Arendt on the Political by David Arndt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019 Review by Ellen M. Rigsby
David Arndt’s (henceforth David A.) Arendt on the Political is an account of Hannah Arendt’s theory of politics. Instead of understanding politics from a philosophical perspective, we should choose to understand what the “nontheoretical forms of thought that prevail in politics” tell us (85). He asks us to largely bracket political theorizing and come down from the realm of philosophy to consider the world of action. And his subject is Arendt because she is the only thinker to try to uncover the aspects of politics that are effaced by our philosophical approaches to it. One may well ask, is this not what political theorists have been doing with Arendt’s work since at least George Kateb’s Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil was published in 1983?1 But David A. argues that political philosophy elides Arendt’s fundamental account of politics with political theorizing, that is, with what he calls “concerns with the eternal, the necessary and the general” (84). It is philosophy’s method of distillation from the specific to the general that causes us to misunderstand what politics means for the life of action, and instead explains what it is for the life of the mind. His introduction ends with a quote from page 20 of Arendt’s Essay in Understanding “Every thought is an afterthought, that is, a reflection on some matter or event.” The purpose of this book, then, is to elucidate Arendt’s understanding of politics so that we can eliminate the confusions about politics that come from not just Arendt’s life, but from our contemporary life. The reason for engaging in this process is that “her work is an effort to understand the deepest differences between democratic politics and the antipolitics of totalitarianism” (32). And while he does not explicitly say so, the confusions he elaborates on, largely from Arendt’s The Human Condition, are also laid at the door of contemporary politics. It is not only that Arendt’s understanding of politics elucidates how political theory misses seeing the life of action, but also that that mistake sends us on the way to the antipolitics of totalitarianism, and that our particular political moment is enacting this confusion. Conceptually speaking, our confusion of philosophizing with understanding politics obfuscates several fundamental aspects of politics that he distills from Arendt’s work. Specifically: because our political discourse tends to make everything political, we lose the genuine sense of politics; because we speak of politics in Social Darwinist or other discursive formats that control its
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