Arendtian Politics: Feminism as a Test Case

Arendtian Politics: Feminism as a Test Case Michael G. Gottsegen. The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. xiü + 311 pp. ISBN 0-7914-1729-8 (cl); ISBN 0-7914-1730-1 (pb). Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. HincJvman, eds. Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. xxviü + 422 pp. ISBN 0-7914-1853-7 (d); ISBN 0-7914-1854-5 (pb). Mary Hawkesworth The works of Hannah Arendt have been noticeably absent from recent efforts to construd a feminist canon. Although acknowledged as "one of the most Uluminating and certainly one of the most controversial poUtical thinkers of our century,"1 Arendt has been described by some feminist theorists as a captive of masculinist modes of thought. Adrienne Rich charaderized The Human Condition as a "lofty and crippled book" expressing the "tragedy of a female mind nourished on male ideology."2 Mary O'Brien castigated Arendt for accepting "the normality and even the necessity of male supremacy."3 Wendy Brown suggested that Arendf s vision revived "pieces of the masculinist Athenian politics that she revered," including "hostüity to the realm of necessity where Ufe is created , reproduced, and maintained."4 And Hannah Pitkin has lamented that "though Arendt was female, there is a lot of machismo in her vision."5 Arendt's embrace of the exclusively male, Athenian polis as the prime example of her ideal politics of speech and action, her depiction of politics as a pradice tied to a quest for immortality, her hierarchical ordering of existence into a realm of freedom and a realm of necessity whüe failing to notice the pernicious sex segregation that has historically charaderized such divisions, and her insistence that poUtics be insulated from demands of the body and claims of social justice provided feminist scholars with rudimentary reasons for repudiating Arendt. In the twenty-five years since Arendf s untimely death, feminist scholarship has grown increasingly complex and sophisticated. Internal debates within feminism have chaUenged efforts to ground feminist poUtics on unmediated conceptions of "the body," "women," "women's interests ," "women's experience," or "women's oppression." The "subjed" of feminist discourse has been decentered and the strategies for and goals of feminist mobilization are questions of considerable contention. As feminist scholars search for insightful ways to analyze and understand the infricades of sexism, racism, and homophobia, and feminist adivists seek to buUd new coalitions to fight the virulent backlash of the "Confract with © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. ι (Spring) 162 Journal of Women's History Spring America," it is fitting that Arendt's corpus be reconsidered. For taken as a whole, Arendt's systematic philosophy affords feminists, as Mary Dietz has suggested, a "way to proceed toward poUtics."6 Arendt also gives us a "model for a feminist politics that seeks to contest (performatively and agonistically) the prevailing construction of sex and gender into binary and binding categories of identity, as weU as the prevailing binary division of poUtical space into a public and private realm,"7 as Bonnie Honig has argued, and also a way to understand the diverse facets of the contemporary feminist project. Both Lewis and Sandra Hinchman's Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays and Michael Gottsegen's The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt are helpful to feminist efforts to reassess Arendt's life work. Both provide an overview of all of Arendt's major works; both situate her concerns within the tradition of German phüosophy in general, and the Existenzphilosophie of Karl Jaspers in particular; and both grapple with tensions and contradictions in her work that have fueled interpretive debates and helped sustain erroneous interpretations. Hinchman and Hinchman bring together fourteen previously published articles in order "to understand and evaluate Arendt's arguments without the rancor and the distortions that prevaüed in the past" (p. xvü). They organize the articles thematicaUy, providing multiple perspectives on Arendt's treatment of such themes as totaUtarianism and evfl, narrative and history, the pubUc world and personal identity, action and power, and justice, equaUty, and democracy, as weU as thinking and judging. The contributors to the volume include some of the...