Amor Mundi 5/12/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
The Closing Arguments at Guantanamo
With the conditions at the United States military detention facility in Guantanamo recently coming under scrutiny comes renewed attention to the case of Mohammed Jawad, the first Guantanamo detainee to testify, under oath and to a military commission, that he had been tortured while being held. Last month, a dramatic reading of statements made by Jawad's lawyer, David Frakt, juxtaposed with statements made by the case's lead prosecutor, Darrel Vandervelde, who left the military in order to help free Jawad, was held at the Pen World Voices Festival of International Literature. In their statements, both men use the language of Constitutionality to suggest that, by torturing detainees such as Jawad, "America," as Frakt puts it, "lost a little of its greatness." Vandervelde writes of his choice to testify in favor of Jawad: "I did it because I believe in truth, justice, the rule of law, and our common humanity. I did it for Mohammed Jawad, I did it because it was my duty, and I did it for us all."
A.O. Hirschman, Philosopher of the World
Cass Sunstein summarizes Jeremy Adelman's recent, and massive, biography of the twentieth century scholar Albert Hirschman. Describing him as a thinker whose work has direct relevance to today's questions, Sunstein both praises Adelman's work and Hirschman's, saying of the latter: "He insisted that human history provides stories, intricate and often nonrepeatable,' which 'look more like tricks history has up its sleeve than like social-scientific regularities, not to speak of laws.'" Hirschman sought, Sunstein writes, "to "prove Hamlet wrong." In Shakespeare's account, Hamlet is immobilized and defeated by doubt. Hirschman was a great believer in doubt-he never doubted it-and he certainly doubted his own convictions. At a conference designed to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his first book, who else would take the opportunity to show that one of his own central arguments was wrong? Who else would publish an essay in The American Economic Review exploring the "overproduction of opinionated opinion," questioning the value of having strong opinions, and emphasizing the importance of doubting one's opinions and even one's tastes? Hirschman thought that strong opinions, as such, "might be dangerous to the health of our democracy," because they are an obstacle to mutual understanding and constructive problem-solving. Writing in 1989, he was not speaking of the current political culture, but he might as well have been."
Kelefa Sanneh reviews in The New Yorker; The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber and Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott. Graeber, an anthropologist, became famous as one of the intellectual leaders of Occupy Wall Street. Scott is also an anthropologist and a fellow anarchist. "Graeber did his anthropological field work in the highlands of Madagascar, and Scott did his in Southeast Asia, but their conclusions were similar. Both of them encountered communities that lived more or less autonomously, finding ways to resist or ignore whatever governments claimed jurisdiction over them. And both are eager to expand the history of lived anarchism beyond Paris and Catalonia; it is, they argue, broader and more common than we've been taught." Sanneh understands that "in America anarchism's appeal surely has something to do with the seeming durability of our current arrangement, and the inexorable growth of the government that maintains it. Such is the power of a sprawling and sophisticated state: the bigger it gets, the easier it becomes for us to imagine that we could live without it."
Julia Hobsbawm gives her father, the historian Eric Hobsbawm, a eulogy with familial warmth that is well aware of his global stature. Still, she focuses mostly on his love for her, for ideas and, importantly, for books of all kinds: "I called his mobile to check in and asked if he needed anything. He had a big sweet tooth and I expected him to ask for some fruit jellies, a favourite, or perhaps some dark chocolate. 'I managed to bring a most turgid book in with me, he said apologetically. 'Would you mind getting me something better?' It turned out that the book he had picked up, assuming it was the last he would ever hold, was a German edition of The Brothers Karamazov, and with the crisis over it was now not to his liking. Knowing his weakness for thrillers - one book wall is covered in the Penguin crime paperbacks with the green spines, his old Ed McBains and more recently Elmore Leonards - I brought him in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. It got him through the hospital tedium and even prompted a rather racy discussion about how much marital bed-hopping it featured. 'Too much,' he declared."
