Prejudices

The first task of thinking, for Arendt, is to make explicit what we take for granted:

These prejudices are not groundless assumptions – they are grounded in the realities of our time. But the reality of our time is that politics has been utterly debased. The danger of these prejudices is not that they distort our situation but that they make it seem natural and inevitable, and that by concealing the meaning of politics they may contribute to its utter disappearance.

By explicitly laying out these prejudices we can begin to gain a certain critical distance from them and start to see the realities of our time in a new light.

These prejudices are as follows:

Politics is a universal and necessary part of human life. There are now many answers to the question of the political, but “What all these answers have in common is that they take for granted that politics exists and has existed always and everywhere that men live together in a historico-cultural sense.”Footnote ⁷ This is “the modern prejudice according to which politics would be an absolute necessity that has existed always and everywhere.”Footnote ⁸

Politics is a means to an end. “All the determinations or definitions of politics that we find in our tradition constitute, in their authentic content, justifications of politics. To speak very generally, all these justifications and definitions end up defining politics as a means to a higher end, even if this end has naturally been interpreted very differently over the course of the centuries.”Footnote ⁹ The means/end schema has dominated political thought.

In the modern age there are two main interpretations of this end.

The end of politics is life itself. Politics is supposed to secure survival and prosperity. “Politics, we hear, is an absolute necessity for human life, whether it is a matter of individual existence or the existence of society. Since man is not self-sufficient [autark], but depends on others for his own existence, he has to care about this social existence which concerns everyone, and without which communal life would not be possible. The task and the end of politics is to secure life in the broadest sense.”Footnote ¹⁰ Arendt stressed that “life” here does not mean a specific way of living, but merely the bare life of animal existence.

The end of politics is liberty. “Politics permits the individual to pursue his objectives in peace and quiet, that is to say, without being bothered with politics.”Footnote ¹¹ While liberty is conceived in many ways, she argued, it is commonly seen as external to politics. Politics secures liberty, and liberty exists outside the political realm.

Politics is a matter of rule. Strictly speaking, to rule is to be sovereign, to be master of a domain, not to be subject to a higher power, to command obedience. More generally, to rule means to have power over others, to be able to control their actions, to be able to make them do as one wills. Arendt argued the hallmark of most political philosophy since Plato is “the concept of rule, that is, the notion that men can lawfully and politically live together only when some are entitled to command and others are forced to obey.”Footnote ¹² The prejudice that politics is a matter of rule underlies the belief that different forms of government are simply different kinds of rule, and this belief is to some extent implicit in the very words with which we conceive and classify forms of government: “monarchy” means rule of one and “oligarchy” means rule by a few. “Democracy” is commonly interpreted as “rule of the people”; “plutocracy” as rule of the rich; “theocracy” as rule of God; “aristocracy” as rule of the best. This prejudice underlies the assumption that the most basic question of political philosophy is “Who should rule whom?”

Politics is ultimately a struggle for the power to rule. While politics in the broadest sense is supposed to concern the organization of power in communities, in a narrow sense politics is thought to be the pursuit of power itself. This is the sense in which “politics” is most commonly used today – we speak of party politics as a contest for control of the government, international politics as a fight for global hegemony, politics in general as merely an arena for class struggle, or as the struggle in which the powerful try to sustain their dominance and the powerless seek to resist and subvert it. This notion of politics supports what she called “the prejudices against politics – the idea that politics at bottom is a tissue of lies and deceptions at the service of shabby interests and even shabbier ideologies, while international politics oscillates between empty propaganda and naked violence.”Footnote ¹³

These assumptions are not just errors, according to Arendt. They are based on experience and reflect the realities of our time. The question is not whether they are inaccurate, but whether they are superficial. What is at stake is not whether they correctly describe the obvious features of politics today, but whether they fail to grasp the distinctive character of the political realm – not whether they blind us to the facts, but whether they prevent us from understanding our situation.

Arendt thought these prejudices obscure the meaning of politics. Their prevalence shows that we have for the most part lost a genuine understanding of political life. Our task as thinkers is to suspend belief in our prejudices and to gain a critical distance from common conceptions of politics. But how is this possible?

A Return to Antiquity

In her reflections on politics, Arendt both followed and strayed from Heidegger’s way of thought. Heidegger had no definite answer to the question of the political. In a 1942 lecture he wrote: “The ‘political’ is what belongs to the polis and can therefore be determined only in terms of the polis … Yet what is the polis of the Greeks? No ‘definition’ can ever answer such questions; or rather the ‘definition,’ even if it points in the right direction, provides no guarantee of an adequate relation to what is essential.”Footnote ¹⁴ Heidegger was less concerned with answering the question of the political than with keeping the question open. To keep it open, in his view, we have to avoid two ways in which the question is commonly foreclosed.

On the one hand, we cannot take for granted a modern concept of the political, and project it back onto the ancient Greek polis. “If the ‘political’ is what belongs to the polis … then it is of little help to us to arm ourselves with any ideas whatsoever of the ‘political’ so as to delimit the essence of the polis using such weapons.”Footnote ¹⁵ To do so is simply to impose our preconceptions on the polis, and to foreclose the possibility that a study of the polis might actually lead us to rethink our current prejudices. Heidegger’s target here was the Nazi view of the polis in light of Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, a view in which the Greeks started to look suspiciously like Nazis. “Today … one can scarcely read a treatise or book on the Greeks without everywhere being assured that here, with the Greeks, ‘everything’ is determined ‘politically’. In most ‘research results,’ the Greeks appear as the pure National Socialists.”Footnote ¹⁶

On the other hand, we cannot just recover a Greek theory of politics and assume that it adequately captures the essence of the polis. To think through the question of the political we have to start with the Greek understanding of the polis, but we cannot assume that Greek philosophy fully grasped the nature of politics. Heidegger makes this point in a passage worth quoting at length:

Any attempt to think through the question of the political, for Heidegger, has to follow a double directive: it must suspend modern preconceptions about the nature of politics and return to a study of the classical polis itself; but it must not assume that classical political theory was able to fully grasp the essence of politics.

Arendt followed this double directive in her thought. To rethink the concept of the political she returned to the Greeks.

But this return was complex. Arendt thought the Greeks first discovered the essence and realm of the political, but their understanding of politics was nontheoretical – they had maxims, notions, and principles, but never an adequate theory of the political.Footnote ¹⁹ She also claimed that as a political sphere opened up in the poleis of ancient Greece, the Greeks had to transform old words and invent new ones in order to talk about this new kind of community; inevitably some of these words led them to think about politics in misleading terms. And finally, she argued that when philosophers began to work out theories of government, they did not fully grasp the specificity of the political realm. Her project was to work out a pure concept of the political by making explicit and articulating in concepts the original understanding of politics implicit in the nontheoretical writings of the Greeks.Footnote ²⁰

Why return to the Greeks? Why study the history of the polis if we are looking for the essence of politics? Why start with the historical to find the essential? If a concept of the political is to have universal validity, it should be applicable to political communities in all times and places – why not look at all political communities throughout history and across cultures, and try to isolate the core features they have in common? Isn’t it arbitrary and ethnocentric to derive a concept of the political from one culture and one period of time?

