¹ Arendt claims that the human condition should be distinguished from human nature. “The human condition is not the same as human nature and the sum total of human activities and capabilities which correspond to the human condition does not constitute anything like human nature” (The Human Condition [Chicago, 1958], p. 10)Google Scholar. The problem of human nature, Arendt continues, is “unanswerable in both its individual psychological sense and its general philosophical sense… nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things” (Ibid.). At another point, she says, “… human nature in general does not exist” (Ibid., p. 193). Arendt, however, is not entirely consistent in this usage. For example, if human nature does not exist, which implies of course that we cannot know it, how is she using the term “human nature” in such statements as “(Power) has no physical limitation in human nature, in the bodily existence of man, like strength” (Ibid., p. 201)?

Aside from this confusion, the distinction that Arendt is drawing between the human condition and human nature is very close to that of Sartre: “… if it is impossible to find in every man some universal essence which would be human nature, yet there does exist a universal human condition… (which is) more or less definitely, the apriori limits which outline man's fundamental situation in the universe” (Existentialism and Human Emotions, trans. Frechtman, B. [New York, 1957] p. 38)Google Scholar.

² Arendt shares this concern with other philosophers, for example, Dewey, John, who described human existence in similar terms, and even built a metaphysics around it. For Dewey, metaphysics is “the cognizance of the generic traits of existence” (Experience and Nature [New York, 1958], p. 51)Google Scholar, and it is “the intricate mixture of the stable and precarious, the fixed and the unpredictably novel, the assured and the uncertain, in existence which sets mankind upon the love of wisdom which forms philosophy” (p. 59). Elsewhere, he notes that “order cannot be admirable in a world continually threatened with disorder” (Art as Experience [New York, 1958], pp. 14–15)Google Scholar.

In the area of political philosophy, the work of Bertrand deJouvenel, especially Sovereignty, exhibits a concern with the founding of associations and the conditions that contribute to their stability. Like Arendt, deJouvenel stresses the significance for human existence of movement, the need for change and founding, and “stationariness,” the necessity for an “outward solidity of things. Man has always been aware that fixity in environment was necessary to him; it is indeed the very condition of his efforts to change this environment. Routine in things makes possible innovation by man” (Sovereignty[ Chicago, 1957], P. 42)Google Scholar.

³ Crises of the Republic (New York, 1972), pp. 78–79Google Scholar.

⁴ Between Past and Future (New York, 1968), p. 146Google Scholar.

⁵ On Violence (New York, 1970), p. 83Google Scholar.

⁶ This exclusively political notion of freedom, according to Arendt, originated with the Greeks of the city-state era. It became a philosophical concept only later when St. Paul shifted the locus of freedom to an inward domain— the will—thereby posing the problem of internal freedom that has troubled philosophers ever since. “Hence, in spite of the great influence the concept of an inner, nonpolitical freedom exerted upon the tradition of thought, it seems safe to say that man would know nothing of inner freedom if he had not first experienced a condition of being free as a worldly tangible reality. We first became aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves” (Between Past and Future, p. 148).

⁷ This is one of the reasons for her opposition to various forms of behavioral thinking.

⁸ See Human Condition, pp. 179–81, 211, 241–42. For an extremely lucid exposition of Arendt's views on the distinction between the “who” and the “what,” see Fuss, Peter, “Hannah Arendt's Conception of Political Community,” Idealistic Studies, III (09, 1973), 252–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ In part, Arendt's theory is not what I would call an “educative” or “developmental” theory of participation, such as we find in J. S. Mill or in the Guild Socialism of G. D. H. Cole, but rather what I propose to call a “revelatory” theory of participation. For Cole, Mill, and others, the most important goal of participation is educative: participatory structures enhance the socialization of the individual and the development of his individual and political capacities.

¹⁰ Arendt points out that the Greeks conceived of the polis as a political organization that was independent of geographical location. This was why, in referring to colonizers, they said, “Wherever you go, you will be a polis” (Human Condition, p. 198).

¹¹ “Every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence—if only because those who hold power and feel it slipping; from their hands, be they the government or be they the governed, have always found it difficult to resist the temptation to substitute violence for it” (On Violence, p. 87).

