The Contradictions of Hannah Arendt's Political Thought

Abstract

Hannah Arendt's political thought is baffling even to the most sympathetic reader. It is baffling not only because of her fondness for questioning our established certainties, and not only because her political values are strange and shocking to us,' but most importantly because her thought is riven by a deep and serious inconsistency and confused by a persistent uncertainty of stance. The serious inconsistency lies between what may for the sake of brevity be called Arendt's elitist and her democratic aspects. She can be read as one of the most radical of democrats. Her political ideal is a vision of ancient Athens, a polity in which there were neither rulers nor ruled, but all citizens were equal within the agora, acting among their peers. She asserts that every man is a new beginning, and is capable of acting in such a way that no one, not even he himself, can know what he may achieve. She cites again and again the revolutionary situations in which the people have sprung spontaneously into action, and she shares Jefferson's desire to perpetuate that revolutionary impulse by means of direct democratic participation. However, if

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