Arendt’s approach was guided by assumptions implicit in her phenomenology. We cannot find the essence of politics by a comparative study of political communities, because to decide which communities are political we would have to rely on a prior concept of politics; that is, we would have to presuppose what we are trying to find. Instead we have to start with a prime example of political community (a community universally recognized as political), to isolate its distinctive traits (the traits that distinguish it from other kinds of community), to abstract these traits from that specific example, and to articulate them in a general concept that captures the distinctive nature of political communities everywhere. Since the prime example of a political community is the classical polis – the origin of the word “politics” – the test of any concept of the political is how well it grasps its distinctive traits. To work out an adequate concept of the political we have to start from the actual history and language of the polis.

Arendt did not idealize the Greek polis, or hold it up as a model to be emulated. She knew the freedom and equality of its citizens depended on the domination and enslavement of noncitizens.Footnote ²¹ Her aim was not to glorify the achievements of “Western Civilization,” but to grasp the distinctive traits of one exemplary political community – classical Athens – in order to clarify the nature and conditions of politics as such.

To follow Arendt we need a minimal grasp of the history of Athenian politics, the institutions that defined the polis, and the genealogy of key political words.

The basic arc of Athenian political history was a slow and discontinuous movement from monarchy to oligarchy to a relatively inclusive democracy.Footnote ²² Pre-classical Athens was apparently ruled by kings until around 700 BC, when the last king was deposed and replaced with a college of nine rulers or archons chosen each year by the aristocratic elite. The power structure probably also included a relatively weak Assembly limited to the warrior elite, and an aristocratic Council of the Areopagus that advised the archons and that had the power to veto decisions made in the Assembly. Common Athenians held the status of citizens, but citizenship did not confer political rights or power. In 594 BC an archon named Solon reformed the constitution in a number of ways: he changed the qualifications for office from birth to wealth, so that the archonships were open to rich commoners as well as to the nobility; he outlawed debt-bondage for citizens, so that native-born Athenians could never be enslaved; he instituted a court where citizens could appeal the rulings of the archons; he established a Council of 400; and he opened (or left open) the Assembly to the poorest Athenians. These reforms had the effect of expanding the oligarchy, opening access to power, and elevating the status of citizens. Still, at this point, most citizens could not hold office or speak in the Assembly. In 546 BC, Peisistratos seized power and ruled Athens as a tyrant for the next twenty-one years. After his son was deposed in 510 BC, there was an open struggle for power between two aristocratic factions led by Isagoras and Cleisthenes. Cleisthenes eventually triumphed by proposing a set of constitutional reforms that would create the most democratic polis in Greece. He divided Athens into 139 neighborhoods or demes, and instituted deme assemblies that were open to all citizens. Every year each deme sent a fixed number of members to sit on a newly established Council of 500. The Council was in charge of setting the agenda for the citywide assemblies, which were moved to an open space west of the Acropolis called the Pnyx. The foundation of Cleisthenes’ reforms was the concept of isonomy (ἰσονομία), the notion that all citizens were equal (ἴσος) by law (νόμος). Isonomy meant that all citizens could participate in the local assemblies, that they were eligible to serve on the Council of 500, and most importantly that all citizens had the right to meet in the Assembly. Assemblies began with the question “What man has good advice to give the polis and wishes to make it known?” Any male citizen could take part in the ensuing deliberations, and all deliberations were decided collectively, one man one vote.

Over the next century, Athens saw a number of constitutional reforms that weakened or dismantled oligarchic institutions and that made it possible for all male citizens to participate in governing the polis. After 487 BC the nine archons were no longer selected by the Areopagus council but chosen by lottery from a pool of citizens preelected by the demes. In 462 BC the Areopagus lost certain key powers, including (probably) the power to review and veto decisions made by the Assembly. A few years later, in 457 BC, the property requirements for the offices of archon and magistrate were lowered, and office holders were for the first time paid for public service. In the 440s Athens began to pay citizens who served as jurors, and around 400 BC it began to provide small payments to citizens who attended the Assembly. By the mid-fourth century, when Aristotle was writing, the Assembly met around forty times a year, and attendance ranged from thousands to tens of thousands of citizens. During the fourth century the constitution went through minor changes until the democratic government was overthrown in 322 BC. Other poleis went through similar developments, and while none became as democratic as Athens, all used various forms of self-government.

By the classical age, the polis was understood as a specific form of community defined by two institutions. The first was citizenship; in every polis the native-born men were all given a certain equality of status and rights. M. I. Finley wrote:

The second institution was collective deliberation and decision-making: every polis had at least one small council and a larger assembly in which qualified citizens could talk about issues facing the community and decide how to deal with them. Finley wrote:

These two institutions let all men of a certain status come together and to have an equal say in decisions affecting the community. This coming together opened up a public space in which citizens could discuss and act on matters of common concern.

The key words of Greek politics took their sense from the experiences proper to this history and these institutions. Arendt’s concept of the political is based on her interpretation of these words.

Isonomy (ἰσονομία) did not simply mean equality before the law, according to Arendt, but equal right to take part in the institutions of government – the juries, the offices, the Council, and above all the Assembly:

Isegoria (ἰσηγορία) meant not simply freedom of speech but the right of all citizens equally (ἴσος) to speak in the Assembly (ἀγορεύω). It did not just mean that citizens were guaranteed a private realm where they could speak without government censorship; it meant that citizens were guaranteed a public sphere in which they could have a voice in collective deliberations. In other words, isegoria did not just limit the power of government over citizens; it gave citizens an equal share of the government’s power–an equal right to participate in the debates in the assemblies and to have an equal say (a vote) in their decisions.

The Greek word for “persuasion” – peitho (πείθω) – has to be understood in the context of these institutions, where political activity consisted first of all in deliberation. Arendt argued that modern translations fail to do justice to the Greek word, which named not just a power of discourse but also a divinity: “‘Persuasion is a very weak and inadequate translation of the ancient peithein, the political importance of which is indicated by the fact that Peitho, the goddess of persuasion, had a temple in Athens.”Footnote ²⁶ We may be tempted to distinguish two senses of peitho: first, the power of discourse to change the way we see things, a power that allows us to convey our views to others, to see things from their perspective, to resolve differences without violence, to reach agreement without coercion, and to maintain concord among citizens without force; and second, the proper name of a goddess, Peitho, whom the Athenians honored with a temple set up on the south slope of the Acropolis after the unification of Athens. But this distinction is misleading – it divides what for the Greeks was one and the same. There was not persuasion on the one hand and a goddess on the other. Persuasion was a goddess, a force both beneficent and dangerous to which humans were subject and which exceeded their full control and understanding. The supreme importance of persuasion is evident at the end of “The Eumenides,” where Athena persuades the Furies to stay and accept a place of honor in Athens, on the condition that they recognize and honor the divinity of Peitho.

