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...action is primarily a normative theory directed against either the advent of mass democracy and its attendant pathologies, or the rise of the social and the reduction of politics to economics that accompanies it. To be sure, both these events play a central role in Arendt's thought. But her theory of political action is misunderstood if it is seen as essentially a reaction to one or both of these "late modern" tendencies. Framed in this way, there seems little doubt that Arendt is pursuing a rearguard "elitist" strategy against the increasingly inclusive--and increasingly social--character of politics in the modern age.
This framing of Arendt's political theory is, however, wrong. While useful to her critics, it fails to take sufficient account of her intellectual trajectory. This was a trajectory from the attempt to understand how the supremely destructive political phenomenon of totalitarianism became possible in the heart of civilized Europe; to a deeper engagement with the proto-totalitarian tendencies underlying the thought of Karl Marx; to--finally--a full-fledged and remarkably deep engagement with the Western tradition of political thought from Plato to Marx. This is a tradition Arendt increasingly came to view as anti-pluralistic and (indeed) antipolitical in many of its most characteristic tropes, concerns, and conclusions.
We can characterize the main phases in this intellectual trajectory in "methodological" as well as substantive terms. Arendt, we might say, moves from the hermeneutic-analytic attempt to understand the constellation of events, practices, and mentalites that made totalitarianism possible to the genealogical attempt to locate protototalitarian tendencies in the thought of Karl Marx to, finally, a "deconstructive" encounter with the Western tradition of political thought itself. This encounter is driven by the desire to recover the experiential basis of a "genuine" politics centered on human plurality, speech, and the exchange of opinion in the public sphere. This layer of experience--"the political" in its original (Greek) incarnation--had been "covered over" by a fabrication model of action, a model installed by a philosophic tradition deeply hostile to human plurality and the "irresponsibility and uncertainty of outcome" it apparently created in the public-political realm.
It is at this level--and not at the level of any supposed existentialist contempt for the "inauthentic" they-self (das Man)--that we encounter Arendt's real debt to Heidegger. (1) This debt has nothing to do with the politics of either Heidegger or the so-called political existentialists. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a deeper critic of Heidegger's philosophical politics--not to mention other fascist-leaning intellectuals--than Hannah Arendt. Rather, the debt is more methodological in character. It concerns not the substance of the political (about which Heidegger and Arendt were in total disagreement), but the manner in which one might go about recovering experiences and meanings that a layer of obfuscating tradition had plunged into obscurity, if not complete oblivion. To quote Arendt's well-known characterization of her friend Walter Benjamin's "method" (a method which had remarkable affinities to both Heidegger and her own):
this thinking, fed by the present, works with the "thought fragments" it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past--but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things "suffer a sea-change" and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living--as "thought fragments," as something "rich and strange," and perhaps even as everlasting Urphamomene (Arendt, 1968a: 205-206).
This passage gives a more or less precise description of what Arendt herself was up to when she attempted--against the entire weight of the tradition from Plato to Marx--to "recover" praxis in its "pure," pre-philosophic form. This recovery finds its fullest articulation in the chapter on action in The Human Condition. The point of that chapter is not--as many of her critics have charged--to resurrect a long-gone polis politics. Rather, it is to delve behind or beneath the intervening layer of our philosophic tradition--a tradition in many respects hostile to politics--in order to bring forth, in "crystallized" form, the phenomenological bases of politics as practiced by diverse equals in a public space. As Arendt says in her Benjamin essay, "the Greek polis will continue to exist at the bottom of our political existence--that is, at the bottom of the sea--for as long as we use the word 'politics'" (Arendt, 1968a: 204).
Like Heidegger, whose own thinking was characterized by a "digging quality peculiar to itself," Arendt's thought was driven by a desire to "get to the bottom," to bring up something "rich and strange" that would serve not so much as a model, but as a means to put our most ossified prejudices about the nature of politics into question. The value of a book like The Human Condition is not to be found in any set of prescriptions it supposedly offers about the public realm (what to let in, what to keep out--or, more pointedly, who to let in and who to keep out). Rather, it is to be found...
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