MARTIN JAY
361
exis tenti alism be said to have surmounted the difficulti es encountered
by her " to ugh " predecessors in the 1920s? Was she merely a proselytizer
for what Benjamin Schwartz has dubbed " the reli gion of politics," or
d id she provide what Margaret Canovan call s " both a new and
noteworth y example of poli ti cal thought, and also a demon stra tion
that genre is by no means dead?" The short answer, a t leas t for this
writer, is tha t desp ite the o bvious breadth of her knowledge and the
unques ti onabl e ingenuity of her mind, the politi cal thought of Han–
nah Arendt is ultimately as probl ema ti c as h er historical scho larship.
Bu ilt on a founda tion of arbitrary definiti ons and questionable, if
highl y imagin a tive, interpreta tions of history and previous political
tho ught, her system is vulnerabl e to many of the o bj ections that led to
the shipwreck of her politi ca l existenti ali st predecessors.
A chi ef source of thi s failure is wha t Canovan recognizes as the
"lop-s ided" quality of her theory. T ha t is, in try ing to restore the
rela ti ve autonomy of po litics in the face of sociological reductionism
and the grow ing domina ti on of society itself, she left herself vulnerable
to a number of o bvious ch arges. By loca ting freedom and equality
excl usively in the poli tical realm, she condemned
by
definition
the
no npolitical to eternal inequa lity and oppress ion . As she frankl y
conceded , the
po lis,
her favorite prototype of a political community,
was made possi bl e by the institution of slavery whi ch liberated the full
ci tizens of Athens fr om the ho usehold, whi ch was rul ed by necessity. In
the modern world, where slavery is harder to justify, pri va te property is
the
sine qua non
for politi cal pa rticipa ti on . T he obviously class–
oriented na ture of thi s a rgument is miti ga ted onl y marginall y by
Hannah Arendt 's admi ss ion in
Caises of the R epu blic
that:
Our
problem today is not how to expropri ate the expropriators, but,
rather, how to arrange mallers so that the masses, di spossessed by
industrial society in capitalist and sociali st systems, can regain
property.
Wha t makes this sta tement untenable is the ass umption tha t the masses
once had suffi cient property to free them for politi cal action , which
they should now " regain ." Wha t makes it even more o bj ectionable is
tha t sh e provided no means whatsoever to help in this reappropriation,
for in
On R evo lution,
she ca tegoricall y sta ted tha t: " Nothing, we
might say today, could be more obsolete than to a ttempt to libera te
mankind from poverty by politi cal means; no thing could be more
fu til e and more dangerous."
T he modern unl eashing of economi c forces whi ch mi ght serve as a
preconditi on for the uni versali zing of priva te p roperty she equated
