Theodor Adorno once wrote an essay to "defend Bach against his devotees." In this book Dana Villa does the same for Hannah Arendt, whose sweeping reconceptualization of the nature and value of political action, he argues, has been covered over and domesticated by admirers who had hoped to enlist her in their less radical philosophical or political projects. Against the prevailing "Aristotelian" interpretation of her work, Villa explores Arendt's modernity, and indeed her postmodernity, through the Heideggerian and Nietzschean theme of (...) a break with tradition at the closure of metaphysics.Villa's book, however, is much more than a mere correction of misinterpretations of a major thinker's work. Rather, he makes a persuasive case for Arendt as the postmodern or postmetaphysical political theorist, the first political theorist to think through the nature of political action after Nietzsche's exposition of the death of God. After giving an account of Arendt's theory of action and Heidegger's influence on it, Villa shows how Arendt did justice to the Heideggerian and Nietzschean criticism of the metaphysical tradition while avoiding the political conclusions they drew from their critiques. The result is a wide-ranging discussion not only of Arendt and Heidegger, but of Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Habermas, and the entire question of politics after metaphysics. (shrink)

Critics of Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy argue that Arendt fails to address the most important problem of political judgment, namely, validity. This essay shows that Arendt does indeed have an answer to the problem that preoccupies her critics, with one important caveat: she does not think that validity is the all-important problem of political judgment--the affirmation of human freedom is.

Many critics bemoan the lack of civic engagement in America. Tocqueville's ''nation of joiners'' seems to have become a nation of alienated individuals, disinclined to fulfill the obligations of citizenship or the responsibilities of self-government. In response, the critics urge community involvement and renewed education in the civic virtues. But what kind of civic engagement do we want, and what sort of citizenship should we encourage? In Socratic Citizenship, Dana Villa takes issue with those who would reduce citizenship to community (...) involvement or to political participation for its own sake. He argues that we need to place more value on a form of conscientious, moderately alienated citizenship invented by Socrates, one that is critical in orientation and dissident in practice. Taking Plato's Apology of Socrates as his starting point, Villa argues that Socrates was the first to show, in his words and deeds, how moral and intellectual integrity can go hand in hand, and how they can constitute importantly civic--and not just philosophical or moral--virtues. More specifically, Socrates urged that good citizens should value this sort of integrity more highly than such apparent virtues as patriotism, political participation, piety, and unwavering obedience to the law. Yet Socrates' radical redefinition of citizenship has had relatively little influence on Western political thought. Villa considers how the Socratic idea of the thinking citizen is treated by five of the most influential political thinkers of the past two centuries--John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss. In doing so, he not only deepens our understanding of these thinkers' work and of modern ideas of citizenship, he also shows how the fragile Socratic idea of citizenship has been lost through a persistent devaluation of independent thought and action in public life.Engaging current debates among political and social theorists, this insightful book shows how we must reconceive the idea of good citizenship if we are to begin to address the shaky fundamentals of civic culture in America today. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of political judgement has been a source of much scholarly investigation and debate in recent decades. Underlying the debate is the assumption that at least in her early writings, Arendt had an actor’s theory of judgement. In this article I challenge this common assumption. As I attempt to demonstrate, it relies on a misunderstanding, not only of Arendt’s conception of judgement, but also of her conception of agents in the public realm. Once we discard the assumption of (...) an actor’s theory of judgement, I argue, some important issues in Arendt’s theory of judgement are resolved, enabling us to perceive it as a unified, rather than self-contradictory, theory of judgement. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's theory of judgment has been the object of considerable interest in the last three decades. Political theorists in particular have hoped to find in her theory of judgment a viable account of how diverse modern societies can sustain a commitment to dialogue in the absence of shared basic principles. A number of scholars, however, have critiqued Arendt's account of judgment in various ways. This article examines criticisms from Richard Bernstein, Ronald Beiner, George Kateb, Jürgen Habermas, and Linda Zerilli. (...) On the basis of early sources from Arendt's manuscripts and Denktagebuch that have not been used in these debates, this article contends that Arendt's position on judgment can be defended against these critics and that her account warrants further exploration. (shrink)

