Indiana University Press
Reviewed by:
The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. By Seyla Benhabib. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1996.

Since her death in 1975, Hannah Arendt’s reputation has grown enormously. Today she is widely recognized as one of the central thinkers of our age. The reasons for her growing prestige are not easily discerned. Her writings were often contentious and internally contradictory. She was too much of an independent and polemical thinker to win universal acceptance from her contemporaries. Regarding her as a political philosopher of nostalgia (see Kateb 1984), an antimodernist admirer of the Greek polis, critics challenged the relevance of her most brilliant insights for understanding the contemporary world. [End Page 162]

However, the fall of authoritarian communism, the resurgence of nationalism and ethnic upheavals, and the rise of gender and other forms of identity politics have all helped to foster a more receptive climate for Arendt studies. The fact that this talented and controversial thinker was a woman can no longer be deemed irrelevant to a full appreciation of her contributions to modern thought, despite Arendt’s firm rejection of the modern tendency to reduce ideas and politics to psychological or personal matters. 1

The first results of the feminist encounter with Arendt suggested she had no place in feminist theory. 2 Her seeming indifference to the body and sexuality, her dismissal of women and their activities in her theory of politics, her dislike of organized feminism—coupled with her celebration of heroic, agonistic political action—led some to charge her with masculine thinking. 3 Fortunately for us, however, figures as complex as Arendt will always remain open to new interpretations. The story of Arendt’s resonance for feminism is being retold, as feminists relate Arendt to the present preoccupations of feminist and democratic thought and practice.

Arendt has been the subject of a series of biographies, ranging from Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s admiring panorama of her unique intellectual strengths to Elzbieta Ettinger’s morbid account of her affair with Martin Heidegger. The anthology Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (1995a), edited by Bonnie Honig, and Lisa Jane Disch’s Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (1994) have contributed to reconstructing Arendt’s relevance to feminist theory. Honig has insisted on Arendt’s contribution to a theory of dramaturgical action and post-identity feminist politics, whereas Disch adds an appreciation of Arendt’s approach to storytelling (Disch 1993; 1994). The feminist implications of the relationship of narration to political action is further explored in Maria Pia Lara’s recent study, Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere (1998). In general, then, contemporary feminists have discovered Arendt’s highly original notions about the relation of politics to cycles of birth (natality), to life (worldliness), and to interrelationships between distinct selves (mutuality). They have revalued her notion of storytelling as a critical linguistic disclosure of great importance for political life. However, feminists are not alone in judging Arendt’s work to be a fertile ground from which to consider problems of plurality and difference in democratic society. Significantly, Jürgen Habermas has recently acknowledged his considerable debt to Arendt, not least for his Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1984; 1987; 1996, 297, 468, 532, 507, 508, 513). But until now, no one working within the tradition of contemporary critical theory has attempted a full-scale reconstruction of Arendt’s work for an explicitly feminist political and philosophical project.

For this reason alone, the publication of The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996) by Seyla Benhabib, one of today’s leading feminist and [End Page 163] critical theorists, is a landmark event in Arendt studies. In Benhabib’s skillful hands, Arendt appears with all her complexity, stubbornness, and contrariety. Benhabib makes no effort to smooth out the contradictions and imperfections in Arendt’s thought. Instead, she offers a compelling case for rereading and discussing Arendt, and for pursuing the political and intellectual horizons that her work raises. In this creative exercise, Benhabib considers some of Arendt’s publications more fertile than others for developing possible new understandings. Benhabib insists that Arendt is not some outdated spokesperson for a lost world, but an original thinker who continues to speak directly to the problems of today’s world. Benhabib claims that Arendt “was no philosopher of antimodernity” (1996, 138).

Hannah Arendt was a reluctant modernist, but a modernist nonetheless; who celebrated the universal declaration of the rights of man and citizen; who took it for granted that women were entitled to the same political and civic rights as men; who denounced imperialist ventures in Egypt, India, South Africa, and Palestine; who did not mince her words in her critique of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism or in her condemnation of modern nationalist movements. Furthermore, Arendt celebrated the revolutionary tradition, which she likened to a fata morgana that appears and disappears at unexpected moments in history.

