Arendt in Crisis: Political Thought in Between Past and Future

Author(s): Jakob Norberg

Source: College Literature , Winter 2011, Vol. 38, No. 1, Arendt, Politics, and Culture
(Winter 2011), pp. 131-149
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27917788

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 Arendt in Crisis:

Political Thought in
Between Past and Future

Jakob Norberg

As media consumers, we are perpetually Jakob Norberg is an assistant

being informed of one crisis or the professor of German at Duke

other: plummeting markets, diplomatic
University. His articles have
breakdowns, influenza pandemics, disastrous
floods, and so on. The point of social vulner appeared or are forthcoming in
ability may seem to migrate, but at no Arcadia, Cultural Critique,
moment is the collective unexposed to dan
ger. It even seems that complex social life PMLA, Telos and other jour
presents itself to us most palpably in the form nals.
of crisis: we only learn about financial insti
tutions, international relations, and delicate
ecosystems when they are subject to grave
disturbances. This is not to dispute the exis
tence of systemic problems, only to look at
how we often come to register them. Minor
imperfections in vast organizational entities
are not very good at claiming our attention

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 College Literature 38.1 [Winter 2011]

whereas a full-scale crisis warrants emotional mobilization and demands

immediate interventions.
If the announcement of crisis is one way in which the media direct our
awareness to issues (Luhmann 1996, 53-81), this act could be of interest to
literary and cultural studies, insofar as these disciplines analyze the staging of
events and the prevalent scripts for narrating society (Wald 2008, 3). (There
is also the crisis in the humanities (Perloff 2000), but this is not a spectacle
that can count on a horrified audience outside of academia, and hence it fails
as a communicative endeavor; it cannot, in other words, be used to stir up
public sentiment.) Yet the ubiquity and even triviality of crisis and its use as
a mechanism for the allocation of our attention and efforts may have ren
dered it unserviceable as a theoretical tool. Since various crises are being
declared on a daily basis, and executives worry about how to "turn crisis into
opportunity," the concept's power of illumination may seem to have faded;
routine invocations have turned it into a synonym for any bad situation.1
In this context, the work of Hannah Arendt can, I believe, revivify our
sense of the concept's specificity and productiveness.2 Many of her analyses
of modernity have attracted considerable interest in contemporary cultural
theory: she is recognized as a critic of the notion of human rights, as a the
orist of imperialism and genocide, and as one of the most important propo
nents of the intrinsic value of political action. As such, she has been an
important reference for contemporary philosophers like Giorgio Agamben.3
She is, however, hardly read for her understanding of crisis as an affliction
particular to modern societies.
Yet a notion of crisis is central to Arendt's work and absolutely vital to
her conception of politics. The interrelation of these two concepts?politics
and crisis?can be summarized simply. According to Arendt, politics is fun
damentally about the relationship of human beings with one another, the
nature of their bond, the principles that unite them, and the very frame of
the multiple local and temporary projects they undertake together. Crisis on
the other hand names the dissolution and possible reconstitution of human
communities: it is the moment when the community's taken-for-granted
integrity is threatened. It follows, then, that crisis is central to politics, for the
supreme political question of human interconnection is brought to light in
times of crisis: we are called upon to reaffirm or deny our previously estab
lished mutual bonds, a project that cannot fail to involve disputes and realign
ments. In crisis, Arendt contends, politics as a particular discourse and prac
tice becomes unavoidable for all. Crisis is not just a synonym for disaster, but
names the moment in which we are forced to become political beings.
To understand crisis in Arendt's work is, therefore, to understand her
vision of the urgency of politics or the way in which the possibility of polit

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 Jakob Norberg 133

ical discourse and action erupts in society. If Arendt is not known for this
perspective, it is perhaps because it requires considerable reconstruction. The
moment of crisis is not simply a theme among others in her writings but
rather a difficulty that surfaces in the form of contradictory storylines and
paradoxical formulations. As we shall see in the analysis of crisis and politics,
Arendt's political thought shares in the destabilizing events that necessitate
political conduct: she, too, wonders about how crises can play out and what
resources societies possess when responding to imminent fragmentation. Is
there, her work implicitly asks, some way of negotiating the troubling affin
ity between vigorous dissent and total dissolution? The task of specifying the
relationship between crisis and politics in Arendt's thought can, therefore, not
be reduced to the simple extraction of an idea from her work: we can
retrieve her answer to the question of crisis only through attention to the
textual elaboration of her thinking.

What is a Crisis?

