arendt, rawls, and public reason - mark button
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7/24/2019 Arendt, Rawls, And Public Reason - Mark Button
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Arendt, Rawls, and Public ReasonAuthor(s): Mark ButtonSource: Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 31, No. 2, Special Issue: Religion and Politics (April 2005),
pp. 257-280Published by: Florida State University Department of Philosophy
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7/24/2019 Arendt, Rawls, And Public Reason - Mark Button
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Arendt, Rawls,
and Public Reason
Over the
past
several
decades,
a
general
consensus has taken
shape
among
a diverse
group
of
scholars
concerning
the moral
and
political
significance
of
public
reason as a standard for
political dialogue
between
citizens
in
pluralistic
liberal democracies.1 While the modern notion of
public reason can be traced back most immediately to Kant, contempo
rary
theorists have
pressed
this idea into the service of
establishing
the
guidelines
and values in
accordance
with which citizens of
diverse and
incommensurable
moral,
religious,
and
philosophical perspectives may
nonetheless come to stable
and
mutually acceptable agreements
about the
basic institutions of
political
society
and
concerning
the most fundamen
tal
questions
that
confront democratic
societies.
Working
with the
(Kant
ian)
ideal that
any
action or
judgment
that will affect
others,
to be mor
ally legitimate,
must be
acceptable
(or
capable
of
being
made
acceptable)
to all those affected, public reason claims to offer the procedural means
and the substantive
values
by
which the moral
validity
of
political judg
ments
can be vouchsafed.
In
this
regard, public
reason has been
closely
identified
with standards
like
reciprocity,
impartiality,
the "moral
point
of
view,"
and
democracy
itself.2
To be
sure,
a host of
contemporary
thinkers
have offered
numerous
critiques
of
public
reason
in
recent
years,
raising
doubts about the coher
'John
Rawls,
Political
Liberalism
(New
York: Columbia
University
Press,
1996
[1993]);
Kent
Greenawalt,
Private Consciences
and Public Reasons
(New
York: Oxford
University
Press,
1995);
Charles
Larmore,
The Morals
of Modernity
(New
York: Cam
bridge
University
Press,
1996), chapters
6 and
7;
Robert
Audi,
Religious
Commitment
and Secular
Reason
(New
York:
Cambridge
University
Press,
2000);
Stephen
Macedo,
Diversity
and Distrust:
Civic Education
in a Multicultural
Democracy
(Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard
University
Press,
2000),
chapter
7.
2Thomas
Nagel,
"Moral Conflict and Political
Legitimacy,"
Philosophy
and Public
Affairs
16
(1987):
215-40;
T.M.
Scanlon,
What We Owe
to Each Other
(Cambridge,
Mass. : Harvard
University
Press,
1998),
chapter
1
Jiirgen
Habermas,
The Inclusion
of
the
Other,
ed. Ciaran
Cronin
and Pablo De Greiff
(Cambridge,
Mass.:
MIT
Press,
1998),
chapter
2;
John
Rawls,
"The
Idea of Public Reason
Revisited,"
in John Rawls: Collected
Papers,
ed. Samuel
Freeman
(Cambridge,
Mass.:
Harvard
University
Press,
1999),
chap
ter 26.
)
Copyright
2005
by
Social
Theory
and
Practice,
Vol.
31,
No. 2
(April
2005)
257
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258
Mark Button
ence,
plausibility,
and fairness of this standard for liberal
justification.3
One central
question
that is raised
by
this
general
turn to
public
reason in
contemporary political thought is what role, if any, religious or other
equally comprehensive
doctrines or
perspectives
should
play
in
public
political
argument
and
decision-making.
How far are citizens
appropri
ately guided
by
their
religious
or moral convictions when
they
enter the
public
domain
and address
important political questions
with
others
in a
condition of extensive
religious,
moral,
and
philosophical
diversity?
One
of
the
basic
issues
at stake here is
whether
there are
good
moral
and
civic
reasons
(not just
wise
prudential ones)
for
thinking
that certain limits or
restrictions should be attached
to
the use of
religious arguments/reasons
in the public political domain.4 A wide range of liberal theorists have
made
compelling
answers to
this
question
in the
affirmative,
arguing
that
citizens
in
pluralistic
democracies have a moral and
political duty
to
conduct their
public political
discussions in accordance with
principles
and
values that
it
would be reasonable
to
expect
other
free
and
equal
citi
zens to
accept.5
In
this
paper
I draw on
an
unlikely
source,
the
political thought
of
Hannah
Arendt,
to
challenge
the idea of
public
reason as a
normative
standard for the conduct of
political
discourse
in
pluralistic
liberal de
mocracies and to outline the beginnings of an alternative to it. I refer to
Arendt as an
unlikely
source for
help
in these matters
because,
as
most
readers of
Arendt are
aware,
she makes some rather stern
distinctions
between what are for her
properly public/political
activities and what
must be
kept private.6
Yet it would be a
mistake
to
presume
that Arendt's
3See for
example,
James
Bohman,
"Public Reason and Cultural Pluralism:
Political
Liberalism and
the
Problem of Moral
Conflict,"
Political
Theory
23
(1995):
253-79;
Veit
Bader,
"Religious
Pluralism:
Secularism or
Priority
of
Democracy?"
Political
Theory
27
(1999):
597-633;
Bhikhu
Parekh,
Rethinking
Multiculturalism: Cultural
Diversity
and
Political
Theory (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard
University
Press,
2000),
chapters
3
and
10;
Paul J.
Weithman,
Religion
and the
Obligations
of
Citizenship
(Cambridge: Cambridge
University
Press,
2002),
chapter
7;
John
Horton, "Rawls,
Public Reason
and the Limits of
Liberal
Justification,"
Contemporary
Political
Theory
2
(2003):
5-23.
4See Mark
Tushnet,
"The Limits
of the Involvement of
Religion
in the
Body
Politic,"
in
J.E.
Wood,
Jr.
nd
D.
Davis
(eds.),
The Role
of
Religion
in the
Making ofPublic
Policy
(Waco,
Tex.:
Dawson Institute of
Church-State
Studies,
1991),
pp.
191-220;
Greenawalt,
Private Consciences
and Public
Reasons,
chapter
1.
5Robert
Audi,
"The
Separation
of
Church and State
and the
Obligations
of
Citizen
ship," Philosophy
and Public
Affairs
18
(1989):
259-96;
Joshua
Cohen,
"Deliberation and
Democratic
Legitimacy,"
in A. Hamlin and P. Pettit
(eds.),
The Good
Polity (Oxford:
Basil
Blackwell,
1989), pp.
17-34;
Amy
Gutmann
and Dennis
Thompson,
"Moral Con
flict and
Political
Consensus,"
Ethics 101
(1990):
64-88;
Stephen
Macedo,
"Transforma
tive
Constitutionalism and the Case of
Religion:
Defending
the Moderate
Hegemony
of
Liberalism,"
Political
Theory
26
(1998):
56-80.
6For a critical
discussion of Arendt's
political thought
on these
points,
see Hanna
Pitkin,
"Justice: On
Relating
Private and
Public,"
Political
Theory
9
(1981):
327-52;
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Arendt, Rawls,
and Public Reason
259
demarcations between the
public
and
private
participates
in
or can be
grafted
onto the
secular-religious
distinction
that is
such a
prominent
fea
ture of the debates surrounding contemporary political liberalism.7 In
deed,
it
is
precisely
because
Arendt's
political thinking
cannot be
mapped
out
in
relation
to the
ongoing theoretical-political
dispute
be
tween
liberalism and
religion
that her
political thought
can
provide
im
portant
new
insights
into
the
contemporary controversy
that surrounds
the idea of
public
reason.
While Arendt's
conception
of
politics
is in its
own
unique way
bound
up
with
a series of
seemingly rigid
demarcations
(between
the
political
and the social or
economic,
for
example),
her
approach
to
the self
and
political action, as well as her understanding of the stakes of sustaining
an
open political
realm more
generally,
create
a critical
space
in which
to
challenge
the basic conceit of liberal
public
reason: that
participation
in
the
grammar
of
public
reason is the
sign
of one's moral
standing
as a
good
and reasonable democratic
citizen. Yet the
purpose
of this
paper
is
not
only
critical,
but constructive. I
will
argue
that
by
turning
to Arendt's
appreciation
for the role of self-disclosure
in
political speech
and
action,
we are
provided
with a model of
political dialogue
that can
expand
in
powerful
ways
the
meaning
and
significance
of "the
public
use of rea
son.
Before
making my
case
for this Arendtian
alternative,
I
discuss
briefly
John Rawls's
conception
of
public
reason,
because
it
represents
one of the most
persuasive
accounts of
how
contemporary
liberal
phi
losophy responds
to the
question
of
religious
and other so-called com
prehensive
doctrines in
politics.
By
addressing
a
particularly
influential
version of
public
reason,
I will show how
an Arendtian
perspective
raises
critical
questions
about the
operation
of such
a
standard,
while account
ing
for
many
of the values
that liberals
rightly
cherish
without the kinds
of constraints and limitations that they propose. This is not to say that
there are no
limits to
public
discourse,
but rather
that the nature of the
boundaries of
the
public
realm
need to be
fundamentally
rethought
and
ultimately
expanded.