In Praise of the Self Suspicious Journalist
Alice Gregory praises author and essayist Janet Malcolm, highlighting in particular her suspicion of the truth claim of any narrative: "Malcolm would say that any story-and especially a well-told and well-reported one-is inevitably a distortion. Throughout her career, she has insisted upon this. 'The realities of characters in fiction-and of their cousins in journalism-derives precisely from the bold, almost childlike strokes from which they are drawn,' she writes in Reading Chekhov."
The Official U.S. Opening of the biopic, Hannah Arendt in NYC
May 29, 2013 at Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St., NYC at 7:45 PM
Film followed by discussion with the director; Margarethe von Trotta, the screenwriter; Pam Katz, Barbara Sukowa and Janet McTeer (playing Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy.)
Buy tickets and learn more here.
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Arendt Center Blog, Jeffrey Champlin talks Arnold Geheln on Arendt and considers Arendt's relationship to philosophical anthropology.
Arendt on Narrative Theory and Practice
“Arendt on Narrative Theory and Practice”
Allen Speight, College Literature, Volume 38, Number 1, Winter 2011, pp. 115-130
Allen Speight, Director, Institute for Philosophy and Religion at Boston University, argues for Arendt’s place among theorists of narrative such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Talyor, and Paul Ricouer. While he does indicate contemporary questions in both the Anglo-American and continental traditions throughout the article, he delivers particularly rich insights into Arendt’s engagement with three canonical thinkers. Specifically, he highlights aspects of Arendt’s use of conceptions of narration in developing her ideas of action in The Human Condition. In each aspect, he sees Arendt drawing on a specific philosophical precursor—Aristotle, Hegel, and Augustine in turn—but also diverging from them.
In relation to Aristotle, Speight focuses on how action reveals the “who,” how the actor emerges not from his intention but from his impact on the world. As does Aristotle, Arendt places a strong focus on drama. Aristotle and Arendt both hold that “dramatic actions” allow us to “construe what sort of a character an agent has.” However, rather than focusing on the reception of the audience, Arendt links the spectator to the actor. Indeed, expanding from Speight’s interpretation, we might say Arendt opens another center in the actor himself with her idea of the daimon, who watches over one’s shoulder.
From Hegel, Speight sees Arendt picking up on the tragic nature of action and how this leads to a need for forgiveness. The agent will not get what he wants and indeed often perish due to effects that he cannot foresee. Speight makes a striking link to Hegel here:
“A stone thrown is the devil’s,” Hegel liked to say: action by its nature is not something construable in given terms but is a kind of “stepping-forth” or opening up of the unexpected and unpredictable (Elements of the Philosophy of Right.) The classic, tragic examples of action in its openness—Antigone’s deed, for example, which both Hegel and Arendt were drawn to—present in an intensified way what is an underlying condition within ordinary action, one requiring the need for some means of reconciliation.
With the line “A stone thrown is the devil’s,” Hegel lets the personified evil step in as a kind of holding place that opens the question of how the effect of action will change the actor. Unlike Hegel though, the ultimate judge is not institutionalized world history, but the world as the space in which the who is revealed.
Stepping back chronologically, Speight then turns to Augustine as a source of Arendt’s idea of narrative rebirth. Here he picks up on an existentialist debate through Sartre: given that one’s account of one’s life can change it fundamentally, do we have a responsibility to an authentic narration? To what extent are we free when we tell our own stories? Arendt rejects the possibility that a life can simply me “made” in narrative. However:
for Arendt the distinction between a life that is “lived” and a story that is “made” involves two distinctly non-Sartrean consequences. The first we have already seen in her “daimõn thesis”: that precisely because we live rather than make a life, there is a privileged—but (pace Sartre) a not necessarily false—retrospective position from which we must view the “who,“ the daimõn, that is revealed in our lives. Thus, as we have seen, the “who” is visible “ex post facto through action and speech” (Arendt 1958, 186) and this retrospectivity in turn privileges the work of the discerning interpretive historian or storyteller. (121)
I find Speight’s repeated discussion of the daimon particularly relevant, since it offers an original way to talk about the belatedness of knowledge, of how it can comes later, or even from the side, without privileging an end position as Hegel does.