What is a crisis? Hannah Arendt never poses this question explicitly, but
it is nonetheless central to her work. In Between Past and Future, her collec
tion of eight "exercises in political thought," the third and the fourth essays
are entitled, respectively, "What is Authority?" and "What is Freedom?" The
following two texts bear the titles "The Crisis in Education" and "The Crisis
in Culture." If one combines the recurrent elements of these titles, one
arrives at a question that is never explicitly posed in the volume yet inscribed
within it: What is?a crisis?
As I will try to show in this essay, this implicit question is an eminently
political one; the field of politics, as Arendt pictures it, is revealed through cri
sis. If she does not formulate the question of crisis directly, it is not because
the answer would be banal or unimportant. On the contrary, the question is
not explicitly formulated, firmly placed and dealt with in an individual essay
because it structures the entire collection. The question "what is a crisis?"
remains unarticulated at the midpoint of the book only because it is the pivot
around which the eight texts revolve. The confrontation with a series of fun
damental and interlinked crises that affect the status of authority, culture,
education, or tradition, drives the work of thought and compels it in certain
directions, but the attempted response to these crises also organizes the vol
ume's overarching mode of presentation. What a methodical reading of
Between Past and Future's underlying narrative reveals is, in the end, an entan
glement of two problems, namely the central problem of politics in the mod
ern world as it emerges in and through perplexing crises on the one hand
and the problem of systematically reflecting upon and writing about politics
on the other.

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 College Literature 38.1 [Winter 2011]

How does the moment of crisis set up Arendt's inquiries into the histo
ry of politics and political thought? Conventionally, crisis designates a point
at which habitual reactions are no longer adequate and previous experiences
provide no guidance. It names the moment at which some event or devel
opment exceeds an agent's present ability to cope. A crisis occurs, then, when
a social system lacks the capacity and means to ensure its continued existence
(Habermas 1973, 11).The fact that crises per definition overwhelm compe
tences reveals the frequent talk of "crisis management" to be oxymoronic: a
crisis is precisely that which we cannot hope to manage, for the problems
that appear cannot be resolved with existing tools or within established
frameworks. The "sustainable configuration of relations" is at the breaking
point (Cazdyn 2007, 647).
Arendt does not stray far from this basic notion of crisis but approaches
it without alarm, undistracted by the noise that surrounds this word. In the
essay, "Crisis in Education," she writes that the crisis, whatever its origins or
causes, "tears away fa?ades and obliterates prejudices" and that this "disap
pearance of prejudices" implies that "we have lost the answers on which we
ordinarily rely without even realizing that they were originally answers to
questions" (Arendt 1977,174). In a crisis, a question finally appears as a ques
tion. Such a moment requires responsiveness to the situation or a willingness
to consider fundamental problems anew, and in this way, the crisis invites us
to "explore and inquire into whatever has been laid bare of the essence of
the matter" (174).The crisis does not only reveal a gap between a problem
we are forced to confront and our present capacity to resolve it, but is also,
more affirmatively, presented as an opportunity for thought. For example, the
essence of education, suddenly laid bare by crisis, is the fact that human
beings are born into the world rather than arrive as perfect copies of those
who already inhabit it, which means that they must be slowly introduced to
and initially even protected from the human community with its conven
tions and norms.
In a crisis, a question appears, a question about what something is in its
essence. The crisis is, therefore, an alternative name for the moment in which
one asks what something is. In fact, the question, "What is a crisis?," may not
appear in the collection of essays because it involves the duplication of a ver
bal gesture and appears almost tautological. Translated into Arendt's idiom,
the question reads: "What is the moment in which one can ask what some
thing is?"We can, however, reformulate this question in more historical terms
to remove the impression of needless repetition: how can a particular devel
opment or situation force a questioning that concerns the essence or the
ground of central human activities, such as authority or education?
Rendered in this way, the question, "What is a crisis?," suggests that criticism

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 Jakob Norberg

and reflection tend to arise when we are knocked off balance. Reassessment
and reorientation are not practices that we willingly engage in out of our
sheer commitment to critical thought. Inert and path-dependent as we are,
opportunities of thought are forced upon us rather than freely chosen: we
need to be pushed into a state of crisis before we start reviewing our situa
tion. As the historian Reinhart Koselleck asserts in his study of the patho
genesis of modern society, crisis and critique collude to undermine stability4:
crisis is change catching us unprepared, whereas critique is the way in which
we endeavor to initiate change.5
This is not the whole story, however, or not the only one. Arendt claims
that a crisis may liberate us from our prejudices, but in another passage she
also relates it to a breakdown of what she calls "sound human reason"
(Arendt 1977,178), a phrase with more positive connotations than the term
"prejudice." In a formulation that echoes her earlier reflections on prejudice,
Arendt even talks of a "disappearance of common sense" as a symptom of cri
sis (178). It might seem that common sense is merely a more respectable
name for our repertoire of stereotypical conceptions, but the emerging par
adox cannot be so easily neutralized. The disappearance of common sense,
Arendt claims, is "the surest sign of the present-day crisis. In every crisis a
piece of the world, something common to us all, is destroyed. The failure of
common sense, like a divining rod, points to the place where such a cave-in
has occurred" (178). In this quotation, a crisis really is an emergency. We are
still in the same essay, but the metaphor has shifted: no essence is laid bare
with the "disappearance of common sense"; what it leaves is simply a cave
in, the ruins after a collapse.6 The world, understood as the territory we share
with each other and the reference point for all our communication, is frag
menting before us.
This dual determination of crisis as the disappearance of prejudices and
the erosion of common sense indicates its ambivalent status in Arendt's
thought. The prejudices that are undermined in a crisis stand as a name for
institutionalized and habituated attitudes that allow humans to cooperate and
to understand new situations in terms of self-evident and shared rules and
routines.7 In a manuscript on the significance of politics entitled "What Is
Politics?," Arendt contends that a complete lack of prejudices would demand
an impossible constant alertness, a continual and strenuous cognitive labor.8
The perpetual engagement of our minds would soon leave us exhausted.
Arendt does not simply disparage prejudices as rigid obstacles to genuine
thought but recognizes their vital importance: they regulate our exposure to
the world.9
Common sense is a related but more complex concept. To begin with, it
denotes a tacit understanding of what is probable in more or less standard sit

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136 College Literature 38.1 [Winter 2011]

uations, an acquaintance with the normal mechanisms of the world, or a cer

tain sense of what can be expected given established routines and previous
experience.10 As a name for an instrument of orientation in a series of sim
ilar situations, it does look very much like a prejudice, but Arendt at times
also hints at a more suggestive and layered characterization of the concept.
Common sense is not only viewed as a set of internalized rules of thumb that
allows for swift interpretation of shifting circumstances.11 Rather, as separate
from the individual senses (sight, touch, taste), it adds nothing to perceptions
other than the all-important sense that others would perceive things in a like
manner, an assumption grounded in the notion of a shared human cognitive
constitution.12 To put it concisely, common sense involves the sense that we
have something in common with others. This explains why Arendt can con
tend that the loss of common sense is tantamount to the gradual destruction
of a common world. That a "piece of the world" caves in does not mean that
a given terrain of objects suddenly dissolves before our eyes. What is lost is
rather the shared assurance that others would relate to this world in a simi
lar way This loss hollows out the idea that my impressions are in principle
communicable and will at least potentially be ratified. Stripped of the confi
dence one derives from the anticipated, possible corroboration by others,
orientation becomes difficult if not impossible. Without even the prospect of
some confirmation from others (that may or may not be forthcoming but
that nonetheless is possible in principle), we lose certainty about our naviga
tional ability.
Against the backdrop of her description of common sense, however
abbreviated and enigmatic it may be, the difference between the two
terms?prejudice and common sense?comes into sharper focus. To follow
Arendt in her diagnoses of decline, this difference is highlighted by the diver
gent but not mutually exclusive consequences of their respective disappear
ance. The loss of prejudices entails a perceptual inundation of our minds
because we are stripped of ready categories for experience. The loss of com
mon sense, on the other hand, makes us utterly lonely, for it is the loss of a
sense of sharing the world with others.
What is a crisis? The crisis evidently has a double character. It forces us
to ask fundamental questions and demands fresh attention to matters previ
ously passed by. In this way, the crisis makes possible a review of the history
and guiding principle of an activity or area, such as authority or education.
At the same time, a crisis is a moment of danger and loss, since it entails the
erosion of what we have in common or the loss of the very notion of the
common, and, therefore, threatens the framework in which any exchange
about some laid-bare ground or shared principle could take place.13 A crisis
throws us back upon ourselves and isolates us from others.This does not sim

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 Jakob Norberg

ply mean that communication becomes more difficult: it rather destroys the
ground for any future interaction at all. The crisis can trigger an exercise in
political thought, but it also threatens to rob this exercise of its foundation,
since politics concerns not individuals in their isolation but the relationship
of men and women to each other.

Two Narratives of Crisis

In presenting two definitions of crisis without explicitly bridging them,

Arendt confronts us with a peculiar juxtaposition of narratives. The first story
is critical, directed against any calcified stereotypes or orthodoxies. We can
discern a destructive impulse in Arendt's work, a will to conquer forgotten
questions hidden under multiple layers of preconceptions.14 Much like her
teacher Heidegger, she seeks to restore the validity and integrity of a partic
ular philosophical experience.15 The other narrative is seemingly nostalgic, in
that it comments on the gradual loss of world: the crisis is a withering away
These two stories can be found within one and the same essay without being
overtly related to one another. Crisis is Arendt's concept for the liberation
from prejudice and an estrangement from others, and she does not address
this double use directly and openly.
The duality in "The Crisis of Education" is not a peculiar contradiction
that can be overlooked because of its singular occurrence. In another essay
entitled "What is Authority?," Arendt invokes a hypothetical agreement
about the notion that modernity has been accompanied by a "constant, ever
widening and deepening crisis of authority" (Arendt 1977, 91). As in all
crises, this means that we can no longer "fall back upon authentic and indis
putable experiences common to us all" and that the term itself has become
"clouded by controversy and confusion" (91).Yet it is precisely when we can
no longer presuppose a stock of shared experiences of authority and are
robbed of a piece of world that we feel compelled to pose the question of
the meaning of the concept: "it is my contention," Arendt writes, "that we
are tempted and entitled to raise this question [what is authority?] because
authority has vanished from the modern world" (91).
What follows this announcement of crisis is a journey through the his
torical meanings of authority. Along the way, Plato and Aristotle, the Roman
Empire, the Catholic Church, and finally the revolutions of the modern peri
od, represent distinct conditions, each embodying a specific understanding
and deployment of authority. The review of this complex, multi-layered enti
ty is not carried out for the purpose of reinstatement, but the work of intel
lectual reconstruction is at the same time a work of liberation: Arendt both
retrieves and dismantles a tradition comprised of bodies of thought and insti
tutional practices to make us aware of a condition in which we are "con

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 College Literature 38.1 [Winter 2011]

fronted anew ... by the elementary problems of human living-together"

without the trust in and protection of institutions and standards of behavior
(Arendt 1977,141).The essay,"What Is Authority?," is thus not a learned arti
cle that lovingly uncovers the past to save it from imminent forgetting but
rather an attempt to understand the exhaustion of the tradition and then also
to grasp that moment as a possibility for confronting the problem of living
together, which is the fundamental problem of politics.
In fact, the traditional and once self-evident norms of action that Arendt
discusses all involve an escape from the political sphere defined as a zone
where the order of human life is in contention. The stations she revisits con
stitute so many attempts to control and contain the political rather than real
ize it. Authority?this is its constitutive character?always demands obedi
ence by subjects and citizens, and the source of its legitimacy is in all cases a
power that transcends the political space. In Plato's philosophy, Arendt claims,
this external source is the ideas, which the philosopher alone discerns and
which he then can represent as yardsticks or patterns for human conduct.16
The philosopher asserts his privileged contact with the world of ideas and
translates them into a set of absolute norms in order to stifle the volatile plu
rality of claims and opinions in the polis. Arendt, therefore, claims that men
only become political in the moment they move beyond the rule of tran
scendent authorities. Politics is constituted by the unpredictable polemical
play of differentiated positions, and it subsides with the silent submission of
all subjects under an indisputable truth, whose medium is the philosopher.
We might say, "truth is the ultimate conversation stopper" (Fuller 2005, 51).
At the same time, Arendt admits that the disappearance of authorities
represents a threat to a shared stock of experiences and the societal stability
that it supports. In the wake of the breakdown of traditional authorities in
the modern era, movements spring up that offer release from the resulting
disorientation by means of pseudo-logical political doctrines and new forms
of membership and belonging. Arendt writes that the "crisis [of authority],
apparent since the inception of the century, is political in origin and nature"
and makes room for the rise of "political movements intent upon replacing
the party system" and the "development of a new totalitarian form of gov
ernment" (Arendt 1977, 91). When old social hierarchies crumble and lose
their binding force, the released "masses" can be reorganized into other soci
etal formations by the consistent use of ideology and terror, a process Arendt
describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism. If Plato wanted to secure order and
obedience through the reign of ideas over the polis, totalitarianism moves
further and endeavors to eliminate completely the plurality particular to the
human community.

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 Jakob Norberg

Arendt may welcome the decline of authority and its powers of pre
scription as the emancipation of politics from transcendent sources of
absolute rules: in accordance with her vision of the autonomy and integrity
of politics, genuine political activity only flares up when dominant social and
philosophical authorities have been subverted, but this vision is combined
with a historical perspective that identifies the crisis of old authorities as the
backdrop to the massive destabilizations of the twentieth century: the author
ity vacuum becomes an opportunity to reconfigure society from above. The
crisis of authority begins to resemble an absolutely fatal breakdown.The cen
tral question is, therefore, not only how we are supposed to approach the
problem of "human living-together" (Arendt 1977,156) once again or even
for the first time, relieved of traditional norms. The question is how we can
do so without the support of authentic and indisputable experiences "com
mon to all," experiences that safeguard subjects from total disorientation and
hence new (and worse) forms of political subordination (101). This is, ulti
mately, the question that emerges in the moment of crisis: what community
or form of "human living-together" is possible when its (potential) members
no longer have anything in common?
At this point, we can also begin to see how entangled Arendt's own
thinking is with the notion of a massive crisis affecting society as a whole and
even pushing it into total disaster. Indeed, her examinations of the history
and covered-over conceptual structure of traditions almost seems complicit
with the upheavals of the twentieth century, for her historical-analytical labor
emerges from crisis that renders prejudices inadequate, holds on to it as an
opportunity for reflection, and perhaps even moves towards it insofar as it
identifies and scrutinizes sets of prejudices. Crisis is presented as the enabling
condition for her historical investigations and the precondition for violent
rule.17 Again, critique seems related to crisis in a fundamental way, an affili
ation that lies behind anxious conservative indictments of critical theory
from the Enlightenment and beyond.18 Since Arendt embeds different and
even seemingly contradictory narratives in her essays, approaching crisis both
as the moment where politics must begin and cannot begin, she cannot be
accused of ignorance on this point. The question remains, however, how she
herself responds to the question that emerges from her essays, namely the
question of a community of people with nothing in common.

The Deus Ex Machina of Judgment

To reiterate the central argument so far: a crisis in Arendt's sense cannot

simply be welcomed as*an occasion to review crucial political concepts or
issues, for it also threatens to weaken or cut the bonds between men and
hence cancel out any possibility of politics. In light of this danger, the crisis

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140 College Literature 38.1 [Winter 2011]

requires a response that not only addresses the essence of whatever has been
laid bare with the disappearance of a prejudice, but must also confirm that
some common ground remains despite the loss of generally accepted, stan
dard answers. The reaction to the crisis must in other words include an inte
grative force that lies beyond any shared traditional standards embraced by all
members of the community.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Arendt devoted much energy to a theory of
judgment, and the editor of her posthumously published lectures on Kant
speaks of the existence of an unfinished treatise on this topic.19 This incom
plete but still extremely significant project has even been hailed as one of her
most enduring contributions. It seems to have many sources and motivations.
It is an extension of her philosophical studies evident in the published lec
tures series, The Life of the Mind, where she analyzes the specificity of willing
and thinking. Or it is a response to the confrontation with Adolf Eichmann,
a man incapable of independently reflecting on and evaluating the obliga
tions imposed on him by authority. In the context of the present recon
struction of parallel narratives of Between Past and Future, however, I would
like to suggest that judgment also works as a response to the peculiarly dual
character of crisis.
A look at intellectual history assures us that crisis and judgment belong
together. There is, of course, the documented etymological connectedness of
crisis and judgment; the Greek krinein, from which crisis is derived, means to
separate, decide, and judge.20 It is not hard, however, to imagine the relation
of the two concepts in more vivid ways. In the medical and military termi
nology of antiquity, crisis referred to the turning point or crucial moment in
which everything is at stake. In a crisis, matters of life and death, victory and
defeat, are yet to be decided; a process, whether a disease or a military battle,
is in a particularly sensitive, particularly significant phase that will either lead
to a dramatic improvement or an equally dramatic deterioration.21 In this sit
uation, nothing is more important than alertness, presence of mind, and
responsiveness to particular conditions, in short, the ability to make the
appropriate judgment.
Possibly drawing on this tradition, in which crisis is the term for an
ambivalent, precarious instant demanding a fitting response,22 Arendt puts
the concept of judgment to work in a way that matches the problem of pol
itics, as this problem becomes manifest in the twin storylines of Between Past
and Future.To begin with,judgment fills out the vacancy left by disappearing
prejudices. Typically, a judgment is an operation whereby a particular is sub
sumed under an accepted standard or general rule. Prejudices are, in this con
text, a kind of routinized operation of pseudo-judgment, in the sense that
standards or rules are continually being applied to a series of particulars with

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 Jakob Norberg Hl

out much review of the adequacy of the one to the other. The prejudiced
grasps the given particular as yet another embodiment of an already well
known phenomenon; he can be described as epistemologically stingy in that
he refuses to pay attention and adjust already-formed concepts to the world.
When Arendt speaks of judgment, however, she does not necessarily call for
a swift and supple change of standards, whereby obsolete rules are replaced
by updated ones. The required judgment is instead a reflective one, a judg
ment that generates its principles through its activity of relating to particu
lars rather than subsuming it under a preformed rule. A judgment is reflec
tive, Kant explains, when the particular is given, and the universal has to be
found for it.23 It is precisely when the "yardsticks of judgment" defined as
the self-evident rules or the generally accepted and unquestioned standards
disappear that judging truly comes into view as an independent activity
(Beiner 1982,96).
But if judgment can replace prejudice (because the latter is nothing but
a fossilized version of the former), it must also remedy the dissolution of a
common world. According to Arendt, it does. Her reasoning relies quite
explicitly on Kant's inquiry into the possible validity of judgments of taste.24
Such judgments, Arendt states in her essay on the "Crisis in Culture," do not
compel agreement in the same way as "demonstrable facts or truth proved by
argument"; they lack the advantages of logic (Arendt 1977,222). The specif
ic validity of any judgment of taste instead derives from the "potential agree
ment of others" who would judge similarly, were they to find themselves in
a similar situation (220). Not endowed with an irrefutable universal validity
but nonetheless refusing to remain absolutely idiosyncratic, the judgment of
taste is always made in "anticipated communication with others" and there
fore depends on the possibility of imagining their presence (220-21).
Such reliance on the potential community of judging persons is only
possible, however, because the judgment of taste is an "estimation of an
object or mode of representation apart from any interest" (Caygill 1989,
321). The judging person may count on the potential agreement of all men
and women capable of judging, because in turning towards the appearances
of the world before them and taking pleasure in them rather than hunting
for suitable and already known objects of consumption, they have temporar
ily extricated themselves from the needs of their ego. Thus liberated from the
"Hmitations" of a desiring being as well as the scarcity of resources (Arendt
1977, 220), they can regard something from the viewpoint of others with
similar cognitive abilities. Unlike the pursuit of private interest, which may
spur the individual to compete or collaborate with others depending on the
conditions, judging is an activity through which "sharing-the-world-with
others comes to pass" (221).

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 College Literature 38.1 [Winter 2011]

Leaning on Kant's investigation of the transcendental conditions of the

judgment of taste, Arendt is able to present judgment as an activity that is both
released by and provides an antidote to crisis. When prejudices appear inade
quate to an erupting situation, and a community turns into a mass of uncom
prehending individuals no longer connected by their shared dependence on
established standards, the operation of judgment seems to supply the perfect
response. First, judging becomes visible as an independent and spontaneous
mental process only when it is absolved from the labor of subsuming partic
ulars under preformed measures or when it is robbed of the support of prior
rules. Second, its activity presumes the "presence of others," for it consists of
nothing else than the attempt to enlarge one's mind to encompass possible
viewpoints in order to secure a "certain specific validity" (Arendt 1977,221).
When a community integrated by shared values or standards threatens to fall
apart and the recognizable world seems to slip away, a degree of human inter
connection reappears as an inherent dimension of judgment, an activity that
presupposes the existence of others with similar cognitive make-up and there
fore seems to be a way of re-establishing at least the promise of a shared real
ity by means of the free exercise of man's faculties.
Reviewing her theory of judgment as it is formulated in Between Past and
Future, we can see that, for Arendt, attention to the world and appreciation
of the perspectives of others coincide in the act of judgment. Without prej
udices and hence without the socio-epistemic comfort and complacency
they entail, we are awakened to a world of unknown things and unpre
dictable events as well as the plurality of men and women trying to under
stand a rapidly changing habitat. In fact, it is only when we lose our grip on
the cognitive tools of prejudice that we are forced to consider in a more gen
uine way the presence of others and accommodate their views in an
"'enlarged mentality' (eine erweiterte Denkungsart)" (Arendt 1977, 220).25
Prejudices may seem to bring us together insofar as they are a collective phe
nomenon, but in fact they make everyone less mindful of the existence of
others. Nor do we associate only because basic bodily needs and desires com
pel us to do so. According to Arendt, we depend on each other at the level
of cognition: we perceive the world in concert, or we do not perceive it at
all.
In Between Past and Future, Arendt combines a diagnosis of the crises of
authority, education, and culture with elements of Kantian philosophy to
point to the possibility of politics or "human living-together" in a post-tra
ditional society. The person who makes a judgment, she claims, does not do
so as a loner. Rather, to judge means to put oneself in the place of others and
hope for the possible convergence of multiple perspectives. This does not
mean that the judging person can count on unanimity: citing Kant, Arendt

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 Jakob Norberg

makes clear that he can in fact only "woo the consent of everyone else" and
wish for an eventual agreement (Arendt 1977, 222). Wooing denotes a
rhetorical rather than logical procedure, a method of persuasion or even
seduction that becomes necessary when discussions and disputes cannot be
laid to rest by reference to the transparency of the self-evident.26
Arendt's appropriation of judgment does not imply a full return to the
prejudices and the common sense lethally beset by crisis but rather forces a
departure from all groups whose stability and cohesion are guaranteed by an
inventory of preset values and views. The community that is the horizon of
judgment cannot be taken for granted, because the transcendental conditions
of the possibility of judgments of taste do not imply a sanction for any par
ticular statement, which then could coagulate into a new fixed rule. When
judging, a person's mind stretches out for the potential agreement of others
and makes a claim to validity on the basis of a promise of community. This
claim is only the invocation of the possibility of communication among men
and women with similar cognitive powers and does not represent a confident
announcement of a truth accepted by all. The community remains something
to be wooed in chronically open-ended negotiations about the character of
the world. The commitment to community among fellow men that these
imagined negotiations presuppose can in fact never come to rest in realized
agreement: "As soon as it sees itself soHdifying, as reflected in a received opin
ion, this community [of the judgment of taste] breaks up, some denouncing
the received opinion as a clich?, others maintaining its acuity and expres
siveness" (Phillips 2008, 99). What emerges in a crisis, then, is "solidarity
without solidity" (Phillips 2008, 99).

Conclusion

The person who makes a judgment in a moment of crisis can legiti

mately hope for agreement but not presuppose actual consent, and the
potentiality for community that appears in judgment cannot be converted
into a new, stable collective identity anchored in generally accepted state
ments about the world. To occupy oneself with politics, which is only possi
ble among a plurality of men and women, is to dive into a crisis, in which
the extant rules by which groups separate themselves from others have
become fragile. A community that practices politics is a community in crisis,
neither definitely cohering nor definitely splitting up. This is, I believe, a cen
tral insight in Arendt's work of some value in the contemporary moment.
Groups that enjoy a spirit of warmth and togetherness and are inspired by a
sense of a shared tradition and mission are not necessarily political commu
nities. They are not even more successful at being a community than soci
eties that appear to be more conflict-ridden and confused. In fact, genuine

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College Literature 38.1 [Winter 2011]

political community formation comes about through the experience of cit

izens "passing through and somehow managing and tending (hegen) a variety
of conflicts" (Hirschman 1995, 235). Demands for loyalty, shared values, and
other kinds of communal thickness mean the end of political interaction, as
Arendt understands it.
But Between Past and Future does not just describe a crisis as a moment
at which fundamental questions emerge at the cost of fragmentation; the col
lection is itself involved in or enacts this moment. Its concealed but struc
turing concern with the character of crisis points to the problem of forming
a community among people who have lost what they had in common and
cannot fall back upon their collective memory. The very development that
allows for politics, defined as the discourse on human living-together, also
hollows out the sense that such living-together takes place at all. It is Arendt's
hope that the exercise of judgment can generate responses to questions for
which we have no ready answers as well as remind us of each other, and in
this way, making judgments is a form of crisis management. At the same time,
Arendt's theory of judgment is an attempt to find a way out of an impasse,
namely the impasse of politics, an activity that seems to come into its own
only when it becomes impossible. Judgment is the only answer to the situa
tion of crisis, and Arendt's theory of judgment is itself a response to a ques
tion to which she, at least for the moment, had no ready answer. Judgment is
brought into Between Past and Future as a way to reconstitute a human com
munity at the point of dissolution, and to hold together a work about to dis
integrate into discrete and contradictory narratives.
Skeptical readers of Arendt frequently point to her nostalgia for the
Greek polis arid her indifference to pressing issues such as the societal distri
bution of wealth and stigmatized social identities. Her absorption of crisis
into the very structure of her text, however, implies that she possesses a dis
tinctively modern sensibility. For her as for many other thinkers of moder
nity, crises are forever impending. Even if Arendt's tone is strangely calm, her
essays accept without any discussion the premise that contemporary society
finds itself in a perpetual state of alarm. (Of course, she may simply want to
exploit the pre-existing discourse of the crisis-nature of the modern period
in order to present more persuasively the case for political action.) This view
of the exigencies of the moment is inscribed in the title of her collection: the
past and the future drift away from each other, and previous experiences can
not be translated into reasonable expectations. This leaves the community in
a gap, an in-between that can turn out to be either catastrophic or regener
ative, depending on whether judgments emerge in the ruptures of time.27
Arendt celebrates politics as a truly autonomous collective practice while dis
cerning the dangers of such autonomy. An image from the preface to Between

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 Jakob Norberg 145

Past and Future captures the precariousness of political action: we are, Arendt
writes, "sucked into politics as though with the force of a vacuum" (Arendt
1977, 3).

Notes

1 For instance, the discourse of a "legitimation crisis" in modern societies has

become an object of scholarly and philosophical review rather than a source of
urgent theoretical interest. Contemporary political theorists such as Wendy Brown
and William Connolly have recently returned to Habermas's Legitimation Crisis from
1973 and its argument for a "social science of crisis," but they survey and translate
his thought rather than debate him (Brown 2008).
2 I am most grateful to Barbara Hahn for introducing me to Hannah Arendt as
a thinker and writer.
3 See for instance Agamben's essay "We Refugees." The title of Agamben's arti
cle is a reference to an article by Hannah Arendt published in 1943.
4 Reinhart Koselleck's study is entitled Crisis and Critique. For the structural
rather than merely incidental relationship of the two concepts, see especially the final
chapter with its discussion of Rousseau (1973,144-5).
5 According to Lauren Berlant, the figure of a crisis satisfies our need for images
of heroism, and in this way it is affiliated with an agent-centered conception of cri
tique: "this deployment of crisis ... aspires to make an environmental phenomenon
appear suddenly as an event because as a structural and predictable condition it has
not engendered the kind of historic action that we associate with the heroic agency
a crisis seems already to have called for" (2007, 760).
6 For a recent analysis of Arendt's metaphorical thinking as an enacted defense
against the mercilessly logical idea chains or ideo-logies of totalitarianism, see Martin
Blumenthal-Barby's interpretation of the (literary) style in The Origins of
Totalitarianism (2009).
7 James March and Johan Olsen define institutions as bundles of routines that
make it possible to coordinate activities, help avoid conflicts, and mitigate unpre
dictability (1989, 24).
8 Ursula Ludz has gathered and edited a series of linked manuscripts on the
question of politics in a collection Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachla?. One of
the fragments has the rubric "Prejudices [Die Vorurteile]" (1993,17-27).
9 Arendt shares this insight into the pragmatic value of pre-formed views with,
for instance, the German sociologist Arnold Gehlen who was her contemporary.
Gehlen hypothesized that the modern combination of greater access to information
flows and relative erosion of traditional conceptions of the world would induce cog
nitive stress (1957, 45-49). For a critical engagement with the Enlightenment rejec
tion of prejudices as a form of heteronomy?a rejection that Arendt with her
Kantian affiliation seems to perform in Between Past and Future?see Hans Georg
Gadamer (1960, 255-61).
10 In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt speaks of common sense as a "mea
sured insight into the interdependence of the arbitrary and the planned, the acci

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146 College Literature 38.1 [Winter 2011]

dental and the necessary" (1958, 352). She seems to be saying that, for the com
monsensical person the course of the world is never entirely predictable, but the par
ticularities of the situation, the accidental and the arbitrary, still remain within the
orbit of the manageable. Common sense works as a guide because circumstances are
rarely totally and utterly alien and can be placed on some hypothetical continuum
between the familiar and the strange.
11 In ? 40 of the third Critique, Kant draws a distinction between sound under
standing ["der gesunde Verstand"] and sensus communis (2001, 176): the latter, he
claims, truly deserves the epithet sense ["Sinne"] since it involves a sense of pleasure
(2001,177).
12 Without necessarily fleshing it out in Between Past and Future, Arendt relies on
an (Aristotelian) tradition in which the individual senses require coordination to
allow for complex sensations, that is, sensations of things that have many qualities
such as bright, smooth, and sweet (Heller-Roazen 2008, 32-36). Yet the accord of
our five senses with one another, without which no objects would appear to us in
their complexity, can be attributed to all: we can legitimately assume that others
enjoy an alignment and unification of their diverse powers. Arendt may draw this
from ? 39 in Kant's third Critique, in which the legitimate attribution of taste and
sound understanding to everyone rests on the presupposition of the proportion of
cognitive faculties shared by all ["Proportion dieser Erkenntnisverm?gen"] (2001,173).
13 Since Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard's interventions, we have become accustomed to
celebrations of the existence of multiple and incommensurate discourses, none of
which can claim to be common to all. It should probably be noted that the mere
observation of "heteromorphous" language games presupposes a position from
which they can appear incommensurate (Lyotard 1984, 65). This position would
then transcend all discourses.
14 In his study of the common ground between Heidegger and Arendt, Jacques
Taminiaux writes of Arendt 's desire to extract phenomena from "a layer of ossified
theses that amalgamate what should be distinguished" (1997,140).
15 Heidegger articulates his notion of the positivity of destruction in Sein und
Zeit (1953,19-27).
16 Dana Villa outlines what he calls Arendt's "postauthoritarian concept of pol
itics" in Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (1995,158).
17 Steve Buckler notes this but does not ground his claims in an analysis of spe
cific textual passages in Arendt's work: "The experience of totalitarianism was, on
Arendt's view, a crystallization of key tendencies within modernity: it 'brought to
light the ruin of our categories of thought.' This crisis offers at the same time an
opportunity to look back and to reconsider aspects of our experience with eyes
unclouded by the tradition that has now been lost" (2001, 621).
18 Reinhart Koselleck's polemical study of how critique and crisis combine to
dissolve political order in the age of Enlightenment stands as an example of this con
servative apprehension (1973,132-57).
19 This is the thesis of the editor of Arendt's Kant lectures, Ronald Beiner (1982,
119-20).

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 Jakob Norberg 147

20 For the etymology of "crisis," see Koselleck's encyclopedia article on the con
cept including its legal and medical contexts (1976,1235).
21 See Koselleck's encyclopedia entry (1976,1235-236).
22 For a treatment of lack of time ["Zeitnot"] as constitutive of crisis, see
Koselleck's essay on the conceptual history ["Begriffsgeschichte''] of this notion
(2006, 213).
23 Kant makes this distinction in the introduction to the third Critique under the
heading "Von der Urteilskraft als einem a priori gesetzgebenden Verm?gen" (2001,
19).
24 Arendt's appropriation of Kant's third Critique has earned her much criticism.
George Kateb writes that Arendt seeks to renew political thought in a manner that
aestheticizes politics: "Arendt sets out to transform, to the fullest degree possible,
political phenomena into aesthetic phenomena" (1999, 133). For a defense of this
alignment of political and aesthetic judgment, see Linda M. G. Zerilli (2005,158-88).
25 Arendt here quotes Kant's third Critique ? 40 where he distinguishes among
the maxims of common human understanding: to think for oneself, to think from
the standpoint of everyone else, and to think consistently (2001,176).
26 On the basis of the anthropological definition of man as the incomplete ani
mal, Hans Blumenberg contends that rhetoric?the endeavor to secure, maintain,
and exploit "agreements [?bereinstimmungen]"?allows for cooperation among
human agents in the absence of other mechanisms, such as instincts (1981,108).
27 April Flakne develops a congruent view in an essay on Arendt entitled "No
longer and Not Yet": judgment is, according to Flakne, the faculty for "confronting
and maintaining a sudden disjointure in time" (1999,157).

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