HANNAH ARENDT, THE ‘GRAMMAR OF POLITICS ’ AND THE

38 Pages·2015·0.31 MB·English

by  Caroline Ashcroft

HANNAH ARENDT, THE ‘GRAMMAR OF POLITICS,’ AND THE
AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Draft: Not for Distribution

Caroline Ashcroft
Department of Politics and International Studies,
University of Cambridge
[email protected]
I

Despite Hannah Arendt’s admiration for her adopted homeland of America – or, perhaps,
because of it – she was never sparing in her criticism of what she believed to be the deep and
manifold flaws of the political culture and reality of the United States in the twentieth century.
The political failures of America, while never approaching the depths of European
totalitarianism, nonetheless mirrored many of the problems that resulted in catastrophe in
Europe, and were in large part a result of America’s adoption of a European political heritage.
This heritage, or rather, the dominant and problematic element which Arendt rejected, in large
part was the result of the French Revolution and a particular notion of ‘the social’ which
emerged from it. For Arendt, this could hardly be considered a political tradition, but rather a
tradition of anti-politics. The social was nothing less than the breakdown of the traditional
political distinctions that structured politics, most importantly, the intrusion of traditionally
private concerns into the public sphere, and the reduction of the political to the level of
economic concerns. What this had led to, both in Europe and contemporary America, was the
breakdown of politics understood as a form of action, leaving men in a condition of political
paralysis, unable to understand and engage each other, and thus, with the problems of the
modern world.

Yet while Arendt worried about the growing predominance of the anti-politics of the social in
contemporary American culture, she also thought she saw, within the fabric of the American
political system, a way that it could potentially be redeemed. In her story of the American
Revolution told in her 1963 text On Revolution, Arendt raises the possibility of the conscious
reconstruction of what she called the ‘grammar of political action,’ the foundations of political
action understood in Arendt’s terms as discourse. What she means by this is that a ‘common
sense’ is necessary to the functioning of any reasonably successful political system in which the
people have a voice; that is, the people must be able to engage in discourse on grounds of shared
understanding. Arendt claims, however, that this grammar must reflect certain limitations on
political action. Notably, it must incorporate a clear conceptualisation of what she refers to as
‘action’ and ‘power’ in order to be genuinely political. In On Revolution she describes a particular
American realisation of this notion of political action: a notion which is at the same time reliant
on history and inherently innovative; and which is, as a result, rooted in both authority and
liberty. This notion of ‘the grammar of political action’ is what this paper will focus on, an idea
elucidated most clearly in On Revolution, but alluded to across Arendt’s work of the 1950s and
1960s. As such, I also use material from a number of Arendt’s other texts to illustrate or explain
her broader thought as it relates to this idea, predominantly her 1956 The Human Condition, and a
number of her essays from the latter 1960s. More specifically, this paper looks at how ‘political
grammar’ functions as a possible counter to the seemingly unstoppable force of the social,
which, she claims, has seriously contributed to the decline of political understanding in
modernity.1 As such, I will claim that the argument Arendt offers in On Revolution is a highly
specific response to the political issues of 1950s and 1960s America, which, however, may still be
seen to be of some relevance to the politics of today, at least as a critical tool. Finally, I will make
the argument that for Arendt, the re-emergence of a ‘grammar of political action’ in the post-
traditional world is, and must be, the aim of the modern political theorist, and thus underlies
Arendt’s political project over this period.

1 A highly pertinent criticism of Arendt’s notion of ‘the social’ as being flawed in its effective rejection of agency
through its seemingly unstoppable nature, is found in Hanna Pitkin’s The Attack of the Blob, (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998).
II

What were the political problems with which Arendt was so concerned? Arendt’s reaction to
four particular events and issues will be briefly outlined here: US policy and activity in the
Vietnam War, the rise of behaviourism in the social sciences, the campus protests of the late
1960s, and the role of the nation-state in the modern world. She wrote more extensively and
directly on America politics in the latter part of the 1960s and the early 1970s, with On Revolution
written at the beginning of this period of more direct engagement with American politics. Thus I
offer these examples, (which are by no means exhaustive), to paint a picture of the complex of
problems Arendt was engaging with throughout the 1960s.

Although Arendt claimed she knew ‘very little about it,’2 she positioned herself decisively against
the involvement of the United States in Vietnam. More precisely, she opposed US policy in
South East Asia not simply on the basis of loss of life, on either side, but because of the
implications of the United States’ foreign policy for itself and its own people. This applied not
only those who fought, but the whole nation, through the effect of the war on political culture.
The consequences of the government’s ‘insane Vietnam policy’ had the potential to cause
enormous damage to the republic, she believed, in an argument which recollects, in some
respects, her earlier claim in The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951.3 As in Europe,
where, she argued, political attitudes cultivated through colonialism ricocheted back into the
domestic politics of the imperial states to disastrous effect, in America the war enabled the

2 Hannah Arendt, ‘Letter to Mary McCarthy,’ Carol Brightman (ed), Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah
Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975, (London: Secker and Warburg, 1995), pp. 181-182.
3 Hannah Arendt, ‘Letter to Karl Jaspers,’ in Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (eds), Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers:
Correspondence, 1926-1969, (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 620.
growth of a dangerous set of political attitudes which were given free rein through the increasing
desperation of American political leaders to achieve some semblance of success.