Aeschylus put this praise of Persuasion in a scene that shows her power, since Athena is able to placate the Furies and to reconcile the old and new gods through the power of persuasion alone.

It is also in this context that we should understand the origin of rhetoric, according to Arendt: “To persuade, peithein, was the specifically political form of speech, and since the Athenians were proud that they, unlike the barbarians, conducted their political affairs in the form of speech and without compulsion, they considered rhetoric, the art of persuasion, the highest, the truly political art.”Footnote ²⁸ Today the word “rhetoric” has been abstracted from the political context in which it emerged, and this abstraction has both narrowed and expanded its sense: narrowed because rhetoric is often reduced to the study of tropes and of the performative power of language; expanded because any text that contains tropes or performative language is said to have a rhetorical dimension. At the limit, this expansion culminates in the claim that “everything is rhetorical.” Arendt by contrast stressed the origin of rhetoric in the development of the polis: “It is characteristic for this development that every politician was called a ‘rhetor’ [speaker] and that rhetoric, the art of public speaking, as distinguished from dialectic, the art of philosophic speech, is defined by Aristotle as the art of persuasion.”Footnote ²⁹ Rhetoric in the original sense was not a dimension of all discourse, but the art of public speech among citizens in the polis.

Arendt argued that the emergence of isonomia and isegoria in Greece profoundly affected the concept of freedom or eleutheria (ἐλευθερία). This originally meant freedom in the basic sense of freedom of movement.

But as collective action among the citizens came to depend on collective deliberation, the meaning of freedom came to include prominently the freedom to speak.

As freedom came to be understood as free speech, the absence of free speech came to be equated with slavery. In The Phoenician Women, for example, Euripides has Polyneices say that the worst thing about exile is that one does not have the right to speak freely: “One thing is most important: no free speech.” Jocasta responds, “That’s a slave’s life–not to say what one thinks.”Footnote ³² A free city was one in which citizens enjoy isegoria. In The Suppliant Women, Euripides has Theseus define freedom with the question that opened the Athenian assemblies: “Freedom is this: ‘Who has good counsel to offer the polis?’”Footnote ³³ By extension, a free city was a city in which the power of government is not concentrated in the hands of a ruler, but in which all the citizens had a share of government power: “Athens is not ruled by one man, but is a free city [ἐλευθέρα πόλις]. Here the people rule, and power is held by yearly turns. They do not give the most to the rich; the poor also have an equal share.”Footnote ³⁴ Freedom in this sense was not just a matter of freedom from government, and it was not located only in a private sphere beyond government control. Eleutheria included above all the right to take part in self-government, and it was realized not outside but within the realm of politics.

The word “citizen” (πολίτης) came to mean not just a native of a polis but one who enjoyed a certain status within it. As citizens won greater access to the spheres of power, citizenship (πολιτεία) was defined by the duty and right to participate in governing the community. Arendt emphasized the esteem the Greeks had for citizenship. The life of the citizen was commonly considered better that of a ruler. In Ion, Euripides has the hero extol citizenship over rulership: “Tyranny is foolishly praised; it has a pleasant face, but inside it is painful … I would rather live happy as one of the people than as a tyrant.”Footnote ³⁵ Citizenship made possible a polity not subject to a ruler but governed by equals.

The word “polis” came to mean a specific form of community native to Greece and defined by institutions of citizenship and self-government, according to Arendt: “The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.”Footnote ³⁶ The polis was “different from other settlements (for which the Greeks used another word [astu]) because it was built around this public space, the public realm in which those who were free and equal could meet at any time.”Footnote ³⁷ The polis was considered a distinct form of community because it made possible a kind of freedom that did not exist anywhere else:

So the verb politeuo (πολιτεύω) meant at the same time to live in a polis, to be a free citizen, to have a certain form of government, and to take part in government.

For the Greeks, the polis was distinct from three other kinds of communities, according to Arendt.

First, they distinguished the polis from the household or oikos (οἴκος): “According to Greek thought, the human capacity for political organization is not only different from but stands in direct opposition to that natural association whose center is the home (oikia) and the family.”Footnote ³⁹ The oikos was grounded in the need to live together in order to master the necessities of life. Τhe management (nomia) of the household (oikos) was economics (oikonomia) – the sphere of activities concerned with survival and prosperity: “The distinctive trait of the household sphere was that in it men lived together because they were driven by their wants and needs. The driving force was life itself … which, for its individual maintenance and its survival as the life of the species, needs the company of others.”Footnote ⁴⁰ But the polis existed not for the sake of life but for the sake of the freedom opened up by concerted action and self-government. Arendt also stressed that the oikos was the sphere of private life, in opposition to the public life of the polis, and that the boundary between public and private was sacrosanct.Footnote ⁴¹ The power of the polity ended at the threshold of the oikos; within his household each male citizen was sovereign. The household was thus a sphere of strict hierarchy; every household was ruled by a master (κύριος) or despot (δεσπότης), who commanded the obedience of his wife, children, servants, and slaves. The community of male citizens, by contrast, was a sphere of equality. Citizens were equal before the law, and no citizen as citizen had the right to tell others what to do.

The Greeks also distinguished the polis from the empires of the non-Greeks, in whose empires the power to decide and to act was concentrated in the hands of a single ruler, such as the Persian emperor or the Egyptian pharaoh, who commanded the absolute obedience of his subjects and against whose power there was no limit, no appeal, no recourse. To the Greeks, this relation between subject and ruler seemed to be essentially the same as the relation between slaves and their masters or “despots” (δεσπότης), and so they called such government “despotic.” In a despotic government there was no place for subjects to do what citizens did in a Greek polis – to come together and to deliberate and act on matters of common concern. For the Greeks there was an essential difference between political and despotic communities, between living in a polis (πολιτεύω) and living under a despotic regime (δεσποτέω). Despotism was not a political system but an anti-political form of government.

Last, the Greeks distinguished the political life from life under a tyranny. The word “tyrant” in Greek (τύραννος) meant a monarch who had not inherited his position but who had seized power. Oedipus was called the tyrant of Thebes, for instance, not because he “tyrannized” the city in the modern sense but because he was not (apparently) the heir to the throne. A tyrant in Greece could be a wise and just ruler, and a tyrannical regime could bring about peace and prosperity. Arendt claimed the Greeks objected to tyranny not because it failed to protect their lives and livelihoods, but because it deprived them of freedom.

The Greeks knew that enlightened tyranny might be a good form of government if the end of government were simply security and prosperity, but in general they took it for granted that “politics and freedom are bound to one another, and that tyranny is the worst form of government, indeed the most anti-political.”Footnote ⁴³

The word “political” (τὸ πολιτικόν) meant what was proper to a polis. It applied to anything that belonged to a free city, to a body of citizens and, more narrowly, to citizens who took the lead in public affairs and spoke in the assembly: “The word politikon was really an adjective for the organization of the polis, and not a designation for any kind of community whatsoever.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Politics (ἡ πολιτική) then was simply what citizens did in a polis.

