Of all the major questions that arguably run through all of Hannah Arendt’s writings and that connect as leading threads the rich abundance of themes she dealt with in her various “exercises in political thought,” 1 there is one which is particularly implicit and inarticulate, that is the question of what it actually means to engage in the intellectual practice of “political thought ” in the first place, or more precisely: what it means to be a “political theorist.” Although this question occupied Arendt almost from the very beginning and definitely to the very end of her intellectual biography, it does not figure prominent among the explicit topics of her work. Not even in her last unfinished study on The Life of the Mind where Arendt attempts to clarify the foundations, peculiarities, and potentials of the most fundamental mental activities of which human beings are capable, does she systematically deal with the characteristics of the one mental activity in which she herself was majorly engaged.
It almost seems as if Arendt categorically refrained from such theoretical self-reflections and consciously preferred to approach this question simply by “exercising” political theory rather than analyzing its foundations from some sort of meta-perspective. In fact, in her well-known interview with the German journalist Günter Gaus from 1964, Arendt seems to indicate that she was hesitant to explicitly reflect upon her self-perception as a political theorist for quite principal reasons. The interview is surely one of the great moments of early German public broadcasting, and definitely serendipity for all those interested in Arendt as a political thinker. The film catches a good deal of the personal style or “tone” of Arendt’s intellectual involvement with reality, which is not the least also due to the alert intellectual attitude and the sensitive Hanseatic understatement practiced by her interlocutor. Gaus and his guest—at the time an internationally renowned intellectual figure and, thanks to the controversy about her book on the Eichmann trial, 2 also somewhat notorious—were a perfect match, as it turned out in the course of the conversation. On this occasion, when answering a question regarding the motives and intentions of her political theorizing, Arendt makes the following remark:
What is really essential to me, I want to say, all these things – with the qualification that nobody knows himself, that one should not look at one’s own cards [dass man sich nicht selber in die Karten gucken soll], that one actually should not do what I am just doing with you – if we suppose all that, I want to say that what is essential to me: I have to understand. 3
We will return to the quite telling answer Arendt provides here with her succinct reference to the concept of “understanding ” which may sound like a commonplace but in fact bears important epistemological implications. For now I want to focus on the qualification preceding the answer, which, by the way, is not included in the published transcriptions of the interview. 4 Arendt does not dwell on the question why she apparently hesitates “to look at her own cards” as a theorist and to go into a more elaborate discussion of her own theory’s intentions and foundations. And unfortunately, her interview partner does not insist on a clarification, as he does in a number of other instances during the conversation. Its laconic nature notwithstanding, however, the remark confirms the impression that Arendt apparently considered an explicit self-reflective inquiry into the nature of her own way of theorizing a rather useless, maybe even detrimental, undertaking. In her occasional remarks on this problem, she insists on dissociating her own perspective from the classical understanding of philosophy , emphasizing that she intends to at least partly “put aside” the peculiar experiences of philosophers and scientists and instead “to fasten our attention on men of action” 5 in order to look at politics , the main subject matter of her reflections, “with eyes unclouded by philosophy.” 6 And she stresses that the term “political theory ” best describes this specific mode of “understanding” political reality. 7 Occasionally, furthermore, she rather “metaphorically and tentatively” indicates the epistemological complexities involved in the intellectual endeavor to “discover and ploddingly pave … anew” the peculiar “small non-time space” in which the mental activity of political theorizing can originate. 8 Nowhere in her work, however, does she more elaborately explain the significance and foundations of this obviously crucial concept of political theory in general or of her specific account of the term in particular.
Hence, while Arendt’s major intellectual commitment as a political thinker was to “understand ” the historical, social, and political reality in which human beings live and act, she did not attempt to systematically understand herself, as it were, in terms of her own mental practice of political theorizing—and ostensibly for principal, maybe also for good reasons. These reasons may have to do with Arendt’s general idea put forth in her theory of action that the answer to the principal question of “who I am” can never be given by myself but only by the many others I interact with. 9 They may also have to do with Arendt’s marked suspicion against the predominant concentration of the social sciences on “methodology ” 10 and with her critique of certain philosophical modes of introspection which she associated, for instance, with René Descartes or Jean-Jacques Rousseau . Arendt was especially ambivalent in her assessment of Rousseau’s political philosophy. Although her explicit statements on Rousseau’s work are highly critical, it is not always completely clear which parts of his thought she outrightly dismissed and which she at least partly and implicitly approved of. What she definitely did not approve of, however, was the kind of systematic attempt to look at one’s own cards in the fashion of the radically explicit introspection as practiced in Rousseau’s Confessions. 11 Even in the very private records of her Denktagebuch, never intended for publication, Arendt observes a conspicuously self-distanced and outwardly (or, in her own words we might say: a “worldly”) oriented intellectual attitude, focusing on the reflection of concrete historical and conceptual problems and above all on her genuine reading of and interpretative controversy with other thinkers. Even in her Denktagebuch, Arendt remains a thinker who almost never speaks about herself.
