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eliminate poverty, there no longer was reason for economic necessity to
be at the center of the political action. The domination of social and
economic necessity in the realm of politics especiall y in the nineteenth
century, obscured, in Arendt 's opinion, the obligation to preserve a
realm of interpersonal freedom, a public realm in which individuals, as
Leroy Cooper points out, see their own identity not as private persons,
but as free members of a shared world irrespective of particular
economic and social status, but beyond the absence of want.
If
extreme
economic optimism, a belief in the primary need for politics in the
modern age, and an admiration for virtuosity, performance, and
excellence make Arendt an elitist, then perhaps the label is not as
significant or damaging as Jay thinks. Certainly, Arendt's admiration
for participatory forms of democracy and for workers' councils hardly
corresponds to what we normally associate with elitist democratic
theory.
How can Arendt's perhaps exaggerated notion of the separate
quality and priority of the political realm be explained? A possible
explanation comes not from her admiration for the
polis
or her
"political existentialism," but in her understanding of the historical
career of Jewish identity in the nineteenth century, her grasp of the
Jewish question. The evolution of society, of class, of economic
distinctions within urbanization and industrialization failed
to
lead to
full integration and the elimination of anti-Semitism. Rather , the
increasing importance of race thinking, of class ideologies, rather than
formal Enlightenment-inspired political categories, in the nineteenth
century exacerbated the position of the Jews. That social history
provided the material opportunities and appearances which deluded
Jews into false political security. Arendt's perhaps romantic yen for
formal political constitutionalism, not uncharacteristic of educated,
assimilated German Jewry (a constitutionalism contained, for Arendt,
in the American revolution) reflected a disappointment and a percep–
tion of a lost historical opportunity to create a world of citizens, of Jews
and Gentiles, whose interrelation was based on the shared public legal
acceptance of the political equality of citizenship alone, irrespective of
social and economic differences. A sense of a lost moment in Germany
in the late Enlightenment, before the Romantic reaction to the French
Revolution, appears already in Arendt's Varnhagen book. It reappears
in Arendt 's speech on Lessing. For Arendt, a true politics, a public
realm with external freedom and active participation would permit
diversity in social and economic life, consistent with political equality
and the opportunity to act as a full part of humanity. The sustained
status of the Jew as pariah, with its enforced worldlessness, seemed