(Benhabib 1996, 138–39)

If Arendt’s purported antimodernism was an obstacle to the feminist recovery of her work, equally troubling was the way in which Arendt drew strong boundaries between public and private life, and seemed to associate the public, agonistic (competitive) male sphere with freedom and the private, nurturing female sphere with necessity. Like other feminist critics of Western political thought (as, for example, Hannah F. Pitkin 1998), Benhabib has little patience with such universalizing dichotomies of gender. She insists in confronting the historical, symbolic, and practical effects of the organization of public and private life within Arendt’s thought. Yet she sides with Arendt on the need to define some kind of boundary between the public and the private. What remains in dispute, she believes, is where, by whom, and to what effect that line will be drawn. Benhabib argues that only by engaging Arendt’s insights about the interdependence of public and private life can we be better prepared to redraw the lines. Without rejecting the need for a robust public sphere, we might fulfill the needs for intimacy, domesticity, and individuality that Arendt so appreciated. Without losing sight of the need to value domestic life, it is necessary to make private life like public arrangements a matter of justice. By elaborating on the feminist insight into how cultural understandings of the public and private domains are social and political constructs, Benhabib suggests that instead of a liability, the public-private distinction [End Page 164] may become a useful resource for reconceptualizing all arenas of social life. Thus, she redefines the public sphere as a filter, a space that allows for creative testing of where to draw these boundaries.

In this context, Benhabib develops her most innovative interpretation of Arendt, presenting her as the creator of an original political philosophy, directly relevant to the demands of present-day democratic and pluralistic societies. She rereads Arendt’s political legacy in its historical and cultural context, emphasizing the seemingly marginal but existential categories of her identity as a woman and as a Jew. Moreover, Adrienne Rich’s often cited quotation about Arendt’s work embodying “the tragedy of female mind nourished on male ideology” (Rich 1979, 212) serves as Benhabib’s starting point to demonstrate the very opposite. She imaginatively takes up and repose the most contested issues in Arendt scholarship, such as her conception of gender, ethnicity, and the role and definition of the public sphere. Benhabib explores Arendt’s early biography of Rahel Varnhagen (Arendt 1997), an eighteenth-century German Jewish woman known for her Berlin salon and correspondence with famous figures, in light of questions of religion and gender. Most importantly, Benhabib draws from the Varnhagen book a new definition of the public sphere, one in which women introduced a noncompetitive outlook on social and political interactions. The latter contrasts with the agonistic, male-oriented model usually associated with Arendt’s better known work, The Human Condition (1958). In addition, the Varnhagen biography suggests an alternative genealogy of modernity, as more than the spread of commodity exchange relations, capitalism, and the growth of mass society (Benhabib 1996, 29).

Benhabib has creatively constructed a method to recover Arendt through a hermeneutic interpretation, which allows for a more careful consideration of her appropriation of the biography of Rahel Varnhagen. “Women, through their letters,” argues Benhabib, “appear to re-create themselves as texts, thus overcoming their own silencing in the major texts of the tradition” (1996, 19). Both the letter form and the salon are “transgressive modes,” modes in which “boundaries are crossed, erased, renegotiated, and recreated” (1996, 19). While recovering Varnhagen’s story, Benhabib shows that there exists a powerful identification between Arendt and her subject. Both were German-Jewesses, each struggled to become conscious of herself as a woman and a Jew. Thus, Benhabib exemplifies how rereading Arendt constitutes a new version of our past and her legacy. She suggests that Arendt’s account of Varnhagen’s dilemma of participating as a woman and a Jew in enlightened Berlin society prefigured her reflections on the horrors of the Nazism.

Arendt’s devotion to understanding the role of the Jew in modern Western societies is established to be an aspect of her earliest writings. In addition, Benhabib draws some creative political considerations from the historical institution of the salon, a site where public and private concerns intermingled. [End Page 165] The eighteenth-century German salon exemplifies Benhabib’s revision of the public/private divide, a space where human solidarity opens the possibility for leveling human beings in a community of shared interests. Here bonds of sociability and intimacy were forged between male and female members of different classes and religious groups, and individual differences and distinctions were appreciated. Yet as Benhabib admits, the enlightenment salon was flawed. It was overly intimate and introspective, highly restricted, and an ultimately failed experiment in achieving the goals of equality and freedom.