Be that as it may, to an interpretation of Arendt’s work—that is, to a study where the question of “understanding Arendt” changes from being self-reflective into constituting the very subject matter—Arendt’s reasons to refrain from explicitly reflecting upon her mode of theorizing do not apply, just as they do not apply to Arendt’s own attempts to lay open “the very center” 12 of a work when interpreting the writings of other political thinkers. To the contrary, for an interpretation of Arendt’s work, it is crucial to come to terms exactly with this point which Arendt—convinced that the “method” or “criteria” of a theoretical work “are mercifully hidden from its author though they may be, or, rather, seem to be quite manifest to reader and listener” 13 —refrained from explicitly bothering herself with and instead left to her interpreters. Accordingly, it is not surprising that many of her interpreters have taken up and focused precisely on this question of what it means for Arendt to engage in the practice of political theorizing . It indeed leads into the motivating center of Arendt’s intellectual endeavor. Although lacking a systematic consideration, her writings are firmly engaged in reflecting this question , in epistemological, political, and ethical terms. And her work as a whole provides a genuine answer to this question, not by explicitly addressing it, but by exercising a very peculiar mode of political theorizing.
The present study attempts to bring out this tacit yet important motive of Arendt’s work by making explicit some of the premises and principles of political theory which Arendt followed in her numerous exercises in political thought. Focusing on these rather implicit aspects of Arendt’s political thought and hence attempting to take a look at her cards as a theorist, as it were, I suggest an interpretation of her work in terms of a “wandering” type of political theorizing. According to this interpretation, for Arendt, political theory is a particular mode of understanding reality which is based on a specific experiential position. This position is characterized by two fundamental features. It is, first, characterized by its localization in between philosophy and politics and, for that matter, somewhere at the boundary between the two realms that Arendt used to call the vita activa and the vita contemplativa of human beings and which she understood to be closely intertwined with each other. Second, it is characterized by its distinctly multi-contextual or comparative perspective . Her studies of the Jewish cultural tradition , the German tradition of philosophy, the European modern political history, the American political tradition since the revolutionary and founding era, and the political institutions, practices, and languages of Ancient Greece and Rome render a great variety of comparative empirical insights . Arendt uses these different and partly even contradictory insights to constitute a multi-contextual theoretical perspective by connecting and fusing these different experiential horizons while at the same time articulating the fragmented constellations in which they are empirically embedded.
These two closely interrelated motives are the decisive traits of Arendt’s intellectual self-perception. They connect her various writings, influence the way how she identifies her major problems, determine how she deals with her material, and, most importantly, inspire the way in which she approaches the conceptual question which more explicitly is at the center of her work, namely the meaning of politics. Arendt’s understanding of the practice of political theorizing implies, as we will see, both a genuinely comparative empirical foundation and a gradual epistemological alignment with and at the same time a gradual emancipation from the practice of politics. This complex relation of her own position toward the realm of political action also resonates in her understanding of the political itself, particularly of its spatial dimension. For Arendt, politics is above all an exceedingly variegated practice by which individual persons and communities make themselves “at home” in the world, not in a romanticist sense, but in the sense of participating in common affairs and therewith creating common “spaces” of freedom. Politics is an activity that not only moves within but also constitutes and reproduces those concrete spaces and horizons of meaning that provide the narratives and contexts in which freedom, citizenship, commonsense understanding, political judgment, and being “at home” are individually and collectively realized.
Arendt stresses that, in order to theoretically grasp the practical logic of this activity, it has to be understood on its own terms, from within these manifold practices of creating common spaces of freedom. This is the major reason why the practice of theorizing must emancipate itself from classical philosophy which since Plato always made the mistake, according to Arendt, to observe these practices from a position too remote to provide insight into their peculiar meaning. At the same time, also theory itself does not immediately participate in these practices. To Arendt, political action and political theory as mental activities are akin, but they are not identical. As a consequence, the intellectual endeavor of political theory for Arendt aims at actualizing a m...