370
PARTISAN REVIEW
With the exception of the 1946
Partisan R eview
essay, Jay bases his
arguments tha t Arendt sought to " libera te political acti on from its
subo rdination " to other dimen sions of life on her theoretica l writings
from the 1950s and early 1960s, not on her earlier hi storical or
journalistic efforts. In these texts, Arendt addressed her political
concern about how the post-Wo rld War II era could approach the
future with its experience of totalita ri ani sm. Arendt 's percepti on , both
of the fl eeting effecti ve integrity of revoluti onary violence and the
pos twar despair of the French existenti alists and former members o f the
res istance (bes t expressed for her in the aphori sm of Rene Ch ar with
which she opened
Between Past and Future)
led her to con centrate
extensively on the ques tion of politi cal renewal. How could a politi cs,
a condition of freedom conducive to the pu rsuit of human excell ence
(in the sense of
arete)
and publi c virtue (in its Roman meaning) be
inspired for the postwar era?
As the prologue to
T he H uman Condition
(1 958) cl ea rl y indi cates,
Arendt considered the social and economic questions facing mankind
less in need of immediate attentio n as a res ult of the pas t achievement
and fu ture promise of contemporary science and techno logy. Her
economic optimism, dated from today's vantage po int, was based on
the seeming historical paradox p resented by modern science: the ability
to sa tisfy, adequa tely, ma teri al wants coincided with the ability to
annihil a te mankind with nuclear warfare. T he soluti ons to question s
of economy and society, issues of ownership and distributi on, o f social
equa lity, appeared techni call y possibl e. They became acutely depen–
dent on prior political action and organiza tion because the modern
wor ld was one of po tenti al ma terial suffi ciency, if not abundance. T his
fact illuminates the quote from her 1970 interview (ha rdl y a centra l
text ) which Jay considers characteristi c, and interp rets pejora ti vely to
assert Arendt 's "margin al" con cern for questi on s of poverty and
slavery. In fact, Arendt 's quote is from a context in which sh e seeks
merely to disabuse the reader of the seemingly clear ideological
distincti on s between the contemporary practi ces of ca pitali sm and
socialism .
T he model of the
po lis,
where politi cs was separa te as publi c, an d
economic beh avior segrega ted as a matter of priva te household, became
appropri ate in the 1950s since th e promi ses of science and technology
to
satisfy the economi c demands and sustain a reasona bl e standard o f
material life in the modern world became the fun cti onal but not the
moral equi va lent of the instituti on of slavery and the p ri va te house–
hold in ancient Greece. Arendt's use of the
polis
model was always
heuri sti c, never literal in a manner th a t imp li ed a cavali er disregard for