Politics meant the practice of self-government, a way of being together in which citizens governed the city through public deliberation and collective decisions.

Arendt insisted that politics for the Greeks was not a means to an end. Political life had a dignity of its own. “Men have never, either before or after, thought so highly of political activity and bestowed so much dignity upon its realm.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The political life – the life of a citizen – was valued for its own sake.

She explained this dignity by pointing to four traits of the classical polis.

First, the polis was a space of freedom, in two distinct senses. In private life, citizens were free in the sense that they were not subject to control or coercion by others. Within the boundaries of the private sphere, inside his own house, in the isolated domain of the oikos, each male citizen was sovereign – there were few constraints on what he could say or do. Freedom in this sense is the absence of constraint. But for the Greeks this negative freedom was only of limited value, since the sovereign isolation of private life severely narrows effectiveness of speech and the range of what people can actually do: “Action … is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act. Action and speech need the surrounding presence of others.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The polis was also a space of freedom in the sense that it instituted a public sphere where citizens could speak and act together. By opening a space where citizens could deliberate and decide what to do together, and by enabling citizens to act in concert to execute their decisions, the polis vastly expanded the range of things that Athenian citizens could actually do, far beyond what each one could do on his own in the sovereign isolation of private life. Freedom in this sense is positive – it is measured not by the absence of constraints but by the horizon of possibilities that are open to us, the range of things it is actually possible for us to do.

Second, the polis was a space of struggle or agon, which the Greeks saw as essential to a good life. A good life was honorable; what they honored was excellence; and excellence was best cultivated and manifested through struggle. Struggle enables men to rise to heights they cannot reach on their own, and the showdown with an opponent is a moment of truth in which men show who they are. It was only in his showdown with Hector, for instance, that Achilles could reach and manifest his true greatness as a warrior. One space of agon was the battlefield. Another was the council of warriors in The Iliad, where allies sought to outshine each other in speaking and giving advice for the common good. A third space of agon was the athletic contest, in which the struggle between opponents was isolated from the life or death fight between enemies and transposed into a competition among friends; the point of the athletic contest was to cultivate and celebrate excellence by opening a space where men could reach and manifest greatness in their struggle to outshine each other. Arendt argued that the polis itself was a space of agon, where struggle had been isolated from the life or death violence between enemies and transposed into a competition for distinction among fellow citizens.

This is an essential point: Politics was like warfare in the sense that they both involved struggle. But politics was essentially different from warfare. It was not domesticated warfare, or war continued by other means. It was closer to the athletic contest or warrior council, in which agon was allowed precisely because the struggle for distinction between friends and allies ultimately contributed to the common good. “The public realm itself, the polis, was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where everybody had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The Greek polis was of course rife with conflict, rivalry, and enmity, but then so is every other form of human community. What was distinctive about the polis was that it made a place for such struggles, not as a domesticated form of warfare but as a competition among citizens, an agon that existed for the sake of the common good. Politics for the Greeks was agonistic but not essentially polemical.

Third, the Greeks valued politics because the polis was a space of appearances, in two senses. The first sense has to do with the revelatory power of speech and action – the power of action and speech to reveal the unique character of the one who speaks and acts. This revelation of character is different from the deliberate projection of an image; no matter how carefully we try to control our public image, our words and actions inadvertently reveal who we are. Our character becomes apparent through our words and deeds. “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The polis was a space of appearance in this first sense: by clearing a public sphere in which citizens could speak and act together, it gave men the chance to emerge from the obscurity of silence and passivity and to show who they were. “The polis was supposed to multiply occasions to win ‘immortal fame,’ that is, to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctiveness.”Footnote ⁵¹

But the polis was also a space of appearance in a second sense. In the sovereign isolation of the private sphere, each individual is condemned not just to obscurity but also to seeing the world from only one perspective – the perspective proper to his place in the world. By instituting a public space where citizens could speak with each other on matters of common concern, the polis opened a place in which citizens could hear different perspectives and start to see the world from several different points of view. Life in the polis was an end in itself for the Greeks, in part because they understood that we are in touch with reality to the extent that we can see it from multiple perspectives. Arendt made this point in four sentences worth quoting at length:

In public life, citizens were forced to confront and respond to perspectives other than their own, and in this multiplicity of perspectives the world revealed itself more clearly and completely than in the sovereign isolation of private life.

Finally, the polis was also a space of memory. Every human community is a site of memory in the sense that its identity depends on stories that make sense of the present in light of the past. But the polis was a site of memory in a more distinctive sense: it not only instituted a public sphere where citizens could speak and act together, it also instituted a cult of remembrance that ensured the greatest speeches and actions would be preserved in memory and recorded for posterity, so that the supreme achievements of its citizens would win immortal fame. This cult of remembrance was in part a way to sustain the ethos of the polis by celebrating the heroes who best exemplified its ideals. But it also provided some consolation for the ultimate futility of human existence, since it promised that, while all mortals are doomed to die, the words and deeds in which they revealed who they were could achieve a kind of immortality.

This cult of remembrance was exemplified for Arendt by the funeral oration of Pericles, who promised his fellow citizens that “the admiration of the present and succeeding ages will be ours.”Footnote ⁵⁴ It assured citizens that their ephemeral existence would not vanish into oblivion, but achieve the reality that comes from being not just seen and heard but remembered forever.

Arendt insisted on the historical specificity of the polis. The word “polis” did not refer to any community whatsoever, but to a specific kind of community that emerged at a certain time and place: “According to the Greeks, [politics] had only existed in Greece, and even there only for a relatively short time.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The word “politics” does not refer to a universal and necessary dimension of human life; it denotes the way of being together proper to this specific kind of community. But she also insisted on the universal significance of the Greek word; it refers to a way of being together that – under certain conditions – is possible in all times and all places: “our very word ‘politics’ is derived from and indicates this one very specific form of political life, bestowing upon it a kind of universal validity.”Footnote ⁵⁶ So a concept of the political must do two things at once. It must do justice to the specificity of the polis – the test of any concept of the political is whether it adequately grasps the distinctive traits of the Greek polis. But it must also have universal validity – it must abstract from these distinctive traits the essential traits of the political itself; that is, the traits that make a community political, and so are common to every political community.

Arendt’s project was not just to understand the Greek polis in its particularity. Her aim was to start with a specific example of a polity and to move toward the political in general. She began with a description of politics in the classical polis, and moved toward a reflection on the nature of politics as such.

What then made Greek politics exemplary? What were the conditions and principles of political life in Greece? What are the indispensable conditions and innermost principles of politics in general?

A Pure Concept of the Political

Political life in classical Greece depended on certain conditions from which Arendt tried to isolate the conditions of the political life as such. We can single out four.

