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theoretician, but as an actor within history. Arendt's standing, and the
appropriate descriptive label for her within the pantheon of important
twentieth-century intellectuals is of concern to Jay, as is the somewhat
oblique assertion of error and historical responsibility with which he
ends his paper. However, Jay fails to grasp Arendt's own method and
intent as an intellectual of
praxis,
for whom speech and action had an
effective place within the events which surrounded her writing. Post–
World War II politics, Zionism and Israel, Nazism and American
politics, its heritage and activity in the 1960s and 1970s, were move–
ments and events in which Arendt thought the intellectual had more
than passive responsibility
qua
intellectual. Consequently, any intel–
lectual historian in dealing with Arendt ought
to
resist the temptation
merely to label her positions with phrases from within the history of
thought, as Jay often does (e.g. anti rationalist, decisionist, subjectiv–
ist). Hannah Arendt was not, in either self-image or practice, a
professional academic. Her ambitions were to act through speech
within historical events,
to
speak with impact
to
a broad thinking
readership. A comprehensive intellectual assessment of Arendt re–
quires, inclusive of a traditional etiology for her thought, more in the
way of a biographical and historical context for each of her writings.
Nonetheless, this caveat with respect
to
Jay's paper is not essential to a
rejoinder
to
his interpretation of Arendt.
Arendt's discussion of politics centered on an idealized view of the
polis,
one which she held throughout her career. This is especially
clear in two of her key writings in which she explored the distinction
between politics and society,
The Human Condition
and her essay
"What is Freedom?". But the stress on political action as a distinct
human potential for change appears also in
The Origins of Totalitari–
anism,
primarily in the third and last section.
In
that context, Arendt
perceived a capacity for "miracle," for an ultimate response despite
total domination. Man's judgment and ability
to
begin anew, to act,
were perhaps the only rescue from extreme circumstances in which
conditions of society and economics provided no short or long range
causal hope for liberation.
In
contrast, despite faults in the historical narrative of the first two
sections of her
Origins,
Arendt quite brilliantly describes the actual
interplay among politics, economics and social change in anti–
Semitism and imperialism. Arendt's view of the social transformations
of the nineteenth century, of the distinction between mob and mass,
reflect a sophisticated understanding not only of the concrete interplay
between politics and society but also of what Max Weber called
Sinnzusammenhaenge,
the meaningful interconnections of the poli–
tical and economic dimensions within historical social action.