In this
regard,
I will also
indicate in the conclusion
Margaret
Canovan,
Hannah
Arendt:
A
Reinterpretation
of
Her Political
Thought (Cam
bridge:
Cambridge
University
Press,
1992), chapter
7;
Seyla
Benhabib,
The Reluctant
Modernism
of
Hannah Arendt
(Thousand
Oaks,
Cal.:
Sage
Publications,
1996),
chapter
5.
7For
critical treatments
of
the
secular-religious
divide
within
contemporary
liberal
ism,
see
Charles
Taylor,
"Modes
of
Secularism,"
in R.
Bhargava
(ed.),
Secularism
and
Its
Critics
(Delhi:
Oxford
University
Press,
1998), pp.
31-53; Bader,
"Religious
Pluralism,"
pp.
597-633;
William
Connolly,
Why
am Not a
Secularist
(Minneapolis:
University
of
Minnesota
Press,
1999);
and
Jeffrey
C.
Isaac,
Matthew
F.
Filner,
and
Jason
C.
Bivins,
"American
Democracy
and the New
Christian
Right:
A
Critique
of
Apolitical
Liberal
ism,"
in Ian
Shapiro
and Casiano
Hacker-Cordón
(eds.),
Democracy's Edges
(Cam
bridge:
Cambridge University
ress,
1999),
pp.
222-64.
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260
Mark Button
to this
paper
how Arendt's
political theory
can be marshaled to
challenge
some of her
own,
in
my
view
unsustainable,
distinctions
between the
po
litical and the non- or pre-political. After presenting the liberal case for
public
reason,
I will
show
what
is
potentially
lost from an Arendtian
view
by
the
operation
of such
a
standard and
why
this matters
for con
temporary politics.
I will then turn
to a
discussion
of
mutual
respect,
civic
friendship,
and the
challenges
of truth claims
in the
political
do
main in an effort to address some of the normative
goods
of
public
rea
son without
sacrificing
the
practical
conditions
necessary
for what
Arendt calls the
political
disclosure of humanitas and
with it the
precon
ditions for valid
political judgments.
Rawls and Public Reason: The Grammar of Liberal
Citizenship
For
Rawls,
public
reason
provides
the
guidelines
in accordance with
which citizens and
public
officials should
apply
the
principles
of a
politi
cal
conception
of
justice
to
specific questions
of law and
policy,
most
especially
those issues
that
Rawls refers to as "constitutional essentials"
and issues of
"basic
justice."8
Public reason
is,
quite self-consciously,
an
idea whose
purpose
is to
bridge
the
ever-looming gap
between
theory
(and
specifically,
a liberal
political
conception
of
justice)
and the tumul
tuous
world of
political practice
and
public inquiry.
As
such,
liberal
pub
lic
reason
contains
both
substantive
(liberal)
principles,
such as the val
ues of
equal
liberty
and
equality
of
opportunity,
and
procedural
standards
that
seek to
specify
the
type
of
reasoning
and the form of
public argu
mentation that is
appropriate
for a diverse
democratic
society
committed
to liberal
legitimacy.
Rawls introduces the idea of
public
reason as an
"ideal
conception
of
citizenship
for
a constitutional
democratic
regime."9
For
Rawls,
the no
tion of a
properly
public
form of
reasoning
is
fundamentally
about how
to conceive
the
type
of
relationship
and the kinds of
moral
duties
that
exist for citizens in a
democracy,
citizens
who,
at least in
theory,
hold
ultimate
political power
and
who,
again
in
theory,
are
ultimately respon
sible for the
exercise of
coercive
public
laws over
one another.
Rawls
argues
that the
ideal of
citizenship,
as
expressed by
the
requirement
of
public
reason,
"imposes
a
moral,
not a
legal,
duty—the
duty
of
civil
ity."10
As
Rawls
conceives of
it,
this
duty
of
civility
imposes
a
moral ob
ligation
on citizens to be
ready
and able to
offer
explanations
as to the
basis of one's public arguments, political advocacy, or vote in terms that
8Rawls,
Political
Liberalism,
p.
214.
9Ibid.,
p.
213.
'"ibid.,
p.
217.
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Árendt, Rawls,
and Public
Reason
261
others
can
reasonably
be
expected
to endorse.
Specifically,
legitimate
forms
of
public justification require
that citizens
"appeal only
to
pres
ently accepted general beliefs and forms of reasoning found in common
sense,
and
the
methods and conclusions of
science when these are not
controversial."11
Rawls's
position
is
frequently interpreted
as one that
seeks
to
exclude
or otherwise
privatize
religion
or other
comprehensive
moral and
phi
losophical
views.12 Yet it is not
quite
accurate to refer to
public
reason as
an effort to
privatize
or "bracket"
religious
or other
comprehensive
modes of
expression,
and this is because far more is involved here.
Rawls's last contributions to these
questions
show
that he
sought
to
ex
pand his view of public reason to allow for the inclusion of comprehen
sive doctrines
in
public
argument.
The crucial
"proviso"
that he attached
to
this
liberalization
(or
widening)
of
public
reason is that
reasonable
[comprehensive]
doctrines
may
be introduced
in
public
reason at
any
time,
provided
that
in
due course
public
reasons,
given by
a reasonable
political
conception,
are
presented
sufficient
to
support
whatever the
comprehensive
doctrines are introduced to
support.13
By
putting
it in
just
this
way,
Rawls shows on the one hand that he is
concerned to have public discourse reflect a commitment to general ac
cessibility
for all citizens
in a
pluralistic
society
even
as
the modes of
public
argument
are
diversified;
on the other hand
this
proviso
also
sug
gests
that the real
argumentative weight
in
public
deliberations must be
carried
by
liberal
public
reason since
this
stipulated
limitation strives
to
make redundant
(or
rather
superfluous)
the
religious
views
whose con
tent must be
fully
accounted for
by nonreligious
(or
non-comprehensive)
values
in order to stand
up
to liberal
scrutiny—that
is,
to be deemed rea
sonable
and
publicly
justifiable.
The reason
for this
type
of moral and
political weighting is that there "are many nonpublic reasons but only
one
public
reason."14
The
nonpublic
status of
"comprehensive
doctrines"
does
not mean that
they
are
essentially private,
but their
presumed
non
generalizability
(and/or
nonaccessibility)
renders
the
public political
em
"ibid.,
p.
224.
12See in
this
respect
the
arguments
of
Jeremy
Waldron,
"Religious
Contributions
in
Public
Deliberation,"
San
Diego
Law Review 30
(1993):
817-48;
David
Hollenbach,
"Public
Reason/Private
Religion?
A
Response
to
Paul
J.
Weithman,"
Journal
of Religious
Ethics 22
(1994):
39-46;
Robert
Audi
and Nicholas
Wolterstorff,
eligion
in
the
Public
Square:
The
Place
of
Religious
Convictions
in Political
Debate
(Lanham,
Md.: Rowman
and
Littlefield,
1997);
Andrew
Murphy,
"Rawls
and
the
Shrinking Liberty
of Con
science,"
Review
of
Politics
60
(1998):
20-44.
"Rawls,
Justice as Fairness:
A
Restatement,
ed. Erin
Kelly (Cambridge,
Mass.: Har
vard
University
ress,
2001),
p.
90;
see
also
Rawls,
Political
Liberalism,
pp.
li-liii.
14Rawls,
Political
Liberalism,
p.
220;
"The Idea of
Public Reason
Revisited,"
p.
583.
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262 Mark Button
ployment
of such
views
deeply problematic,
and absent certain liberal
impediments
(i.e.,
the
proviso)
these claims are
judged
potentially
coer
cive.
At its
core, then,
the idea of
public
reason claims to
provide
a
moral
standard
of
reciprocity
and mutual
respect
that instructs citizens of a
plu
ralistic
democracy
to eschew those forms
of
reasoning
and modes of ar
gument
that
they
cannot
reasonably
expect
others to endorse or assent
to;
or,
in
accordance
with Rawls's
proviso,
one should
always
be
ready
and
capable
of
supplementing
those claims or
"grounding
reasons" with
nontheistic,
nonsectarian
public
reasons.15 This
is how
contemporary
lib
eralism understands what
respect
for
persons requires.
If a stable
political
consensus under conditions of ethical and philosophical pluralism is the
goal,
then
(shadowing
Rawls's own move
away
from
"metaphysics")
public
dialogue (and political philosophy)
should avoid
or
seek to
mini
mize
long-standing philosophical
controversies.16 As Rawls makes
plain,
this
criterion
"imposes very
considerable
discipline
on
public
discus
sion"17—a
point many
of Rawls's defenders seem to have
overlooked,
with a
few notable
exceptions.18
The idea of
public
reason
applies
not
only
to
institutions
like the
U.S.