The question of judgment has become one of the central problems in recent social, political and ethical thought. This paper explores Hannah Arendt's decisive contribution to this debate by attempting to reconstruct analytically two distinctive perspectives on judgment from the corpus of her writings. By exploring her relation to Aristotelian and Kantian sources, and by uncovering debts and parallels to key thinkers such as Benjamin and Heidegger, it is argued that Arendt's work pinpoints the key antinomy within political judgment itself, (...) that between the viewpoints of the political actor and the political spectator. The paper concludes by highlighting some lacunae and difficulties in the development of Arendt's account, difficulties that set challenges for those theorists (such as Seyla Benhabib and Alessandro Ferrara) who wish to appropriate and extend Arendt's contribution into the field of contemporary critical theory. Key Words: action • aesthetics • community • freedom • history • judgment • reflection. (shrink)

The phrase ‘critique of power’ refers to that analytical program within social philosophy that concerns the discord between the individual and the social orders. From the perspective of many critical theorists, Hannah Arendt’s conception of power, however, is considered unsuitable for such a critical enterprise. In contrast to this assumption, the article argues for reading Hannah Arendt’s concept of power in the light of a critical theory of the political. The critical potential of her thoughts is embedded in her concept (...) of power, which provides an as yet disregarded but highly relevant approach for the analysis of contemporary political orders. Despite the great number of writings concerned with Arendt’s concept of power, this critical potential has not yet been unfolded. This is primarily due to a constricted reading of her concept of power where it is seen as per se normatively positive and non-repressive. In order to overcome this misleading interpretation, the article reconstructs Arendt’s concept of power and argues that her political thinking should be literally read as a critique of power. To illustrate this critical potential, the article unfolds 5 dimensions of Arendt’s analysis of power: the political-parcipitative; the socio-economic; the political-institutional; the ideological-critical; and the ethical. (shrink)

It has become nearly a truism for contemporary theorists of democracy to understand the democratic space as agonistic and contested. The shadow that haunts thinkers of democracy today, and out of which this assumption emerges, is the specter of totalitarianism with its claims to a totalizing knowledge in the form of ideology and a totalizing power of a sovereign will that claims to be the embodiment of the law. Caught up in these totalizing claims, the citizenry becomes elated. The only (...) remedy to totalitarianism is a democratic space wherein no one can claim to know the truth, no one can claim to occupy the space of power, and no one can claim to embody the law. The problem with this remedy is that it fails entirely to take account of what Arendt understands to be the fundamental condition of totalitarianism, namely, the institution of a "lying world order" whereby reality is replaced with a lie. For Arendt therefore the remedy for totalitarianism and its elated citizenry depends first and foremost upon the existence of factual truth. Following Arendt as well as Shoshana Felman's work on testimony, I argue that bearing witness to factual reality is the ground of the democratic public space and the remedy to an elated citizenry caught up in a lying world order. (shrink)

Although critical of what she calls the `antipolitical' forces of love and sovereignty, Arendt reluctantly embraces these aspects as the basis of politics itself. I explain this paradox by arguing that Arendt seeks to balance Greek and Roman notions of freedom with modern conceptions of the will. The solipsistic will poses a threat to politics (it is the source of sovereignty itself). Yet the will is a fact of modern life and cannot be ignored. I argue that despite her embrace (...) of classical understandings of freedom as contingency, Arendt seeks to limit contingency and even freedom itself. She does this to accommodate the will which must have some sense of agency and continuity in order to be able to function at all. Arendt argues that sovereignty can, if properly constrained, produce a `certain limited reality' and can (along with love) serve as a basis for politics. I claim that Arendt sacrifices her classical ideals, allowing for the possibility of a modern, lesser version of freedom (which in her view is better than no freedom at all). (shrink)