Arendt wrote on the Vietnam War at some length in her 1971 article Lying in Politics, a comment
on the recently leaked ‘Pentagon Papers,’ the US Department of Defence report on their
involvement in Vietnam since the end of the Second World War, and their decision-making
processes with regards to Vietnam. These documents revealed, or confirmed, that the aim of the
officials who directed US policy in Vietnam, ‘was neither power nor profit,’ Arendt wrote. ‘Nor
was it even influence in the world in order to serve particular, tangible interests for the sake of
which prestige, an image of the “greatest power in the world,” was needed and purposefully
used. The goal was now the image itself, as is manifest in the very language of the problem-
solvers, with their “scenarios” and “audiences,” borrowed from the theatre.’4 Ultimately, she
continued, the goal became merely to ‘save face,’ not to avoid defeat itself, but to find ‘ways and
means to avoid admitting it.’5 The problem, Arendt claims, is that in this scenario, the reality of
political action itself had been displaced.6 While she accepts that lying has ever been part of
politics, for her, a line has been crossed. America’s policy in Vietnam, she writes, did not simply
contain lies or elements of untruth, but was premised upon a complete disregard for reality,
whether the reality described by the reports of American agents in Vietnam or the reality of the
failed policies and military offensives, repeated over and again, to not greater effect than before.7
In Truth and Politics, Arendt explains that, ‘the result of a total and consistent substitution of lies
for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as
lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of

4 Arendt, ‘Lying in Politics’, in Crises of the Republic, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), p. 20.
5 Ibid., p. 19.
6 Arendt is here quoting Richard Barnet’s opinion on the Pentagon Papers. Arendt, ‘Lying in Politics’, p. 19.
7 Ibid., p. 42.
truth vs falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed.’8 Vietnam was a
manifestation of this dangerous trend.

The attitudes of the ‘problem solvers’ and policy makers of US policy in Vietnam, specifically
their incredible lack of concern with the reality on the ground, is rooted in another of Arendt’s
key themes, her critique of behaviourism and more broadly, the rationalisation of the political
sphere through the social sciences. The problem solvers ‘who lost their minds because they
trusted the calculating powers of their brains at the expense of the mind’s capacity for experience
and its ability to learn from it, were preceded by the ideologists of the Cold War period,’9 she
wrote. The rise of science as a discipline, has been accompanied by a rationalising urge across all
spheres of life and thought, including politics, with the effect that it has ‘changed and
reconstructed the world we live in.’10 The result for the individual acting within this new mode of
thought can be seen in her depiction of the scientist, who ‘leaves behind a part of himself and his
own power of understanding, which is still human understanding, when he goes to the laboratory
and begins to communicate in mathematical language.’11 There is something deeply
dehumanising about the activity of science for Arendt. Rationalised scientific thought simply
operates within a different scheme of values and considerations to politics. One is concerned
with depersonalised outcomes and behaviours, cause and effect, while the other is concerned
with value driven actions, different and freedom. It is for this reason that she rejects what she
sees to be the growing dominance of the scientific method over political and social thought.
While the individual scientist might be able to bear putting aside a part of his human
understanding within the limited sphere of his professional life, when the scientific mode of

8 Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics,’ in Between Past and Future, (London: Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 252-3.
9 Arendt, ‘Lying in Politics,’ p. 39.
10 Arendt, ‘The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,’ in Between Past and Future, (London: Penguin Books,
1993), p. 262.
11 Ibid., p. 263.
thought comes to be that of political life as a whole, the power of humanistic understanding risks
being lost entirely.

The third concern that will be addressed here is Arendt’s commentary on the student protests of
the mid to late 1960s, predominantly as they occurred in America. On one level, she was
optimistic about what the protests meant for US politics and its future. In 1965 she described the
student protests in Berkeley as ‘the most interesting thing happening here.’12 Their protest
represented, she argued, ‘a real danger to the status quo precisely because it strikes at the heart of
genuine political life.’ 13 The students, she believed, had tasted the pleasure of political action
directly through their own experience, and had as a result begun to grasp what politics is really
about, in a way few can or do in representative political systems. Yet, she would later write, the
students, although ‘acting’ in a political sense failed to produce the kind of revolution they
sought because ‘they have no inkling of what power means, and if power were lying in the street
and they knew it was lying there, they are certainly the last to be ready to stoop down and pick it
up…The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they
can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to a revolution.’14 What could ‘pave the
way,’ she wrote, ‘is a real analysis of the existing situation such as used to be made in earlier
times… [but] the theoretical sterility and analytical dullness of this movement are just as striking
and depressing as its joy in action is welcome.’15 Thus, despite not only the best of intentions,
but, to some degree, the exercise of political action, the student protests would prove to be
impotent on a larger political level due to their failure to grasp power. Arendt points here, in
contrast to her widely known focus on action and experience, to the importance of theoretical

12 Arendt, ‘Letter to Karl Jaspers’, in Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, p.583.
13 Ibid., p.583.
14 Arendt, ‘Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,’ in Crises of the Republic, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1969), p. 206.
15 Ibid., pp. 206-7.
background. It is not just how people act, but also how they think about what they are doing that
matters.