We agree with Benhabib that the associational model of the public sphere prefigured in the female-led German salons suggests an alternative model of modern society as the locus of concerted, positive action. Moreover, by this provenance—what she calls a “counter-genealogy” of modern society—Benhabib successfully links Arendt to feminism and Arendt to contemporary democratic politics. It does not, however, sufficiently address the other side of political life, that is, how a different, agonistic kind of action provides the possibility for individuals to appear in public, to challenge traditions and prejudices, and to claim recognition for marginal groups. Without such agonal interventions, it is difficult to picture how we can make public claims about the need to transform institutions.

Beyond the Varnhagen biography, Benhabib looks to Arendt’s other writings to amplify her outlook on democratic politics. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt 1979), Benhabib finds the clues for Arendt’s understanding of a central tension in modern society: the conflict between political equality, on the one hand, and sociocultural, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and gender differences, on the other. According to Benhabib, Arendt proposed to resolve the tension by recourse to an associational model of the public sphere, derived from eighteenth-century salon culture and early modern civil society. Benhabib veers away from the agonal model of politics derived from The Human Condition (Arendt 1958), characteristic of both earlier interpretations of Arendt’s theory of action and recent postmodernist defenders of Arendtian agonism (see Hill 1979 and Villa 1997). The former is often cast as a recovery of an Aristotelian version of the Greek polis and a portrayal of political actors as literary heroes; the latter is often cast as a Nietzschean model of agonistic action. 4 Recently, however, Bonnie Honig has ventured an unorthodox postmodern reading of Arendt’s agonistic theory of politics. Political actors resist domination and reconfigure their own identities by appearing and performing in the public view of others, while at the same time, transforming their understandings about the symbolic and social order. Insisting on an associational model, Benhabib is reluctant to endorse such a possibility, that is, that Arendt is also concerned with the display of political action as something valuable per se. But without allowing for a conception of political action as a place for initiatives that are agonistic, Benhabib runs the risk of denying one important aspect of Arendt’s most innovative approach to the theory of action: namely, her understanding that struggles by groups are always connected to [End Page 166] the ways they choose to attract the attention of others. This agonistic side of action, moreover, is linked to the aesthetic dimension. Arendt believed that the aesthetic domain provided a precious space for expressing individuality, our uniqueness, and our contributions to the world of plurality.

In our view, neither the postmodern enthusiasm for agonism nor Benhabib’s preferred focus on association capture Arendt’s multidimensionality as a social thinker who embraced simultaneously both sides of action, the agonistic and the associational. Why Benhabib stresses the importance of one dimension of action over the other one is related to how she understands democracy as a space for building a noncompetitive egalitarian political community, for building up collective agreements about institutional transformation. Honig’s refusal to consider the associational side of action, by contrast, leads her to ignore how politics is something besides resistance or domination. In building up a common project, groups need spaces for possible agreements. Yet, to ignore agonism altogether is to overlook not only the role of conflict but also of symbolic action. Thus, while we understand the reasons why Benhabib fears agonism, we see association and performance as two necessary moments in the transformation of the public sphere. We need both to produce compelling claims for both justice and recognition.

Despite these reservations, we do find a clear and positive contribution in the key concept of association through which Benhabib recovers Arendt’s legacy. She credits Arendt with applying Alexis de Tocqueville’s insights about freedom of association as a bulwark against the tyranny of the majority and a check on conformity. She stresses the empirical side of Arendt’s studies of totalitarianism, which crystallized in a political sociology of the public sphere. Even in totalitarian regimes, argues Benhabib, Arendt saw that “the forces of society begin to assert themselves against the state. The self-organization of society is thus a threat to every totalitarian regime as well as a powerful indicator of the degree of detotalization at work” (1996, 73). An understanding of alternative public spheres or associations enhances our appreciation of the transition to democracy in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, and underscores the potential contribution of feminism and other social movements to the process of democratization. Benhabib argues: “Read in this light, Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism can be said to have anticipated the currently growing and rigorous literature on the formation of civil societies in systems undergoing transitions from authoritarian and totalitarian rule to democracy, for a multiplicity of public spaces are the sine qua non of an independent and vigorous civil society as a component of democratic cultures everywhere” (1996, 75).

Finally, Benhabib is also right in relating Arendt’s great contributions to contemporary political philosophy and feminist theory to storytelling. Storytelling, as feminist historians and political theorists know, 5 becomes a tool for struggling against oblivion and nothingness, for narratives can bring new perspectives to the fore. In this way, the narrator is not only a writer of fictions [End Page 167] but a moral judge, for “historical judgement revealed the perspectival nature of the shared social world by representing its plurality in narrative form” (Benhabib 1996, 89). We might say, indeed, that Benhabib has clarified our understanding of contemporary society by telling us a series of new stories about Hannah Arendt. She has created a new narrative and told it well.

