Hannah Arendt on the principles of political action

Introduction

Hannah Arendt is well known for her conception of political action as the public initiation of new beginnings, through which individuals disclose unique identities and so realize the uniquely human capacity for individuality. She argues that the greatness of such action is intrinsic; it lies neither in the achievement of goals nor in the maintenance of life. In emphasizing the novelty of political action, and embracing it as an intrinsically important part of human experience, Arendt offers a compelling vision of political freedom. Yet, this conception of politics has long invited criticism for potentially turning political action into an exercise in hollow dramatics. On the one hand, Arendt’s politics may seem ethically unrestrained insofar as it lacks any evaluative criteria for judging action beyond the obscure standard of “greatness.” On the other hand, her politics may seem impractical and restrictive insofar as it excludes or trivializes purposive activity and socio-economic concerns.

Although these charges are by now familiar to readers of Arendt, in many cases they remain operative as perceived limitations of her political theory. In this essay, I respond to these charges while attempting to honor Arendt’s commitment to a form of theorizing that understands politics on its own terms instead of legislating for politics from a perspective of moral philosophy. I do so by elaborating a relatively underappreciated aspect of Arendt’s political theory: her claim that action is always inspired and guided by “principles.” Although several commentators have noted this appeal to principles, no sustained attempt has yet been made to explain exactly how principles address the aforementioned critiques while also preserving Arendt’s characterization of action as highly novel and intrinsically worthwhile. This is understandable given that Arendt’s own discussions of principles, while numerous and suggestive, tend to be frustratingly brief. Nevertheless, I argue that a reorientation of Arendt’s political theory toward the role of principles provides a more robust response to her critics than has previously been offered and yields a more nuanced conception of action than many readings of Arendt allow.

The first section of this essay outlines in more detail the criticism that Arendt’s politics is ethically unrestrained and the criticism that it is limited in its practical import. I claim that previous attempts to address these concerns through Arendt’s conception of principles have been incomplete and that Arendt herself does not sufficiently emphasize the significance of principles for her political theory. The second section, however, demonstrates that there are ample resources in Arendt’s texts to reconstruct a fuller account of principles that is capable of answering her critics in new and compelling ways. I first outline the way in which principles bestow upon an action an element of intrinsic meaning above, but not wholly unrelated to, its goals. Acknowledging Arendt’s debt to Montesquieu, I then examine what I call the “worldly” character of these principles by distinguishing them from motives, moral standards, compassionate empathy, and sentiment. This discussion undermines conventional readings of Arendtian action as impractical or restrictive, even if it cannot entirely resolve Arendt's problematic attitude toward the “the social question.” It also illuminates the robustly ethical dimension of Arendt’s politics, elaborating her understanding of political “greatness” by detailing the ways in which principles serve as evaluative standards.

Having responded to the criticisms of Arendt that frame the essay by distilling a distinctively political ethics, I turn in the third section to examine the more historically textured conception of principles offered in On Revolution. Arendt’s account of the American Revolution highlights the apparent tension between her claim that action is highly novel and her claim that action manifests “general” principles. To negotiate this tension, I argue that Arendt understands principles to be regenerated over time, not only through their preservation in institutions and artifacts but also through their unpredictable rearticulation in action. While principles come down to us through history, their meaning is inherently contestable as they become variously manifest in different political contexts. I conclude by clarifying how principles can offer us guidance in political judgment and action without undermining Arendt’s commitment to engage politics on its own terms.

Principles of action: Underappreciated in Arendt studies

Central to Arendt’s understanding of politics is her claim that political action initiates radically new beginnings that rupture expectations and conventions. Each action “looks like a miracle” in that it “break[s] through the commonly accepted and reach[es] into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis.” ¹ It is partly this characterization of action as highly novel that makes Arendt’s vision of political freedom so compelling. However, the ruptural aspect of Arendt’s conception of action also leads critics to worry that her politics is not adequately restrained by ethical standards. If action really does constitute a radically new beginning that “breaks through the commonly accepted,” it surely cannot be judged according to any evaluative criteria determined in advance. Indeed, Arendt goes as far as to claim that action “carr[ies] with itself a measure of complete arbitrariness.” ²

The concern that Arendt’s politics is ethically unrestrained is reinforced by her claim that action cannot be judged according to “moral standards.” ³ George Kateb considers this unwillingness to impose moral limits on political action to be troubling and accuses Arendt of “playing with fire” and even “celebrating immorality.” ⁴ Martin Jay goes further, suggesting that Arendt’s conception of action as radically novel and morally unrestrained has “a special affinity with violence” and reeks of a form of “political existentialism … not entirely blameless in the rise of fascism.” ⁵ In offering these critiques, neither Kateb nor Jay seriously investigates whether Arendt’s politics offers a non-moral set of evaluative standards that somehow preserves her commitment to the novelty and intrinsic greatness of political action. Both assume that, if politics cannot be judged using regulative moral standards, it risks uncritically accommodating violent, wicked, or even fascistic phenomena.