¹² A dramatic example of this phenomenon was the downfall of Batista in Cuba in 1959. His armv, equipped with recent U.S. weaponry, was still comnletely intact when he left the country; it was never defeated by Castro's forces in any significant encasement. Yet such was its powerlessness that it melted away before the power of a well-organized group of guerillas. Arendt (On Violence, p. 53) cites the Czechoslovak nonviolent resistance in 1968 as an example of the confrontation of pure power and pure violence.

¹³ Human Condition, p. 200.

¹⁴ On Violence, p. 41.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 72.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Human Condition, p. 9.

¹⁸ Human Condition, p. 178. Arendt's connection between beginning and birth is derived in part from St. Augustine. See ibid., p. 177 and On Revolution, pp. 212–13.

¹⁹ See On Revolution, pp. 123–27.

²⁰ Human Condition, p. 50.

²¹ On Revolution, p. 92.

²² Some writers in social psychology and sociology of knowledge tend to adopt a similar perspective. For example, Peter Berger says: ”Identity, with its appropriate attachments of psychological reality, is always identity within a specific socially constructed world… One identifies oneself, as one is identified by others, by being located in a common world” (“Identity as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge,” European Journal of Sociology (1966), p. 111).

²³ Adams, John, Discourses on Davila, Works (Boston, 1851), 4:280Google Scholar. Cited in On Revolution, p. 63. See also Human Condition, p. 49.

²⁴ See Human Condition, p. 197.

²⁵ See, for example, O'Sullivan, N. K., “Politics, Totalitarianism, and Freedom,” Political Studies, 21 (06, 1973), 183–198CrossRefGoogle Scholar. O'Sullivan claims that Arendt espouses a “romantic cult of heroic individualism” (p. 184), revealing an unrealistic and dreamlike preference for Greek antiquity and the political forms of organization found there. He asserts that, for Arendt, “the model of the perfect political actor… is Achilles; and politics itself is specifically defined in terms of the polis” (p. 196). This leads her, O'Sullivan adds, to disregard ”all subsequent political experience for purposes of theorizing about contemporary society” (p. 197).

²⁶ Human Condition, pp. 24, 187.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 31.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 205.

²⁹ See the essay, “Civil Disobedience,” in Crises of the Republic.

³⁰ On Revolution, p. 175. Compare Nietzsche, who defines man as the only animal that can promise (The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Golffing, F. [New York, 1956], pp. 189–92.)Google Scholar. His estimate of this capacity, however, unlike Arendt's, is quite ambivalent.

³¹ This latter criticism has been expressed by K. Boulding who argues that Arendt ascribes no significance to the private sphere and that she has a “very strong distaste for labor—that is, for the simple homeostatic activity of daily life” (“Philosophy, Behavioral Sciences, and the Nature of Man,” World Politics, 12 [01, 1960], 273Google Scholar; and by O'Sullivan, N. K., who says, “It must be stressed that for her the term private always expresses contempt” “Politics, Totalitarianism, and Freedom,” p. 184Google Scholar, emphasis mine).

³² Between Past and Future, p. 253, emphasis mine.

³³ Human Condition, p. 71.

³⁴ Between Past and Future, p. 186.

³⁵ Human Condition, pp. 126, 256.

³⁶ Crises of the Republic, p. 212.

³⁷ Ibid., p. 211.

³⁸ Human Condition, p. 257.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 61.

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 75.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 257.

⁴² The term “pluralism” is being used in a sense different from either Mill's pluralism or the interest-group pluralism of contemporary American political science.

⁴³ Human Condition, p. 321,

⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 17,

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 73.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 157.

⁴⁷ Between Past and Future, p. 264.

⁴⁸ Human Condition, p. 71; see also p, 199.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 118–19; see also p. 121.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 46.

⁵¹ Ibid., p. 28.

⁵² In the late 1960's this “hatred of permanence” even began to affect the domain of art. Arendt asserts that works of art, “because of their outstanding permanence… are the most intensely worldly of all tangible things.” Since they are meant to be excluded from use and consumption, “their durability is almost untouched by the corroding effect of natural processes” (Human Condition, p. 167). What seems to have happened, however, at the end of the 1960's, was the emergence of art forms lacking durability and worldly stability. Witness the phenomena of throwaway art, sandworks of art, happenings, self-destructive sculpture, random music. See Burnham, Jack, Beyond Modern Sculpture (New York, 1970)Google Scholar.

