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August 21, 2005
Politics is usually seen as little more than power relations, competing interests and claims for recognition, conflicting assertions of "simple" truths. This is the modern prejudice against politics. What it offers us is an endorsement of a teleology of progress, a certainity that the past was evil by contrast to the sunny prospects of the present.
If most most politicians are happy apostles of progress, then political philosophy, in other words, has looked at politics from the philosopher's point of view, not from that of the political actor. Margaret Canovon says that Arendt held that this perspective has had a number of unfortunate results. These are:
In the first place, politics has been downgraded and has lost its dignity... [it]cast all aspects of the vita activa into such disrepute that action became confused with other activities. Politics has as a result been misunderstood ever since either as a form of work, the fabrication of objects, or as labor, the business of keeping ourselves alive. From the philosopher's point of view, politics could in any case be only a means to an end, not something good in itself. It was therefore easily misinterpreted as a form of fabrication, best directed by a ruler who understands the end to be achieved. The notion of a single ruler rather than a plurality of actors was naturally congenial to philosophers who were looking for a single truth to override plural opinions. Politically, the great disadvantage of this point of view was that it implied a loss of understanding of human plurality, the fact that (as Arendt never tired of repeating), "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the
world." But philosophers were not much concerned with freedom of action. Possessing the truth, they sought not to persuade the masses but to compel them, either by threatening them with divine punishment or by using deductive reasoning. Meanwhile, they gave the coup de grace to an authentic understanding of politics by capturing the crucial notion of freedom, which they reinterpreted to mean a private or internal condition rather than freedom to move and act in the public world.
Hannah Arendt argued passionately against the prejudice against politics, and in doing so she brings questions of meaning, identity, value, and transcendence to our impoverished public life.
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Need some guidance here, Arendt says that everything is politics. Does she mean everything in the social sphere is about power relations, and politics is the median by which we barter/share/judge power?