This concern is not easily assuaged by Arendt’s suggestion that action be judged by “the criterion of greatness.” ⁶ Without further explication, the criterion of greatness seems to require little more than that action be novel and memorable. Indeed, it could be understood to carry strong overtones of precisely the kind of ethically unrestrained action that worries Arendt’s critics. While Arendt elaborates “greatness” as the “specific meaning of each deed,” further elaboration is necessary if this standard is to be capable of distinguishing ethically laudable action from ethically problematic or abhorrent action. ⁷

Seyla Benhabib responds to the concern that Arendtian politics lacks ethical restraints by finding in Arendt’s fragmentary account of judgment the “moral foundations of politics.” ⁸ Attempting “to think with Arendt against Arendt,” Benhabib argues that Arendt’s reflections on judgment can be reconstructed to yield a “procedural model of enlarged thought” that serves as a foundational ethical standard for the public realm. As Benhabib explains, and as will become clearer in the following section, this procedural ethics does not constitute a “moral standard” in the narrow sense that Arendt conceives of morality. Nevertheless, in advancing a foundational ethical model, Benhabib does not do justice to Arendt’s primary commitment to understand politics “with eyes unclouded by philosophy.” ⁹ As Steve Buckler explains, Arendt’s insistence that action is radically novel and intrinsically great, and her related conception of the public realm as radically unpredictable, caution the political theorist against the imposition of any foundational ethical model onto politics. ¹⁰ This includes the kind of thin procedural model advanced by Benhabib. Ultimately then, Kateb, Jay, and Benhabib all refuse to engage politics on its own terms and instead grasp for forms of foundationalist ethics that Arendt considers antithetical to politics. These commentators thus fail to explore whether there is a distinctly political form of ethics that is compatible with Arendt’s strongest claims regarding the ruptural quality of political action.

Several commentators speak to the concerns raised by Kateb and Jay by showing that Arendt’s political theory includes an ethical orientation that is more compatible with the conditions of politics than is Benhabib’s procedural model. However, no commentator has thoroughly investigated Arendt’s understanding of “principles” as the evaluative standards that give such an orientation substance. For example, Lawrence Biskowski argues that Arendt provides “quasi-transcendental foundations for political judgment” with the “values” of “love of freedom” and “care for the world.” ¹¹ While he refers to “love of freedom” and “care for the world” as “foundations,” they do not provide a model with which to regulate politics. Rather than constituting an ethical foundation of the sort advanced by Benhabib, these values merely encapsulate an ethical orientation that corresponds to the “existential underpinning of Arendtian democratic politics.” However, while it is plausible for Biskowski to claim that Arendt’s ethics must be oriented toward nurturing the shared world in which political freedom is realized in action, he does not explain how the values of “love of freedom” and “care for the world” yield critical evaluations of events. Arendt’s conception of principles provides a more robust political ethics than these values alone, yet Biskowski’s treatment of principles is only cursory.

More recently, Buckler also attempts to distill from Arendt’s texts an ethical orientation compatible with her commitment to understand politics on its own terms. Drawn to Arendt’s reflections on judgment, yet wary of introducing a foundational ethical model, Buckler claims that Arendt’s political ethics boils down to “the imperative … to act in the light of exposure to the circumstantial judgments and verdicts of spectators.” ¹² He claims that “constraints” are imposed on action by expressions of “approbation and disapprobation” by reflective spectators, whatever these happen to be. Taken alone, this interpretation of Arendt’s political ethics is peculiarly conservative, since it provides no resources for criticizing the inadequacy of such expressions at moments when the worldly conditions for politics have been eroded. Thankfully, Buckler goes on to identify a more critical dimension of Arendt’s ethics in her claim that violence and lies erode the conditions for sound judgment. However, like Biskowski, Buckler fails to capitalize on the richer resources that Arendt’s account of principles offers for elaborating a robust political ethics.

Margaret Canovan and, more recently, Andreas Kalyvas both go further than either Biskowski or Buckler in highlighting the critical role that principles might play in filling out the ethical orientation of Arendt’s politics. ¹³ However, these commentators do not adequately explain how principles operate as evaluative standards facilitating critical judgments. They are thus unlikely to move those critics most concerned about the potential unruliness of Arendt’s politics. In addition, neither Canovan nor Kalyvas adequately explains how Arendt’s claim that action manifests general principles can be reconciled with her claim that all action is highly novel.

Leaving aside for a moment the concern that Arendt’s politics is ethically unrestrained, readers of Arendt have also long been troubled by another concern: namely, that the distinctions Arendt draws between different modes of human activity may seem to imply an implausibly restrictive conception of politics that is unable to engage practically with contemporary challenges. For one thing, the distinction Arendt draws between intrinsically great public action and the merely instrumental fabrication she calls “work” leads some to worry that her politics is insufficiently attuned to goal-directed or purposive endeavors. Jürgen Habermas, for example, claims that Arendt’s politics excludes both asocial (“instrumental”) and social (“strategic”) forms of purposive activity and is consequently too narrow. ¹⁴ Unlike Habermas, Mary Dietz does not argue that Arendt straightforwardly excludes purposive activity from politics. She notes Arendt’s claim that action has a “specific productivity.” ¹⁵ However, Dietz argues that Arendt also consistently identifies purposiveness with the non-political domination supposedly characteristic of work. Given that goal-directed activity has this association, Dietz claims that Arendt is unable to “conceptually vindicate” her acknowledgment that political action is productive. ¹⁶

A handful of Arendt’s stronger statements, and especially her reference to action’s “practical purposelessness” in a footnote of The Human Condition, appear to confirm Habermas’s claim that she understands action as lacking goals. ¹⁷ However, Arendt’s discussion of principles of action in “What is Freedom?” presents this issue differently. Here she suggests that political action always pursues goals but that it differs from other forms of activity in that it also manifests principles of a particular kind. James Knauer convincingly draws on this discussion of principles to undermine the claim that Arendt excludes purposive activity from politics. ¹⁸ However, Knauer still does not recognize the full significance of goals for Arendt’s politics. His discussion suggests that the intrinsic greatness of an action lies solely in its manifestation of a principle, independent of the relatively insignificant matter of its concrete goals. This trivialization of action’s goals allows Dietz to maintain her claim that Arendt formulates purposiveness “negatively,” even once it is shown that Arendt does not always associate the pursuit of goals with the domination characteristic of work.

