Crisis and Vulnerability in Hannah Arendt's Political Thought: Political Action, Judgment and the Figure of the 'Conscious Pariah'

The chapter investigates the role the concept and experience of crisis play in Arendt's political thought. As the first paragraph substantiates, her analysis of crisis mainly consists in a radical 'critique of modernity' that aspires to detecting and exposing its logic without continuing to fall prey to it. However, contrary to other scholars who had the same critical intent like Voegelin and Strauss, Arendt does not think that designing a new political philosophy could be a proper response to crisis because this would mean continuing to privilege thinking over acting, reinstating the philosophical hostility to phenomena that has led to the fatal totalitarian attempt to manipulate and even suppress reality. If Arendt's diagnosis of crisis may thus be close to that of other scholars of her time, and it was influenced in a definitive way by the experience of, and reflection on, totalitarian domination, total war and the Holocaust, her prognosis is original and peculiar. As illustrated in the second and third paragraph, she in fact boldly departs from the traditional concept of political action as being the actualization of a doctrine or value, or consisting in a hierarchical, impersonal relationship, to identify the real opportunity for renewal offered by crisis in the recovery of a notion of an equal, spontaneous and boundless action, keeping to the particularities of reality and shaping history as continuously interrupted by unpredictable human actions. For Arendt, political action remains forever relevant, even in extreme circumstances and for the most vulnerable, in which case judging, i.e. engaging in thinking and being concerned with the world is not only an inescapable responsibility, but also a form of political action. In this regard, the chapter argues that the figure of the 'conscious pariah', of the outcast of the Jewish tradition who appears in Arendt's writings and who will be described in the last paragraph, can be seen as a symbol of both the existential, personal experience of crisis she lived and proudly accepted, and the 'external' judging position, the methodological view she continuously tried to adopt when approaching the most consolidated notions of Western political thought and their crisis. Crisis, Arendt tells us, signals a dissonance between reality and knowledge and challenges the ways in which we understand, signify and act upon this very same reality, in which we assign meaning to history and we structure our relationship with the past and the future, but it is no excuse – not even in political emergencies and when in the condition of a pariah –, for not acting, for not judging and taking our part of responsibility towards the world. Indeed, it is the moment in which the meaning and nature of political action is to be recovered anew and embraced.