Maria Pia Lara

Maria Pia Lara is a Professor at University Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. The review of Seyla Benhabib’s book was produced while she was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Research of Women and Gender at Stanford University. Her most recent book is: Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere, (University of California Press 1998). (mpl@xanum.uam.mx)

Joan B. Landes

Joan B. Landes is Professor of Women’s Studies and History at The Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Cornell University Press 1988), and editor of Feminism, the Public and the Private (Oxford University Press 1998). She has also written on Hegel, Marxism, the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Mary Wollstonecraft, and is currently completing a study of gender and visual representation in eighteenth-century France. (jb15@psu.edu)

Footnotes

* Permission to reprint a book review from this selection may be obtained only from the author.

1. As Arendt remarked famously in her essay on Rosa Luxemburg, in the face of “suffragette equality,” Luxemburg “might have been tempted to reply, Vive la petite différence” (Arendt 1968, 44). As her biographer Elizabeth Young-Bruehl notes, Arendt “became uneasy whenever she saw the ‘woman problem’ generate either a political movement separated from others or a concentration on psychological problems” (Young-Bruehl 1976, 273).

2. For an astute contribution and a fine overview of early feminist engagements with Arendt, see Dietz (1995).

3. Adrienne Rich claimed that Arendt was her own worst enemy, denouncing the “power of male ideology to possess such a female mind, to disconnect it as it were from the female body which encloses it and which it encloses” (Rich 1979, 212). Likewise, Mary O’Brien labeled Arendt a “female male-supremacist” (O’Brien 1981, 9).

4. For example, Dana Villa argues, “the performance model deployed by Arendt follows Nietzsche in seeking to unmask this ‘fiction,’ to escape the slavish, moralizing prejudice against action, a prejudice manifest in the ‘necessary’ positing of such a subject as the causal ground for all deeds or ‘effects’” (Villa 1997, 190).

5. Thus, feminist studies have insisted on the need to recover biographical accounts of women to redress the way our history was understood. Similarly, political theorists have fought to re-narrate our oppression and exclusion through a new reading of classical, liberal, and supposedly democratic categories. See, for example, Carole Pateman’s rereading of the “liberal” contract as a “sexual” contract (Pateman 1988).

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1968. Men in dark times. New York: Harcourt Brace and World.
———. 1979. The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. (Originally published as The burden of our time. London: Secker and Warburg, 1951.)
———. 1997. Rahel Varnhagen: The life of a Jewish woman. Trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston and ed. Liliane Weissberg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dietz, Mary G. 1995. Feminist receptions of Hannah Arendt. In Feminist interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Disch, Lisa. 1993. More truth than fact: Storytelling as critical understanding in the writings of Hannah Arendt. Political Theory 21 (4): 665–94.
Disch, Lisa Jane. 1994. Hannah Arendt and the limits of philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Ettinger, Elzbieta. 1995. Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The theory of communicative action. Vol. 1, Reason and the rationalization of society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.
———. 1987. The theory of communicative action. Vol. 2, Lifeworld and system: A critique of functionalist reason. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.
———. 1996. Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Trans. William Rehg. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Hill, Melvyn A., ed. 1979. Hannah Arendt: The recovery of the public world. New York: St. Martin’s.
Honig, Bonnie, ed. 1995a. Feminist interpretations of Hannah Arendt. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
———. 1995b. Toward an agonistic feminism: Hannah Arendt and the politics of identity. In Feminist interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Kateb, George. 1984. Hannah Arendt: Politics, conscience, evil. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld.
Lara, Maria Pia. 1998. Moral textures: Feminist narratives in the public sphere. Cambridge, England: Polity.
O’Brien, Mary. 1981. The politics of reproduction. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Pateman, Carole. 1988. The sexual contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. 1998. The attack of the blob: Hannah Arendt’s concept of the social. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Rich, Adrienne. 1979. On lies, secrets and silence: Selected prose 1966–1978. New York: Norton.
Villa, Dana R. 1997. Hannah Arendt: Modernity, alienation, and critique. In Hannah Arendt and the meaning of politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth. 1976. Hannah Arendt: For love of the world. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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