MARTIN JAY
365
belongs among the few obvious, demonstrable data that confirms
human freedom" and accordingly that there was an "undeniable
affinity of lying with action, with changing the world-in short with
politics," she was essentially defenseless against the charge that the
totalitarian politics of the "big lie" and her own vision of an ideal
politics were curiously alike. Her attempt to argue that factual, as
opposed to theoretical truth, provided an outer limit on the practice of
lying because of the stubborn irreversibility of facts was a weak
resolution to this problem for she admitted that "contingent" facts are
"never compellingly true." Once again her reliance on idiosyncratic
definitions-the search for truth, she tells us, is an isolated, singular
activity, whereas the essence of politics is discursive, intersubjective
opinion-sharing-Ied her into dangerous waters.
If
examined historically her examples of pure political action
prove equally uncertain. Thus, as Schwartz has pointed out, she never
reflected on the source of the Socratic turn away from the life of the
polis
in the name of reason: "Is it possible," he asks, "that, living as
closely as they did to the 'public space' of the Athenian assembly, they
were aware that the public realm offers no escape from the self-interest,
lowly intrigues, and what seems to have been the manipulations of
some of those whom they called sophists?" When it comes to Machia–
vellian
virtu
Hannah Arendt offered no real evidence to show that its
pursuit remained unsullied by the more mundane issues of Renais–
sance politics. Similarly, in her discussion of the American Revolution,
she admitted that the major activity of the founding fathers was the
creation of a constitution, which, by her definition , puts them under
the sign of
homo faber.
Indeed, all legislation, as she saw it, is
nonpolitical because of its constitutive function. Finally, her appeal to
the councils, soviets, and
Riite
as examples of man's persistent desire
for a public space in which to speak and act in the hope of attaining
worldly immortality, although not without its virtues, can only be
judged as historically inaccurate. Workers' councils, as the name
implies, were designed from the very first to seize economic power at
the factory site itself. Nonethel ess, in
On Revo lution
Hannah Arendt
chastised the councils for betraying the purely political goal she
assigned them:
The fatal mistake of the councils has always been that they them–
selves did not distinguish clearly between participation in public
affairs and administration or' management of things in the public
interest. In the form of workers' councils, they have again and again
tried to take over the management of the factories, and all these
allempts have ended in dismal failure.