⁵³ Human Condition, p. 128.

⁵⁴ Between Past and Future, p. 211; see also Human Condition, p. 121.

⁵⁵ Human Condition, pp. 106–07.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 134, emphasis mine; see also pp. 120, 140.

⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 108.

⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 52.

⁵⁹ Ibid.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 173.

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 135.

⁶² That the existence of human self-awareness requires the transcendence of the self beyond the biological or natural self that is merely given is an assumption that Arendt shares with Hegel and a tradition in philosophy that run from Hegel through Sartre. By itself, the biological life process is a form of necessity that we share with the animals; this is why Arendt regards the laboring activities that we must perform in order to keep alive as the lowest of human activities. In Hegel's discussion of the master-slave relationship, the master shows that he is truly a human being and worthy of superiority by risking his life for pure prestige and recognition, for a goal that is not immediately necessary for the life process; he risks his life for something beyond the merely given natural instinct for self-preservation. A. Kojeve, in his interpretation of Hegel, observes that if “desire is directed towards a ‘natural’ non-I, then the I, too, will be ‘natural.’ The ‘I ‘will have the same nature as the thing toward which that desire is directed; it will be a ‘thingish’ I, a merely living I, an animal I. It will never attain self-consciousness” (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. JrNichols, J. H., [New York, 1969], p. 4)Google Scholar.

⁶³ Between the Past and Future, p. 95; see also p. 11.

⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 192; see also Human Condition, p. 246.

⁶⁵ Hegel makes the same point when he says, “the action, as t he a im posited in the external world, has become the prey of external forces which attach to it something totally different from what it is explicitly and drive it on into alien and distant consequences” (Philosophy of Right, trans. Knox, T. M. [Oxford, 1942], p. 80)Google Scholar. Sartre's comment is similar: “Each day with our own hands we make it (history) something other than we believe we are making it, and history, backfiring, makes us other than we believe ourselves to be or to become” (Search for a Method, trans. Barnes, H. [New York, 1968], p. 90. The reason, for Sartre, that history escapes us is “not because I do not make it; it is because the other is making it as well” (p. 88). “The social field is full of acts with no author, of constructions without constructor” (pp. 163–64)Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Human Condition, p. 220.

⁶⁷ On Revolution, p. 175; see also Human Condition, pp. 244–45. Forgiving is another way in which we cope with the unintended consequences of action. If promising is concerned with the future, insofar as it seeks to establish “islands” of commitment and predictability in an otherwise uncertain future, then forgiving looks backward to what has happened and forgives or excuses the actor for what was unintentionally done. For “without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover” (Human Condition, p. 237).

⁶⁸ On Revolution, p. 169.

⁶⁹ Ibid., p. 170.

⁷⁰ Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1968), p. 465Google Scholar.

₇₁ On Violence, p. 80.

⁷² Human Condition, p. 209.

⁷³ Ibid., p. 254; see Between Past and Future, p. 199.

⁷⁴ Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 351–53ff; see also Arendt, H., “Understanding and Politics,” Partisan Review, 20 (07–08, 1953) 387Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ For example, O'Sullivan (“Politics, Totalitarianism, and Freedom,” p. 194) claims that, like Rousseau, Arendt's “ideal society is deliberately left unsupported by anything except the general will” and H. Kariel states that “an anticipation of this (Arendt's) stance is found in Rousseau's celebration of the General Will” (The Promise of Politics [Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey], 1966, p. 16n)Google Scholar. Deane, H. also finds that “so many of her political prejudices are strikingly similar to those of Rousseau” (Political Science Quarterly, 78 (1963), 621)Google Scholar. While there are similarities—both Arendt and Rousseau favor active participation and emphasize a social contract—they are rather unimportant similarities. After all, such widely disparate thinkers as Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and John Rawls have employed the device of a social contract in their political philosophies; likewise, the notion of participation can be filled in with different contents, depending upon the theory of which it forms a part.

⁷⁶ On Revolution, p. 163.

⁷⁷ Ibid.

⁷⁸ Ibid., p. 165.

⁷⁹ Ibid., p. 71.

⁸⁰ Rousseau, , The Social Contract, trans. Cole, G. D. H. (New York, 1950), pp. 23–24Google Scholar.