In the second half of his article, Speight offers a reading of Men in Dark Times that illustrates how Arendt uses these three aspects of her narrative theory in her own practice of narration. His reading the sections on Jaspers and Waldemar Gurian explicitly link the question of the daimon, biography, and how a person come to appearance in the public realm. Readers following the growing subsection of Arendt scholarship engaged with Arendt’s literary dimension will find an original effort here that offers a model for future work connecting Arendt’s theoretical articulations with her writing practice.
-Jeffrey Champlin
Habermas on Arendt’s Conception of Power
Jürgen Habermas sees Arendt as usefully placing emphasis on the origin of power as opposed to its means of employment. In contrast to Max Weber, who understands power in terms of particular individuals seeking to realize a fixed goal, she separates power from the telos (end), developing what Habermas calls a theory of power as "communicative action". This formulation gestures towards his own conceptual language (see Theory of Communicative Action, 1981) and in Arendt he names plurality as the condition for communication, quickly moving from distinctness to connection:
"The spatial dimension of the life-world is determined by the "fact of human plurality": every interaction unifies multiple perspectives of perception and action of those present […]"
Perceptively-and provocatively-Habermas compliments this description of the spatial dimension of the world with a temporal one:
"The temporal dimension of the life-world is determined by the "fact of human natality": the birth of every individual means the possibility of a new beginning; to act means to be able to seize the initiative and to do the unanticipated."
In this description, we see that a kind of conceptual past allows something new to happen in the future. Further, the reference to the past is singular ("the birth of every individual") but allows action between people. So in natality, as Habermas describes it, we go from the past to the future and the individual to the group. The very emphasis on the origin of power, however, raises the question of how it is to endure over time. The phrase "temporal dimension of the life-world" points to this problem: how to use power in the future when, as Arendt writes in the Human Condition: "power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies." This citation helpfully emphasizes that power shouldn't be seen as capital that can be deployed at the time that a ruler or executive wishes. Arendt suggests instead that it cannot be virtualized, that it always exists in a one to one relation with opinion as it shifts.
Habermas ultimately accuses Arendt of a sleight of hand in taking refuge in the idea of the contract to solve the problem of her radical conception of action. In ending his article with an emphasis on the "contract theory of natural law" however, he overlooks the difference between a promise and a contract in Arendt. The promise offers individual stability of one's identity over time in the same way that the contract offers consistency to group action and both in a sense win consistency through the virtual. In both cases the reality of identity comes into being only over time. However, there is a different kind of "storage" in the model of the promise than the one we imagine with capital. Arendt suggests the contract as a way to make a short term structure that retains flexibility that the idea of stockpiled power does not.
-Jeffrey Champlin
Guided Into the World
"Heidegger is wrong: man is not “thrown” “in the world;” if we are thrown, then – no differently from animals – onto the earth. Man is precisely guided, not thrown, precisely for that reason his continuity arises and the way he belongs appears. Poor us, if we are thrown into the world!"
"Heidegger hat unrecht: “in die Welt” ist der Mensch nicht “geworfen;” wenn wir geworfen sind, so – nicht anders als die Tiere – auf die Erde. In die Welt gerade wird der Mensch geleitet, nicht geworfen, da gerade stellt sich seine Kontinuität her und offenbart seine Zugehörigkeit. Wehe uns, wenn wir in die Welt geworfen werden!"