The final issue I will mention, and the boldest and most significant, is Arendt’s criticism of the
notion of sovereignty and the idea of the nation-state. It is, needless to say, not possible in this
limited space to explain the extensive theoretical background to this critique nor the
consequences for Arendt’s concept of the political. However, in brief, there are two significant
aspects to this criticism in Arendt’s work: one historical, and one contemporary, although both
are applied to modern politics. The historical argument starts with the claim that the concept of
political rule, the precursor to what would develop into the idea of state sovereignty in the early
modern era, was evident in the thought of Plato.16 Plato, and those who followed him in the
tradition (and for Arendt, this means virtually every political theorist of note from the 4th century
BC to the beginning of the 20th century), considered politics to be a practice of rule over others, as
opposed to holding a conception of politics as an inherently participatory and equal activity, as
Arendt understands it.17 The idea of politics as rule emerged in Plato through his separation and
prioritisation of thought over action, and has framed political thought in one way or another ever
since then.18 In the modern world, it has become the dominant conception of politics behind the
institution of the nation-state, as understood in its Weberian guise as the legitimate holder of a
monopoly on violence. For Arendt, sovereignty, or on a basic level, the rule of man over man by
the use of force, simply could not form a legitimate foundation of politics.

16 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p.222.
17 Notable and rare exceptions in the canon, for Arendt, included Aristotle, Machiavelli, Montesquieu and
Kierkegaard, whose work, she believed, exhibited real innovation in their partial rejection of politics as rule.
18 Ibid., p.222.
The modern element of this critique is related to a very particular turn of events, namely the
creation of nuclear weapons. Where military organisation and technologies of war have advanced
to a level where enemies may possess the means to destroy not only each other, but the entire
world, the efficacy of the sovereign state defined by its monopoly on violence, has surely become
irrelevant, she argues. Sovereignty relies on violence as a means, but the possibility of using
violence in any feasibly rational way has been eliminated. When war threatens existence, not just
national existence, but the literal existence of every single person in the state, or even the whole
world, there is no rational place for war in the way it has been used in the pre-nuclear era. But if
war and the use of violence to underpin state authority had been made impossible by these
developments, what enables ‘rule’ in the modern world? We must change our concept of the
sovereignty of the state in response to the fact that war has become a practical impossibility, she
claimed.19 The changing conditions of the human world means that the term ‘sovereignty’, along
with the assumptions that underpin it, is so terribly misaligned with the reality of politics that it
simply can’t mean anything, Arendt believes.

What all of these cases have in common is repeatedly articulated complaint that individuals
engaging in politics today do not and cannot communicate with each other politically.
Involvement in politics can mean many things, as indicated by the prior examples: the actions of
the US administration, the actions of the student protesters, or the activities of the social
scientists. But in this sense, it means merely the interaction of society as a whole, and not the
more demanding concept which Arendt describes in The Human Condition. On the whole,
America, along with the rest of the Western world, lacks the kind of political vocabulary which
would enable them to take part in the latter, more authentic form of politics, and one which is as

19 Hannah Arendt, ‘On Violence,’ in Crises of the Republic, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), p.107.
such more suited to the challenges of modernity. In the Vietnam War, US politics became
subject to a continual revision of ‘reality’ as continual policy failures provoked another version of
‘truth’. But even more concerning than this endless lie, was what enabled it, the fact that below
there was no more substantial concept of politics: just image-making, and the shifting of reality
to produce a favourable or popular image, over and again. In her critique of the rationalisation of
politics, Arendt is criticising the loss of a meaningful vocabulary through the reduction of
political thought to questions of logic alone. Human understanding, by contrast, is made
meaningful by the fact that it emerged between people, in ways that can not necessarily be
rationalised. The students failed to create political change not because they did not act, but
because they did not understand the nature of political power. Because they could not define it,
they couldn’t identify and use it when they saw it. And Arendt’s critique of sovereignty is a claim
that not only are the central institution of politics fundamentally outdated, but there is something
in Western politics that never truly accepted the nature of the political.

It is quite apparent where this critique originates in Arendt’s work. It flows out of her work on
totalitarianism, the emergence of which constitutes ‘a break with all our traditions; [which has]
exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgement.’20 The post-
totalitarian world is the post-traditional world, in Europe as much as America, both because the
events and ideologies that led to totalitarianism, were, in important respects shared, and because
the breakdown of tradition (or, or if one takes her analysis of Plato’s influence at her word, its
unmasking), once completed, could not be undone. ‘What is frightening in the rise of
totalitarianism is not that it is something new, but that it has brought to light the ruin of our
categories of thought and standards of judgement.’21 It is the absence of shared categories of

20 Hannah Arendt, ‘Understanding and Politics’, Essays in Understanding, (New York; London: Harcourt, Brace & Co,
1994), p. 310.
21 Ibid., p. 318.