Supreme
Court
(which
Rawls calls an
"exemplar
of
public reason"),
but also to citizens in a wide
range
of
pub
lic political activities like advocacy, campaigning, voting, and so on. Ad
ditionally,
while Rawls is most
concerned to establish the
operation
of
public
reason on matters of "constitutional
essentials,"
where basic issues
of
rights
and liberties are
at
stake,
he is
admirably forthright
in acknowl
edging
that "it
is
usually highly
desirable to settle
political questions
by
invoking
the values of
public
reason."19
One useful
way
to understand
public
reason
is to
view it as a kind of
language
requirement
for
liberal
citizenship.
To
adopt
and
practice
the
moral
duty
of
citizenship
that is
conveyed by
public
reason is to
"adopt
a
certain form of discourse."20 Political liberals seek to institutionalize
public
reason as
the official
language
for
public
political argument.
It is
not the
only
language you
will hear in
politics,
but
it
should of
right
be
the dominant
one at the end of the
day.
Not
everyone
will be a
native
speaker,
but
everyone
will
be
expected
to
learn it and
use
it,
"in due
course,"
as it
were. In this
respect,
the
Rawlsian
proviso
is a
requirement
i5See
also
Amy
Gutmann and
Dennis
Thompson,
Democracy
and
Disagreement
(Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard
University
Press,
1996), chapter
2.
6Rawls,
"The Idea of
an
Overlapping
Consensus,"
Collected
Papers,
p.
429.
17Rawls,
Political
Liberalism,
p.
227.
l8See,
for
example,
Paul
Weithman,
"Rawlsian
Liberalism and
the
Privatization of
Religion:
Three
Theological
Objections
Considered,"
Journal
of
Religious
Ethics 22
(1994):
3-28;
and
Weithman,
Religion
and the
Obligations of
Citizenship,
chapter
7.
19Rawls,
Political
Liberalism,
p.
215.
20Ibid„
p.
242.
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Arendt,
Rawls,
and Public Reason
263
that
compels
a moral
duty
on citizens who would
draw on
comprehen
sive doctrines in
public argument
to be fluent in more than
one
language.
More directly, liberal public reason is a kind of political Esperanto that
aims to
help
citizens live
on
"the surface" of their
political
relations
with
one
another,
providing
a
necessary
second
tongue
for
properly public
(i.e.,
moral and
civil)
engagement.
Other
"nonpublic" languages
drawn,
for
example,
from
churches,
sacred
texts,
or moral
philosophy
must ei
ther be set
aside
or
readily
translated in the
public
domain
according
to
the rules of liberal
grammar.
But
secular
(that
is,
non-sectarian and non
comprehensive)
political
translation itself
is a
moral
duty
of
citizenship,
not a task that can be
sloughed
off to
others,
at
least if one desires to be
judged a reasonable and civil person. Since no language is really separa
ble from the broader
culture of
which
it
is
an
integral part, public
reason
represents
more
than
just
the form of
reasons
and the kinds of
arguments
that are
employed
in
public,
but
also
highlights
a
specific way
in
which
citizens are to understand themselves
and relate
to
one
another
over
time.21
What is
important
to stress here
is that Rawls and other
contemporary
liberals
encourage
the
adoption
of the standards of
public
reason and a
form of liberal
bilingualism
because it not
only
addresses the essential
question of how to justify coercive laws in a pluralistic social environ
ment under various
"burdens of
judgment,"
but also because
it
casts the
political
relation of citizens
in a constitutional democratic
regime
as one
of "civic
friendship."22
The "civic" side of this "civic
friendship"
is
con
tained
by
public
reason's
injunction
to
appeal only
to
political
values
(not
comprehensive
philosophic
or
religious
values,
or at least
not exclu
sively)
when it comes
to
public political
discourse.
The rather
surprising
notion of
"friendship"
here comes from
the norms of
reciprocity,
civility,
and trust that Rawls believes
will
proliferate
with the
deployment
and
cultivation of liberal public reason. Public reason, then, is not just a mat
ter of
specifying
the
legitimate (epistemic) grounds
for
arguments
that
address
questions
of
basic
justice
or the use
of coercive
power,
it is
a
normative
(moral)
model of
citizenship
that seeks to
shape
the contours
and dimensions of
the
public political
sphere,
the
language
and
argu
ments
heard
therein,
and the
dispositions
and character
of all those
who
participate
in democratic
political
argument.
In
sum,
to
understand
and
comport
oneself
as a democratic
citizen,
in
accordance with this
liberal
frame,
means
that
one
has absorbed
the values and
procedures
of
public
reason. In this sense, the "proviso" is not just a task of (epistemic) sup
plementation—or
a test of valid
public
arguments—but
also
fundamen
21
See
Rawls,
"The
Idea of Public Reason
Revisited,"
p.
574.
22Rawls,
Political
Liberalism,
p.
li.
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264
Mark Button
tally
a
project
of moral/civic
preparedness.
With
political
liberalism's commitment to an "ideal of
citizenship"
and a specific form of civic friendship in mind, it isn't accurate to claim
that Rawlsian liberalism
and
public
reason
express
a commitment to
"epistemic
abstinence"
or to
"higher
order
impartiality."23
We
might
more
accurately
refer to
this
commitment
as one of moral and civic trans
formation via
the
linguistic/moral
thrust of
public
reason.
I
raise this
point
not to rehearse the familiar
charge
that
contemporary
liberalism is
only
another sectarian
political
doctrine
traveling
under the
specious
guise
of official
neutrality.
That
contemporary
liberals are committed to
(or
are at least now
more
willing
to
acknowledge)
the
political
conse
quences and the cultural-transformative effects of their conception of
moral
citizenship
is
a
qualified
advance
in the coherence of liberal
politi
cal
theory.24
Yet a central
question
remains,
and
that
is whether
qualities
like civic
friendship,
mutual
respect,
and
reciprocity
are
adequately
ac
counted for or
generated by political
liberalism and
public
reason so
un
derstood. In
my
view,
these
important
civic
qualities
are
seriously
con
strained and
potentially jeopardized
by
liberal accounts
of
public
reason.
I
what follows
I
draw
on
certain features of
Hannah Arendt's
political
thought
to indicate
why public
reason
might
have a
constraining
effect
on values of civic friendship and norms of reciprocity, and to show that
there is an alternative
way
of
conceiving
these
political goods
that does
not
depend
on the
restrictions of liberal
public
reason.
Arendt, Humanitas,
and the Relevance of the Public Realm
Within the
extensive
scholarship
dedicated
to
Hannah Arendt's
political
thought,
there is
significant
disagreement concerning
both how her the
ory
of action
and the
public sphere
should be
understood,
and what
po
litical
consequences
(if
any) might
follow from
adopting
one or another
privileged
interpretive reading
of Arendt's
theory.
There
are
many
excel
lent
analyses
of these
interpretive
battles and the
issues
at
stake within
them.25
The one
thing
that
nearly
all of
Arendt's
interpreters
have been
23See,
respectively, Joseph
Raz,
"Facing
Diversity:
The Case of
Epistemic
Absti
nence,"
Philosophy
and Public
Affairs
19
(1990):
3-46;
and
Nagel,
"Moral Conflict and
Political
Legitimacy,"
pp.
215-40.
24This is an
integral
feature of recent works
by
Macedo and
Barry;
see
Macedo,
Di
versity
and
Distrust;
and Brian
Barry,
Culture
and
Equality:
An
Egalitarian Critique of
Multiculturalism
(Cambridge,
Mass.:
Harvard
University
Press,
2001).
25See for
example,
Maurizio Passerin
d'Entrèves,
The Political
Philosophy of
Han
nah
Arendt
(London:
Routledge,
1994),
chapter
2;
Bonnie
Honig
(ed.),
Feminist
Interpre
tations
of
Hannah
Arendt
(University
Park:
Pennsylvania
State
University
Press,
1995);
and Dana R.
Villa,
Arendt
and
Heidegger:
The
Fate
of
the Political
(Princeton:
Princeton
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Arendt,
Rawls,
and Public Reason
265
able to
agree
upon
is that
there
are
significant
tensions within her
theory
of action and the
public sphere.
These tensions
(for
some,
contradictions)
have been explored along a number of different axes: the expressive and
the
communicative
models of
action,26
the communicative and the in
strumental-strategic,27
the
agonal
versus
the
narrative,28
and elitist/heroic
versus
democratic/participatory.29
Doubtless these and
many
other inter
pretive
divisions will continue to mark the
study
of Arendt's
political
thought
for the foreseeable
future,
and
some
of this
(at
least
where schol
ars
recognize
that the tensions in Arendt's
thinking
are themselves a
par
tial
reflection
upon
the
very
conditions
of
contemporary
democratic
po
litical
life,
requiring
exploration,
not
resolution)
is all to the
good.
Yet
my aim in what follows is not to engage Arendt's critics, but rather to
consider what
consequences
and what alternative
possibilities
Arendt's
political
theory might
hold for us when focused
upon
the
question
of the
relationship
between
religion
and liberal
public
reason.
In contrast to Rawls and
political
liberalism more
generally,
political
speech
and action for Arendt are not
solely
or
ultimately
about the rea
soned
justification
of one's
pre-existing positions
to others
in
a
public
forum.