The concern that Arendt’s politics lacks practical import is reinforced further by the distinction she draws between political action and the life-preserving activity she calls “labor.” Arendt is unambiguous in claiming that the raison d'être of politics is public freedom, rather than the maintenance of life. Commentators such as Kateb and Hanna Pitkin worry that this implies a narrow conception of political discourse that excludes socio-economic issues entirely. ¹⁹ Indeed, it is difficult to deny that some of Arendt’s more hyperbolic statements on the rise of “the social” have this troubling implication. ²⁰ However, Arendt’s distinction between sentiments and principles in On Revolution points toward more a nuanced approach to the social question. Here she implies that issues of material interest may become political when they are addressed for the sake of a worldly principle such as “solidarity.” ²¹

So, why have commentators generally failed to offer a satisfactory account of the significance of principles for Arendt’s political theory? Largely it is because Arendt herself never offers a sustained discussion of principles that directly addresses the potential weaknesses of her conception of politics. Arendt’s discussions of principles are generally brief and situated within dense theoretical passages. The fact that Arendt repeatedly invokes principles at key moments indicates their significance for her thought. Yet, Arendt does not fully acknowledge this significance and only hints at solutions to some of the more perplexing dimensions of her understanding of principles. The fact that principles are barely discussed in the “Action” chapter of The Human Condition further explains the lack of secondary commentary, since this text is often granted centrality in Arendt studies. Nevertheless, principles appear in all of Arendt’s major texts, from her early magnum opus on The Origins of Totalitarianism to her final unfinished work on The Life of the Mind. In the next section, I draw together these scattered reflections, granting principles of action greater emphasis than Arendt is prepared to grant them.

Principles of action: Evaluative standards for politics

In “What is Freedom?,” Arendt undermines her previous assertion that political action is characterized by “practical purposelessness” by claiming straightforwardly that goals are “important factors in every single act.” ²² Every act pursues goals of some kind, even if they seem trivial, intangible, or shortsighted. In other words, action can never be purged of means-end reasoning altogether. However, the conditions of political action are such that its goals, unlike the goals of work, are rarely achieved. According to Arendt, the human being as worker (homo faber) characteristically fabricates artifacts in isolation, following a model or “blueprint” and achieving his goal with a high degree of reliability. It is due to homo faber’s mastership or sovereignty over his task that work is, for Arendt, associated with domination. ²³ In contrast, the condition of political action is human plurality. Action occurs in a public space of appearance in which the “innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions” of different people make the achievement of goals unlikely. ²⁴ Thus she insists that action’s pursuit of goals should not be understood as a reliable form of sovereign “making,” an activity that is “contradictory to the very condition of plurality” on which politics relies. ²⁵

Arendt further distinguishes political action from work by claiming that, in addition to pursuing goals, it is both “inspired” and “guided” by principles. ²⁶ In her “Introduction into Politics,” she explains that a principle of action is “the fundamental conviction that a group of people share,” which “move[s] human beings to act.” ²⁷ This conviction then becomes manifest in the action itself, enabling actors to generate collective power. In addition, Arendt claims in The Life of the Mind that a principle “probably” serves as an “ultimate standard for judging the community’s deeds and misdeeds.” ²⁸ She states in On Revolution that this standard “saves the act of beginning from its own arbitrariness” by allowing us to derive meaning and even “validity” from actions. ²⁹ As the source of action’s meaning, principles presumably also serve as the potential source of political “greatness.” These claims together suggest that principles are crucially important for Arendt’s politics, since they not only inspire action but also enable actors and spectators alike to judge that action.

As Knauer shows, Arendt’s conception of principles elucidates her claim that action is intrinsically worthwhile. According to Arendt, the activity of work is “entirely determined by the categories of means and end.” ³⁰ Homo faber fabricates particular artifacts (ends), which then become means to reach further ends. This instrumentalization of the world leads to a “devaluation of all values” as nothing retains intrinsic worth. ³¹ In contrast, action transcends the purely means-end logic of work by also manifesting a principle, through which it acquires an additional dimension of significance. The meaning and potential greatness of a principle’s manifestation lies in the performance itself, and so action is in one sense free from its pursuit of any particular goal.

However, this does not necessarily mean that the goals of an action are unrelated to its meaning. Against the interpretations offered by Knauer and Dietz, Arendt, in fact, suggests that goals are “important factors,” not only in the sense that they inevitably play a role in action but also in the stronger sense that they contribute to our judgments of political greatness. She claims that any particular goal of action “can be judged in the light of its principle once the act has been started.” ³² To judge a goal in this way is not to assess whether that goal has been achieved, or how useful it is in relation to other ends. It is rather, I submit, to discern the extent to which a particular goal exemplifies and sustains a principle. This particular judgment escapes means-end reasoning, as a goal is viewed neither as an end, nor as means to further ends, but simply as an example of a principle in action. In other words, the goals of an action matter for Arendt, because it is partly through them that the action manifests a principle and so acquires meaning and greatness.

Arendt’s claim that the goals of an act can be judged in the light of its principle “once the act has been started” brings to the fore an important element of her understanding of the temporality of action. With this claim, she suggests that actions should be understood as sustained movements, rather than as discrete moments. A principle is somehow identified at the beginning of an action, which then “lays down the law” and becomes the standard against which we can judge subsequent goals. ³³ How, then, are we to identify the principle guiding an action in the first place? Although Arendt does not provide a clear answer to this question, we might speculate that we identify principles by observing a range of factors, including the context, slogans, and tactics of an action, as well as the goals it articulates in its earliest stages. All of these factors might help to give an action form, contributing to its manifestation of a principle. Goals might thus play a role in our identification of an action’s principle, as well as in our judgments of how well that action goes on to exemplify and sustain its principle.

