Love and Responsibility: a Political Ethic for Hannah Arendt

This paper argues that those critics of Hannah Arendt's thought who have protested at her disavowal of 'moral standards' as being appropriate in the judgment of political action have, in fact, misjudged the structure of her thought. My argument is, however, a constructive one: the paper seeks to demonstrate how Arendt arrives at her sweeping rejection of conventional standards of moral judgment, and what solution she proposes. I do this in three stages. First, I address Arendt's understanding of self as opposed to world : especially how the moral absolutes which may be claimed by the former may threaten the very structure of the latter. Second, I draw upon her model of action to discover the idea of a worldly ethics, one of principle . And third, I consider the fate of our goals when we act into the world, paying particular attention to the idea of responsibility and the on-going responsiveness to the world that belongs to action under a principle.     

Abseits des Mainstreams. Hannah Arendt zum 100. Geburtstag

Zusammenfassung Hundert Jahre Hannah Arendt sind ein guter Anlass, sich die Zeit — und den Platz — zu nehmen, an diese ungew?hnliche politische Denkerin zu erinnern. Sie war und ist eine Ausnahmeerscheinung, und das bedeutet auch, dass ihr Blick auf die Welt und ihre Methode der Begründung politischer Theorie oft umstritten, aber eines niemals war: langweilig. Ihre Ideen widersprachen h?ufig der g?ngigen politischen und politikwissenschaftlichen Diskussion. Aber ihr Urteil erwies sich auch oft als weitsichtiger als das ihrer Kritiker. Sie zu würdigen in ihrer Rolle als unabh?ngige politische Theoretikerin, einen — wenn auch nur kurzen — Spot zu werfen auf ihr Leben, ihr politisches Denken und ihr Werk, ist Anliegen dieses Kommentars. Doch hundert Jahre sind kein Anlass, Hannah Arendt als eine Art „historisches“ Ph?nomen zu betrachten. Ihr Denken ist ungebrochen aktuell und immer noch abseits des Mainstreams. Am Beispiel der Diskussion um die Integrationspolitik in Deutschland m?chte ich zeigen, dass Hannah Arendt uns neue — vermutlich umstrittene — Perspektiven in dieser Diskussion er?ffnet und uns davor warnt, politische Probleme, die sich durch das Faktum der Zuwanderung ergeben, als religi?se Konflikte zu interpretieren. Darüber hinaus ist sie der Meinung, dass gesellschaftliche und kulturelle Integration sich staatlich nicht erzwingen l?sst — und dies auch nicht wünschenswert sei. Die Differenzierung des gesellschaftlichen Lebens in eine Vielzahl voneinander abgegrenzter Gruppen sei vielmehr ein Garant gegen die Tyrannei des Konformismus.     

Politics and enlightenment: Kant and Derrida on cosmopolitan responsibility

Walter Benjamin once remarked of the enterprise of translation ‘that it is nowhere’: that the labour of transcribing the sense, inflection and difference of any particular language and text must always situate the translator in a space which is neither ‘of the original, nor ‘of the language into which it is to be transcribed. This ‘non‐position’ of the translator—between the original and its analogue, between the ‘spirit’ and the ‘letter’, the difference and the acceptability of the text—marks the labour of translation as an ethical responsibility: that of communicating the significance of something—a gesture, a story, a custom, a tradition—which has appeared to this/our socio‐linguistic culture as strange and unfathomably alien; and to achieve this communication without annulling its strangeness, its alterity. The purpose of my comparison of Kant and Derrida's remarks on cosmopolitical responsibility therefore, is fourfold. First, I want to suggest that it is this ‘stricture’ of translation—this difficult responsibility of both judging and respecting the difference of foreign’ cultures—which marks the (non‐Kantian, non‐situated) ‘territory’ of cosmopolitical responsibility. Second, by using Kant's remarks on the relationship between the political evolution of European Enlightenment culture and a possible world confederation of sovereign states, I want to point up the hierarchies and secondarizations involved in the determination of universal standards of moral, ethical and political conduct (even if these standards are originally prosecuted as the legislative conditions of a ‘radical democracy'). Third, I want to look at the ways in which the stricture of translation has been articulated as a theory of ‘global’ responsibility—particularly in the divergent ethical and political approaches of Jurgen Habermas and Jean‐Francois Lyotard. Fourth, I want to suggest that it is Derrida's idea of a ‘dual responsibility’ of critical thought to the political and philosophical resources of European Enlightenment and to the difference of non‐European nations and cultures, that marks the difficulty (the stricture) of acting responsibly within the global economics of power, identity and legislation. I want, in other words, to show that the ‘nowhere’ of Benjamin's translator, is a ‘place’ whose possibility demands a certain ‘Kantian’ right of reflection; that is, the right to pursue the ‘transcendent’ principle of respect for the other.     

Not life but the world is at stake: Hannah Arendt on citizenship in the age of the social

This article evaluates Hannah Arendt's contribution to ‘thinking citizenship’ in light of her controversial account of the modern rise of ‘the social’. It argues that Arendt's writing on the social is best understood not primarily as analytical and normative but as an historical argument about the effect of capitalism and modern state administration on meaningful citizenship. This short piece analyses one important element of Arendt's story about the historical rise of the social: that it is a peculiar hybrid of polis and oikos, a scaled-up form of housekeeping, and its threat to the public, political world.     

政治学研究领域的真与真理

自然科学及一些社会科学学科所求的真--其研究领域中具有稳定性、必然性、决定性的因素,即所研究对象的本质与规律;所求的真理,就是对于所研究对象的本质与规律的正确认识.政治学研究所求的真却不是政治现象或政治事物所固有的本质与规律,而是人民根本利益;政治学研究所求的真理就是对于人民根本利益的正确认识.自然科学的真理的基本性质只是真,不具有善、恶、好、坏的价值性质;政治真理则是真与善的统一.自然科学的真理具有超越时代、国家等界限的普适性,政治真理的适用范围则是特殊的,只适用于特定的时代、国家.