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Hannah Arendt's Theory of Freedom: a Reinterpretation

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Hannah Arendt's Theory of Freedom: a Reinterpretation View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Birmingham Research Archive, E-theses Repository Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Freedom: A Reinterpretation By Luke Neal A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Political Science and International Studies School of Government and Society College of Social Sciences University of Birmingham September 2015 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract Freedom is undoubtedly a central concept employed by Hannah Arendt in her political thought, yet I believe that it remains open to further interpretation. This thesis attempts to outline what Arendt means by the term and the implications of it for her thought more broadly. Advancing a nuanced methodology which seeks to understand the relationship between Arendt’s primary concepts, this thesis examines how a large body of terms come together to form her unique and heavily politicised theory of freedom. These ideas are often related to Arendt’s philosophy of speech, which draws heavily upon ancient Greek political understanding. The thesis proceeds with reference to her critique of totalitarian language and the problems that she associates with it, which is then compared specifically with the Greek account of rhetoric. From here the thesis proceeds toward Arendt’s ideal of political discourse which it is suggested also is heavily grounded in the German hermeneutic tradition. Combining the Greek and German influences, I conclude that Arendt’s account of freedom should be labelled freedom as rhetoric. Building upon this observation it is then claimed that Arendt is best understood as advancing a form of hermeneutic republicanism. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the University of Birmingham for giving me the opportunity to write this thesis through their generous scholarship and teaching opportunities. I would also like to thank Richard Shorten, Andrew Knops, and Steve Buckler for their superb guidance over the past years. None of this would have been written, of course, without the support of my great friends and family. Thanks, again. Table of Contents 0. Introduction 1 0.1. Understanding Arendt’s Philosophical Method 1 0.2. A Basic Method of Terminological Analysis 12 0.3. Thesis Summary 15 1. Chapter One: Politics, Freedom, and Speech 19 1.1. The Puzzle of Political Action 19 1.2. Speech in Antiquity 23 1.3. Speech and the tradition of Political Philosophy 29 1.4. Speech in Modernity 32 1.5. Socratic Speech 42 1.6. Politics Against Cliché 47 2. Chapter Two: Modernity and Friendship 49 2.1. Loneliness and the Totalitarian 50 2.2. The Path Toward Loneliness 57 2.3. Re-thinking Modern Friendship 64 2.4. Classical Friendship 70 2.5. Friendship and Political Association 76 3. Chapter Three: Judgment and Political Responsibility 78 3.1. The Moral Lessons of Totalitarianism 79 3.2. Judgment as Political Understanding 84 3.3. Hermeneutics and the Binding Power of Rhetoric 93 3.4. Responsibility for the World 101 3.5. Towards Connecting Judgment and Freedom 109 4. Chapter Four: Action and Principle 111 4.1. Defining Political Principle 112 4.2. Principles and Values 119 4.3. The Principle of Totalitarianism 122 4.4. Principles in the Great Revolutions 130 4.5. Toward Freedom 143 5. Chapter Five: Freedom as Rhetoric 145 5.1. Freedom as the Meaning of the Political 146 5.2. Movement as the Basis of Freedom 149 5.3. The Act of Founding as the Relatively Absolute 156 5.4. Freedom and Principle 163 5.5. Freedom as Rhetoric 168 5.6. Towards an Arendtian Theory of Hermeneutic Republicanism 179 6. Conclusion 186 6.1. Thesis Summary 186 6.2. Considering Freedom as Rhetoric 189 6.3. Considering Hermeneutic Republicanism 194 6.4. Thinking About the Past For the Present 198 7. Bibliography 202 Abbreviations EJ: Eichmann in Jerusalem EU: Essays in Understanding HC: The Human Condition JP: The Jew as Pariah K: Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy MDT: Men in Dark Times OT: The Origins of Totalitarianism OV: On Violence PAP: Philosophy and Politics PP: The Promise of Politics RJ: Responsibility and Judgment T: ‘Thinking’ in The Life of the Mind TMC: Thinking and Moral Considerations W: ‘Willing’ in The Life of the Mind A Note Arendt supplied highly gendered language, often referring to humanity as ‘man’ or ‘mankind’. For the sake of staying true to Arendt’s language, I have not attempted to change this. I hope that this will not be interpreted in a negative manner. The Greek polis will continue to exist