First, politics is based on the experience of plurality and commonality. What we have in common with others, according to Arendt, is not a human nature within each individual, but the world in which we live – the horizon of meaning in which things have sense and worth, and the earth that is our common ground: “Politics emerges in the space-between-men, hence in something that is basically exterior to man.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Our being in the world is always plural – we live among others who are more or less different from us: “Politics is about the community and reciprocity of beings who are different … Politics rests on the fact of human plurality.”Footnote ⁵⁸ What makes us different is not that we possess different natures but simply that we see the same world from different points of view: “This plurality … is specifically the condition … of all political life.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The political life is possible because being human means being in the world with others.

Second, politics is made possible by discourse. Our power to see the same world from different points of view is multiplied by our ability to speak: “Men in the plural, that is, men insofar as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Humans can be political because they are endowed with speech: “Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.”Footnote ⁶¹

Third, political life requires a public sphere where people can articulate different points of view on the world they share in common: “The reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised.”Footnote ⁶² Politics is impossible where the public realm is eliminated, since this elimination destroys the sense of belonging to a common world and suppresses the plurality of perspectives on which political life depends. A community in which all share the same point of view, or in which different perspectives are not allowed to appear, is not a political community.

Fourth, politics is possible only when people recognize some common good. Conflicts can be resolved politically when shared interests outweigh particular interests. “Interests constitute, in the word’s most literal significance, something which inter-est, which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together.”Footnote ⁶³ There can be no politics where people find themselves together without recognizing any common good.Footnote ⁶⁴ Politics in the strict sense becomes impossible whenever the competition for government power degenerates into a life-or-death struggle for dominance, where each competing group aims to seize and exercise government power for its own good at the expense of all others. The more clearly people recognize a common good, and the more it outweighs what is good for each particular faction, the easier it is to establish a genuinely political community.

These four conditions make political life possible but not inevitable: “A political realm does not automatically come into being wherever men live together.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The political realm depends on a space of appearance that is a permanent possibility but not a permanent fact of human existence: “Wherever people gather together, it is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever.”Footnote ⁶⁶

What then is politics?

Arendt singled out seven traits that define the sphere of the political.

1. 1. Political life excludes the rule of some over others. To rule is to have power over people, as a master has power over slaves, or as a despot has power over subjects. It was essential to the polis that relations of rule were banished among male citizens; no citizen as citizen had the power to command other citizens and to demand their obedience. The Greeks prided themselves on this rejection of rulership, according to Arendt. In The History Herodotus tells the story of Otanes, a Persian who advocated isonomy and who refused to be either king or subject, saying that he was willing neither to be a ruler nor to submit to the rule of another:Footnote ⁶⁷ “οὔτε γὰρ ἄρχειν οὔτε ἄρχεσθαι ἐθέλω.” “I am not willing to rule or to be ruled.”Footnote ⁶⁸ For Arendt this rejection of rulership is essential: “Since Herodotus, [the polis] was understood as a form of political organization in which the citizens lived together under conditions of no-rule, without a division between ruler and ruled.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The polis let male citizens live in equality rather than in the hierarchy inherent in any form of rule.

2. 2. Political life is based on the principle of equality. Political equality meant equality of rights (isonomia), equality of power (isokratia), and equal right to speak in the assembly (isegoria).Footnote ⁷⁰ The equality among enfranchised citizens of a polis stood in sharp contrast to the inequality among members of a household: “The polis was distinguished from the household in that it knew only ‘equals,’ whereas the household was the center of the strictest inequality.”Footnote ⁷¹ Each citizen had an equal part in the polis, and none had authority over the others.

3. 3. Political life excludes violence: “In Greek self-understanding, to force people by violence, to command rather than to persuade, were pre-political ways to deal with people characteristic of life outside the polis, of home and family life, where the household head ruled with uncontested, despotic powers, or of life in the barbarian empires of Asia, whose despotism was frequently likened to the organization of the household.”Footnote ⁷² To use any kind of force on citizens was to treat them as inferiors and thus to violate their status as equals. Arendt noted that this exclusion of violence was the basis for “the Athenian custom of ‘persuading’ those who had been condemned to death to commit suicide by drinking the hemlock cup, thus sparing the Athenian citizen under all circumstances the indignity of physical violation.”Footnote ⁷³ To say that political life excludes violence does not mean that violence is absent from political communities; Arendt knew of course that the freedom in the Greek polis depended on slavery and domination within the household. Violence was the prepolitical condition of possibility of politics: “Coercion and violence have always been the means to found and enlarge or secure the space of politics, but they are not in themselves political.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Matters that naturally involve violence (such as war and slavery) are objects of political concern, but take place outside the political realm and are not in themselves political.

4. 4. In political life, violence and coercion are replaced by speech: “To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The mode of speech proper to political life is persuasion, since in persuasion I speak to others as people who are capable of making up their own minds, and who are free to accept or reject my point of view. The centrality of speech in the life of the polis is suggested by the fact that the Athenians had a temple on the Acropolis dedicated to the goddess persuasion, Peitho (Πείθω). Speech makes possible a noncoercive and nonviolent way of living together.

5. 5. The primary form of political action is common deliberation. Deliberation concerns questions of ends – practical questions of how we should live together and what we should do in the concrete situations in which we find ourselves. Political life first consists in “speechmaking and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading” that precedes effective action.Footnote ⁷⁶ To participate in the life of a polity means to engage in this common deliberation over communal ends: “Debate constitutes the very essence of political life.”Footnote ⁷⁷

6. 6. The political realm is delimited by the distinction between public and private. Politics has to do with public matters – matters that can and should appear in the common world, and that are legitimately matters of common concern. What is political is whatever is properly of common interest to the polity as a whole. Whatever is deemed private, by contrast, is not properly a matter of political concern or subject to political power. The private realm is the sphere of what is our own (τὸ ἴδιον) as opposed to what is common (τὸ κοινόν) – what we cannot or need not share with others, that to which the polity has no claim and which is properly free of political control. What is private is also what is properly hidden from others and has to be protected from the visibility of the public realm.Footnote ⁷⁸

7. 7. Politics exists for the sake of freedom: “The realm of the polis was the sphere of freedom.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In Greek thought, freedom meant not being ruled by any compulsion, neither the will of others, nor the impulses of one’s passions, nor the activities that are necessary to survival. But to be free also meant not to rule others. Aristotle said explicitly that “the life of a free man is better than the life of a despot.”Footnote ⁸⁰ For Herodotus, the only Persians who were free were the descendants of Otanes: “till this day his house continues as the only free one in Persia.”Footnote ⁸¹ Arendt insisted that neither those who rule nor those who are ruled are really free: “To be free meant both not to be subject to the necessity of life or to the command of another and not to be in command oneself. It meant neither to rule nor to be ruled.”Footnote ⁸² “To be free meant to be free from the inequality present in rulership and to move in a sphere where neither rule nor being ruled existed.”Footnote ⁸³ Since the political realm excludes any form of rule, it is above all the space in which freedom is possible: “The raison d’être of politics is freedom.”Footnote ⁸⁴

These seven traits can be articulated in a pure concept of the political: politics is a way of being together, based on principles of equality and nonviolence, in which people decide what to do and how to live together through mutual persuasion and common deliberation on matters of public concern.

