Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays

PART IV

PART IV Action and Power Earlier we saw that history for Arendt recorded and established the meaning of human action in the public realm. This section examines action and the related phenomenon of power in greater depth. As outlined in The Human Condition, Arendt's theory of action issued a challenge to reigning social science paradigms. Instead of focusing on the structural or functional properties of systems as determinants of what people do politically , on the choices that perfectly rational actors would make under various scenarios, or on routine political processes, procedures , and behaviors, it approached action from the existential perspective of the person or group that acts and the spectators who observe. In doing so, it emphasized the freedom that is manifested when people initiate something new and improbable, a public, visible deed that interrupts the otherwise automatic course of events. Arendt tried to disentangle power from its prepolitical or bureaucratic simulacra: the rule of the paterfamilias and his epigoni, the manipulation and propagandistic distortions of realpolitik, and the expansion and contraction of administrative control over a territory. She sharply criticized the modern tendency to mistake violence for power, and the related conception of government as an institution whose essence is domination. This is a tendency that she linked to the rise of the state and its counterpart, the social realm, and to the corresponding decline of a genuine public sphere. That modern people would misunderstand power so fundamentally only testifies to our confusion of action and politics with "household" affairs (in the widest sense). As Arendt understood it, power was actually both a by-product of 207 208 Part IV present action-a sort of energy that comes into being whenever people join together politically-and a condition for future action, insofar as it nurtures the public space ofappearance. It arises, she urged, from "below," from the web of human relationships. And she suggested that increasing levels ofviolence can be expected in modern societies, as channels for civic participation dry up and bureaucracy expands to fill the breach. Citizens may resort to violence out of frustration over their inability to act in concert , just as governments may do so because of an inability to manage social tensions. A loss of power is at core of both these developments. If critics have praised the care with which Arendt distinguishes between power and various forms of domination, they have also wondered whether her theory, in dismissing "household " concerns as merely social or prepolitical, does not render itself irrelevant to the dilemmas of modern life. The economy, of course, long ago expanded beyond its limits in the oikos and permeated political life in the narrow sense (Arendt's "rise of the social"). Meanwhile, the oikos itselfhas become politicized; family and intimate relations have moved into the limelight of public debate and conflict, their inequalities and injustices exposed. Accordingly, Arendt's critics have tried to find ways of preserving the emancipatory potential of her theory of power and action while challenging its almost classical rigidity and exclusiveness. In his essay, Jiirgen Habermas examines the differences between Arendt's idea of power-understood as the common will, conviction, and consensus that is generated through "illocutionary" discourse and that can inspire deeds in the public arena-and those held by Weber, Parsons, and their disciples. The virtue of Arendt's definition is that it enables one to distinguish power from both force and purposive-rational (goaldirected ) activity. For her, power helped sustain the "intersubjectively shared life-world," and it was sustained, in turn, by those political institutions that give it a worldly space in which to appear. Habermas observes that Arendt developed her "communications concept" of power with reference to the extreme cases of totalitarianism, where free discourse is impossible, and revolution , where it emerges almost ex nihilo to challenge the legitimacy of the prevailing order. But her theory, although promising, incorporated certain "absurdities," which Habermas traces to her Aristotelian understanding ofpraxis and her tendency to regard as "pathological" any political order that deviates from her ideal- Action and Power 209 ized model of the Greek polis. Notable among these alleged blunders are Arendt's beliefthat questions ofeconomic inequality are un- or prepolitical, her neglect of power's strategic dimension (as exhibited in struggles for leadership), and her failure to acknowledge the way ideologies systematically undermine the prospect of free public communication. Together, such problems cast doubt upon the viability ofArendt's philosophy in the contemporary world. Arendt's political thought has been criticized...