Arendt’s discussion of the relationship between principles and goals is undeniably cursory, however, and questions remain regarding how exactly we are to identify the manifestation of principles and judge whether particular goals sustain those principles. ³⁴ Nevertheless, what I have shown is that Arendt’s conception of politics need not be interpreted as excluding, disparaging, or even trivializing purposive activity. Moreover, Arendt’s suggestion that goals be judged in the light of principles provides at least an indication of how we might differentiate between better and worse goals without slipping into purely means-end reasoning. To reiterate, this kind of judgment is oriented toward the selection of goals, conceived as exemplars. It is not an assessment of the ultimate outcomes of an action, nor does it conceive goals as means to reach further ends.

Let us now investigate more closely the precise nature of these principles that apparently play such a crucial role in politics. When discussing principles of action, Arendt consistently draws upon Montesquieu’s account of the principles that animate and sustain different forms of government. For Montesquieu, each form of government has a principle that constitutes “the spirit of the laws.” In Arendt’s words, these principles provide “guiding criteria by which all actions in the public realm are judged beyond the merely negative yardstick of lawfulness, and which inspire the actions of both rulers and ruled.” ³⁵ The law provides a merely negative yardstick because it typically only tells us what is permitted and what is forbidden within a community. Principles, on the other hand, serve as more general and more positive springs to action, which come to be reflected in different ways in laws, institutions, culture, and individual deeds. According to Montesquieu, there are three such principles: honor in monarchies, virtue (or “love of equality”) in republics, and fear in tyrannies.

Arendt adapts Montesquieu’s account in several ways. First, she claims that his enumeration of political principles is “of course pitifully inadequate to the rich diversity of human beings living together on the earth.” ³⁶ In addition to honor, virtue, and fear, she identifies the principles of “fame,” an Athenian form of “freedom,” “justice,” “the belief in the innate worth of every human being,” “solidarity,” “public or political freedom,” “public or political happiness,” “the interconnected principle of mutual promise and common deliberation,” “consent and the right to dissent,” “rage,” “charity,” “distrust,” and “hatred.” ³⁷ Furthermore, unlike Montesquieu, Arendt implies that a political community is not necessarily bound by a single central principle and may be animated by several principles at once. ³⁸ Finally, Arendt places less emphasis on attaching principles to particular forms of government and relates principles to the political realm in the broader, less state-centric sense of a public space in which individuals interact and perform.

So, what is it about Montesquieu’s original typology that remains important for Arendt? And what draws together the motley assortment of principles that she includes in her expanded list? One reason that Montesquieu’s principles appeal to Arendt is that, unlike many legal or moral standards, they are not end-oriented in form and so do not prescribe specific goals. For instance, an actor who is inspired and guided by “virtue” should not be understood as acting in order to bring about virtue. Instead, she should be understood as acting virtuously, or for the sake of virtue. This enables Arendt to identify in action an element of intrinsic greatness beyond the means-end logic of work. The additional principles listed by Arendt seem to share this quality.

In addition, a crucial feature of the principles invoked by Arendt and Montesquieu is, I submit, that they are thoroughly worldly. One sense in which principles of action are worldly relates to their animating force. As we have seen, both Arendt and Montesquieu claim that principles not only serve as standards for making political judgments but also “inspire” action. Yet, Arendt is careful to specify that principles are not psychological motives, originating from within the self to drive outward behavior. This is because, from a political perspective, the self is not understood as an entity constituted prior to action and consisting of hidden depths to be plumbed. Instead, politically speaking, the self is only constituted through the action that takes place in a public space of appearance. Accordingly, Arendt understands the animating force of principles as an externalized, worldly force. She claims that, as opposed to motives, “principles inspire, as it were, from without.” ³⁹ Montesquieu’s understanding of principles as having a worldly reality in the spirit of a political community complements this claim.

A second and related sense in which principles of action are worldly relates to their ethical orientation. Biskowski is right to argue that, if Arendt’s politics is to contain its own ethical standards, they must be oriented toward strengthening the conditions of political action itself by caring for the “world” in which action takes place. This is one of the key reasons that Arendt regards “moral standards” as inappropriate criteria for judging politics. In “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” Arendt argues that “moral precepts” of the Judeo–Christian variety “take as their standard the Self and hence the intercourse of man with himself.” ⁴⁰ This form of morality is primarily concerned with self-purification rather than with sustaining a common world, as it demands above all else that the individual maintain a clear conscience and live comfortably with(in) himself. In “Collective Responsibility,” Arendt reiterates that it “is of course part and parcel of the Hebrew-Christian heritage … that moral matters concern such a thing as the well-being of a soul rather than that of the world.” ⁴¹

Arendt, in fact, recognizes the political significance of a kind of Socratic self-examination, to which the Judeo–Christian concern for the self is ostensibly related. This practice of eradicating self-contradiction through a “two-in-one” struggle with oneself can, Arendt claims, prevent individuals from participating in wrongdoing. However, this practice can only avert misdeeds rather than inspire us to act. She thus claims that it remains “entirely negative” and even that it “has nothing whatsoever to do with action.” ⁴² Socratic moral thinking is ultimately “a kind of emergency measure,” necessary in times of crisis to keep individuals from participating in widespread evil, but inadequate to sustain a common world. ⁴³ And, while this fundamentally negative moral impulse may have some limited political significance, Arendt is far less approving of the positive “moral precepts” or codes of conduct that are seemingly also oriented toward self-purification. For Arendt, the “total collapse” of morality during the Third Reich suffices to show that the “conventions, the rules and standards by which we usually live, don’t show up too well under examination and that it would be foolhardy to place any reliance upon them in times of emergency.” ⁴⁴ Indeed, Arendt claims, “the invocation of allegedly moral principles for matters of everyday conduct is usually a fraud,” unrelated to the genuine moral practice of critical self-examination. ⁴⁵

