266
PARTISAN REVIEW
Arendt remained in all her works the jurist, the legal analyst. Her con–
cerns were to plumb the depths oflegitimacy, not as an abstract discourse
on nationalism, but as an effort to review the grounds that permit a peo–
ple to survive even harsh and tyrannical conditions. In this, she was neither
a conservative nor a liberal, at least not in any conventional modes of those
concepts. To be sure, this difficulty in easy characterization may be that
property in Arendt that has proven most irritating as well as most elusive
to critics.
For example, Arendt saw in modern conservatism (in contrast to the
writings of ancient Greek philosophers) a profound two-hundred-year
response to the French Revolution, seeing it as a polemic in the hands of
Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Eric Voegelin, and their modern
followers. While liberals, for their part, were doomed to provide an uneasy
rationalization for a totalitarian revolution they could neither quite under–
stand, accept in full, nor reject. But the ambiguity of such formulations
notwithstanding, in this way, she compelled a fresh reading of historical
events of enormous magnitude.
It is questionable, and not at all certain, that Arendt had her causal
ducks in a row. It would seem that Jacob Talmon, who also wrote on
The
Origins
if
Totalitarianism
with a different perspective but remarkably similar
conclusions, was closer to the mark in suggesting that the radical segment
of the French Revolution, and the French Enlightenment before that, were
the real source of polemics-both as a style suited to ideological thinking
and as a substantive way to treat political power. But it may well be that
conservatism for so many years did reveal reactive rather than proactive
tendencies. It did so until it was once more linked to mass politics and
political party life in America. But, of course, Arendt died just when the
transformation of conservatism from a class-based theory to a mass-based
practice was commencing. Yet these are considerations within democratic
cultures that were far removed from the monolithic world of totalitarian–
ism that allows for genocides.
As someone steeped in classical Catholic thought and the German
legal tradition, the juridical order of things was critical to Arendt through–
out her career. The legal system is that logical artifact that both makes
possible and calls forth the loftiest aims of human beings, and at the other
extreme, prevents or at least curbs the implementation of their most venal
desires. These strongly ancient Jewish and classical Greek appeals to the
legal as the logical were invoked by Arendt both to illustrate the survival
of the human race and its function to limit and ultimately thwart the total–
itarian temptation behind the genocidal invocation.
On Revolution
is a continuation of discussions first broached in
The
Human Condition
and in
The Origins
if
Totalitarianism.
Since this work is
