Endowing Life with Splendor

There are many things that are questionable or unpersuasive in the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt, but there is one thing that entitles her to the high rank she continues to occupy among twentieth-century political philosophers, namely that she is a brilliant spokesperson for the view that politics possesses a privileged status among the panoply of human activities, and that she supplies an especially powerful articulation of why politics in particular is what truly humanizes human beings.

It may seem obvious that there is a performative dimension to politics. After all, politicians cannot get elected unless they succeed in presenting themselves in ways that voters find attractive and compelling and that capture voters’ emotions, engage their sense of identity, and elicit their trust. What seems much more surprising is that this aspect of political life can be presented normatively and, as we discover when we read The Human Condition, can in fact be made the basis of a strikingly bold political philosophy.

What is immediately striking about Arendt’s articulation of her political philosophy in The Human Condition is all that is missing from it: no account of the modern state; no account, really, of citizenship or the rights and duties of the citizen; no account of the problems and dilemmas of modern states (e.g., problems of fair distribution, or of how to balance equality and liberty, or of just and unjust wars). On the contrary, the purpose of her political philosophy is to give an account of why much of what the modern state does, much of how it conceives itself as a set of institutions, is questionable when judged by the standard of an uncompromisingly authentic understanding of the political qua political. She shifts us to a completely different universe of political experience, and she does that very deliberately.