Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil by George Kateb

Review by: Ronald Beiner

Source: Political Theory, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Nov., 1985), pp. 626-630
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191619
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POLITICAL THEORY / November 1985

argues, is due to the continuing influence of positivistic conceptions of

explanation and confirmation in the sciences according to which Marx's
hypotheses are regarded as "covering laws" from which empirical
propositions can be deduced. Miller's case for the mode of production
interpretation is that Marxist explanation is satisfied not when general
laws are invoked to predict specific outcomes, but when there is a full
and adequate description of the causal mechanisms that produce change
when change does in fact occur (pp. 276, 284). Explanation, then, is
always retrodictive or, as Marx put it, always comes "post festum."
Miller's argument has the virtue of weening Marx away from positivism
and its narrow conception of explanation that he claims even "thoughtful" positivists have abandoned. Its disadvantage is that it turns
Marxism into a kind of eclecticism in which the primacy of the
productive forces loses its privileged position.

-Steven B. Smith
Yale University

HANNAH ARENDT: POLITICS, CONSCIENCE, EVIL by George

Kateb. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983. Pp. xi, 204. $24.95.
The literature on Hannah Arendt tends on the whole to be
undistinguished. Reactions to her work range from ill-tempered irritation (and even rage), to bland approbation, to blind enthusiasm. It is
refreshing, therefore, to be presented with a considered, well-pondered,
well-written, and thoroughly thoughtful commentary on her by George
Kateb. Kateb's work manages to rise above the dismal quality of many
of the other commentaries perhaps because he always speaks with his
own distinctive voice, which has a considerable power of its own. He
strives neither to condemn Arendt nor to celebrate her, but always to
address her as a thinker and to engage her concerns from the perspective
of his own.
Kateb's concern is the relation between Arendt'sthought and modern
democracy. He believes that an encounter with her critique can help to
revitalize and invigorate the theory of modern democracy. Kateb begins

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at the right place, with the closing passage of On Revolution. There

Arendt cites the wisdom attributed by Sophocles to Silenus: that not to
be born is best of all, but second-best is for life, once it has appeared, "to
go as swiftly as possible whence it came." In answer to this challenge of
Silenian wisdom, Arendt refers to the freedom and splendor of the polis,
which enabled citizens "to bear life's burden."
Kateb wishes to restore to this passage its full shock value, its
foreignness. Politics as that which alone gives meaning to an otherwise
intolerable existence? Politics as the redemption of life's burden? Kateb
is right to force us to consider how much this flies in the face of our
commonly received evaluations of politics. The problem Kateb raises is
this: If political action possesses an existential supremacy such that it
alone is valuable in itself, and therefore withstands the wisdom of
Silenus, then politics cannot be subordinated to moral considerations. If
politics, not morality, confers worth and meaning upon human life, then
political action stands, strictly speaking, "beyond good and evil." Kateb
concludes his critique by stating openly what he says Arendt tries to
evade-although she comes close to conceding the fact-that only the
activities of the mind, philosophy and poetry, not political action, can
ultimately rebut the wisdom of Silenus.
Kateb's basic starting point is a moral commitment to representative
democracy, and it is this that places him at loggerheads with Arendt. For
Kateb, representative democracy rests upon a moral vision, and is
inseparable from certain shared conceptions of justice. By contrast,
Arendt's general inclination is to consign morality to the private sphere,
and to characterize political action in terms that abstract from moral
motivations. What follows for Kateb, therefore, is that a defense of
modern democracy dictates a critique of Arendt's dichotomy between
politics and morality.
There is little doubt that much of political action at its best grows out
of moral concerns. Arendt herself can hardly fail to acknowledge this,
although the acknowledgment does not figure centrally in the analysis
in The Human Condition. In a statement cited by Kateb, Arendt says,
"Rosa Luxemburg was very much concerned with the world and not at
all concerned with herself... she couldn't stand the injustice within the
world. Whether the criterion is glory . . . or whether the criterion is

justice, that is not the decisive thing. The decisive thing is whether your
own motivation is clear-for the world-or, for yourself." More
important, Arendt, in Crises of the Republic, praises student activists
because their motivation is moral. Quite often, the divergence between

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POLITICAL THEORY / November 1985

