The Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt

Peter Gratton, Yasemin Sari, Peter Gratton, Yasemin Sari

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350053304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

Hannah Arendt's (1906-1975) writings, both in public magazines and in her important books, are still widely studied today. She made original contributions in political thinking that still astound readers and critics alike. The subject of several films and numerous books, colloquia, and newspaper articles, Arendt remains a touchstone in innumerable debates about the use of violence in politics, the responsibility one has under dictatorships and totalitarianism, and how to combat the repetition of the horrors of the past. The Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt offers the definitive guide to her writings and ideas, her influences and commentators, as well as the reasons for her lasting significance, with 66 original essays taking up in accessible terms the myriad ways in which one can take up her work and her continuing importance. These essays, written by an international set of her best readers and commentators, provides a comprehensive coverage of her life and the contexts in which her works were written. Special sections take up chapters on each of her key writings, the reception of her work, and key ways she interpreted those who influenced her. If one has come to Arendt from one of her essays on freedom, or from yet another bombastic account of her writings on Adolph Eichmann, or as as student or professor working in the field of Arendt studies, this book provides the ideal tool for thinking with and rediscovering one of the most important intellectuals of the past century. But just as importantly, contributors advance the study of Arendt into neglected areas, such as on science and ecology, to demonstrate her importance not just to debates in which she was well known, but those touched off only after her death. Arendt's approaches as well as her concrete claims about the political have much to offer given the current ecological and refugee crises, among others. In sum, then, the Companion provides a tool for thinking with Arendt, but also for showing just where those thinking with her can take her work today.

PART I

Sources, Influences, and Encounters

1

Arendt and the Roman Tradition

Dean Hammer

Despite the variety of interpretations brought to bear on Hannah Arendt, the Greek, and specifically Athenian, contours of her thought remain almost axiomatic starting points in scholarship. Largely unexplored are the Roman aspects, which continually wend their way throughout her writings.¹ These Roman influences have implications for how we interpret Arendt. In this chapter, I look at how the Romans help to mediate, in ways the Greeks do not, her paradoxical concerns with newness, on the one hand, and durability, on the other. I look at two Roman strands in Arendt’s thought that revise in important ways the Greek relationship between founding and acting and the role of culture and fabrication.

Founding, Beginning, and Action

One of the aims of Arendt’s thought lies in the recovery of action in the modern world. Arendt is reacting to the forces of commercialism, consumerism, and scientism that reduce our relationship to each other and to the world as behaviors driven by either biological impulses or utilitarian calculations. In contrast to a view of human behavior as motivated by some prior cause, whether biological necessity or a means-ends relationship, Arendt develops a notion of action whose distinguishing characteristic is that it is uncaused. Action springs from the miracle of beginning that lies in our origins as being born, an insight Arendt associates with Augustine and Virgil.

Appraisals of her notion of action invariably focus on its connection to the Athenian polis and her “beloved Greeks.”² This model of action is given either a Nietzschean spin, seen as a celebration of agonistic display in which individuals, in competitively appearing before others like Homeric warriors on the battlefield, “endow the world with meaning” and “give it a significance and beauty it would otherwise lack,”³ or more of a civic republican guise traced back to Aristotle in which individuals become most human in their ability to act together as political beings.⁴ Although the Athenian polis continues to be seen by scholars as the “best historical model of a public space” for understanding Arendtian action,⁵ one quickly encounters its limits in explaining how politics can be something more than “virtuosity” and actually do something.⁶ We can supplement this Athenian model with what Arendt sees as the paradigmatic models of action in the two foundation legends that would guide Western political thought and, specifically, the American founders: the Hebrew legend of the Israelites and Virgil’s story of Aeneas.

Foundations are political beginnings, moments defined less by agonistic display or already formed habits of civic engagement and more by how a community is born. In On Revolution, Arendt explores most fully the American founders’ uncertainty about how to prepare for “an entirely new beginning.”⁷ The Israelites provided one model, dating their founding as a people back to the Creation of the universe (and of time) by an eternal God. But in a world that can no longer ground its political life in Creation, the American founders turned to the Romans. The Romans, Arendt claims, provide a “lesson in the art of foundation” and a solution to the “perplexities inherent in every beginning,” a model expressed in its “purest form” by Virgil.⁸

The perplexities to which Arendt refers lay in the tension between the notion that “an act can only be called free if it is not affected or caused by anything preceding it” and the sense that “insofar as it immediately turns into a cause of whatever follows, it demands a justification which, if it is to be successful, will have to show the act as the continuation of a preceding series, that is, renege on the very experience of freedom and novelty.”⁹ How is action anything but sporadic bursts that have no relationship to what comes before or after? Stated slightly differently, how can we act within history and how can action be a part of history?

