Introduction

The human capacity to think was of enduring interest to Hannah Arendt. Her observations on the efforts of totalitarian ideologies to destroy thinking (1994b, 350), her urgent proposal in the introduction to The Human Condition to “think what we are doing” (1998, 5) and her later reflections on Adolf Eichmann's incapacity to think, all attest to its ongoing importance to her. But whereas in the earlier books this interest is subordinated to her concern with politics and human action, in her last works it becomes her overt concern, culminating in a series of lectures, later organized into the essays collected in Responsibility and Judgment (2003a) and reworked as the first volume of the (uncompleted) trilogy that makes up The Life of the Mind (1979). It is worth asking: Why should sociologists care about this portion of Arendt's writings? Surely, theories of mental activity are the purview of psychologists, philosophers and cognitive scientists, and their sociological import is likely to be small or ancillary to questions of social action. But this reply ignores the extensive history of sociological thinking about inner life, as well as more recent theories of mental activity that have assumed particular importance among sociologists, especially critical realists. The latter have argued for a stronger conception of the mental capacities required to understand personhood within sociology generally (Smith, 2013). They have emphasized the capacity for reflexivity and internal conversation (Archer, 2003, 2007, 2012), arguing that theories of mental activity cannot be kept outside of sociology, since such activities are themselves socially mediated and lie at the roots of social action. If these claims are taken seriously, then Arendt's theory of mental activity also bears greater scrutiny by sociologists, since she advances an original and extensive account of the structure of mental activity, especially the capacity to think. This chapter discusses Arendt's explorations of the phenomenon of thinking in the context of her general theory of mental activity, as this is presented primarily in her later essays collected in the posthumous collection, Responsibility and Judgment. Although these essays anticipate some of the themes taken up in The Life of the Mind, they are more closely linked with her earlier writings and to some extent avoid the philosophical baggage that obscures many of her insights in the latter work.