (but not inevitable). Indeed, Arendt
would probably say that the Weberian master narrative conceals more than it
reveals—not only with respect to the factors that made totalitarianism pos-
sible, but also with respect to its sheer historical contingency as well as the
specific modernity of the totalitarian movements themselves.
Arendt’s broader European and historical perspective enabled her to pro-
vide a more fine-grained analysis of how imperialism, racism, and the decline
of the nation-state created conditions favorable to the rise of such movements.
It also enabled her to trace the way these phenomena undermined the relative

13  Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harper, Brace, Jovanovich,
1951), Part I (“Antisemitism”) and Part II (“Imperialism”).

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stability and durability of the European nation-state system, the hollowed-out

shell of which was destroyed utterly by the totalitarian regimes themselves.
According to Arendt, totalitarian regimes aimed at nothing less than the
submergence of all institutional, legal, and social structures in the ever-moving
“process reality” of natural or historical evolution. Their ambition was to ac-
celerate the supposed “laws of movement” of Nature or History, thus hastening
the creation not only of a new world but also a “new animal species, mankind”
to go along with it.14 Behind this ambition stood not the nihilistic cliché that
“everything is permitted” but rather the characteristically totalitarian convic-
tion that “everything is possible.” It was possible, the totalitarians thought, to
use terror and the power of organization to create a totally deterministic world.
This would be a world in the movement predetermined by the laws of Nature
or History would be able to race through mankind without the least resistance;
a world from which unpredictability and “obstacles” created by human spon-
taneity had been expunged.
Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism thus made her fear not the “eclipse of
reason” (Horkheimer) but rather the assimilation of the whole of human ex-
istence to natural or pseudo-natural rhythms and imperatives. When, in The
Human Condition, she turned from this analysis to consideration of the char-
acteristic features of modernity, she thought she detected a similar—but more
broadly based and non-terroristic—assimilation of human existence to the
imperatives of natural or pseudo-natural processes. Hence her focus in The
Human Condition on what she calls the “life process” of society: the cycles of
production and consumption that determine and constitute the life of the ani-
mal laborans.
I will not detail here what I see as the primary links between The Origins of
Totalitarianism and The Human Condition. Suffice it to say that they are substan-
tial, however much the respective “stories” of the two works seem to diverge. If
pressured to single out one crucial connection, however, I would point to the
ferociously destructive dynamism of totalitarian movements and regimes (on
the one hand) and the state of perpetual flux created by the rapid economic
and technological changes of the last two hundred years (on the other). Of
course, capitalism is not the moral equivalent of totalitarianism, and—contra
Marcuse and Adorno at their most hyperbolic—there is and never has been
any parallel between Auschwitz and the shopping mall. Nevertheless, it is im-
portant to note that Arendt did see in the “creative destruction” (Schumpeter)
of capitalism the practice of dynamism for the sake of dynamism and a spirit

14  Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 460–479.

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similar, in some respects, to that of the “permanent revolution” preached by