While “in the center of moral considerations of human conduct stands the self,” Arendt claims that “in the center of political considerations of conduct stands the world.” ⁴⁶ Accordingly, the principles that she claims both inspire political action and provide criteria for judging action concern primarily our shared public space and the ways in which we appear to each other in this space. We can clearly identify this feature in principles such as “honor” and “fame,” which have little meaning in isolation from the public space of appearance that Arendt regards as the site of politics. The worldliness of a principle such as “virtue” is perhaps less clear, since virtue may be understood to refer to the inner qualities of a good soul. However, following Montesquieu, Arendt defines political virtue narrowly as the “love of equality” and specifically the love of our equal status as distinct actors in a public space. In order to manifest a worldly principle of this kind through action, one need not necessarily purify the soul or prevent cognitive dissonance. Indeed, we have already encountered Arendt’s claim that a political understanding of the self simply does not emphasize psychological depth in this way.

The worldly orientation of Arendt’s principles distinguishes them not only from the moral concern with the self but also from the kind of direct empathy with others that Arendt calls “compassion.” In On Revolution, Arendt defines compassion as “co-suffering:” the experience of being “stricken with the suffering of someone else as though it were contagious.” ⁴⁷ This feeling is experienced for a single other person and so, like the moral concern with the self, it concerns the individual in his singularity. Because political considerations instead center on a world of human plurality, Arendt classifies compassion as a private passion which “remains, politically speaking, irrelevant and without consequence.” ⁴⁸

While compassion is felt for a single other and is neither positive nor negative politically, Arendt claims that a concern for suffering can also be extended to the sufferings of multiple others. One way to generalize a concern for suffering is to view multiple others as a downtrodden mass and to feel sorry for them. The resulting feeling is pity: a mere “sentiment” which, unlike compassion, does not involve direct empathy with others. Arendt is always disdainful of sentimentality, claiming that pity in particular actually feeds off the existence of suffering since it can only comprehend others as sufferers. ⁴⁹ Importantly, though, there is a different way to generalize our concern for suffering. The “alternative” to feeling pity is, Arendt claims, to manifest the principle of “solidarity.” Whereas pity encourages us to view others as a mass of sufferers, solidarity enables us to stand alongside others as potentially equal yet distinctive actors within a political community or world. We are then able to respond to suffering by “establish[ing] deliberately and, as it were, dispassionately a community of interest with the oppressed and exploited.” ⁵⁰

Arendt’s distinction between the sentiment of pity and the principle of solidarity raises important questions regarding the scope and practical import of her politics. I have argued that Arendt does not exclude purposive activity from politics and that at times she even recognizes the selection of goals as a crucially important aspect of political greatness. However, it remains unclear whether her distinction between “action” and “labor” and her account of “the social” should be read as excluding socio-economic debates and goals from politics. While some passages of On Revolution certainly suggest that such concerns are excluded, the aforementioned distinction between sentiments and principles points toward a more nuanced approach. When Arendt contrasts pity and solidarity as alternative responses to suffering, she focuses on a particular kind of suffering: material deprivation or poverty. She suggests that the fault of the French revolutionaries was to pity the poor, turning people into a homogenous suffering mass and failing to grasp their potential individuality and dignity. Consequently, the revolution became preoccupied with the provision of life’s essentials over the establishment of political rights and institutions and was “deflected” from “the foundation of freedom.” ⁵¹

The alternative response to socio-economic problems, then, is to manifest the principle of solidarity. Those who act out of solidarity are not unconcerned with suffering in general, or with material deprivation in particular. However, because they comprehend others as possessing a potential beyond their biological needs, they are also not entirely preoccupied with socio-economic imperatives. While those who act out of solidarity may attempt to advance the material interests of the “oppressed and exploited,” they always act for the sake of something higher: political empowerment. Accordingly, Arendt claims that solidarity is “aroused by suffering” but “not guided by it.” ⁵² If we emphasize these passages of On Revolution over others, it appears that socio-economic issues are perhaps not excluded from politics entirely and that the “the social” does not refer to the incursion of such issues into public debate. Instead, these passages suggest that political action is permitted to engage socio-economic issues, so long as it is not reduced to such issues. On this account, the social rears its head when we fail to convert a concern for material deprivation into a principle of action and instead view others merely in terms of their biological needs.

Arendt’s openness to a politically principled engagement of socio-economic issues is evident in several other contexts, such as in her discussion of public housing in America and in her discussion of the Israeli kibbutzim. ⁵³ Yet, there remains an unresolved tension between these passages and some of Arendt’s stronger claims regarding the rise of the social. Arendt seems reluctant to follow through on her suggestion that we may establish a “community of interest” through the principle of solidarity, often reverting to the claim any attempt to advance material interests is antithetical to politics. This ambivalence is especially palpable when, in the “Action” chapter of The Human Condition, Arendt discusses the European labor movement. Here Arendt lauds the labor movement as “the only group on the political scene which not only defended its economic interests but [also] fought a full-fledged political battle.” ⁵⁴ In the terms developed in On Revolution, we might understand the labor movement as engaging socio-economic issues through the worldly principle of solidarity rather than the sentiment of pity. Yet, Arendt then goes further, not only claiming that the labor movement had aspirations beyond socio-economic goals but also asserting that the economic activity of its members was merely “incidental” to their political role, and that the “spring” of their activity was unrelated to labor conditions. I wish neither to deny nor to defend Arendt’s recurring tendency to demarcate the realms of labor and action in this rigid fashion. I wish merely to emphasize the inconsistencies in her treatment of this issue, and to highlight the potential significance of the principle of solidarity for developing a more nuanced Arendtian approach to the social question.

