One of the most enduring contributions of Arendt's political thought is to be found in her reflections on judgment which were to occupy the last years of her life. Together with the theory of action, her unfinished theory of judgment represents her central legacy to twentieth-century political thought. It is to the role and function of judgment in the world of human affairs that I would first like to turn my attention, with a view to exploring its place in the architectonic of Arendt's theory of politics.

Among the faculties with which human beings are endowed, judgment – which Arendt saw as “the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly” – occupies a central place while being at the same time one of the most difficult to conceptualize. The reason for this difficulty probably lies in the fact that judgment, especially moral and political judgment, is closely bound to the sphere of action and thus exhibits all the problems of mediating theory (or the inner reflection that accompanies judgment) and practice. Moreover, compared to the faculties of thinking and willing, it lacks clear criteria of operation as well as precise standards of assessment.

In the Introduction to The Life of the Mind, Arendt tells us that her preoccupation with mental activities (thinking, willing, and judging) had two different origins. The immediate impulse came from her reflections on the Eichmann trial. The most unsettling trait of Adolf Eichmann, who seemed to be completely entrapped in his own clichés and stock phrases, was his inability to think. The phenomenon of the banality of evil led her to ask: “Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty of telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?” “Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually 'condition' them against it?” (LM, vol. i, p. 5). The second source was “certain doubts” that had been plaguing her since she had completed The Human Condition. She originally intended to call the book The Vita Activa because she focused her attention on three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. But she realized that the very term, vita activa, was coined by those who primarily valued the vita comtemplativa. Such a tradition held that “thinking aims at and ends in contemplation, and contemplation is not an activity but a passivity” (LM, vol. i, p. 6). Thus contemplation was valued above the active life.

The Victorian novel was predominantly a novel of domestic manners, not a novel of ideas. As a general rule, Victorian novelists did not give intellectual propositions the status of themes, or employ characters to debate them - unlike later writers such as Thomas Mann or Andre Gide. In fact, Victorian reviewers and readers put serious pressure on novelists to downplay intellectual subjects, which were often regarded as anti-aesthetic. Intellectual life was also considered a male preserve, and intellectual subjects a threat to “masculinize” the novel. The strict separation of private and public spheres in Victorian culture necessarily set the domestic novel apart from intellectual concerns. Nevertheless, an influential branch of intellectual fiction was sustained by a few major Victorian novelists - most notably, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy. Close attention to the work of these writers (which I will provide later in this chapter) can help define a set of intellectual engagements that were, in fact, broadly shared by other novelists - even if those engagements often took place beneath the surface of domestic fiction, in matters of form and method, or in the intrusion of non-literary discourses, or in novelists' ambivalent fascination with the figure of the intellectual. In fact, intellectual debates informed so many aspects of Victorian fiction so powerfully that it would not be inaccurate to say that those debates governed both the form and the substance of the genre.

Among all of Hannah Arendt's writings, Eichmann in Jerusalem generated by far the most acrimonious and tangled controversy, which has since cast a long shadow on her eventful but otherwise respectable and illustrious career as a public intellectual and academic. The Eichmann “affair” raised a host of questions about Arendt not only as a political thinker but as an individual Jew. Gershom Scholem's cruel phrase that Arendt lacked “Ahabath Israel” (love of the Jewish people) captures this collective bitterness.

Ironically this book is Hannah Arendt’s most intensely Jewish work, in which she identifies herself morally and epistemologically with the Jewish people. It is as if some of the deepest paradoxes of retaining a Jewish identity under conditions of modernity came to the fore in Arendt’s search for the moral, political, and jurisprudential bases on which the trial and sentencing of Adolf Eichmann could take place. Arendt had struggled to bring together the universal and the particular, her modernist cosmopolitanism and her belief in some form of collective Jewish self-determination all her life. Precisely because this work was so close to who she truly was, it distracted from her equanimity and exhibited at times an astonishing lack of perspective, balance of judgment, and judicious expression.

“The pen,” Jonson wrote in his commonplace book Timber, or, Discoveries, “is more noble than the pencil; for that can speak to the understanding, the other, but to the sense” (1528-30). The invidious comparison here is between the written word and pictorial art; but the synecdoche itself shades the two into each other: Inigo Jones did his drawings in pen and ink, while the books that survive from Jonson's library include many with marginalia in pencil - the instrument of Jones' invention was the pen, that of Jonson's understanding the pencil. In fact, the passage, Poesis et pictura, goes on to praise picture more highly than poetry. It is “the invention of heaven: the most ancient, and most akin to nature.” The two arts, moreover, are indissolubly linked, just as sense and understanding are; and “whosoever loves not picture is injurious to truth, and all the wisdom of poetry” (1536-8).

By the late 1970s it seemed to have become a universally acknowledged truth that the typical form of the nineteenth-century English novel was the “classic realist text,” a conservative literary form concerned to reinscribe a commonsense view of things as they are, whose formal and ideological characteristics were adumbrated (and frequently castigated) by a host of critics bent on a radical critique of literature and its institutions. This account of the hegemony of realism in the Victorian novel has been interrogated by critics with varying theoretical and political preoccupations who have explored the non-realist or anti-realist aspects of canonical Victorian novels, or redirected literary historical attention to the cultural significance of a range of bestselling and sometimes controversial nineteenth- century fiction texts such as the sensation novel of the 1860s and a number of fantastic narratives from the fin-de-siècle which do not conform to the tenets of “classic” “bourgeois” realism, and which have tended, hitherto, to be pushed to the margins of literary critical attention, or treated as aberrant.