at the bottom of our political existence…for as long as we use the word ‘politics’ Hannah Arendt Men in Dark Times Introduction This thesis seeks to examine what I believe to be the most important term for the writings of German political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975): freedom. Within the following chapters I proceed with an analysis of the concepts that feed into her understanding of freedom, with the intention of granting the term further clarity. Throughout the thesis I attempt to show how her account of freedom is influenced by various observations regarding both the totalitarian phenomenon and traditional philosophy as founded by Plato. One of the central claims which influences proceedings is the vast influence that her theory of speech exerts over her thought, which culminates in my final description of Arendtian freedom as rhetoric. Using this account of freedom as rhetoric I then question how this impacts our understanding of Arendtian politics, focussing in particular on her republicanism. In this introduction I introduce Arendt’s philosophical method and then use this as a means of generating an appropriate method for the task of this thesis, which I label gravitational. Following this, I provide a quick summary of the arguments made throughout these pages. 0.1 Understanding Arendt's Philosophical Method Close friend of Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, has provided two of the most revealing descriptions of Arendt's writings. The first emerged during an exchange at a conference in Toronto, 1972: This space that Hannah Arendt creates in her work and which one can walk into with the great sense of walking through an arch into a liberated area and a great part of it is 1 occupied by definitions. Very close to the roots of Hannah Arendt's thinking is the distinguo: ' I distinguish this from that. I distinguish labor from work. I distinguish fame from reputation.'...I think that the chance of invigoration and oxygenation does combine with some sense of stability and security. And that is through the elaboration, the marvellous, shall we say, unfolding of definitions. Each of her works is an unfolding of definitions, which of course touch on the subject, and more and more enlighten it as one distinction unfolds (after another) (McCarthy, 1979: 337-338) In response, Arendt acknowledged that she always initiated the study of topics via a definitional process. The second quotation is from McCarthy's eulogy 'Saying Goodbye To Hannah' published in The New York Review of Books a month after Arendt's sudden death in 1975: If I understood her, Hannah was always more for the Many than the One...She did not want to find a master key or universal solvent...The proliferation of distinctions in her work, branching out in every direction like tender shoots, no doubt owes something to her affection for the scholastics but it also testifies to a sort of typical awe-struck modesty before the world's abundance and intense particularity (2006: 33) Both quotations centre around Arendt's literary method of definition and distinction, identifying a practice which remains curiously ignored in the vast body of literature surrounding one of contemporary political theory's most divisive names. Examples of this structure abound: most conspicuously, it is found in the categorisation of the human activities in The Human Condition and the mental faculties in The Life of the Mind; In both cases, the definition of terms configure the development of the text with each term analysed separately; the main body of The Human Condition is comprised of three chapters corresponding to 'labour', 'work', and 'action' (which, incidentally, succeeds a chapter on the public-private distinction), just as The Life of the Mind is a trilogy split between 'thought', 'will', and 2 'judgment'. On a condensed scale, some of the 'exercises in political thought' collected in Between Past and Future bear the hallmark of this approach; for instance, the chapter 'The Concept of History' clearly develops around the distinction between objectivity and impartiality (BPF: see pages 48-53). What this displays is a manner of political thinking consciously directed by a method of definition and distinction, and for this reason Mary McCarthy has revealed a particularly fruitful interpretative resource. To phrase it directly, Arendt very clearly thinks terminologically. I believe, therefore, that the abundance of terms which Arendt employs is her core strength, and is the source of interest for many people in her writings. Similarly, it is hard to find commentaries which are not led to a large extent by her terminological structures.
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