-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, Notebook 21, Section 68, August, 1955
Hannah Arendt follows her teacher Martin Heidegger in casting the classical philosophical question of the relation of the one and the many as the relationship between the individual and the world. Like the early Heidegger, she emphasizes the future, but she more frequently combines conceptual and narrative explication. For Arendt, freedom is at stake, the freedom of plural humanity that can call on, but cannot be reduced to, guiding ideas of tradition or authority. Yet while she consistently defends freedom through action that cannot be tied to the logic of the past or an assumed goal in the future, her thinking has both a moment of freedom and concern with connection to the past.
In Being and Time, Heidegger’s idea of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) offers a conceptual hinge between a limitation and expansion of freedom. On the one hand, the thrown “Dasein” cannot choose to come into the world, much less into a particular world. On the other hand, once situated in a field of relations, possibilities open that allow Dasein to fashion a sense of the future and self-knowledge.
Arendt can be seen to ask how exactly we are to recognize the original condition of being thrown in such a way that new possibilities open up. Her objection to Heidegger in the passage above takes a subtle linguistic path that shows how her method of reading inflects her philosophical ideas. Rather than holding exclusively to the conceptual development of “thrownness,” she offers a terminological challenge. She says that man is only thrown into the natural “earth,” not the humanly-made “world.” In inserting this distinction between the earth and the world, she reads “geworfen” not abstractly as “thrown,” but concretely, implying that she has in mind a second use of the German verb "werfen:" to refer to animals giving birth.
Arendt wants to leave the merely animal behind. The German verb “leiten” that I have translated here as “guided” could also mean to direct, to conduct, to lead, to govern. Thinking ahead to Arendt’s writing on education, I hear a connection to “begleiten,” which means to accompany. The guiding that one receives gives a sense of continuing and belonging to a greater world. Heidegger insists that Dasein does not choose to be thrown into a specific world, we are born without our choice or input. For Arendt, this is our earthliness and she emphasizes the difference between the human world and the given earth. With respect to the world, she highlights the connection to others from the start. Since others exist before the entrance of the newcomer, we also assume responsibility for their entry to the world. One must be educated into the world, which is not simply the earth, but the humanly constructed edifice that includes history and memory and the polis.
Dana Villa and Peg Birmingham suggest that Arendt replaces Heidegger’s “geworfen” with “geboren” (“thrown” with “born”). The passage from the Thought Diary above shows the complexity of this substitution and that it only works by changing the context to the world rather than earth. However, while the quote shows that Arendt relegates Heidegger’s thrownness to the realm of the earth and body, her own idea of “natality” brings the body back to her thinking of freedom. Being born is very important for Arendt, but not in Heidegger’s sense. If "werfen" can refer to animals giving birth, Arendt works out a specific way in which humans are born, one that emphasizes a liberating break from the earth. Humans, as Arendt will say in The Human Condition, are born with the ability to start something completely new.
I think Arendt would say that we are always guided in a certain way. This leads us to ask if today we are making a choice as a society to abdicate explicit reflection and responsibility regarding the terms of guidance, either by “outsourcing” these decisions to experts or assuming that individuals can still make rational choices in the face of corporations and institutions that carefully take advantage of cognitive limitations. In other words: In what ways are people guided into the world that we do not think about, and how could reflection help us here?
On the other hand, the note ends with an existential lament that reminds us of the Romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin’s “weh mir” (“poor me”). After noting how she thinks Heidegger is wrong to see us thrown into the world, Arendt returns us to his despair; but the despair she imagines arises insofar as we are thrown into the world—which would mean that we lose the world as a humanly built home.
-Jeffrey Champlin
Born into a World of Plurality
“We are born into this world of plurality where father and mother stand ready for us, ready to receive us and welcome us and guide us and prove that we are not strangers.”