Hannah Arendt is sometimes regarded as an important source of, or inspiration behind, contemporary communitarian political thought. There is some measure of truth to this view, but to think of her political theory as distinctively communitarian is more than a little misleading. For what characterizes communitarianism as a philosophical challenge to liberalism is a highlighting of how the self is constituted by collective or group identity, and an argument that insufficient concern with thick shared identities marks a central deficiency of liberal-individualist conceptions of political community. If, however, a properly communitarian argument emphasizes the collective constitution of selfhood, and the political salience of the shared identity so constituted, one would expect communitarians to exhibit significant sympathy for the politics of nationalism - a form of politics that places shared identity and thick communal attachments at the very core of its understanding of political life. Yet, as we shall see, Arendt's thought shows itself to be, in this respect, pronouncedly anti-communitarian. Thus an examination of Arendt's stance toward nationalism should help to clarify those aspects of her thought that are located at the furthest remove from specifically communitarian concerns. Though the Arendtian and communitarian critiques of liberalism do overlap in important ways, there is a fundamental respect in which Arendt's criticisms of liberalism are motivated by a very different set of theoretical concerns than those characteristic of the communitarian critique.

Browsing among the shelves of Jonsoniana leaves no doubt that Jonson is known primarily as a playwright. It would not be surprising if, of the thousands who remember Volpone or The Alchemist with amusement, most have never heard of “Penshurst,” and as many may have forgotten or never learned that the lyrics they sang in childhood (”Drink to me, only, with thine eyes, / And I will pledge with mine”) are Jonson's. Even so, literary tradition has been more generous to Jonson the poet than to Jonson the critic; he is firmly established as the premier courtly poet of Jacobean and Caroline England, and, as such, progenitor of selfproclaimed “Sons of Ben,” who sought, even during the Civil War and Interregnum, when courtly values were not in vogue, to emulate Jonson's poetic style. While loyal to the principles of his poetic practice, the Cavaliers were not so enamored of Jonson's interest in literary theory and philosophy. Critical theory was not for fearless prisoners and exiles like Lovelace and Suckling. And yet Jonson looked to his Roman predecessors for more than models of poetic and dramatic forms.

Philosophy and politics: a central concern

Hannah Arendt disavowed the title of “philosopher,” and is known above all as a political theorist. But the relationship between philosophy and politics animates her entire oeuvre. We find her addressing the topic in The Human Condition (1958), in Between Past and Future (a collection of essays written in the early 1960s), and in Men in Dark Times (another collection of essays, this one from the late sixties). It is treated in her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, composed during the seventies, and also in the posthumous Life of the Mind, two of three projected volumes of which were complete when she died in 1975. Certainly, Arendt's thought cannot be understood without taking into account her deep suspicion of and equally deep commitment to philosophy in the context of political reflection. For all that, her writings on this abiding preoccupation do not gel into a systematically articulated theory or programmatic statement. Instead, they reflect Arendt's appreciation of what remained for her a “vital tension” – an enigma.

Shortly before his death, when asked to name the actors he considered the best interpreters of his plays, Chekhov cited three members of the St Petersburg Imperial Theatre who had appeared in the first productions of Ivanov and The Seagull. His slighting omission of actors of the Moscow Art Theatre reflected the nineteenth-century attitude that a player was supposed to enhance a playwright's words through virtuosity and instinctive affinity. However gifted the Art Theatre actors may have been, Chekhov regretted that their individual talents were subject to the overriding concept of a director.

The irony is that Chekhov's own plays had themselves evolved from vehicles for histrionic display into ensemble pieces, best implemented by a masterful director. His playwriting career culminated at a time when the director was emerging as prime mover in the modernist theatre. In common with the Wagnerian notion of Gesamtkunstwerk, the stagecraft promoted by Appia, Craig, Stanislavsky and Reinhardt required every component in the mise-en-scene to be integrated and controlled by a single vision. Chekhov's drama benefited from this development: actors might give outstanding performances of specific roles, but his plays rarely caught on with audiences unless packaged by a director into a comprehensible and congruent format. A comparison of, say, the romantic Hamlets of Kean, Devrient and Mochalov makes sense; but to compare the Ranevskayas of Valentina Cortese, Alia Demidova and Jutta Lampe to any advantage one must set them in the contexts created by Giorgio Strehler, Anatoly Efros and Peter Stein.

Although Anton Chekhov was only thirty-six when the cinema was invented, serious film-making did not begin in Russia until a couple of years after his death. So, unlike his contemporaries Maxim Gorky (six years his junior) and George Bernard Shaw (four years his senior), who both took a passionate interest in the possibilities of the new medium, he did not live to see his work reach the screen. His niece however, Olga Chekhova, a sculptress who emigrated to Germany, appeared in F. W. Murnau's Schloss Vogelod (1921) and Rene Clair's Un Chapeau de paille d'Italie (1927), and his nephew, Michael Chekhov, enjoyed considerable success in America as both teacher and actor, his most celebrated role being the psychotherapist to whom Ingrid Bergman takes Gregory Peck in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).

As early as 1911 there was a one-reel Russian comedy based on Chekhov's story 'Romance with Double Bass', directed by Kai Hansen. (The British comedian John Cleese directed and appeared in an amusing British version of this tale in 1974 with his then wife, Connie Booth.) In 1914 Boris Glagolin made movies of Illegal and The Daughter of Albion, and in 1917 Boris Sushkevich filmed The Flowers Are Late. Meanwhile, in 1913, Vladimir Mayakovsky evoked the playwright's name in the magazine Kine-Journal in an article called 'Theatre, Cinema, Futurism': 'The theatre moves towards its own destruction, and hands over its heritage to the cinema. And the cinema industry, branching away from the naive realism and artifice of Chekhov and Gorky, opens the door to the cinema of the future - linked to the art of the actor.