Being political and the reconstruction of public discourse: Hannah Arendt on experience, history and the spectator

This study analyses a number of Hannah Arendt’s books and essays written over fourdecades and suggests that a common thread can be detected that links together thedifferent stages of her thought. The need to do this follows from having to treat withcaution Arendt’s own judgement that in the mid-1930s her thinking changed when shebecame political. In relation to writings she produced throughout her life, what can beseen is that she was actually preoccupied by one and the same question, namely, whatit means to be with other people, she just looked for answers in different places andused different methods. The study shows how in her dissertation on Saint Augustine’streatment of love and such early published pieces as ‘The Enlightenment and theJewish Question’ and her commentary on Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Arendt was alreadychallenging Heidegger’s ontology, in Being and Time, of ‘being-with-one-another’.Her thinking at this time was purely empirical though, dependent upon interpretationsof history alone. Her later work, The Origins of Totalitarianism and The HumanCondition, for instance, reveal that Arendt’s political conversion amounted to therealisation that ontology and history are as necessary to each other as Kant’s conceptsand intuitions. Her defence of plurality therefore, represented both a reaction to theevils of totalitarianism on the grounds that it is an anti-political form of government,and a revised challenge to Heidegger’s assessment of das Man on his own terms. Inaddition though, Arendt’s depiction of public space and public discourse, suggestedthat choosing to be with others politically, is an antidote to the solitude of theindividual engendered by mass society