Having now outlined the basic parameters of Arendt’s conception of principles, and engaged the concern that her politics is overly restrictive or impractical, let us return to the question of whether her politics is ethically unrestrained. The foregoing discussion suggests that, in order to qualify as political action, an act must not only be novel but must also manifest a principle of a particular kind. These principles have a clear ethical orientation toward the world in which we appear to each other as distinct actors. This means that political judgment cannot be boiled down either to moral considerations of individual conscience, or to direct empathy with other individuals.

While principles are not moral standards, Arendt claims that they do serve as guiding criteria for political judgment. The foregoing discussion already suggests several ways in which principles might enable political actors and spectators to make critical judgments. First, we have seen that, because political action not only pursues goals but also manifests principles, it is not determined entirely by its means and ends. This means that, if an act appears to be unguided by any principle and to pursue its goals in a wholly instrumental fashion, we have reason to question its meaningfulness or “greatness.” Second, while principles do not prescribe particular goals in advance, we are nevertheless able to judge whether a chosen goal exemplifies and sustains an action’s principle. Finally, I have suggested that political action may perhaps engage socio-economic issues so long as it does so for the sake of a principle such as solidarity. This means that we can question the meaningfulness or greatness of any attempt to address socio-economic issues in an unprincipled, merely sentimental fashion. In drawing these distinctions, Arendt elaborates principles of action in a more critical mode than does the primarily sociological Montesquieu. As a result, Arendt’s account of principles yields a more robust form of political ethics than those offered by Biskowski and Buckler, since it offers not only a general ethical orientation but also evaluative standards that facilitate judgments of various kinds.

Nevertheless, the possibility of making these critical judgments may still be insufficient to assuage ethical concerns, especially given that both Arendt and Montesquieu identify ostensibly divisive principles such as “fear” and “hatred” as worldly principles of action. The risk that action might be inspired by such principles may simply reinforce concerns that Arendt’s politics is unruly and dangerous. Although commentators such as Canovan and Kalyvas recognize the significance of principles for Arendt’s politics, they do not address this important puzzle, and so fail to offer a satisfactory account of the way in which principles facilitate critical political judgments. In the remainder of this section, then, I supplement Arendt’s account by clarifying the political significance of action inspired by problematic principles such as “fear.”

For Arendt, fear qualifies as a principle of action in a crude sense because it shapes the way people relate to each other in public space and can inspire unpredictable action. However, echoing Montesquieu’s claim that fear is “corrupt by its nature,” Arendt explains that this principle has a tendency to isolate people, destroying the interpersonal bonds that help to constitute the public realm and “throw(ing) men into a situation contrary to political action.” ⁵⁵ Moving beyond Montesquieu, Arendt adds that the principle of fear is intimately tied to the fundamental human experience of “loneliness.” ⁵⁶ Thus, “fear, properly speaking, is not a principle of action, but an antipolitical principle within the common world.” ⁵⁷

Kateb refers to problematic principles of this kind as “freedom-destroying principles” and contrasts them with “freedom-preserving or freedom-creating principles.” ⁵⁸ However, this distinction fails to capture Arendt’s paradoxical suggestion that action inspired by fear does realize our distinctively human capacity for public freedom in one sense while also undermining the conditions of that freedom. The notion of a “degenerative” principle, rather than a “freedom-destroying” principle, better complements this claim. Although Arendt does not discuss this phenomenon in detail, the principles of distrust, hatred, rage, and charity might also be understood to possess the degenerative quality that makes politics “destroy and annihilate itself.” ⁵⁹

In addition to elaborating the degenerative principle of fear, Arendt theorizes another inherently corrupt form of politics unforeseen by Montesquieu: 20th century totalitarianism. While subjects under a tyrannous government maintain “a minimal, fearful contact with other men,” and are thus still capable of action, the loneliness of totalitarian societies is so total that the space for action disappears altogether. ⁶⁰ According to Arendt, principles of action then become irrelevant as they are replaced by an overarching “ideology” that claims to explain everything in terms of the laws of history or nature. Whereas even the tyrannous principle of fear can inspire unpredictable deeds, each with a specific meaning, totalitarian ideologies understand all events to be logical deductions of an already established idea. This novel form of government is pervaded not merely by fear but rather by terror.

This discussion underscores that, in order for a principle to render action politically great, it must not only relate to the public realm we share in common but must also sustain our continued engagement in realm. In addition to inspiring us to act, principles such as virtue and solidarity have what I want to call a “(re)generative” quality such that they reinforce the vitality of the public realm in which they operate. Thus, Arendt’s account of principles invites political actors and spectators to make evaluative judgments on two levels. First, we can judge the extent to which an act exemplifies and sustains a worldly principle at all, rather than succumbing to mere instrumentalism, sentimentalism, or ideology. For Arendt, only principled action bestows a “specific meaning” on each deed and so only principled action can be great. Second, we can evaluate whether the worldly principle manifest in action is degenerative and thus partly “antipolitical” in character or, conversely, (re)generative of the conditions of political action. This ethical framework enables one to critique the dangerous phenomena that worry Kateb and Jay. It does so not by dismissing such phenomena as immoral but rather by recognizing in them a perversion of politics. In the next section, I elaborate what it means for a principle to be (re)generative, by examining the more historically textured conception of principles offered by Arendt in her account of the American Revolution.