Rather,
according
to
Arendt,
the raison d'être of
public
words and
deeds
is
self-disclosure,
the disclosure of one's
unique
humanitas to oth
ers in a plural, political context. "In acting and speaking, men show who
they
are,
reveal
actively
their
unique personal
identities
and
thus make
their
appearance
in the human world."30 This
is,
to be
sure,
a
complicated
and difficult
way
of
thinking
about
political
speech,
for while it
does not
deny
the
importance
of common
decision-making,
such
a view
takes the
essential
significance
of
politics
out of
the domain of the
strictly
instru
mental mode of interest
articulation/acquisition,
means-ends
rationality,
or consensus
formation.
Instead,
Arendt's vision of
politics emphasizes
the
intangible
"web" of human
inter-relationships
that are created be
tween people when they enter a public political space. Public words and
deeds are
always,
of
course,
about some
objective,
material
concern
or
reality,
but
what
is
of
equal importance
for Arendt are the immaterial
University
ress,
1996),
chapter
1.
26d'Entrèves,
The Political
Philosophy of
Hannah
Arendt,
pp.
83-85.
27Jürgen
Habermas,
"Hannah Arendt's Communications
Concept
of
Power,"
Social
Research
44
(1977):
3-23.
28Benhabib,
The Reluctant Modernism
of
Hannah
Arendt,
chapter
5.
29See
Margaret
Canovan,
"The Contradictions
of Hannah
Arendt's Political
Thought,"
Political
Theory
6
(1978):
5-26; Bhikhu Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the
Search
for
a New Political
Philosophy
(London:
Macmillan,
1981);
and
Jeffrey
C.
Isaac,
"Oases
in the Desert:
Hannah Arendt on Democratic
Politics,"
American Political Sci
ence
Review 88
(1994):
156-68.
30Hannah
Arendt,
The Human Condition
(Chicago:
University
of
Chicago
Press,
1958), p.
179.
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266
Mark Button
webs of
relationships
that form whenever
people
gather
in
a
public
po
litical context. As
the
metaphor
of the "web"
suggests,
this
quality
of
the
political is somewhat intangible and exceedingly fragile and perishable:
Its
peculiarity
is
that,
unlike the
spaces
which are the work of our
hands,
it does not sur
vive the
actuality
of the movement
which
brought
it into
being,
but
disappears
not
only
with the
dispersal
of men ... but
with
the
disappearance
or arrest of the
activities
them
selves. Whenever
people gather together,
it is
potentially
there,
but
only potentially,
not
necessarily
and not forever.31
An
important
feature of
Arendt's
understanding
of the nature and
value of
public
speech
and
action
is that she does not think that actors
within a plural public sphere have full or autonomous control over the
self that is
ineluctably
disclosed or revealed
through
their words and
deeds.
Drawing upon
a connection to both Ancient Greek
religion
and
Roman
sources,
Arendt
argues
that
the disclosure
of "who"
someone
is,
in contradistinction to "what"
somebody
is,
... is
implicit
in
everything somebody says
and
does.
It can be hidden
only
in
complete
silence
and
perfect
passivity,
but its
disclo
sure can almost never be achieved as a willful
purpose
... On the
contrary,
it is more than
likely
that
the
"who,"
which
appears
so
clearly
and
unmistakably
to
others,
remains hid
den
from
the
person
himself,
like the daimon in Greek
religion
which
accompanies
each
man
throughout
his
life, always looking
over his shoulder from behind and thus visible
only
to those he encounters.32
In a
public
laudatio
for Karl
Jaspers, given
in the same
year
as the
publi
cation of The Human
Condition,
Arendt makes an
explicit
connection
between this idea of
an
overseeing
God or
spirit
and an individual's
unique
humanitas,
which Arendt
tends to
treat
as
non-subjective
person
ality
or distinct humanness:
This
daimon ... this
personal
element in a
man,
can
only
appear
where a
public space
exists;
that is the
deeper significance
of the
public realm,
which
extends
far
beyond
what
we
ordinarily
mean
by political
life. To
the extent
that
this
public space
is also
a
spiritual
realm,
there is manifest in it what
the Romans
called humanitas,33
For
Arendt,
this
non-subjective
(non-controllable)
humanitas is
risked,
acquired,
and
ultimately
extended as a
gift
to
others when we
make our
"venture into
the
public
realm."
What
light
does
Arendt's
stress on the
revelatory,
nonmanipulatable
dimensions of
political
action
and
public identity
throw on liberal
efforts
to
construct forms of
public justification
to
govern
and
discipline politi
3lIbid.,p.
199.
32Il
33H
p.
173.
32Ibid.,
p.
179-80.
33Hannah
Arendt,
Men in Dark Times
(New
York: Harcourt
Brace
Jovanovich,
1968),
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Arendt,
Rawls,
and Public Reason
267
cal discourse and
citizenship?
One immediate
consequence
of
entertain
ing
this Arendtian stress
on
the
disclosive
dimensions
of
speech/action
is
that liberal attempts to secure substantive and procedural standards of
public/secular
reason,
in advance of
public engagements
on
questions
of
common
concern,
will
likely
mean
that
the full
revelatory potential
of
public
political
life will have been
significantly
diminished. The kind
of
guidelines
that
political
liberals offer
by way
of
disciplining
citizens
into
an
appropriate
form of
political reasoning represents,
from
an
Arendtian
perspective,
an
attempt
to
respond
to the conditions of human
plurality
in
ways
that
ultimately
condition and constrain that
pluralism
in
accordance
with
a certain set of
(liberal)
standards. Of
course,
contemporary
liberal
theorists like Rawls and Macedo fully acknowledge this. If Arendt were
to counsel
something
different,
on the basis of her
understanding
of the
self
and the
requirements
for a
public space
of
appearance,
so much
the
worse for
political
action as
implicit
self-disclosure,
political
liberals
would
likely
say.
But what are
the
consequences
of
short-circuiting
the
disclosive
aspects
of
speech
and action
upon
which Arendt
put
so
much
significance?
One
way
to address this
question
is to first note that a
primary
as
sumption
at work
in
political
liberalism is that
religious
adherents
(as
the
holders of fixed "comprehensive doctrines") speak from their position as
believers with a
telos attached to them like a chain. The doctrines are
fixed,
their
political
identities
stable,
their
voices sectarian and univocal.
Contemporary
liberal
theory
often treats
opinion
as
something
that is
formed
prior
to
entering
the
political
domain
(in
the
"background
politi
cal
culture"),
and
public
reason
comes into
play
as a
particular
mode of
discourse
by
which to
safely regulate
the
reciprocal exchange
of
these
pre-established points
of view. Two
points
of contrast
with
Arendt
should be made here. The
first,
drawing
on her own
unique reading
of
Kant, emphasizes that thought and opinion formation themselves depend
upon
conditions of
publicity,
and critical
publicity
in
particular.34
This is
a condition in which the
testing
of
one's
position
arises from the
critical
interaction with other
people's
form of
thinking.
Such
a
condition,
Ar
endt
argues,
"presupposes
that
everyone
is
willing
and able
to render
an
account of
what
he
thinks
and
says."35
Yet
rendering
an
account
and tak
ing responsibility
for
what one
thinks
is not a
process
of
proof
or rational
justification,
and it is not
a
process
that can
really get
off
the
ground
if
publicity
itself is
already
defined and
given
distinct normative value in
accordance with one pre-given standard or logic of reasoning. In the fol
34Hannah
Arendt,
'Truth and
Politics,"
in
Between Past and
Future
(New
York: Pen
guin
Books,
1961), pp.
227-64,
at
pp.
234-35.
35Hannah
Arendt,
Lectures on Kant's
Political
Philosophy,
ed. Ronald
Beiner
(Chi
cago:
University
f
Chicago
Press,
1982),
p.
41.
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Mark Button
lowing
reply
that Arendt
gave Mary
McCarthy
when
pressed
to defend
her own
partitioning
of the social and
the
political,
Arendt
speaks
to
the
historical and institutional variability of the standard of publicity, and
with it the
importance
of
keeping
that standard
open
to a
variety
of con
cerns and
voices,
including questions
of
religious
faith:
Life
changes constantly,
and
things
are
constantly
there that want to be talked about.
At
all
times
people living
together
will
have
affairs that
belong
in the realm of
the
public—
"are
worthy
to
be
talked about in
public."
What these matters are
at
any
historical mo
ment
is
probably
utterly
different. For
instance,
the
great
cathedrals were the
public
spaces
of the
Middle
Ages.
The town halls came later. And there
perhaps they
had to talk
about
a matter which is not without
any
interest either: the
question
of
God.
So what
becomes
public
at
every given period
seems to me
utterly
different.36
The
point
then is not
only
that
publicity
is never
a
singular quality,
some
thing
that can
be
affixed to
one
pre-political
standard
(science
or "com
mon
sense")
without
sacrificing
the
potential meaning
and
power
of
pub
licity,
but also that its status as an
open
field
(a
living potentia)
is a con
stitutive feature of a free
political
life
in
common with others.37
The second
point
of contrast that needs to be made is that if we
grant,
with
Arendt,
that it is never
simply
the case that an individual's
compre
hensive
view
speaks
in a
clear,
unidirectional
way
to issues in the
public
domain,
but rather that the self is also
ineluctably spoken
or revealed in
the
pubic exchange
of words and
deeds,
then accounts of
public
dis
course that continue
to treat
subjects
as discrete carriers of fixed
pre
political
claims
(and
fashion rules of
engagement
in accordance with this
view of
political
actors)
will
inevitably
lead us
astray.
