POLITICAL SCIENCE

What does Arendt mean by 'Action'?

Political Science

What does Arendt mean by 'action'?

Arendt's theory formally defines the public realm in opposition to that which is private, natural, and removed from the common. To Arendt the context of politics is the public realm thus defined: the content of politics is the exercise of freedom in speech and action in this realm which Arendt also calls "the space of appearance." As she conceives it, the public realm cannot be specified in institutional and concrete terms. On her own account, these facets, including legislation, are pre-political in the sense that they must precede politics proper. Her lack of interest in institutional problems is on a par with her refusal to see economic issues as part of politics (Arendt, 1956, pp.175-247).

In Arendt's theory, the purpose of politics is internal to itself; it requires no justification beyond itself because the practice of politics in her sense allows men to be free, lay claim to human status, and achieve unique personal identities. These virtues potentially inherent in politics are deemed by Arendt to be reason enough to prize politics above all else in the life that men commonly share (Arendt, 1959, pp. 45-56). Though the purpose of politics is internal to itself, the virtues which vindicate politics are external in the sense of being virtues which men value in their relationship with one another: it is the public character of these virtues which makes them political virtues.

The conceptual narrowness of the public realm, excluding so much of the necessary and the useful from its concerns, contrasts sharply with the breadth of its substantive ambitions. Arendt is unique among political theorists in demanding from politics so little materially, and so much more humanly. The positive content of Arendt's politics is capsulated in three specific concerns: political freedom and action, the kind of citizen-actor necessary to the public realm, and the intimate link between public action and personal identity (Bell, 1999, pp.96).

Freedom and Action

Arendt's political theory, grounded in a series of antithetical distinctions between the political and non-political, is structured around the conceptual contrast between the public and the private. Furthermore, she invariably defined nearly all her key concepts in terms of other concepts, so that the concept of labour, for example, is part of the definition of the concept of necessity and vice versa; and both labour and necessity are part of the definition of slavery and so forth. The same holds true for the concepts of freedom and action (Bell, 2005, pp. 1-27).

This mutual interdefinition of key concepts is analytically problematic. The problem is one of conceptual incest: thus it makes no sense to say of an actor that he is free but has yet to act or that he is a citizen who is somehow not free in his actions or that he is a man of action who despises public debate. In the Arendtian schema which is--without explicit acknowledgement--parasitic upon the Homeric social order, to be free is to be a citizen-actor in ...