-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch
Notebook 19, Section 39, Feburary, 1954
When Rousseau opens Of The Social Contract with the striking phrase "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” he sets up a stark opposition between nature and culture that powers his reconsideration of social bonds. Hannah Arendt also speaks of birth to open the problem of freedom but rather than relegating it to a merely natural state she employs it within a wide variety of narratives, figures of speech, and explanations of novel concepts. Most famously, she employs the term “natality” in The Human Condition to work out a thinking of freedom that offers true interruption and surprise in the face of growing historical and technological automation in the second half of the 20th century. Although Arendt's Thought Diary does not reveal the kind of precise development of natality that would satisfy the demands of scholars of Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts), a number of entries refer to birth in a manner that illuminates her later work by establishing sites of concern and questioning.
In the passage above, we see Arendt honing in on the connection between man and world to establish a relation that at first appears surprisingly untroubled to readers of her later work. She describes the mother and father as being there for the child in four ways. In being “ready,” they have prepared for him in advance. They will “receive” him, bringing him to the place that they made. In “welcoming” we might think of additional signs of acceptance that indicate a broader, social incorporation. Further, the parents do not just take in the child at that moment, but offer to “guide” him, accompanying him for a time in the world. The parents do all of this to show that the child belongs, but in Arendt’s repetitions I see an awareness of the difficult amount of work needed in this regard. Moreover, in the “we” of the last line the reader might see not just another reference to the child but to the parents as well. The repeated welcome affirms the place of the parents and child.
The passage above helps us consider society’s response to the newcomer in contrast to Arendt’s idea of “second birth” in which an individual moves beyond the welcome of the world. Now one takes one’s stance in relation to the world by reflecting on the distinction between actual birth and an idea of freedom that emerges from thinking about birth. In chapter 5 of the Human Condition, Arendt writes: "With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our physical appearance." By speaking of insertion, she indicates making room, a gesture of opening a place. In the second birth, one realizes that the plurality of the world does not simply pre-exist but that our own arrival refigures it.
The two kinds of birth that Arendt describes lead us to reflect on the pressures of globalization and the continuing debt crisis in a new light. With the immense weight of previous decisions assigned to them even before they are able to assume a role in society, young people might never reach the stage of feeling that they are “not strangers.” From this starting point, without having a sense of the welcome of the first birth, they may not be able to make the leap through the “like” to the second birth of making a change in the world.
-Jeffrey Champlin
Does the President Matter? Arendt Center Fall Conference Lineup
The Hannah Arendt Center's Fifth Annual Fall Conference will take place on September 21-22, 2012 at Olin Hall at Bard College. A mere five weeks before the upcoming presidential election, the topic could not be any more timely:
DOES THE PRESIDENT MATTER?
A CONFERENCE ON THE AMERICAN AGE OF POLITICAL DISREPAIR
Click here to learn about the keynote speakers and attendees.
Denktagebuch Conference at the Hannah Arendt Center
This is an exciting week at the Hannah Arendt Center. We are in the middle of the first annual Arendt Center Working Group Conference. The gathering was conceived to bring together humanities scholars from around the world to read, discuss, and think about one particular book in detail. This year's volume is the recently published Denktagebuch (or "book of thoughts") by Hannah Arendt.
Our illustrious participants for this conference are:
Ursula Ludz - Ludz is one of the editors of Denktagebuch as well as the sole editor of Letters: 1925-1975 by Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. She also compiled the penetrating paperback Ich Will Verstehen (I will Understand), which contains a collection of autobiographical statements by Hannah Arendt and a complete bibliography of her works. Additionally, she is a member of the editorial staff of the internet journal Hannaharendt.net.
Roger Berkowitz - Berkowitz is the Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center and an Associate Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, and the editor and a contributor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics.
Jeffrey Champlin - Champlin was a 2011-2012 fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center with a Ph.D. in German from NYU. He taught at Bard this past year and will be teaching in Palestine in the fall as part of the Bard/ Al Quds Partnership.
Thomas Wild - Wild, a pre-eminant Hannah Arendt scholar from Germany will be joining the Bard faculty teaching German this fall. He will also be a Research Associate at the Hannah Arendt Center. He has published several books on Arendt including an "intellectual biography" of Hannah Arendt, and a monograph on Hannah Arendt's relationships with key postwar German writers.