By misconstruing
or
simply flattening
the
complicated relationship
between the self
and
the
selfs
public/political identity, political
liberals
treat the "fact of reason
able
pluralism"
as a condition that
always
exists outside of the
self,
on
the
surface,
and hence
containable. Yet the essential "boundlessness" and
agent-revealing quality of public speech and action suggests, at the very
least,
that these
standards will
always
be frustrated. For
Arendt,
"[^imitations
and boundaries
exist within the
realm of human
affairs,
but
they
never offer a
framework that can
reliably
withstand the
onslaught
with which each new
generation
must insert itself."38
Historically
speak
ing,
it
is
by
contesting
the limitations
and boundaries of what
passes
as
"public"
that
new interests
and constituencies
become
political subjects
as well
as the
subjects
of
liberal-democratic
justice.
More
normatively,
36
Arendt,
"On Hannah
Arendt,"
in M.A. Hill
(ed.),
Hannah Arendt: The
Recovery of
the Public
World
(New
York: St. Martin's
Press,
1979),
p.
316.
37See also
Arendt,
"What
is Existential
Philosophy?"
in
Jerome Kohn
(ed.),
Essays
in
Understanding:
1930-1954
(New
York: Harcourt Brace and
Company, 1994), pp.
186
87.
38Arendt,
The Human
Condition,
p.
191.
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Arendt, Rawls,
and Public
Reason 269
what
is
at
stake,
according
to
Arendt,
"is the
revelatory
character without
which
action and
speech
would lose all human relevance."39 That
is to
say, it is humanitas and its related values that are at stake with public
reason
and
the
moral
regulation
of the
public political
domain,
not sim
ply religion
or
comprehensive
doctrines
as
such.
To be
sure,
political
liberals are not naïve about the difficulties en
tailed
by
a criterion like
public
reason,
but there is little evidence that
they
have
taken
a full
accounting
of the
ways
in
which
politics depends
upon,
or
simply
is,
the
space
of
appearance
that rises
directly
out of
peo
ple acting together,
rather than the
derivative,
manipulable
condition for
coming
to decisions
about the
legitimate
use of coercive
power
(as
im
portant as those decisions are). Yet, political liberals endeavor not only
to
give political
standards and
guidelines
for
public
reasoning,
they
also
seek to fashion the
deeper self-understanding
of citizens
qua
citizens
af
ter
these
justificatory
standards. What I am
stressing,
by way
of
contrast,
is the
deep
(at
times,
tragic)
sense
in
which,
as
figures
as
diverse as
Sophocles,
Marx, Oakeshott,
and Arendt
argue,
the
political
is not
fully
within rational human control or contrivance. For
Arendt,
the sources of
unpredictability
and
contingency
in
politics
have
nothing
to do with the
role of
something
like
fortuna
or an
Hegelian
Geist,
and
everything
to do
with the revelatory features of public speech and action. The "who" of
the
speaker,
one's distinctive
personal
identity,
or
humanitas,
of which
religious
convictions are
ineluctably
a
part,
will
always
find
public
ex
pression
whenever and wherever
people
act
politically.
Hence,
from an
Arendtian
perspective,
it
is
both fruitless and inhuman
(in
Arendt's sense
of that
term)
to define one's
religious
and/or moral
conceptions
as
part
of
one's
"nonpublic
identity,"
as Rawls does.40 As Arendt
argues:
To
dispense
with this
disclosure,
if
indeed
it
could
ever be
done,
would mean to trans
form men into
something
they
are
not;
to
deny,
on
the other
hand,
that
this disclosure
is
real and has
consequences
of its own is
simply
unrealistic.41
The
revelatory, nonsovereign,
and
tragic
dimensions of
the self and
po
litical action
may simply
be taken as
an
instance
of Arendt's irreducible
difference
from liberalism.
And
that,
of
course,
would
be
right,
as
nu
merous
scholars have
shown.42 Yet
it
would
be a mistake to
suppose
that
39Ibid.,p.
182.
40Rawls,
"Justice as
Fairness: Political
not
Metaphysical,"
Philosophy
and
Public
Affairs
4
(1985):
223-51,
p.
241.
41Arendt,
Human
Condition,
p.
183.
42See Bonnie
Honig,
Political
Theory
and the
Displacement
of
Politics
(Ithaca:
Cor
nell
University
Press,
1993),
chapter
4;
Frederick
Dolan,
"Political Action
and the
Un
conscious:
Arendt and
Lacan on
Decentering
the
Subject,"
Political
Theory
23
(1995):
330-52;
Villa,
Arendt and
Heidegger, chapters
1 and
5.
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270
Mark
Button
nothing
else
might
follow
from
placing
this Arendtian
perspective
into
conversation
with
political
liberalism
and to
forgo
a critical reflection
upon how her understanding of public speaking and acting under condi
tions
of
pluralism
might challenge
and amend
the liberal standard of
pub
lic reason that has reached such
a
position
of
prominence
today.
Common Sense/Sensus
Communis
The above discussion of the essential and
ineluctable role of self
disclosure in
public
life
bears
directly upon
further
problems
with the
liberal idea of
public
reason
because it
suggests
that,
among
other
things,
the disclosive dimension
of
political agency,
which
political
liberalism
short-circuits and
constrains,
is
fully wrapped up
with
both
our sense of
reality
and the formation of
something
like
a sensus
communis,
or com
mon sense. Recall that in
seeking
to
give
content to
public
reason in a
way
that would not run
afoul
of the basic condition
of
"reasonable
plural
ism,"
Rawls
argues
that
in
making public
justifications
about issues of
basic
justice
citizens are to
appeal,
"only
to
presently accepted
general
beliefs and forms of
reasoning
found in common sense."43
Rawls
runs
into a certain amount of
trouble
by incorporating
the idea of common
sense
into his standard for
public justification,
because it introduces both
an historical
and cultural dimension into his
theory
that doesn't otherwise
mesh well with
his
analytic categories.
As
he seems to
recognize,
what
passes
for
generally accepted
beliefs and "common sense" in the antebel
lum
American
South
is
not what most
political
liberals would want to
endorse.
Hence,
Rawls has to undertake
some
rather
significant
addenda
to make his idea of
public
reason work for
figures
like the abolitionists or
Martin
Luther
King,
Jr.,
who
might
otherwise be taken as the
perfect
counterfactuals to the
principles
of
public
reason,
since
they
advocated
for
political
change
at different historical moments in
ways
that
freely
and
effectively
drew
upon
"comprehensive" religious
views.44
By
contrast,
Arendt held a clear
sense of the
power
imbalances and
the
disproportionate
effects on
ethno-religious
minorities
in
accepting
something
like
appeals
to common
and
historically/culturally
condi
tioned
standards of sense and
belief. In
discussing
the terms and
con
straints of Jewish
emancipation
in
Europe
in the nineteenth
century,
Ar
endt
argued
that
Jews could
only
achieve real
emancipation
if
they
were
accepted
as
Jews,
not as
"parvenus,"
or Jews
acting
or
being
secular. In
her
biography
of Rahel
Varnhagen,
Arendt
exposes
the
underlying politi
cal
and
cultural
dynamics
that
renders
assimilation for
religious
and eth
43Rawls,
Political
Liberalism,
p.
224.
"Ibid.,
pp.
247-52.
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Arendt,
Rawls,
and
Public Reason
271
nic minorities
a
process
of
interiorizing
self-hatred. In a
context of anti
Semitism,
secularization
or
assimilation into dominant
"public
stan
dards" of being entails a powerful measure of self-renunciation for many
Jews.
At the
same
time,
such
"public"
standards and
beliefs demand a
degree
of
self-guardianship
that
is
nearly
impossible
to
sustain,
but
which
nonetheless
can
have
disproportionate
and
disfiguring
effects on a
personal
life.45
Yet the notion of
"common sense" still
plays
a
powerful
role in Ar
endt's
thinking,
but
one
that,
unsurprisingly, depends
on the
condition
of
a
political space
that
allows for
the self-disclosure of citizens. For
Arendt
common sense is an
open,
révisable
political
product
of
multiple per
spectives focusing together upon one common issue or concern.
Common sense ... discloses to
us the nature of the world insofar as
it is
a
common
world;
we owe to
it
the fact that our
strictly private
and
"subjective"
five
senses and their sen
sory
data can
adjust
themselves to
a
non-subjective
and
"objective"
world which we have
in common and
share
with
others.
Judging
is
one,
if not the
most,
important
activity
in
which this
sharing-the-world-with-others
comes to
pass.46
In
short,
it is
hard to see
how a
standard like "common
sense,"
as an
op
erative
quality
in the
political
act of common
judging—as
both Arendt
and Rawls see it—can be confidently held as a source of justice if that
principle
does not seek to maximize
the fullest
expressions
of as
many
people
as
possible.