Distinctions

This concept of the political implies four distinctions.

1. 1. The distinction between “what is essential to politics” and “what belongs in the political sphere.” The word “political” is ambiguous. When we say something is political, we sometimes mean it is an essential part of politics, in the sense that politics cannot exist without it. In this sense Arendt spoke of mutual persuasion and common deliberation as political modes of discourse – they are political in the sense that they are necessary parts of political life: “debate constitutes the very essence of political life.”Footnote ⁸⁵ At other times, when we say that something is political, we mean that it is properly a matter of political concern and debate. In this sense we speak of war and violence as political matters – they are political in that they are issues that concern the community as a whole and therefore deserve to be debated and decided in the political sphere. We have to keep these two senses distinct. When Arendt said that politics excludes violence and that violence is not political, for example, she meant that while violence is of course a matter of political concern, it does not belong in the political realm.

So there are two senses of the question, “What is political?” In one sense it asks, “What kinds of things are essential to politics?” This is a theoretical question, and Arendt tried to answer it with her concept of the political. In another sense the question asks, “What matters should be politicized?” that is, “What questions legitimately concern a community and should be resolved through public debate and collective deliberation?” This is a political question that cannot be decided in theory, but has to be endlessly open to public debate. On this second question Arendt had her own opinions, which were informed but not dictated by her understanding of politics. We have to distinguish two facets of Arendt’s work: her concept of the political and her opinions on what matters should be politicized. Politics is a universal possibility of human existence for Arendt, but what counts as properly political is a matter of opinion that varies across histories and cultures: “At all times people living together will have affairs that belong in the realm of the public – ‘are worthy to be talked about in public.’ What these matters are at any historical moment is probably utterly different.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Private matters can always be made public, and public matters can always be privatized, and the distinction between what is properly public and what is properly private is always open to political debate.Footnote ⁸⁷

1. 2. The distinction between politics and rule. The strangest part of Arendt’s concept of the political is her exclusion of rule from politics. We are so used to thinking of politics in terms of rule that this exclusion seems absurd. But for Arendt it was the confusion of politics with rule that most obscured the specificity of the political.

The difference between rule and politics is clearest in oligarchies, where the power to decide and act is concentrated in the hands of a few people. These few may gather on occasion as equals to discuss matters of common concern and to decide them through mutual persuasion and common deliberation. Once decisions are reached, however, the oligarchs may then impose their will unilaterally on the other members of the community, who have no choice but to obey. In Arendt’s terms, in such an oligarchy the political realm is restricted to the few who have power, while most people are powerless and excluded from politics. The (horizontal) relations among such oligarchs are political relations, that is, relations of equality and nonviolence; within the circle of oligarchs there is no division between ruler and ruled. However, the (vertical) relation between the oligarchs and the rest of the community is a relation of rule, that is, a relation of hierarchy and force; the few are able to command and the many are forced to obey. Rule is power over others. Politics is the self-government of equals.

The distinction between politics and rule was essential to the difference between the political realm and the realm of the household. Rulership belonged in the household, not in the body politic: “The whole concept of rule and being ruled, of government and power as we understand them as well as the regulated order attending them, was felt to be pre-political and to belong to the private rather than the public sphere.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The body politic proper was defined by the principle that all male citizens were equal and that there was no division between rulers and ruled. (In Athens there were still archons selected by lot every year who administered public affairs, but they were not rulers strictly speaking since – at least in Athens after 462 BC – the ultimate power to decide did not belong to them but to the citizens as a whole.) Each male citizen, however, was the ruler of a household over which he had absolute power.

The distinction between politics and rule was also essential to the difference between political communities and communities ruled by one man. Such monarchies seemed to the Greeks essentially similar to a household ruled by a sovereign master, so they were named and understood in terms derived from the realm of the household. “All Greek and Latin words which express some rulership over others, such as rex, pater, anax, basileus, refer originally to household relationships and were names the slaves gave to their master.”Footnote ⁸⁹

1. 3. The distinction between politics and rule implies a distinction between politics and government: we recognize forms of government that have no place for politics (such as totalitarian dictatorships), just as we recognize forms of politics that take place outside the institutions of government (such as movements of nonviolent resistance). The distinction between politics and government allows us to distinguish formal politics (debate and action within institutions that have the power to make decisions binding on the polity as a whole) from informal politics (the activities of those who come together outside of government institutions for the sake of common deliberation and collective action on matters of public concern). It also lets us distinguish de jure political power (the right to make decisions and to direct the actions of institutions) from de facto political power (the support of citizens and the capacity to direct their power to act).

2. 4. Arendt also distinguished political from technical questions. Political debate is appropriate only for questions of opinion – questions to which there can be no one right answer but only incommensurable perspectives: “Public debate can only deal with things which – if we want to put it negatively – we cannot figure out with certainty. Otherwise, if we can figure it out with certainty, why do we all need to get together?”Footnote ⁹⁰ Such questions are political in the sense that they should be resolved by common deliberation. On the other hand, there are questions with one right answer – questions of fact, technique, or expertise: “There are things where the right measures can be figured out. These things can really be administered and are not then subject to public debate.”Footnote ⁹¹ Such questions are essentially technical and can be delegated to experts.

Arendt knew that few questions are purely technical or purely political. Most questions in the public sphere have a technical side and a side that is properly political. The distinction is not meant to exclude certain issues from the political realm, but only to distinguish two sides within matters of public concern – a side that should be politicized and a side that can be left to experts: “With every one of these questions there is a double face. And one of these faces should not be subject to debate.”Footnote ⁹²

Other Views of Arendt’s Concept of the Political

Arendt’s concept of the political is commonly misunderstood in several ways.

Readers of Arendt have long recognized she had a distinctive understanding of politics, but they have generally viewed the question of the political as one topic among others in her work. This view overlooks the central place in her work of the question of the political, and misses the way her understanding of the political informed her views of the basic realities of political life (power, force, authority, violence, government, contract, law, and freedom). The question of the political is central to her work. It is not one topic among others, but a focal point around which the disparate elements of her thought cohere. (I will try to show this in Chapter 5.)

Many readers of Arendt have overlooked the historical dimension of her thought, and interpreted the political in Arendt as a timeless and universal reality of human life. Margaret Betz Hull has argued, for example, that the political is an intrinsic dimension of subjectivity: “Arendt herself adds yet another dimension to the concept of the subject, namely the political. Her subject is primarily a political subject …”Footnote ⁹³ This oversimplifies Arendt’s thought. It is true that humans always have the potential to live in political communities, according to Arendt: “Whenever people gather together, [the space of politics] is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever.”Footnote ⁹⁴ But this potential has rarely been realized: “Politics as such has existed so rarely and in so few places that, historically speaking, only a few great epochs have known it and turned it into a reality.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Politics has been rare because, while humans always have the potential to live politically, it is possible to realize that potential only when the conditions of political life are recognized and affirmed. Politics depends on the conditions of plurality and commonality, on our capacity for speech, on a public sphere where speech is free, and on the recognition of a common good that outweighs particular interests. Where these conditions are denied or suppressed, as in totalitarian regimes, political life is practically impossible. “A political realm does not automatically come into being wherever men live together.”Footnote ⁹⁶ This is why politics has existed only in certain times and places: “the notion that politics exists always and everywhere human beings exist is a prejudice.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Politics is not a universal and timeless reality of human life, but a historically contingent possibility of human existence.