Tracy Strong - Strong is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UC San Diego with a Ph.D from Harvard University.He is the author of numerous books including Politics Without Vision: thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary.
Anne O'Byrne - O'Byrne is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. Her field of research is 20th century and contemporary European philosophy. In her articles she investigates the political and ontological questions that arise around embodiment, labor, gender, and pedagogy using the work of authors such as Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean Baudrillard and Julia Kristeva.
Wout Cornelissen - Cornelissen is an Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy at VU University Amsterdam. His Dissertation project is ‘Conceptions of the Political in the Work of Karl Popper, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt.’
Patchen Markell - Markell is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University and writes and teaches about Hannah Arendt as well as on figures such as Hegel, Marx, and Aristotle. His first book, Bound by Recognition was published in 2003. He is currently at work on a book-length study of Arendt's The Human Condition.
Christina Tarnopolsky - Tarnopolsky is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at McGill University in Quebec. Her research interests include Classical Political Philosophy; Contemporary Social Theory; Emotions and Politics; Aesthetics and Politics. Her book, Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants: Plato’s Gorgias and the Politics of Shame was published in 2010.
Ian Storey - Storey will be a Junior Teaching Fellow at the Arendt Center for 2012-2013. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago where he has been teaching since 2009. His article, "Kant’s Dilemma and the Double Life of Citizenship” will be published shortly.
We held a welcome dinner in the attendees honor at an Suminski Innski on the Hudson River in Tivoli.
Education in a Transitory World – Jeffrey Champlin
"Basically we are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of joint, for this is the basic human situation, in which the world is created by mortal hands to serve mortals for a limited time as home."
-Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future
Facing the command of the ghost, Hamlet laments his task of revealing that his uncle murdered his father to rule Denmark: "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right." As the heir to the throne, Hamlet's personal situation is inherently political and Shakespeare's tragedy stages the premature death of the father as genealogical break that raises the question of succession. Arendt generalizes Hamlet's words in a manner that might appear paradoxical at first: how can the world always be becoming out of joint? Is there never a moment of rest or cohesion from which the disjunction starts?
Her conception of finitude is key here: humans make a world (comprised of structures and practices of living together) that lasts only for a set period. In this sense "home" for Arendt does not offer the permanent refuge that philosophers and poets often long for. The crisis in education that she writes of in the late 1950s is in part one of a particular time and place. She does critique specific pedagogical trends such as an emphasis on play-like activities in the classroom over "the gradually acquired habit of work." In a broader sense, however, the crisis of education actually responds to the crisis in authority that she sees occurring over a long historical arc. While she recognizes the declining power of the parent, teacher, and expert, however, Arendt does not merely advocate a harsh return to old models. Instead she advocates a "minimum of conservation" that allows the most basic operation of reinterpreting the past based on new conditions. The word "education" derives from the Latin root ēdūcĕre, meaning "to lead forth" but for Arendt such a journey could have little confidence in its destination.
Political and economic shifts in the post Cold-War era have put pressure on education such that today it is increasingly charged with directly preparing students for integration into a system of world trade. Students have in recent months raised demands against student debt in higher education which is the result of a system of individual financing that appears less reasonable to those now facing uncertain careers.
At the same time, higher education budgets continue to be cut in general (especially at public institutions) and the Humanities continue to come under specific attack, usually under the rubric of lack of immediate relevance. Rising debt without prospect of repayment and budget cuts both suggest something worse than a crisis in education: a threat to education itself in its role in transmitting ideas of the past in order to enable the new generation to reconfigure a common world.
Representation in Absentia-Jeffrey Champlin
“Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoint of those who are absent; that is, I represent them.”
-Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” Between Past and Future
When Arendt first refers to political representation, we might think we are on familiar ground. After all, the question of how to move from the citizen to the representative was a vexing problem for the founders of the United States, one that resulted in the creation of the House of Representatives and Senate. The Great Compromise was a way of balancing the representation of small and large states, and the troubling Three-Fifths Compromise sought to guarantee representation to the southern states while preserving slavery. Today, the debate over the influence of lobbyists, political donations, and corporate personhood speaks to a renewed concern over how politicians can best represent the interests of voters.
Arendt does address questions of political representation of this sort in her detailed examination of the move from the late colonial period to the passage of the Constitution in On Revolution. In the above quote, she speaks of “political thought” in terms of the mental process of an individual—one who asks himself, "what would others who are absent think?" Moving from the objective statement of the first sentence to the subjective “I” of the second, she performs what she explains, bringing us inside the mind of someone who thinks through representation. The political subject does not hold on to essential or deeply rooted beliefs, but instead considers one position and then another. One might think of a sequence in a movie that switches between subjective angles, showing how a number of characters view a scene without ever moving back to an objective angle that shows them from outside. The effort of representative thinking is, first, to think from as many viewpoints as possible. This is, at least in part, what Arendt means by "enlarged thinking."
It is important to emphasize that representation does not simply repeat or copy the multiple points of view of others. One does not, for example, ask others what they think and then consider it. Instead, she says those to whom the standpoint belongs are “are absent.” Since they are not there, a space opens in which I can create a version of their view in my mind.
Rather than re-presentation in the strict sense, it is a matter of creatively presenting. In representing all of those who are absent, I must then seek to make a judgment and judge what opinion all of those people would and should share. In such a way, political thought, as representational thought, requires that I make judgments about what all people should agree upon.
From here we would want to move to a careful study of Arendt’s claim that Kant’s aesthetic third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, has important political implications that Kant himself never recognized. A condensed version of this argument in Between Past and Future speaks of "wooing," or persuading, others from one's individual position. An example might be drawn from the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has gained attention in part as a platform for individual stories about injustice. From an Arendtian point of view, the success of the movement would depend on making personal insights universal by imaginatively listening to others. In this way, one does not merely tell of one's own experience but represents the truth. Of course, to speak of representing the truth here requires that we guard against traditional prejudices. For Arendt the truth and the universal are not pre-given but constructed through action an not eternal but rather exist for a determinite period of time.
-Jeffrey Champlin
The Weakening of Power Through Violence
"Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it."
--Hannah Arendt, On Violence
As revolutionary movements take flight in the Middle East and around the world, many today look back to the 1960s with a romantic fascination. Hannah Arendt had great respect for the student protest movements—most of all she appreciated the joy they took in acting in public. And yet, she was also critical of the use of violence. Arendt approached political violence during the late 1960s as a sign of the decline in power.
In her engagement with the rhetoric of the student movement, Arendt identified what she took to be a key misunderstanding: the belief that violence could create power. In her lexicon, however, violence is not the outward manifestation of power but a sign of its decline. Power draws citizens to work for and with a government; violence, seeks to force such compliance. According to her colorful example, only perfectly obedient “robot soldiers” could overcome the basic dependence of governors on the support of their citizens.
True power depends on a strong representative link: a person is in power to the extent that others empower him. Arendt appeals to James Madison’s words “all government rests on opinion” to support this assertion. Governmental power requires citizen support.
And following the law recommits the citizen and the government to the original grant of power. Such extension sustains the decision that grounded the institution through the original action (in Arendt's sense of the ability of people to come together to create something new).
Since power relies on empowerment over time rather than a simple earlier instance of foundation or enforcement through violence, Arendt sees it as fragile. Power can be lost at any moment. In her further reflections in On Violence she addresses the complex ways in which a government’s very response to violent protest can undermine its own power in the sense of being empowered. For both supporters and challengers of a regime, only action, not violence, can create power.
Jeffrey Champlin
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