To
keep
such a standard from
functioning
as
merely
an
ideological
construct of a
particular
historical-cultural
moment,
to
minimize
the
possibility
that
appeals
to "common
sense" are little more
than a
disciplinary
norm
of
political-discursive
domestication,
common
sense has
to be
figured
as
the sensus
communis,
that
is,
something
that
cannot exist
apart
from the
activity
of
judging, acting, revealing
persons.
Hence,
common sense cannot
be understood as a set of fixed
"general
beliefs"
if it is to sustain an
enabling relationship
to democratic citizen
ship,
but rather should be seen as a set of
common
practices
or
ways
of
life that are
constantly subject
to what Arendt calls the
"incessant talk" of
politics.
In
this
regard,
an
Arendtian sensus communis
seems closer to
what
Hans-Georg
Gadamer calls an historical
horizon,
which
is
always
in
motion and never
closed,
than it does to Rawlsian common sense.47
45In addition to her
biography
of
Vamhagen,
especially
relevant here
is her discus
sion of
Kafka's
Castle,
"The Pariah as
Rebel,"
in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish
Identity
and
Politics in
the Modern
Age,
ed. Ron H. Feldman
(New
York: Grove
Press,
1978),
pp.
83
90.
See
Arendt,
Rahel
Varnhagen:
The
Life of
a Jewish
Woman,
revised
ed.
(New
York:
Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich,
1974).
46Arendt,
"The Crisis
in
Culture,"
in
Between
Past and
Future,
pp.
197-226,
at
p.
221.
47See
Hans-Georg
Gadamer,
Truth
and
Method,
2nd
ed.,
revised
(New
York:
Contin
uum,
1994).
"In fact the horizon
of the
present
is
continually
in
the
process
of
being
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272
Mark Button
Mutual
Respect, Reciprocity,
and
Philia
Politike
Up to this stage in the argument I have sought to show what might be
lost,
from an Arendtian
perspective,
by
the
adoption
of a standard of
pub
lic reason for
determining
the
legitimate
grounds
and
guidelines
for the
conduct of
political
discussion
in
pluralistic
democracies. In the remain
der of this
paper
I want to show how Arendt's
political
theory
seeks
to
address some of the basic values that
political
liberals like Rawls want to
establish—such as
equal
freedom,
mutual
respect,
and civic
friendship—
but does so without the kinds of restrictions
and sacrifices that
public
reason introduces into
the
public political
forum.
As we have seen, public reason in Rawls and other contemporary lib
eral thinkers
represents
more than
just
an
attempt
to
justify
the
legitimate
grounds
for
legal
coercion
under
conditions
of
pluralism,
but also seeks
to
fashion,
in tandem
with
this former
project,
a
specific conception
of
normative
(moral)
citizenship.
This can be seen
clearly
when Rawls ar
gues
that
the criterion of
reciprocity expressed
in
public
reason is de
signed
to
"specify
the nature of the
political
relation
in a
constitutional
democratic
regime
as one of
civic
friendship."48
Hence the
question
is
not whether the
(very
old)
category
of civic
friendship
is sustainable un
der "the fact of reasonable pluralism" and the "burdens of judgment," but
rather how civic
friendship
is to be
cultivated
in a
society
marked
by
ex
tensive and
incompatible religious
and
philosophic
differences. We
want
to insist on the
importance
of mutual
respect,
tolerance,
and fairness in
free,
pluralistic
societies,
but how are
these
values
cultivated and stabi
lized over time? As we have
seen,
liberal
public
reason
gives
a
particular
answer
to these
questions.
Yet we need to ask the
following:
Does mu
tual
respect
and
civility
under conditions of
extensive
religious
and
phi
losophical diversity
require
the
operation
of
Rawlsian
public
reason,
un
derstood as
appeals
to
standards that are
already well-accepted as "gen
eral beliefs"
and
provided by
"common
sense"? Is the
duty
of
reciprocity
violated,
as Rawls
and others
argue, by
invoking
the
"grounding
reasons"
or
deepest
values that
animate and motivate
one's
participation
in
poli
tics? Does
the kind of
civility
and mutual
respect
that is
generated
by
the
observance of
public
reason
provide
an
adequate conception
of demo
cratic
citizenship
and
democratic
politics?
formed because we
are
continually having
to test all our
prejudices.
An
important
part
of
this
testing
occurs in
encountering
the
past
and in
understanding
the
tradition from which
we come.
Hence the horizon of the
present
cannot
be formed without the
past.
There is no
more an isolated
horizon
of the
present
in itself than
there are historical
horizons which
have
to be
acquired.
Rather,
understanding
is
always
the
fusion of
these horizons
suppos
edly
existing by
themselves"
(p.
306).
48Rawls,
"The Idea of Public
Reason
Revisited,"
p.
579.
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Arendt, Rawls,
and Public
Reason
273
By
taking
Arendt's
political
theory seriously
and
marshaling
it
in this
setting,
the
answer to
these
questions
is
no,
and the
reasons for this
nega
tive response are drawn from her understanding of the importance of the
revelatory qualities
of
political speech
and action. In
Arendt it is
clear
that both
mutual
respect
and
civic
friendship fully depend
upon
the dis
closure of one's
humanitas,
the "who" of the
person—the
very qualities
we have
already
seen that
political
liberalism
seeks to do
without. As she
argues
in The Human
Condition:
What
love is
in
its
own,
narrowly
circumscribed
sphere, respect
is in the
larger
domain of
human affairs.
Respect,
not unlike the Aristotelian
hilia
politike,
s a
kind of "friend
ship"
without
intimacy
and
without
closeness;
it is a
regard
for the
person
from the dis
tance which the space of the world puts between us.49
What
Arendt
compels
us to ask
of
political
liberalism and of the idea
of
public
reason
is how mutual
respect,
let alone
friendship,
could ever
be
thought
to arise between
people
who
see
it
as an incumbent feature of
that
relationship
to
withhold, avoid,
detach,
or
transfigure
what
may
well
be
the most
significant
thing
about
them—their
faith,
their
conception
of
the
good,
their sense of
values
and
the source of those values. Is
public
reason a
necessary
and
appropriately
chastened
way
of
understanding
the
prospects of civic friendship and the nature of the duty of civility under
conditions of
pluralism?
For Arendt the answer is
clearly
no,
and
yet
I
don't think that Rawls and Arendt are
simply talking past
one another on
these
important points.
This is
important
to stress
because,
like
Rawls,
Arendt is committed to the values of
democratic
constitutionalism,
plu
ralism,
and modern
(negative)
rights.50
Yet
(again
like
Rawls)
she does
not want
to
forgo qualities
like
civility,
mutual
respect,
and
civic friend
ship
in our
political
life.
Still,
to
understand the
differences here we will
have
to take our cues for the
conceptualization
and
practice
of
these
vir
tues from a source other than liberalism, and for Arendt this means the
Greeks and Romans.51
What
comes out of
her
reading
of these
traditions
(among
other
things)
is a
powerful
sense of the
political
relevance of
friendship.
The essence of this
friendship
consisted
(as
one
might
expect
of the
Greeks)
in
talking. "[The
Greeks]
held that
only
the
constant
inter
change
of
talk united citizens
in a
polis.
In
discourse
the
political impor
tance of
friendship,
and the
humanness
peculiar
to
it
were made mani
49Arendt,
The Human
Condition,
p.
243.
50See
Arendt,
The
Origins of
Totalitarianism
(New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovano
vich,
1973), pp.
290-302,466.
SIFor
an
effective critical
rejoinder
to
Arendt's
supposed "nostalgia"
for the
Greeks,
see
Roy
Tsao,
"Arendt
against
Athens:
Rereading
The Human
Condition,"
Political The
ory
30
(2002):
97-123.
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274
Mark Button
fest."52
By repeatedly stressing
the interconnections
between
friendship, po
litical discourse, and humanitas, Arendt helps us to see that there is
something
essentially self-defeating
about
any
model of
respect
or civic
friendship
that
depends
on a
"method
of avoidance" to come about.
It
is
self-defeating
because it overlooks or denies
the
inevitable role
of
disclo
sure
and
humanitas in our
political
relationships—a
factor
that must be
accounted
for in our
political
lives even when those associations are con
centrated
upon
"reaching
an
altogether worldly,
material
object."53
Hence,
friendship—political
friendship
for Arendt—consists
in address
ing
what stands between
people,
in the sense of
what both unites and
separates people. The idea here is not that in doing so everyone will nec
essarily
come to like
everybody
else,
nor of course
that
everyone
will
come to
some
kind of
agreement
about a
particular conception
of the
good,
but
rather
that in
"talking
about
what is between
them,
it becomes
ever more common to them."54
What
is
important
for Arendt is
that
this idea
of
making
things
com
mon between
plural
selves,
and
forming
bonds of civic
friendship
in
turn,
requires
a
space
of critical
publicity
in which one's "truths" can
be dis
closed
and
engaged by
others. "The
political
element in
friendship
is that
in the truthful dialogue each of the friends can understand the truth in
herent in
the other's
opinion
... This kind of
understanding—seeing
the
world from the other
fellow's
point
of
view—is the
political
kind of
in
sight par
excellence."55 From an Arendtian
perspective,
values like mu
tual
respect
and the norms of
reciprocity
are not
violated
or
harmed
by
citizens
invoking
their
comprehensive religious
or
philosophic
views in
public;
to the
contrary,
the conditions for mutual
respect
and
civic friend
ship
are
provided
by
individuals
honestly
speaking,
as
far
as
they
are
able,
their "truths" as
they
see them. This is not a sufficient
condition for
the endurance of a common public world, but it is a necessary one.