The repetition and regeneration of principles

While the distinction I have drawn between degenerative and (re)generative principles speaks to the charge that Arendt’s politics is ethically unrestrained, it also brings to light a remaining puzzle. On the one hand, Arendt insists that actions are unexpected beginnings that “break with the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary.” ⁶¹ An appreciation of this novelty is, after all, a crucial element of Arendt’s commitment to approach politics on its own terms, with eyes unclouded by philosophy. On the other hand, Arendt seems to suggest that the principles manifest in action are not entirely unique to specific contexts and can in fact be regenerated over time. She characterizes principles as “general” and even “universal,” not in the sense that they are somehow valid for all political actors but rather in the sense that they are “not bound to any particular person or to any particular group.” ⁶² Principles “can be repeated time and again,” and it is the sign of a fully political principle that it reinforces the vitality of the public realm and so promotes its own repetition. ⁶³

Arendt’s claim that principles of action are “repeated” extends even to the most extraordinary of political moments, perhaps most dramatically the American founding. In On Revolution, she singles out the American Revolution as an exemplary instance of political action, through which a radically new beginning was initiated. At the same time, however, she is keen to emphasize that revolutionary actors relied both on their own previous experience of self-government and on “the archives of ancient prudence” for animating principles. ⁶⁴ The principles that characterized the revolutionary spirit in America had been “nourished throughout the colonial period,” and the Founders turned to Rome as their “great model and precedent.” ⁶⁵ Existing commentaries on Arendt’s account of principles in On Revolution do not adequately address this puzzle. Wolfhart Totschnig’s reading overlooks Arendt’s historical grounding of the Revolution entirely and claims that extraordinary political moments of this kind “invent” brand new principles. ⁶⁶ And while Kalyvas recognizes that principles are never created “ex nihilo,” he too denies that principles have any basis in “common memories or historical traditions.” Ultimately, like Totschnig, he overlooks Arendt’s historical grounding of the Revolution and states repeatedly that America’s principles simply “emerge[d] out of the constituent act itself.” ⁶⁷

How, then, can we square Arendt’s claim that political action is unpredictable and novel, (“as though the beginner had abolished the sequence of temporality itself,”) with her claim that action repeats principles that have “come down to us through history”? ⁶⁸ Although Arendt does not directly attempt to reconcile these claims, the apparent tension between them can be negotiated if we recognize a kind of creative repetition that is peculiar to the political realm. Accordingly, acts of founding, as well as the later acts through which these settlements are “enacted further, augmented and spun out,” repeat principles by rearticulating them. ⁶⁹ When actors manifest principles from the past, they do so in innovative and unexpected ways, transforming the principles themselves. So, while the American Revolution did not invent its principles—“the interconnected principle of mutual promise and common deliberation,” “public or political freedom,” and “consent and the right to dissent”—it rearticulated them in such a way that they could no longer mean what they once did. Thus, the variety of repetition characteristic of action is crucially different from the monotonous repetition of labor, or the repetition of the worker who typically follows his blueprint. It is the open-endedness and unpredictability of action’s repetition that gives this dimension of human activity its “measure of arbitrariness” and makes it appear “as though the beginner had abolished the sequence of temporality itself.”

The elasticity of principles of action distinguishes them from both the self-oriented “moral standards” that Arendt claims have no place in political judgment and the procedural ethical model sought by Benhabib. In “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” Arendt frequently characterizes moral standards as “fixed,” not in the sense that they are difficult to shake off (far from it) but rather in the sense that they are doctrinaire in form. And while Benhabib’s approach may not be doctrinaire in the same way, it nevertheless erects an ethical foundation in the form of a procedural model to be honed over time. Thus, although Arendt does not draw this contrast explicitly, principles of action seem to differ from other ethical standards partly by virtue of their openness to rearticulation. While politics does not lack evaluative standards altogether, it is distinct in that the meaning of its principles is always subject to contestation and transformation in radically novel ways. Indeed, we might infer that it is partly the unpredictable re-articulation of (re)generative principles through action that revitalizes the public world we share in common and thus sustains the conditions for future action. This echoes Arendt’s broader claim that “the world, in gross and in detail, is irrevocably delivered up to the ruin of time unless human beings are determined to intervene, to alter, to create what is new.” ⁷⁰

Nevertheless, the regeneration of political principles over time does not depend solely on the creative manifestation of principles in action. Additionally, principles must be preserved in institutions, stories, political theory, poetry, and other cultural artifacts if they are to be kept vital. As we have seen, Arendt claims that the American Founders drew not only on their own experience of self-government but also on “the archives of ancient prudence” for animating principles. In particular, their appreciation for the principle of “public or political freedom” was cultivated by texts of political theory that provided “the concrete elements with which to think and dream of such freedom.” ⁷¹ Arendt goes as far as to claim that, “without the Founding Fathers’ enthusiastic and sometimes slightly comical erudition in political theory … no revolution would ever have been effected.” ⁷²

Arendt emphasizes the importance of preserving principles, not only in her account of the American Revolution’s initiation but also in her account of its subsequent failures. She claims that, after enacting a new political beginning, the “second task of revolution [is] to assure the survival of the spirit out of which the act of foundation sprang, to realize the principle which inspired it.” ⁷³ Despite the early promise of the republic, the Founders failed to achieve this second task in two important ways. First, the principles that comprised the revolutionary spirit were not provided with a “lasting institution,” “a new political space” within which they could be rearticulated for generations to come. ⁷⁴ Second, and partially as a result of this institutional failure, there was a “failure of post-revolutionary thought to remember the revolutionary spirit and to understand it conceptually.” ⁷⁵ Interest in political theory “dried up” after the foundation, and the inspiring principles of the founders were forgotten. ⁷⁶ According to Arendt, America’s failure to institutionalize and remember its founding principles soon enabled materialistic and conformist desires for private happiness to overshadow the experience of public happiness.