Commentators on Arendt have also not laid out her concept of the political at an adequate level of precision. When they attempt to define her understanding of politics, their definitions tend to be so broad that they could easily include various nonpolitical forms of activity and community. In Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (1997), for example, John McGowan wrote that for Arendt, “politics has to be, among other things, a realm of self-creation through free, voluntary action undertaken in consort with and in relation to other people.”Footnote ⁹⁸ In Hannah Arendt (1998), McGowan specified further that in her view “the political is the realm of ‘acting in concert’ and, as such, the world in which a public, shared world, is created.”Footnote ⁹⁹ In “Political Action: Its Nature and Advantages” (2000), George Kateb wrote that for Arendt “politics is action and … action is speech in public about public affairs.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (2000), Seyla Benhabib defined “the normative core of the Arendtian conception of the political” as “the creation of a common world through the capacity to make and keep promises among a plurality of humans who mutually respect each other.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ In Why Arendt Matters (2006), Elisabeth Young-Bruehl wrote that “The word politics … for Arendt refers to human beings acting – discoursing, persuading, deciding on specific deeds, doing them – in the public realm.”Footnote ¹⁰² Bhikhu Parekh argued in Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (1981) that “For Arendt … politics is the activity of conducting the affairs of the community by means of speech.”Footnote ¹⁰³ In Hannah Arendt and Human Rights (2006), Peg Birmingham claims that for Arendt “the political [is] the realm of representation and the process of signification wherein identities of the ‘who’ (and these are always both unique and plural) are reinscribed and re-presented within the web of relationships that constitute the inter-esse of public spaces.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ These accounts are too imprecise to fully do justice Arendt’s understanding of politics. They fail to grasp the historical distinctiveness of political communities, and they fail to clearly delineate the differences Arendt saw between politics and other forms of community and concerted action.

This imprecision has led to a fourth misunderstanding. Arendt distinguished two senses of the word “political,” as we saw: in one sense it means “what is essential to politics”; in another sense it means “what belongs in the political sphere.” Many of Arendt’s readers have failed to see this distinction. This failure is especially clear in John McGowan, who argues that “Pace Arendt, the definition of the political is not and cannot be stable. The definition of what is ‘properly’ political cannot be grounded on anything except human agreements and conventions …”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ These two sentences confuse the essential difference between “the definition of the political” (what defines the political realm) and “the definition of what is ‘properly’ political” (what topics ought to be subject to political debate and decision-making).

This confusion has led to a common misunderstanding of Arendt: that because she tried to rigorously distinguish in principle between the sphere of politics and other spheres of human existence, she also believed that matters proper to other spheres ought to be excluded from political debate.

One version of this misunderstanding concerns violence. Since Arendt excluded violence in principle from the sphere of politics, it is argued, she also excludes potentially violent conflicts from political debate. In Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, for example, McGowan wrote that Arendt “exiles the potentially violent conflicts from politics.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This is a misreading. Arendt exiles violence from the political realm, in the sense that politics is a way to deal with conflicts nonviolently. But politics does not exclude violence in the sense of exiling potentially violent conflicts from political debate and action. One of the main points of politics is to try to manage nonviolently conflicts that are “potentially violent.”

Another version of this misunderstanding concerns economics. In The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt, Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves wrote Arendt “maintains that all questions pertaining to the economy are pre-political.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Since Arendt sharply distinguished the sphere of politics from economics, the argument goes, she must have also thought economic questions were not properly a matter of political debate. This is also a misreading. Arendt did argue that economic questions should not be subject to political debate insofar as they are purely technical or factual questions. But the logic of her position implies that economic questions should be subject to political debate to the extent that they are not purely technical or factual, but touch on questions of justice and the common good, which are obviously matters of political concern.

A third version of this misunderstanding concerns social questions. Arendt sharply distinguished the political from the social. In her view, it was a dangerous confusion to conceive political communities on the model of social communities, to impose on citizens of a polity the norms and relations proper to members of a society, or to conflate political revolution with social transformation. These confusions were central to the anti-politics of National Socialism, and for that reason Arendt was of the opinion that most social matters should not be subject to political power. But her theory of politics does not necessarily exclude social questions from political debate. The logic of her thought implies that social questions may properly be politicized to the extent that they are implicated in questions of the common good. Since legal and political equality are essential to political communities, social equality may be an aim of political action insofar as social equality is an essential precondition of legal and political equality. While the social and political spheres are in principle distinct, it does not follow that social questions are in fact necessarily excluded from politics altogether.

The result of these misreadings is a common and misguided critique of Arendt. Critics mistakenly assume that Arendt meant to exclude from politics questions about phenomena proper to nonpolitical spheres of life – as if she wanted political debate to ignore economic questions, social questions, and questions about potentially violent conflicts. It is often said that Arendt’s view of politics is narrow, rigid, and nearly empty. Hanna Pitkin spoke of “the curious emptiness of content characterizing Arendt’s image of the public sphere.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ George Kateb argued that for Arendt the content of political discourse must only concern phenomena essential to politics: “political action is talk about politics.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Dana Villa claimed that Arendt wanted a “self-contained” politics in which the only proper content of political discourse was politics itself: “the content of political action must be politics.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ In The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, Michael Gottsegen spoke for many critics when he concluded, “Arendt has excluded too much from politics.”Footnote ¹¹¹ This criticism is based on a failure to distinguish two senses of the word “political,” which can apply to phenomena essential to politics, but also apply to nonpolitical matters that are subject to political debate. Critics have failed to adequately distinguish Arendt’s theory of what is essential to politics from her opinions on what topics ought to be politicized, and this failure is based on an insufficiently precise understanding of her concept of the political.

Other Concepts of the Political

Other thinkers have conceived politics differently, as we have seen. For Carl Schmitt, politics was the sphere of radical antagonism: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”Footnote ¹¹² For Emmanuel Lévinas, it was “the art of foreseeing war and of winning it by every means.”Footnote ¹¹³ For Michel Foucault, it was “the set of relations of force in a given society.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ For Michael Oakeshott, it was “the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice has brought together.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ For Moses Finley, it was “the art of reaching decisions by public discussion and then of obeying those decisions as a necessary condition of civilized life.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

Heidegger also understood the polis differently from Arendt. In his view, the political is not a particular way of being together belonging to a specific kind of community, but rather a fundamental structure of being-together that allows humans to share a common world. In a 1942 lecture he wrote: “In the midst of beings, the polis is the open site of all beings, which are here gathered into their unity because the polis is the ground of such unity and reaches back into that ground. The polis is not some special or isolated region of human activity.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ The political, in this view, is a universal and necessary dimension of human existence.

