The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social

THE ATTACK OF THE BLOB HANNAH ARENDT'S CONCEPT OF THE SOCIAL

THE

UNlVERSITY

CHICAGO

AND

Of

CHICAGO

LONDON

PRESS

HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN is professor emerita of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Fortune Is a Woman (1984), Wittgenstein and Justice (1972), and The Concept of Representation (1967). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1997 she received the Lippincott Prize of the American Political Science Association, the same prize awarded in 1975 to Hannah Arendt.

Contents

Acknowledgments

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1998 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1998

0706 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 ISBN: 0-226-66990-4

The Problem of the Blob

TWO

Jewish Assimilation: The Pariah and the Parvenu

19

Biographical Interlude: Philosophy, Love, Exile

35

The Refugee as Parvenu and the Conscious Pariah

52

The Birth of the Blob

69

Writing The Human Condition

98

FOUR FIVE

SIX Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Absent Authorities: Tocqueville and Marx

115

Abstraction, Authority, and Gender

145

The Social in The Human Condition

177

Excising the Blob

203

EL.EVEN

Why the Blob?

226

TWELVE

Rethinking "the Social"

251

SEVEN

Pitkin, Hanna Feniche!. The attack of the blob: Hannah Arendt's concept of the social / Hanna Fenichel Pitkin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

EIGHT NINE TEN

ISBN 0-226-66990-4 (alk. paper) 1. Arendt, Hannah-Political and social views. science-Philosophy. 1. Title.

]C251.A74P57 1998 320.5'092-dc21

2. Political

98-13333 CIP

1

ONE

THREE

12 34 5

vii

Notes

285

Bibliography

329

Index

339

@l The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for

Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

v

Acknowledgments

Many people have helped me with this book. Hubert Dreyfus, Hans Sluga, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl lent me their expertise to answer specific questions. Peter Euben listened attentively and, at just the right time, suggested, "You really ought to say something about Marx." Meta

Mendel-Reyes illuminated Arendt's writings on the 1960s for me. Bonnie Honig edited and greatly improved the essay that eventually became this book. Sara M. Shumer shared with me in an endless conversation about the prospects for politics in our time-and carried the heavier pack. Mi-

chael Paul Ragin, George Shulman, Dee Dee Skinner, and John H. Schaar read the manuscript-most of them more than once-and gave me wise, productive) detailed advice and steady encouragement. Two referees who

read it for the University of Chicago Press also made many helpful suggestions. Olga Euben was admirably efficient and patient in processing my words. And the many students who, over the years, read Arendt with me

generously fed, criticized, and reshaped my thinking. I am deeply grateful to them alL A few paragraphs in chapter 11 first appeared in "Rethinking Reification," published in 1987 in Theory and Society 16, pp. 263-93. Parts of chapters 1 to 4 and 8 first appeared in "Conformism, Housekeeping,

and the Attack of the Blob," a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in San Francisco in 1990.

vii

ONE

The Problem of the Blob

This book traces the career of one problematic concept in the thought of one major political theorist of our time. The concept merits attention not because the theorist got it right and used it to teach an important truth, but quite the contrary, because the concept was confused and her way of deploying it radically at odds with her most central and valuable teaching. If studying it is nevertheless worthwhile, that is because its significance transcends the technicalities of textual interpretation and the critique of a particular thinker's work. If the concept was a mistake, that mistake was not just idiosyncratic or careless, and the problem that the concept was intended to address remains problematic. The thinker is Hannah Arendt; argua b1y the greatest and most origi~ nal political theorist of the mid-twentieth century; the concept is what she called "the social." Arendt wrote a dozen books, and her thought ranged widely, encompassing journalism, history, and philosophy, but "political theorist" is what she ultimately came to call herself, and her primary contribution surely centered on the constellation of three interrelated concepts that she treated as almost synonymous: "action," "poli~ tics," and "freedom." Though we all use these words, she thought, we do not really understand what they mean, because we lack the experiences from which they spring, the activities in which they belong. She regarded these experiences and activities as the most valuable available to human beings, called them our "Jost treasure," and tried to restore our access to the full significance of these words so that we might also recover the corresponding forms of life. By these three complex, interrelated terms Arendt meant, first of all, the human capacity for initiative, spontaneity, innovation, doing the unexpected, launching an unprecedented and worthy undertaking. Hu~ man beings, she stressed, have the capacity to interrupt the causal chain of events and processes, to intervene in history and begin something new that may then be taken up and carried forward by others. She called this

2

CHAPTER

ONE

the capacity for action, and thought that we mostly deny and hide from It, both because of the profound instability it seems to threaten and because of the enormous responsibility it implies. Recognizing the full extent of our powers, we might have to make major, uncomfortable changes in the way we live. , Second, because we tend to associate initiative and creativity with SCIence, technology, and the material world, Arendt stressed doing rather than making, praxis rather than poiesis. She focused on innovation in n~n~aterial culture, which she called the "web of relationships": the instItutions, norms, customs, standards, practices, rituals, and ideas that make ~p a civilization. Our cultural arrangements do not just grow natu~ raliy, lIke a tree; they are founded, practiced, and enacted by people. But Arendt thought that We resist acknowledging the degree to which the patterns by which we live are our own doing-if not originally created by us, nevertheless sustained right now by nothing more than ourselves.