totalitarian movements and regimes.
While the Faustian energies driving capitalist modernity are hardly identi-
cal with those driving totalitarian mass movements, one could say (following
George Kateb’s suggestion) that both forms emanate from a fundamental re-
sentment of the human condition. That is, they emanate from a resentment of
the limiting conditions (mortality, plurality, natality, and boundedness to the
earth) that have set the parameters, and structured the meaning, of human
existence hitherto. The fact that humanity currently seems intent on trash-
ing the earth (which Arendt calls the “quintessence of the human condition”)
once and for all, and appears similarly intent on remaking the “animal spe-
cies mankind” through gene-editing and bio-mechanical engineering, under-
lines not just the relevance of The Human Condition’s critique of the modern
age, but also its greater philosophical depth compared to post-Dialectic of
Enlightenment Frankfurt School theory.
This may seem an overly harsh verdict to some. I should hasten to add that,
qua theory and cultural critique, the Frankfurt School offers an enormously
rich and varied tradition, one that I partly identify with. However, from the
very beginning—that is, from the publication of Horkheimer’s programmatic
essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” in 1937—the Frankfurt School has seen
itself as operating “between” philosophy and social science; that is, as specifi-
cally committed to the creation of a viable, normatively grounded, program of
(critical) social research. Like Marx, its ambition was to transcend “mere” phi-
losophy. Unlike Marx, it never thought that “philosophy has only interpreted
the world; the point is, however, to change it!” The failure of the German work-
ing class to fulfill its ostensible historical role in the 1930s, combined with the
dubious nature of “actually existing socialism” in the Soviet Union, meant that
“interpretation” still had its work cut out for it.
However, “interpretation” now meant not philosophy, but theory. The point
of theory was not to “induce perplexity” about basic moral terms and hierar-
chies of value, but rather to measure the distance between the avowed goals
of the so-called “bourgeois revolutions” and the social and political realities
they produced. Critical theory’s social scientific commitments entailed that
critique remain immanent critique, tied relatively closely to both sociologi-
cal reality and to the standards bourgeois civilization had set for itself. When
it strayed from these commitments—as it undoubtedly did in Dialectic of
Enlightenment—it seemed to wander into the precincts of totalizing or “re-
jectionist” critique, as well as into a practical-political cul-de-sac from which
there was no escape.

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The Human Condition, while utterly different in form and conception

from Dialectic of Enlightenment, often seems to wander into the same pre-
cincts. Hence its reputation for embodying a kind of root and branch anti-
modernism. In his pathbreaking book Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience,
Evil, George Kateb labels Arendt a “great anti-modernist” and rhetorically asks
whether anyone—assuming they are not in an “insubstantial mood”—could
really desire all or even the majority of the changes wrought by capitalism and
modern science undone.15 Kateb’s question provides a useful brake upon those
of Arendt’s readers who uncritically imbibe her Hellenism or who—perhaps
influenced by Heidegger—are open to the idea that modern technology has
created an ersatz reality, one in which human beings have been reduced (like
everything else) to the status of “standing reserve.”
However, I think Kateb’s question presumes that The Human Condition, like
Critical Theory, has an underlying practical intent. I don’t think this is the case.
Indeed, Kateb’s presumption that it does draws us back into the instrumental
view of the theory-practice relationship that has so dominated the Western tra-
dition of political and social thought. “Thinking what we are doing” need not
be a prelude to some program of action. In the case of Arendt and The Human
Condition it most certainly isn’t. To many, this will make what I have been call-
ing Arendt’s “philosophical” critique of the modern age appear “useless” or ir-
relevant, of little value to citizens of contemporary liberal democracies. And,
indeed, insofar as The Human Condition questions the hierarchy of values that
has come to dominate the modern world, it is of little practical use—except,
perhaps, to theologically or metaphysically minded disparagers of modernity
who would like to add Arendt to their dubious lists of “authoritative” sources.
What The Human Condition does do is to enable us to take a big step
back from the world we live, act, and behave in. It provides the degree of
philosophical-critical distance necessary for one to think about the modern
age without first taking a stance either for or against it. Indeed, one of the vir-
tues of The Human Condition is that it enables us to see just how inadequate,
dogmatic, and unreflective all such stances, whether positive or negative, are.
Here I would once again reference Foucault, who famously remarked about his
own work that the message was “not that everything is bad, but that everything
is dangerous.”
Like Foucault, Arendt is alerting us to some of the dangers of modernity—
and doing so without pretending that there is some fantasy of democratic

15  George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa: Rowman & Allanheld,
1984), 150.

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Athens or republican Rome that could possibly save us from them. There is
only the modern world, its dangers, and a more or less informed awareness of
those dangers. If Hannah Arendt’s “anti-modern” philosophical criticism has
anything to teach the contemporary citizen, it is that those dangers are more
deeply rooted, and more fraught with consequences for our public world and
our earthly home, than many of us care to imagine. It is precisely by provoking
perplexity about the modern age—its animating forces and reigning table of
values—that Arendt contributes, not to linking philosophy and politics, but
to the creation of a thinking dialogue about where we are and where we are
going, both as a culture and as a civilization.

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