I think it is precisely these questions that led Arendt to look to the Roman experience for an answer. The thought of an absolute beginning—as something created from nothing—is incomprehensible because it abolishes “the sequences of temporality” so that we are left thinking the unthinkable.¹⁰ The Hebrew solution to this incomprehensibility lies in locating that beginning in a God who remains outside time. The Romans, too, though not identifying a Creator, seek to locate their origins in mystery. For Cicero, the founders were like gods.¹¹ And what comes before the founding “remains perpetually shrouded in mystery.”¹² What is prior to the Roman foundation exists outside history, as a type of “fairy-tale land” inhabited by gods and nymphs in the timelessness of nature.¹³ It is precisely through “an imaginative interpretation of old tales,” Arendt suggests, that future generations could “come to grips with the mysterious ‘In the beginning.’”¹⁴

In describing the American founders’ search for models of founding, Arendt notes that they, with some relief, did not have to stare into the “abyss of pure spontaneity” since the Roman founding is “not an absolutely new beginning.”¹⁵ In fact, part of Arendt’s point (contrary to some interpretations¹⁶ ) is that action, like its paradigm in founding, always occurs in a world that comes before. Arendt provides us with two different images of what a beginning looks like. One image is of natality, in which the birth of a child brings something new into the world, but “there always was a world before their arrival and there always will be a world after their departure.¹⁷ Although the association of political action with natality is often associated with Arendt’s discussion of Augustine, Arendt, in fact, attributes this image to Virgil (and, in turn, to Augustine’s Roman heritage). Arendt traces the image of founding as birth back to Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, which celebrates the reign of Augustus as the beginning of a new order (magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo).¹⁸ This new order is one in which a new child and new generation are born into earth.¹⁹ The birth of a new age, like the birth of a child, is not an absolutely new beginning, but is a beginning within “the continuity of history.”²⁰ For the Romans, as Arendt suggests, the world’s salvation brought about by Augustus lies not in a divine beginning, but in the “divinity of birth as such.”²¹ The capacity for beginning, as Arendt argues, “could have become the ontological underpinning for a truly Roman or Virgilian philosophy of politics” in which “human beings, new men, again and again appear in the world by virtue of birth.”²²

Arendt provides a second image of beginning, and that is in the interruption of time, between the “no more” of some prior order and the “not yet” of a new order.²³ In the founding legends of both the Israelites and the Romans, the interruption of time appears as the gap between liberation from an older order and establishment of freedom through the constituting of a new order.²⁴ In this regard, the Aeneid is the story of the “hiatus” between “liberation from the old order and the new freedom embodied in a novus ordo saeclorum.”²⁵ The lesson that emerges in this recasting of old tales is that freedom is not an “automatic result of liberation.”²⁶ What stands out to the “men of action” who looked to these founding legends was not the “marvelously colorful tales of adventure” but the process by which a yet-constituted people prepare for a new beginning.²⁷

Arendt’s point is that the Roman founding is not the appearance of something from nothing but the marking of human time in the formation of a city. The arrival of Aeneas on the shores of Italy appears as the beginning of time not as a metaphysical moment but as “counting time ab urbe condita.”²⁸ The phrase, which roughly translates as “from the founding of the city,” serves as the title to Livy’s history of Rome and suggests, in Arendt’s interpretation of Virgil, that history begins when there are tales to tell of humans living and acting together. Thus, the Aeneid, as Virgil makes clear in the opening verse, is a song of a man who would found a city (dum conderet urbem).²⁹

There is a larger point I want to make that goes beyond either the Roman or American model of founding. Foremost among Arendt’s concerns for our modern age is how we orient ourselves from the fragments of a past. The Romans suggest one way. They did not see themselves as establishing a new foundation from something unprecedented, but as forming a renewed foundation (erneute Gründung) from something old.³⁰ Arendt describes the Roman founding as an act of rebuilding their community from the annihilating fires of the Trojan war.³¹ By conceiving of foundations as “reconstructions,” the past could be rescued and made into something new.³² The task of founding appears, thus, not as an “absolutely new beginning,” but as the “resurgence of Troy” and the “re-establishment of a city-state that had preceded Rome.”³³

We have thus far looked at how the Roman founding provides a perspective on one aspect of the perplexity of action: that of the incomprehensibility of an absolutely new beginning. The Roman foundation also addresses the second perplexity of action: How, given its authoritative status, does beginning make possible the future experience of freedom? The Romans are noticeably absent in scholarly attempts to answer this question, largely because Roman politics is seen as almost antithetical to Arendtian freedom. Wolin suggests that the Romans conceived of politics as an activity that had to conform to pre-established institutions.³⁴ Canovan characterizes “the Roman experience of foundation” as “a once-for-all affair that establishes a political world and leaves successive generations to carry it on rather than to repeat the experience of action.”³⁵ And Villa sees Arendt as “making a strong case for relief at the passing of authority.”³⁶

But there is little in Arendt’s discussion of the Romans that suggests such a relief. In describing the “sacredness of foundation” for the Romans, Arendt suggests that “the foundation of a new body politic—to the Greeks an almost commonplace experience—became to the Romans the decisive, unrepeatable beginning of their whole history, a unique event.”³⁷ The two main divinities of Rome mirror the Roman answer to the perplexity of beginning: Janus, the god of beginning, and Minerva, “the goddess of remembrance.”³⁸ It is in this relationship to the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Editors’ Introduction
• Part I Sources, Influences, and Encounters
• Part II Key Writings
• Part III Themes and TopicsOntology, Politics, and Society
• Politics
• Society
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright