The Nature of Political Theory

194 The Nature of Political Theory

One important motif that underpins this fascination with the loss of the political
to the social is totalitarianism. BothOn the Origins of Totalitarianism(1958) and her
Eichman in Jerusalem(1965) were, in part, responses to events in her own time, but,
they also contain an idiosyncratic philosophical reading of those events. Both books
chart, in one sense, the disintegration of citizenship and a corresponding sense of
what it is to be human. Nazism, Stalinism, racism, mass society, and imperialism are
all linked in the same destructive matrix as totalitarianism. One might therefore read
these as a series of deeply-damaging pathologies (see Villa (ed.) 2000: 3). The total-
itarian ‘mentality’ or pathology is something that could, in fact, reoccur for Arendt
in certain configurations of circumstances. It represents the conquest of nature and
determinism over human freedom and responsibility. Marx, she considered, unwit-
tingly, facilitated this process. Arendt’s book theHuman Condition(1958) was written
against the backdrop of the latter two works. Its primary focus was on the conditions
for authentic politics.^23 Totalitarianism implies, as such, the end of politics. It is
anti-political. Politics implies another condition of existence. As Margaret Canovan
notes, ‘just as totalitarian terror...strips human beings of their plurality and spon-
taneity in order to reduce them to an animal species, so [Arendt] argues in theHuman
Conditionthat as labouring values have risen to prominence, something very similar
has been happening painlessly in all modern societies’ (Canovan 1994: 103; see also
Villa (ed.) 2000: 6). It is the public world of politics that guards humanity from both
the impetus to totalitarianism and the dominance of nature. The ‘public thing’ thus
takes on a profound significance for Arendt. It is the bastion of both civilization and
politics.
Arendt’s republicanism is premised on a historical and philosophical response to
the role and effect of the totalitarian mentality. Political freedom is not bestowed by
nature or history. It is the result of intelligent effort. Further, it is a way of coping with
inevitable human diversity. She adopts a similar view of equality here, which is not
read in either natural or social terms. Equality is part of the public thing. It is aresult
of human action and is, in fact, contrary to nature. As Canovan comments, Arendt’s
political thought is thus ‘conceived as an attempt to salvage and articulate ancient
republican experiences by rethinking the traditional concepts in a way that takes
account of human plurality and recognizes the political as something that happens in
the spacesbetweenplural men’ (Canovan 1994: 207). Politics in the modern republic
is therefore immensely subtle. It is envisaged as a public space ‘between’ citizens, and
yet, at the same time, belonging to all citizens. Ruling entails utilizing the common
support of all citizens. Citizens (as Pettit and Skinner also emphasize) cannot be
free if subjected to a master—even a benign master. Political freedom is therefore
a public thing, embedded in republican order, and possessed by all citizens of the
republic. As such, it is fundamentally important, corresponds with our ‘humanity’
(against nature), acts as a bastion of civilization, and is an implicit defence against
totalitarianism. This concept of freedom (which is again neither negative nor positive)
is read partly as the ‘capacity to begin’, think, and create within this public space,
guarded by constitutional arrangements and upheld by the public commitments of
all citizens.