Whereas
the criterion of
reciprocity
is
ultimately
constrained
by
a
par
ticular
form of
reason-giving
in
political
liberalism,
reciprocity
for Ar
endt is
a cultivated
sentiment that
is
ultimately
concerned with
sustaining
an
open,
common world
between
plural subjects.
For
Arendt,
no
humanly
meaningful
political
in-between or
commons
can
take
shape
between
citizens,
and
no civic
friendship
can
arise,
with
out
speech
and
action that
is able—as far
as
speech
can—to reveal
the
"who" of each
person
in his
unique plurality.
Had Arendt
lived
long
enough to witness it, she may well have viewed recent liberal efforts to
"Arendt,
Men
in Dark
Times,
pp.
24,
81-94.
"Arendt,
The Human
Condition,
p.
183.
54Arendt,
"Philosophy
and
Politics,"
Social Research 57
(1990):
72-103,
p.
82.
"Ibid.,
pp.
83-84.
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Arendt,
Rawls,
and Public Reason
275
formulate
guidelines
of
public
reason as
another one of a
long
line of
understandable but ill-advised
attempts
to
overcome the
contingency
and
unpredictability of political action and plural public spaces, a move that
embraces
instrumental
poiësis
over
praxis.
Whereas
the moral
burden in
public
reason
requires
that
one be
prepared
to translate and/or
supple
ment one's
"comprehensive"
views
with
pre-established
forms of reason
ing
and liberal rules of
justification,
the
moral burdens in Arendt's con
ception
of
public reasoning
relate in a
distinctly
different
way
to citizens
as both
speakers
and listeners. In the
first
case,
it
prompts
individuals to
speak
their "truths" as
fully
as
possible,
and does so
with the
understand
ing
that the
public political
world can
gather
and
separate
people
only
so
long as the commons (and with it the sensus communis) is conceived as a
free and
plural space
of
appearance.
In the second
case,
it
encourages
the
formation of sincere
listeners,
that
is,
persons
who will
imaginatively
and
sympathetically
strive to understand the world from the other's
point
of
view.
Hence,
reciprocity
in an Arendtian frame is both a
precondition
for
and a
product
of a commitment to an
open
and shared
political
world:
"For the world is not humane
just
because
it
is made
by
human
beings,
and
it
does
not
become
humane
just
because the human voice sounds in
it,
but
only
when
it
has
become the
object
of discourse."56 These
ideas
introduce the last dimensions of Arendt's political theory that I will dis
cuss here that bear on the liberal idea of
public
reason: Arendt's
analysis
of the
relationship
between "truth" claims
and the
public political sphere.
Truth in
Politics,
or
Learning
to be Human
Out of
a
concern
for the
potentially
coercive dimensions
of
religious
and
other
comprehensive
"truth" claims under
conditions of
pluralism,
liberal
public
reason
encourages
certain modes
of
speech/behavior
in an effort
to maximize the formation and
stability
of democratic
majorities
on fun
damental
questions
of
justice.
Running throughout
Arendt's
writings,
from her dissertation
on Saint
Augustine
to her
writings
on totalitarian
ism and
political
judgment,
is
a no less
significant
concern with the an
tagonistic
relationship
between
truth and
politics,
as well as
religious
belief
and
politics.
What is
usually
remembered about
this discussion
is
either Arendt's
anti-foundational
assertion
that from
"the
viewpoint
of
politics,
truth
has a
despotic
character,"57
or her
critical assessment
of the
turn
to
religious
"absolutes"
during
various
political
founding
mo
ments.58 Yet Arendt's treatment of rational,
philosophic,
or
religious
56Arendt,
Men in Dark
Times,
p.
24.
57Arendt,
"Truth and
Politics,"
p.
241.
58Arendt,
On Revolution
(New
York:
Viking
Press,
1963),
chapter
5;
and see also The
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276
Mark
Button
truth and its
relationship
to
politics
and
citizenship
is
a
great
deal more
interesting
and
complex
than
simply declaring
such standards either ir
relevant for or pernicious to the political sphere and political freedom.
Taking
creative cues from Socrates
and
Cicero,
as well as
Lessing
and
Jaspers,
Arendt
mapped
out
an alternative
way
of
conceiving
the rela
tionship
between
religious
or
philosophic
truths
and
public political
dia
logue,
an
understanding
that entails more than
simply
declaring
truth
claims above or
beyond
the
political.
This
alternative
understanding
highlights
another avenue
with which to contest
the constraints that lib
eral
public
reason
places
on the
conduct of
political
discourse
and,
more
broadly,
the moral valences of
contemporary citizenship.
For Arendt, all truths, philosophic or religious, necessarily become
opinions
when
they
enter the
public
sphere: episteme
becomes doxa moi
in the context of the
diversity
of
points
of
view in a
plural public
world.
If
we
accept
the idea
that there is more coercive than
persuasive
content
in truth claims—that
is,
they
are claims
that demand
recognition,
not
consent or
agreement—the question
for
Arendt,
as with
Rawls,
is
whether there is
any
place
for truth in
politics.
The trouble is that
factual
truth,
like
all
other
truth,
peremptorily
claims to be acknowl
edged
and
precludes
debate,
and debate constitutes the
very
essence of
political
life. The
modes of
thought
and communication that deal with
truth,
if seen from the
political per
spective,
are
necessarily
domineering; they
do not take into
account other
people's opin
ions,
and
taking
these into account is the hallmark of all
strictly political thinking.59
The
problem
of
religious
or
philosophical
truths from the
perspective
of
contemporary
liberalism is likewise that such
claims are
partisan
or
sectarian and
considered
nongeneralizable
or
nonaccessible under the
conditions of
pluralism
and the burdens of
judgment.60
Given
Arendt's
concerns about the nature
of truth
in
relation to the
public
domain,
and in
particular
truth's absolutist
character
in
a
sphere
that is
pluralistic
and
relative
by
definition,
we
might suppose
that
recent liberal
efforts to con
struct fair
terms of mutual
exchange
on
questions
of common
political
concern are
practical
attempts
to
respond
to
what Arendt
called the "an
cient
antagonism"
between
truth and
politics.
Additionally,
Arendt's
concern
to
preserve
the
autonomy
of
the
political sphere
and to
safeguard
it
from either
philosophical
rule or
instrumental
rationality
might
be seen
as
roughly
equivalent
to
political
liberalism's
approach
to
overarching
conceptions
of
truth.
This,
I
think,
would be a
mistake.
Arendt's obvious
concern with the
coercive
dimension of truth claims
(the absolute)
not
withstanding,
the
appropriate
political
response
to
the
presence
of
such
Life
of
the Mind
(New
York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich,
1978),
pp.
195-217.
59Arendt,
"Truth and
Politics,"
p.
241.
^See
Rawls,
Political
Liberalism,
pp.
54-58.
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Arendt,
Rawls,
and Public Reason
277
claims
is not
to
avoid,
bypass,
or
transpose
them into a liberal
key
(the
Rawlsian
proviso),
but to
"humanize" them
through
constant
public
talk.
To say that truth claims or "comprehensive doctrines" can be "hu
manized"
through public
engagement
is to
say,
on the one
hand,
that
such claims are not
beyond public accessibility,
mutual
understanding,
or
critical
scrutiny,
nor are
they
a
priori non-reciprocal.
But this also
means,
as Arendt
argues,
that
"we humanize
what
is
going
on in the world and in
ourselves
only by speaking
of
it,
and in the course of
speaking
of it we
learn
to
be human."61
Arendt,
following
Jaspers
(but
also Socrates and
Cicero),
saw distinct
political
value
not
merely
in endless
conversation,
but
in a
specific
form of
"limitless
communication,"
one
that
"signifies
faith in the comprehensibility of all truths and the good will to reveal and
to listen as the
primary
condition for all human intercourse."62 "Truth"
can coexist
with the
political,
Arendt
insists,
but
"only
where it is hu
manized
through
discourse,
only
where each man
says
not what
just hap
pens
to occur to
him at
the moment but
what he
'deems truth'."63 This
kind of
"truth
talk,"
with its obvious
depth
and
personal
salience,
can
help
establish the common
inter-spaces
that
both link
and
separate
citi
zens,
providing
the
very
conditions for
a
specifically
civic form of
friendship.
None of this is made
possible,
however,
if we
are
already
predisposed, given certain analytic liberal categories, to see in every phi
losophic/religious
truth claim the
inscrutable,
non-accessible,
or
greedy
demand for
power
and
unqualified
submission.
What
accounts for this
significant
difference
in
regard
to the
role
of
"truth"
in
politics?
