In her 1954 lecture “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought,” Hannah Arendt gave members of the American Political Science Association a tour d’horizon of philosophical developments on the Continent after World War II. After contrasting Plato and Aristotle's contemplative devaluation of the “realm of human affairs” with the partial recovery of its dignity implicit in Hegel's concept of history, Arendt surveys the responses of Catholic thinkers (like Gilson and Maritain), French existentialists (Sartre, Camus, Malraux and Merleau-Ponty), and, finally, her own teachers, Jaspers and Heidegger, to events that have “brought out and made public a deeprooted crisis of Western civilization of which the non-academic philosophers have been aware long before it assumed a political reality” (EU, 431).

In Arendt's estimation, the advantage the French and German existentialists had over Hegel—and, indeed, their Catholic counterparts—is that they have, in Heidegger's words, “left the arrogance of all Absolutes behind us.” Arendt glosses this statement as follows:

It should come as no surprise that Arendt, her respect for thinkers like Gilson and Maritain notwithstanding, has little patience for their call for a “re-subordination of the temporal-political realm to the spiritual, in which the spiritual can be represented by the Catholic Church” (EU, 434). But she is equally skeptical of the French existentialist tendency to “look […] to politics for the solution of philosophic perplexities that in their opinion resist solution or even adequate formulation in purely philosophic terms” (EU, 437). Their “activist or radical humanism” attempts to overcome the “absurdity” of the human condition—its finitude, contingency and lack of place in a meaningful order of Being or History—by “living as though the limitations of [the human] condition did not exist.”

INTRODUCTION

Viewed from a certain angle, the rise of post-structuralist and post-modernist theorizing in the 1980s and 1990s seemed to signal a return to an intellectually dubious (and politically dangerous) cult of irrationalism. Jürgen Habermas's The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987) stands as perhaps the most sophisticated defence of ethical-political rationalism in the face of the broad but diffuse ‘rage against reason’ symbolized by post-structuralist thought. Lesser figures such as Richard Wolin and Zeev Sternhell have recently added their voices to warn against the ‘seductions of unreason’ and the renaissance of the ‘anti-Enlightenment tradition’. Habermas worried about the levelling of the genre distinction between philosophy and literature, as well as post-modernism's apparent repudiation of normative foundations. Wolin and Sternhell are cruder but more direct. The critique of Enlightenment rationality, they assert, can lead only to fascism or some form of romantic nationalism. To doubt the rational foundations of ‘the rights of man’ was to join the forces of darkness represented by Gobineau, de Maistre, Schmitt and Heidegger.

The reader of the contemporary ‘reason versus unreason’ literature will be struck by how this literature evades (or suppresses) the powerful critiques of political rationalism that emerged during the 1940s and 1950s in the English-speaking world. These critiques – offered by Michael Oakeshott, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon and Karl Popper – were diverse in approach, form and motivation.

INTRODUCTION: THE REBIRTH OF CIVIL SOCIETY

Tocqueville's reflections on civil society have proven to be one of his most enduring theoretical legacies. They have also proven to be one of the most contested and promiscuously appropriated. This is especially so in America, where in recent years there has been an explosion of academic and journalistic writing on the topic of civil society. Authors from across the ideological spectrum have turned to Tocqueville for guidance in figuring out how the resources of civil society - the diverse array of political, charitable, educational, religious, neighborhood, and professional associations - might best be deployed in the fight against a wide range of social ills. These include perceived declines in civic engagement and individual responsibility, the loss of trust and a sense of community, and the spread of urban decay, apathy, and selfishness.

Perusing this literature, the casual reader might well conclude that ''civil society'' has become little more than a feel-good slogan in a time of generalized distrust of (or impatience with) governmental institutions. The core of Tocqueville's idea - civil society as the sphere of intermediary organizations standing between the individual and the state - has been worked and reworked to the point where it is no longer clear where the primary importance of this realm lies.

Widely recognized as one of the most original and influential political thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt remains an elusive figure. She never wrote a systematic political philosophy in the mode of Thomas Hobbes or John Rawls, and the books she did write are extremely diverse in topic, covering totalitarianism, the place of political action in human life, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the meaning of the modern revolutionary tradition, the nature of political freedom and authority, and the faculties which make up “the life of the mind.” These works are not constructed upon a single argument, diligently unfolded, or upon a linear narrative. Rather, they are grounded upon a series of striking conceptual distinctions - between tyranny and totalitarianism; action, labor, and work; political revolution and struggles for liberation; thinking, willing, and judging - which Arendt elaborates and weaves into complex thematic strands. The interconnections between the strands are sometimes left to the reader. Thus, it is no surprise that newcomers to her work are often baffled by how the pieces fit together (not only from book to book, but often within a single volume). They cannot help wondering whether there is, in fact, a consistent perspective behind her varied reflections on the nature of political evil, the glories of political action, and the fragility of civilized society (the “human artifice”) in the face of mounting natural, technological, and political pressure. The situation is not helped by the fact that many commentators on Arendt have tended to seize upon one strand of her oeuvre, elevating her reflections on political action, or her theory of totalitarianism, to a position of unquestioned preeminence.