Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays

CHAPTER 5: Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative

CHAPTER 5 Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power ofNarrative SEYLA BENHABIB The question of Jewish identity and the fate of the Jewish people in the twentieth century were the undeniable conditions which inspired a rather unpolitical student of the Existenzphilosophie ofKarl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger to become one ofthe most illuminating, and certainly one of the most controversial political thinkers of our century.l At the center of Hannah Arendt's political thought is a tension and a dilemma, indicating that these two formative forces of her spiritual-political identity, German Existenzphilosophie of the late 1920s and her political experiences as a Jewish-German intellectual, were not always in harmony. When Arendt reflects on the political realities of the twentieth century and on the fate of the Jewish people in particular, her thinking is decidedly modernist and politically universalist. She looks for political structures that will solve the nineteenth-century conflict between the nation and the state. Although the modern states established after the American and French revolutions made the recognition of the individual as a rights-bearing person the basis of their legitimacy, nationalist developments in Europe revealed that one's right to be a person was safeguarded only insofar as one was a member of a specific nation: Reprinted from Social Research, vol. 57, no. 1 (1990), pp. 167-96. 111 112 Seyla Benhabib From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an "abstract" human being who seemed to exist nowhere....The whole question of human rights, therefore, was quiekly and inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one's own people, seemed to be able to insure them.2 On these matters Arendt was a political modernist who pleaded for the realization ofthis basic principle ofpolitical modernity, that is, the recognition ofthe right to have rights simply because one is a member of the human species. Arendt's major theoretical work, The Human Condition, however , is usually, and not altogether unjustifiably, treated as an antimodernist political test. The same historical process which brought forth the modern constitutional state also brought forth "society," that realm of social interaction which interposed itself between the household on the one hand and the political state on the other. "The rise of the social," as Arendt names this process, primarily meant that economic processes, which had hitherto been confined to the "shadowy realm of the household," emancipated themselves from this domain and entered the public realm.3 A century before, Hegel had described this process as the development in the midst ofethical life of a "system of needs" (System der Bedurfnisse), of a domain of economic activity governed by commodity exchange and the pursuit of economic self-interest. The emergence ofthis sphere meant the disappearance ofthe "universal ," ofthe common concern for the political association, for the res publica, from the hearts and minds of men.4 Arendt sees in this process the occluding of the political by the social and the transformation of the public space of politics into a pseudospace of social interaction, in which individuals no longer "act" but "merely behave" as economic producers, consumers, and urban city dwellers. This relentlessly negative account of the "rise of the social" and the decline ofthe public realm has been identified as the core of Arendt's political "antimodernism."5 Indeed, at one level Arendt's text is a panegyric to the agonistic political space of the Greek polis. What disturbs the contemporary reader is perhaps less the high-minded and highly idealized picture of Greek political life which Arendt draws, but more her neglect ofthe question: If the agonistic political space of the polis was possible only Hannah Arendt 113 because large groups of human beings like women, slaves, children , laborers, noncitizen residents, and all non-Greeks were excluded from it and made possible through their "labor" for the daily necessities of like that "leisure for politics" which the few enjoyed, then is the critique of the rise of the social, which emancipates these groups from the "shadowy interior of the household," also a critique of political universalism as such?6 Is the "recovery of the public space" under conditions of modernity necessarily an elitist and antidemocratic project which can hardly be reconciled with the demand for universal political emancipation and universal extension of citizenship rights?7 To put it somewhat polemically: Arendt's own version of the predicament of the "German-Jewish...