Kateb and Arendt is one of emphasis more than anything, but with a
writer of Kateb's powers of discrimination, getting the emphasis right is
all-important.
Kateb's chapter on civil disobedience is a defense of Socrates and
Thoreau against Arendt's critique of conscience in politics. Arendt
impugns their citizenship, saying that they were more concerned with
being true to themselves than with being true citizens, whereas Kateb
tries to show that their commitment to the politics of conscience did not
detract from, but rather expressed, their citizenship. In his chapter on
modern democracy, Kateb exploits the following tension in Arendt's
work: that whereas The Origins of Totalitarianism assumes a commitment to constitutional government (that finds its only present-day
expression in representative democracy), in her other works she treats
existing embodiments of constitutional politics as a negligible good in
relation to her ideal of "participatory citizenship." Kateb concludes
with a defense of modernity, which is at the same time a defense of
"moderate alienation." Kateb bases this defense on the ideal of
democratic individuality drawn from his heroes: Emerson, Thoreau,
and Whitman.
The answer to this argument is that the practice ratherthan the theory
of representativedemocracy indicates a radically attenuated experience
of citizenship and, furthermore, that totalitarianism, in turn, is an
outgrowth of enfeebled citizenship. If this analysis is correct, the
antitotalitarian theorist may have cause not to celebrate modern
democracy but to be fearful of its consequences. It may be that Arendt's
experience of representative institutions in Weimar Germany led her to
dwell on the weaknesses, rather than the strengths, of liberalism.
Arendt's apprehensions on this score (and with them, her ambiguous
relationto liberalism)are captured best in a passage from an unpublished
essay entitled "The Eggs Speak Up": "Liberalism,the only ideology that
ever tried to articulate and interpretthe genuinely sound elements of free
societies, has demonstrated its inability to resist totalitarianism so often
that its failure may already be counted among the historical facts of our
century."
In the face of Kateb's critique, several further points can be made on
Arendt's behalf. First, although it is incontestable that politics draws
sustenance (and content) from the pursuit of moral purposes, it is worth
noting that Arendt theorizes in the context of a world that not only
suffers from injustice and social deprivation but that is also massively

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depoliticized; a world in which citizenship is a memory, not a reality. The

basic argument between Kateb and Arendt is that he sees representative
democracy in terms of its displays of citizenship, whereas she tends to
see it as a failure or abdication of citizenship; Kateb views the
relationship between the people and their representatives as an active
one, whereas she views it as an essentially passive relationship. It is
difficult not to construe the latest electoral performance of American
representative democracy as supporting Arendt's case rather than
Kateb's.
Second, Kateb overplays the existentialist overtones of Arendt's
theory. The emphasis for Arendt is not the desire of the political actor to
live with existential intensity, but the desire to live in a public world.
Finally, when Kateb criticizes Arendt for being too sweeping in her
protest against alienation and in her commitment to worldliness, he
does not give sufficient weight to something that should be evident: that
from Arendt's point of view it is such a struggle to make ourselves at
home in the world precisely because we come into the world as strangers.
As Kateb shows in his last chapter, the guiding intention of Arendt's
work is to foster not just acceptance of the conditions of human
existence, but gratitude for what is. Arendt's affirmation of worldliness
is a triumph over Greek (and Kantian) pessimism, as well as a challenge
to the peculiar "world-alienation"of modernity (which Kateb describes
as a kind of resentment of the human condition in its conditionedness,
resentment of "limitation as such"). In embracing worldliness, what
Arendt seeks is a gratitude or receptivity toward the phenomena of the
world, but without passivity or a submissive amorfati; that is, she seeks,
as Nietzsche and Heidegger do, to exult in the world of appearances, yet
without Nietzschean or Heideggerian fatalism. As Kateb remarksin one
place, "It is as if her own return to the Greeks is a way both of
sublimating the pessimism that totalitarianism induced in her and
finding a worldly rebuttal to it."
The decisive difference betwen Kateb's critique of Arendt and those
of other critics is that each of Kateb's criticisms flows from respect for
her thought, and from the effort to understand her. Ideas that others
would hurry to dismiss are given a fair hearing. Although never
abstaining from criticism, Kateb matches Arendt's hermeneutic "generosity," as he calls it, with a generosity of his own. Kateb's survey of her
book on totalitarianism is particularly outstanding. Kateb, like Arendt,
is concerned above all to understand, to gain an internal comprehension

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POLITICAL THEORY / November 1985

of events in the political realm that seem almost to defy understanding,

and his humane judgment always holds in check the urge to judge too
quickly. It is a testimony to the powerful integrity of Arendt's thought
that it could elicit such a rich and well-crafted response.

RonaldBeiner
University of Toronto

GUILDS AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN EUROPEAN POLITICAL

THOUGHTFROM THE TWELFTH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT
by Anthony Black. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Pp. xv,
280. $32.50.
Nostalgia for lost community and atavistic longings for the recovery
of real or mythical communities of the past have been a recurrentfeature
in Western history. The theme of lost community was present in both
late medieval and early modern mentality and revolutionary doctrines
in the form of what I have elsewhere called the ideology of the normative
past. It took on fresh life in the romantic era and has also been one of the
stronger notes of contemporary culture and radical sentiment since the
1960s. Contemplating industrial society, John Ruskin and William
Morris wished to renew the lost craft fellowship they attributed to the
life of the Middle Ages; and although the book under review doesn't
mention it, Ruskin established his Guild of St. George to this end.
Modern Western intellectuals, conservative and radical alike, also
frequently lament the destruction of community as the price paid for the
benefits bestowed by the liberal or social democratic welfare state. In
recent sociology, likewise, the concept of mass society and its related
anomie reflects anxiety and regret over the disintegration of communal
bonds consequent on the industrial and postindustrial economic and
political order.
It is a noteworthy fact, however, that Western political thought
across the centuries has shown comparatively little interest in the forms
of communal life contained within society or polity. Its main effort has
been to understand the polity in general, its types and functions, the
nature of its justice, and the obligations and rights of its members, both

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