Part
of
the answer is that whereas
both
Rawls
and
Arendt
(like Aristotle)
give
central
political significance
to
logos
(or
rea
soned
speech),
Arendt views
logos
itself as
subject
to
productive
trans
formations
through
critical
publicity
in a
way
that
public
reason does
not
allow. In
doing
so,
Arendt directs us to
an alternative form of
public
speech and action that might take its basic orientation and ethos from a
statement
by Lessing,
a line that Arendt
deems "the most
profound
thing
that has ever
been
said
about the
relationship
between
truth and human
ity:
'Let each
man
say
what he deems
truth,
and let truth itself
be com
mended unto
God.'"64
Arendt draws
optimism
and
joy
out of
Lessing's recognition
of hu
man
limitation,
or
what Rawls calls the
"burdens of
judgment":
it
is
pre
cisely
because
we are
never
collectively
certain of the
truth that
we are
able
to have an
engaging,
vibrant,
and
meaningful public
life,
one
that
6lArendt,
Men
in Dark
Times,
p.
25.
62Ibid.,
p.
85;
see
also
Arendt,
"Concern
with Politics
in Recent
European
Philoso
phical
Thought,"
in
Essays
in
Understanding, pp.
441-43.
63Arendt,
Men in Dark
Times,
p.
30.
"Ibid.,
p.
31.
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278
Mark Button
can
draw
upon
without
needing
or
believing
it
possible
to settle on one
comprehensive
view. To
be
effective, however,
one must be
willing
to
undertake what we might call the Socratic requirement—to speak one's
truth as
fully
as one
can, or,
put
more
modestly,
to
speak
one's doxa
truthfully.
That is to
say,
then,
that
what
one deems
truth
matters to
poli
tics and
needs
to be
spoken publicly.
This is
necessary
because
the
public
realm and
the
moral
validity
of
political judgment
depend upon
maximiz
ing
the innumerable
perspectives
of
others,
and
focusing
these views on
each and
every question
that
enters the
public
domain.
To
be
sure,
this
process
also entails a certain amount of
risk,
because one must be
ready
to watch
one's
"truths" become one
opinion among many
in
the
public,
and to risk this disclosure and public consideration is to accept the idea
that
these "truths"
may undergo
revision or
change.
This
is,
at least in
part, why courage
and moderation rank so
high
on Arendt's scale of
po
litical
virtues.65
On these
points,
Socrates was an
exemplar
for Arendt:
"Socrates wanted to make the
city
more truthful
by
delivering
each of the
citizens their
truths.
The
method
of
doing
so is
dialegesthai, talking
something through,
but this dialectic
brings
forth truth not
by destroying
doxa or
opinion,
but
on
the
contrary
reveals doxa in its own
truthful
ness."66 Once
again,
the end
result
was
not
arriving
at one
acceptable
general truth, because "to have talked something through ... seemed re
sult
enough."67
This
is
the
knowledge
that friends
possess.
Nothing
could be more different from liberal "methods
of avoidance"
or
public reasoning
requirements
than this. As a
consequence,
and to
help highlight
what this
Arendtian
conception
of
public dialogue
is
driv
ing
at,
we
might
identify
two sets of
practical
lessons that can
be derived
from the above
discussion.
First,
for
contemporary
liberals,
the
point
is to
stress that
there
may
be
more truth in doxa than
they suppose,
but more
importantly,
the
process
of
considering
these truths
helps
to constitute
our common political world, offers incentives to participate in it, and
provides
the
terms
and the
spirit
of
civic
friendships.68
Public
reasoning
65See
Arendt,
The
Human
Condition,
pp.
35-36,
191.
66
Arendt,
Philosophy
and
Politics,"
p.
81.
67Ibid„
pp.
81-82.
68Another
way
to
see this
commitment at work
in Arendt is
to observe that for
her
(and
Kant),
it
would be absurd
to
hold
to
the old
Latin
adage:
"Let
justice
be
done
though
the
world
may perish."
This
evaluation
changes,
however,
if we
replace
justice
with truth.
In
doing
so,
Arendt
argues,
"the sacrifice of truth
for the survival
of the world
would be
more futile than the sacrifice of
any
other
principle
or virtue. For while we
may
refuse
even to
ask
ourselves
whether life
would still be
worth
living
in a
world
deprived
of such
notions
as
justice
and
freedom,
the
same,
curiously,
is not
possible
with
respect
to the
seemingly
so
much
less
political
idea
of truth ... No
permanence,
no
perseverance
in exis
tence,
can even
be
conceived of
without men
willing
to
testify
to what is and
appears
to
them
because it is."
"Truth and
Politics,"
p.
229.
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Arendt,
Rawls,
and
Public Reason
279
itself will
always
be
plural (never
singular)
and
will
ineluctably
draw
upon
a
diverse
set of
ideas, doctrines,
and
energies
whose latent
political
possibilities we shall never be able to fully predict or control. Second,
for the adherents of
any
particular
truth
(religious
or
otherwise),
we
might
counsel
the
following:
truth will become doxa in the
political
arena and will remain
so
until,
humanized
through
public
discourse,
it
is
turned into
something
that could be
democratically
"held" as a truth
through
open
discourse,
persuasion,
and
agreement.
For some this will
surely
be a hard
pill
to
swallow,
but this fact alone cannot
justify
the
foreclosure
of
public political engagement
or
the
curtailment of humani
tas.
Conclusion
If
reciprocity
and civic
friendship
are what
political
liberals
want,
then
it
is the
idea of
public
reason
they
should abandon.
I
have
argued
that with
an
appropriate
concern for the absolutist dimensions
of
any
truth claim
(religious
or
secular),
Arendt
provides
a
perceptive
vision of
the
self
and
politics
that is more
open
to
and
critically engaged
with the
deepest
di
mensions of
persons
(humanitas).
If we are interested in mutual
respect,
meaningful
forms of
toleration,
and the cultivation of civic forms of
friendship,
this
perspective
provides
a first
step
towards a more
promis
ing
alternative than liberal
public
reason. To be
sure,
adopting
this Ar
endtian
conceptual
frame,
as I have
presented
it,
is not without its own
internal
problems.
Indeed,
the
Arendtian-inspired perspective
that
I have
utilized
here to contest
the limits of
public
reason
may
also
need to be
employed against
Arendt
herself,
or at least certain
features of Arendt's
own
understating
of the boundaries
of the
public
realm.
Many
critics
have
rightly
pointed
out
that Arendt seeks to
limit
the
conduct of
public,
political
exchange
to those matters that are, in her view,
properly
and
authentically political.
The
critical thrust of these
arguments
is
that the
nature of
Arendt's own boundaries
on the
political
are
so austere as to
foreclose
the
entry
of
issues and
organized
claims
that have become
es
sential
in modern
politics,
things
like social
welfare,
economic
justice,
and education.69
There is
simply
no
denying
the fact
that Arendt views
many
of
these
kinds
of issues as not
appropriately
political.
This does
not
mean,
how
ever,
that such matters
are
unimportant,
or
that
they
are
inconsequential
for the establishment of a vibrant
political
sphere
according
to Arendt. In
69Habermas,
"Hannah
Arendt's Communications
Concept
of
Power";
Pitkin,
"Justice:
On
Relating
Private and
Public";
Margaret
Canovan,
"Politics as Culture:
Hannah
Arendt
and the Public
Realm,"
History
of
Political
Thought
6
(1985):
617-42.
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280 Mark Button
fact,
exactly
the
contrary
is
true.70
Nonetheless,
Arendt's
understanding
of socio-economic
concerns as
part
of the
necessary, pre-political
condi
tions for the full exercise of human freedom holds little persuasive
weight
for
those who
recognize
that
passing
the threshold of
the
political
(inclusion
on
the
public agenda)
is itself one of the
primary
conditions
for
having
the
so-called "social"
question
addressed
in
the first
place.
Yet
if we
highlight
those dimensions of
Arendt's
political thought
that have
been utilized here to
question
the restrictions of liberal
public
reason
(self-disclosure,
humanitas,
and civic
friendship),
Arendt
provides
criti
cal resources with which to
challenge
the coherence and
stability
of her
own exclusions.
Indeed,
if we
give
these
qualities priority
in
our under
standing of political speech and action, Arendt's various attempts to fix
the
political
in
abstract,
non-contextual terms
are as
unavailing
as
politi
cal
liberalism's
fabrication of a monovocal standard
of
public
reason.
The
possibilities
of an
open,
disclosive
space
of
appearance, taking spe
cific
shape
within
the in-between
of
plural
selves,
may
thus
be
seen as
virtuously crosscutting,
from both a
theoretical
and
practical
point
of
71
view.
Mark
Button
Department of Political Science
University
of Utah
70See
especially
here
"What is
Freedom?" in
Between
Past
and
Future,
pp.
143-72,
at
pp.
149-50.
7'Earlier versions of this
paper
were
presented
to the
Tanner Humanities
Center of
the
University
of
Utah and at the Annual
Meeting
of the
Western Political
Science
Asso
ciation,
Denver, Colo.,
March
2003.1
would like to thank all
those who
participated
in
these
discussions,
especially
Ed
Wingenbach.
For their
helpful
comments on
earlier
drafts
of
this
article,
I
would also like to thank
Lisa
Disch,
David
Gutterman,
Chandran
Kukathas,
and Linda
Zerilli.