Without evaluating Arendt’s account of American political development, we can see from this account that she considers the regeneration of principles over time to depend not only on their periodic manifestation in action but also on their preservation as sources of inspiration in relatively stable institutions and artifacts. ⁷⁷ This dimension of Arendt’s politics reinforces Jeremy Waldron’s claim that, for Arendt, “there can be nothing political without structure.” ⁷⁸ Conversely, it undermines any interpretation of Arendt’s politics that characterizes action as erupting “ex nihilo” and, in so doing, fails to appreciate the historical conditions facilitating such action. Despite Arendt’s conviction that action constitutes a new beginning, she clearly specifies that this “does not mean that it is ever permitted to start ab ovo, to create ex nihilo.” ⁷⁹ Furthermore, this emphasis on erecting institutions and producing cultural artifacts implies that, for Arendt, the vitality of the public realm is partly dependent on activities that resemble fabrication or “work” more closely than they resemble action.

The claim that principles are preserved over time in institutions and artifacts might appear to contradict Arendt’s assertion that principles “are manifest in the world as long as action lasts, but no longer.” ⁸⁰ This apparent contradiction is illusory, however, because Arendt understands the term “manifest” to have a narrow meaning. In order for a principle to become manifest or “come to light,” it must emerge in a public space of appearance in action. ⁸¹ It is through such appearance that principles take on radically new and unpredictable rearticulations. Nevertheless, Arendt clearly holds that principles also exist in a different, latent sense in durable structures and artifacts. For Arendt, the vitality of public space depends on a reciprocal relationship between the reinvigorating manifestation of principles in action and the stabilizing preservation of principles in the “granite groundwork” of the political body. ⁸² Despite the ultimate failures of the American Revolution, Arendt praises the founders for their appreciation of this relationship and their recognition that novelty and stability were in fact “two sides of the same event.” ⁸³

However, while we may construct institutions and artifacts with varying levels of success, we must not understand the history through which principles come down to us as ultimately oriented toward an ideal realization of those principles. This is important for Arendt because any approach to political history that is oriented toward an ultimate end tends to reduce individual actions to mere means and so disavow their intrinsic greatness. The kind of historical narrative through which we trace the path of a principle might include an account of how effectively it has been preserved over time in structures and artifacts. However, if this narrative is to do justice to politics, it will also highlight novel rearticulations of principles in action. Indeed, Arendt considers the “single instances, deeds and events [that] interrupt the circular movement of daily life” to be the primary “subject matter” of political history. ⁸⁴ She argues that a failure to recognize the intrinsic greatness of these interruptions, and a concomitant tendency to view actions only as means to ends, has resulted in “the growing meaninglessness of the modern world.” ⁸⁵

Conclusion

I have argued that Arendt’s account of principles addresses familiar criticisms of her politics, offering a distinctively political ethics while undermining conceptions of action as impractical or restrictive. In elaborating Arendt’s understanding of political greatness, I have shown that she conceives principles of action in a more critical mode than Montesquieu, enabling us to make various ethical judgments. First, while action is not purposeless, we can distinguish merely instrumental activity from meaningful principled action. Arendt also invites us to judge the goals of an action in light of its principles. Second, Arendt’s understanding of the principle of solidarity reveals her ambivalence regarding the social question, enabling us to differentiate between principled and merely sentimental orientations to socio-economic problems. Third, by developing Montesquieu’s claim that fear is corrupt by nature, Arendt allows us to distinguish further between what I have called degenerative and (re)generative principles of action. Finally, Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism enables us to recognize circumstances in which worldly principles of action have been supplanted by rigid ideologies. With these aspects of Arendt’s distinctively political ethics in hand, I have explained how we might trace the preservation, re-articulation, or erosion of principles in historical perspective.

While Arendt’s account of principles may thus enable us to develop rich analyses of events past and present, it does not provide us with formulas to make any of the aforementioned ethical judgments with certainty. It is up to us to judge whether an action is animated by a particular principle, whether an action avoids sentimentality, whether a given principle should be classified as degenerative, and whether politics has been corrupted by ideology. Moreover, we have seen that principles of action differ from foundational ethical standards in that they are always open to radical rearticulation. Since the meaning of worldly principles is itself fluid, these principles can only be understood to serve as rough guideposts for retrospective political judgment. The radical novelty of politics also implies that principles can be no more than guideposts in their role of directing future action. While Arendt understands principles to possess an animating force that moves human beings to act, she follows Montesquieu in claiming that they simply “inspire” action rather than offer determinate prescriptions for action.

The reason that principles can only guide judgment and action in this open-ended sense is, of course, that Arendt remains committed to engage politics on its own terms. For her, this means that a truly political ethics must not only be worldly in orientation but must also resist erecting foundational standards. To apply an ethical foundation or model to politics would be to impose homo faber’s sovereignty onto a public realm that is characterized by radical unpredictability and intrinsic greatness. Thus, for Arendt, principles of action are not brought to politics from without, to regulate or constrain it. Rather, the manifestation and contestation of principles is politics. While this conception of principles will not satisfy those seeking determinate judgments of events or prescriptions for action, I have argued that it yields a more robust political ethics than Arendt’s interpreters have yet offered.