⁸¹ Palmer, R. R., Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution (New Jersey, 1941), p. 163Google Scholar; cited in On Revolution, p. 93.

⁸² One of the characteristics of totalitarian regimes, according to Arendt, is that they attempt to destroy all such associations and intermediary bodies. For her, totalitarian movements are “mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals” (Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 381). Since these movements demand unconditional loyalty and obedience from their members, all traces of group solidarity, including family ties and memberships in various associations, must be eliminated. This is accomplished by various means: purges, terror, denunciations, duplications of offices, constant change; all those measures are designed to prevent the growth of any stability and human togetherness. Aristotle, in discussing how tyrannies can be preserved, observes that they forbid “common meals, clubs, education, and anything of a like character—or, in other words, a defensive attitude against everything likely to produce the two qualities of mutual confidence and a high spirit” (Politics 1313b).

⁸³ Human Condition, p. 201.

⁸⁴ There is an apparent interconnectedness and conceptual coherence to almost everything Arendt has written. One couldi show, for example, the importance that Arendt's concern with stability (and innovation) has for her analvses of such concepts as education, culture, authority, totalitarianism, and revolution. Furthermore her more conceptual writings usually have practical implications while, in turn, her topical discussions are informed by a unified set of conceptual distinctions. Her essays on contemporary problems, whether it be civil disobedience, violence, mass culture, school desegregation, manned space exploration, or the Pentagon Papers, are based on the same conceptual framework. The coherence and unity of her thoueht arealso evident in her work on totalitarianism and modern science, as well as in her interpretations of major philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Marx.

⁸⁵ Still another example is Arendt's view that education is a prepolitical phenomenon and should not, therefore, be an instrument of politics or be judged by criteria that are relevant in the public realm. “We must decisively divorce the realm of education from the others, most of all from the realm of the public” (Between Past and Future, p. 195). There are also the distinctions between morality and politics, and between rational (philosophical) truth and factual truth.

⁸⁶ Between Past and Future, p. 169, emphasis mine.

⁸⁷ Human Condition, p. 185.

⁸⁸ Austin, J. L., Philosophical Papers, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1970), p. 201Google Scholar. See, for example, Arendt's historical investigations of the distinctions in usage between labor and work (Human Condition, pp. 80–82, 136n.), or her examination of the history of such words and concepts as culture, freedom, authority, and history in Between Past and Future.

⁸⁹ Waismann, F., “Language Strata,” in Logic and Language, ed. Flew, A. (New York, 1965)Google Scholar.

⁹⁰ On worker participation, see the discussions in Dahl, R., After the Revolution (New Haven, 1970, pp. 115–40Google Scholar; Cook, T. and Morgan, P., eds., Participatory Democracy (New York, 1971)Google Scholar, chap. 6; Pateman, C., Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge, 1970, pp. 67–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on Guild Socialism, see Cole, G. D. H., Guild Socialism (New York, 1920)Google Scholar and Essays in Social Theory (London, 1950)Google Scholar; and Glass, S. T., The Responsible Society: The Ideas of Guild Socialism (London, 1966)Google Scholar.

⁹¹ Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 498. This does not exclude the possibility that there would be governmental agencies for handling economic problems. Her point is that the proper management and administration of economic affairs require a different kind of talent and is based on different principles from that of action in the political arena. Arendt, in discussing the failure of the councils, claims that they “were incapable of understanding to what an enormous extent the government machinery in modern societies must indeed perform the functions of administration. The fatal mistake of the councils has always been that they themselves did not distinguish clearly between participation in public affairs and administration or management of things in the public interest. In the form of workers' councils, they have again and again tried to take over the management of the factories, and all these attempts have ended in dismal failure” (On Revolution, pp. 277–78).

⁹² Perhaps a distinction should be made between this type of case, in which the overthrow of a corrupt regime may result in the amelioration of previous hardships, and those situations where only a new technology and not political change can lead to the resolution of economic problems. For example, increased corn yields in the last quarter of a century have been due not to political wisdom but to the development of hybrid corn and other advances in agricultural technology.

⁹³ On Revolution, p. 283.

⁹⁴ Human Condition, p. 177.

⁹⁵ Between Past and Future, p. 169.