Why then single out Arendt’s concept of the political? How can we say one concept of the political is better than others? On what basis can we argue that different concepts of the political are more or less adequate? What reasons did Arendt have for rejecting other concepts of the political?

There are four reasons: (1) Any concept of the political must comprehend the prime example of a political community – the Greek polis. (2) Other concepts of the political fail to grasp the distinctive character of the polis. (3) These concepts fail to adequately distinguish politics from other spheres of human existence. (4) These failures have led thinkers to misconceive basic realities of political life. Let us go through these reasons one at a time.

1. 1. One task of thinking, for Arendt, is “to discover the real origins of traditional concepts in order to distill from them anew their original spirit which has so sadly evaporated from the very key words of political language … leaving behind empty shells with which to settle almost all accounts, regardless of their underlying phenomenal reality.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ To work out a theoretical concept of a political phenomenon, in this view, we have to start with a prime example and to single out the distinctive traits that make it what it is. One test of a concept is whether it adequately grasps the specificity of that prime example. Take the concept of fascism: there are many different concepts of fascism today, which are applied with more or less precision to many different phenomena. But the prime example of fascism is still the Italian Fascist movement of the early twentieth century, the original source of the word “fascist.” One test of any concept of fascism is whether it grasps the distinctive nature of the original Fascist movement. A concept of fascism is inadequate if it only grasps the traits that the original Fascists share with all other right-wing ideologies; that is, if it applies equally well to all right-wing ideologies and fails to grasp what was distinctive about the original Fascists.

In the same way, any concept of the political is inadequate if it fails to grasp what was distinctive about the Greek polis – the original source of the word “politics.” This does not mean the word had a single original sense, or that this original sense is the definitive meaning of the word. It means we have to work towards a general concept of politics starting from an actual example of a political community, and the prime example of a political community is the one first named by the word “politics.”

1. 2. Other concepts of the political fail to grasp the distinctive character of the polis. Instead, they define the political in terms of traits proper to all human communities, and so obscure the specificity of the polis. It is correct that the polis was characterized by “extreme antagonism” (Schmitt),Footnote ¹¹⁹ “relations of force” (Foucault),Footnote ¹²⁰ “the art of foreseeing war and winning it by any means” (Lévinas),Footnote ¹²¹ “the art of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people” (Oakeshott),Footnote ¹²² “the open site of all beings” (Heidegger).Footnote ¹²³ But these traits also characterize most other forms of human community. To define the political in terms of traits proper to all communities is like trying to define what makes us human in terms of traits we share with all other living beings. Other concepts of the political take for granted “the modern prejudice according to which politics would be an absolute necessity that has existed always and everywhere.”Footnote ¹²⁴ By defining the political in terms of traits proper to all human communities, they efface the differences between political and nonpolitical forms of community.Footnote ¹²⁵

2. 3. These concepts of the political fail to distinguish politics from other spheres of human existence, in several different ways.

First, they efface the difference between the polis and the family, and this effacement lends credence to a number of dubious analogies: political authority is modeled on paternal authority; citizenship is modeled on kinship; the bonds between citizens are modeled on the bonds of brotherhood; and political community is understood in terms of the family.

They also efface the distinction between the polis and the oikos (the household), an effacement that leads to three confusions. It suggests that politics is merely a means to an end, and that the end of the polis is essentially the same as that of the oikos – namely, the survival and prosperity of its members. This makes it seem reasonable to sacrifice the freedom possible in a political community for the safety and prosperity of a well-administered state – its effect is to obscure the essential link between politics and freedom. And it makes it seem reasonable to think of political power on the model of the sovereign power exercised by the master of a house – to conceive all political power in terms of rule and domination.

These concepts of politics also confuse the distinction between political communities and communities governed by a sovereign ruler (monarchy, tyranny, despotism, dictatorship). This confusion goes all the way back to the classical polis, where innovations in the practice of politics were not always matched by innovations in language and thought. In practice, Athenian isonomy dissolved the distinction between rulers and ruled among male citizens after decades of tyrannical rule. But in their thinking, the Greeks continued to understand power in terms of rulership. This is explicit in the words of Theseus we have already cited from The Suppliant Women:

The logic is clear: the people have taken the place of the king, and they continue to do what kings do. The verb here for what the people do (ἀνάσσει) means to be the ruler (ἄναξ), to be the master of a house, to be the king of a people, to be sovereign. This word really does describe the relation between male Athenian citizens and the disenfranchised groups in Athens (foreigners, slaves, women, and children). In this sense it is possible to speak of the male citizens as a ruling class. But it does not make sense to use the concept of rule to describe power relations among enfranchised citizens within the political sphere itself. When citizens gathered in the Assembly to decide on matters of common concern, who was ruling whom? The question makes no sense because, insofar as politics requires genuine equality, the concept of rule strictly speaking is out of place in the political sphere. But the Greeks transposed the language of rule into the political sphere and tried to understand political power in its terms.Footnote ¹²⁷ And the inheritors of Greek thought continued to understand political power in terms derived from nonpolitical domains – sovereignty, dominion, domination, rule.

1. 4. These failures have led thinkers to misconceive the realities of political life. Since common concepts of the political fail to grasp the specificity of the polis, they fail to distinguish between political and nonpolitical forms of community, and these failures have led thinkers to understand political phenomena in terms proper to other spheres of human existence (the family, the household, the rule of a sovereign), terms that distort the distinctive nature of political phenomena. The result of these failures, according to Arendt, is that – across the whole tradition of political theory since the Greeks – the basic realities of political life have been systematically misconceived.

At the core of these misconceptions is the confusion of politics with rule: “our whole tradition of political thought has concluded … that the essence of politics is rulership and that the dominant political passion is the passion to rule or govern. This, I propose, is profoundly untrue.”Footnote ¹²⁸

The confusion of politics with rule leads us to think of political power as analogous to the power of a sovereign ruler; that is, it leads one to think of the (horizontal) power relations within the community of citizens in terms proper to the (vertical) relations of power between the ruling class and the politically disenfranchised. It leads one to think of democratic politics, for example, in terms of “self-rule,” “the rule of the people,” “majority rule,” and “popular sovereignty.” The confusion of politics and rule supports a simple-minded equation of power with domination. And this equation supports the modern prejudices about politics with which we began: that politics is a universal and necessary part of human life; that politics is a means to an end; and that politics in the narrow sense is ultimately a struggle for power.

Since philosophers have traditionally failed to distinguish politics and rule, according to Arendt, they have failed to adequately distinguish the basic realities of political life. In her book On Violence, Arendt singled out the confusion of power, strength, force, authority, and violence. Her words are worth quoting at length.

The equation of politics and rule has led political philosophers to misconceive many phenomena essential to politics: not just power, strength, force, authority, and violence, but also opinion, judgment, imagination, rhetoric, persuasion, deliberation, action, government, contract, law, principle, and freedom.

How have these phenomena been misconceived? What are the sources of these misconceptions? And how did Arendt conceive the basic realities of political life?