A time to set politics aside

On September 24 2008, the American presidential campaign took a dramatic turn when John McCain, the candidate for the Republican party, announced that he would suspend his campaign and go to Washington in order to rally support for an economic stimulus package that should help solve the crisis that had struck the financial markets in the United States, and threatened to develop into a serious global economic downturn. In was time, he said, ”to set politics aside”,[1] and called for his Democratic counterpart, Barack Obama, to do the same. Barack Obama, however, refused, arguing that ”this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person who, in approximately 40 days, will be responsible for dealing with this mess”.[2] Nevertheless, the two presidential candidates issued a joint statement, calling for a bipartisan solution to the crisis: “Now is a time to come together Democrats and Republicans in a spirit of cooperation for the sake of the American people.”[3] This is obviously not the place to engage in a detailed discussion of the reasons behind and the character of the financial crisis. What should be noted, however, is that both presidential candidates seemed to accept, first, that there was a difference between financial or economic issues and political issues and second, that the financial or economic issues took precedence over political ones.

In attempted allegiance to Hannah Arendt’s mode of thinking, I will let this event, and these remarks made by the two presidential candidates, be the impetus for an inquiry into Arendt’s own understanding of politics. For how, we may ask, are we to interpret and understand the fact that the economy became the most important issue in the 2008 American presidential campaign? What, in other words, is the significance of this? And more specifically, what does it say about our notion of politics, and the importance we bestow upon it, when it can be ”set aside”, and trumped, as it were, by putatively more important concerns? These questions, I suggest, can be answered in the context of Hannah Arendt’s political thinking, and the remarks made by the two presidential candidates can be shown to have a quite interesting meaning in this context.

In a nutshell, I’ll argue that politics, in Arendt’s view, should be understood as collective action, and that the rightness of this understanding hinges upon the possibility to make Arendt’s highly individualistic notion of political action into a collective one. Accordingly, the question I seek to answer in this paper, apart from the question of what Arendt understands by politics, can be stated as follows: Is politics, understood as collective action, possible? To say that politics is a form of action is not to say, of course, that politics is identical with action or that Arendt’s conception of politics has the same extension as her concept of action. Rather, I suggest that her understanding of politics can not be grasped unless we have an idea of what she means by action, and, perhaps more importantly, what does not qualify as action. Moreover, arguably, action, in Arendt’s sense of the word, is the most important element of an answer to the question of what she understands by politics.

Reflective remarks

However, before inquiring into Arendt’s understanding of politics, and before we even try to assess whether her understanding is right, an initial reflection upon the nature of these questions seems to be required. In other words, before we go on and answer the question of what Arendt understands by politics, we must look into how she herself approaches politics. As Aristotle famously points out in The Nicomachean Ethics, we should never ”expect more precision in the treatment of any subject than the nature of that subject permits”,[4] and hence, our approach towards Arendt’s understanding of politics should be in line with the way she herself understands it. More to the point: As to the first question, about her understanding of politics, it should be noted that it cannot be captured from a purely analytical point of view. While a conceptual analysis can be useful for some purposes, it would be a non-starter and run against the spirit and idiosyncratic methodology of Arendt’s own work to assume that her understanding of politics can be reduced to a would-be exhaustive definition. Arendt’s approach, following in the footsteps of Edmund Husserl, is phenomenological, i.e. she tries to describe and highlight how politics in its various shapes and forms is experienced, both actually and potentially, by participants and observers in the field. Hence, our task would consist in giving a general account of these experiences. By taking, as a reference point, the political experiences of the subjects living the polis of Greek antiquity, and by drawing upon a long tradition of political thought, Arendt seemingly intend to say something about politics per se. But exactly because of her broad historical view, it becomes notoriously difficult to establish the exact level of generality of what she says. For, it could be asked, if political practice as well as politicians’ and political thinkers’ understanding of politics has fluctuated incessantly throughout history, how is it even possible to say something about politics per se? I will not discuss this matter further here, but just note that this is a fundamental methodological problem. As to the second question, about the rightness of Arendt’s view, it should be noted that this can be interpreted in at least three ways. First, there is the question of whether Arendt’s understanding of politics is consistent. Is it, in other words, possible to think her conception of politics without contradiction? Second, there is a question of whether Arendt’s understanding of politics is phenomenologically correct. Does she, in other words, succeed in capturing the experiences of the various actors in the political field? And third, there is a question of whether Arendt’s understanding is normatively right. Is her conception of politics something to be strived for? In other words, ought the political experiences she highlights to be cultivated? These questions are all important in their own right. Here, however, I will focus upon the first and the second, i.e. whether Arendt’s understanding of politics is consistent and phenomenologically adequate.

Politics as action

In the following section, I will argue that Arendt’s understanding of the political is best exposed through her concept of action. Politics, in Arendt’s sense of the word, is collective action. Or so, at least, I argue. And in order to see what is meant by collective action, we must first look into the concept of action itself. In the everyday use of the word, action seems to be understood as whatever someone does. A baker acts, we are inclined to say, if she bakes bread in order for someone to eat it; likewise, a carpenter acts, we say, if she makes a chair in order for someone to have a place to sit; and finally, an activist acts if she initiates a demonstration against the G-20 summit. This is, of course, the everyday use of the word, and it seems to encompass whatever someone does. However, and this is an important point in itself, Arendt’s use of the word action is markedly different from the everyday use of the word. Of the three instances of ”doings”, or activities,[5] mentioned above, only the last would qualify as action in Arendt’s sense of the word. And in order to see how this can be the case, we need to give an account of the two other activities, and what they are, if are not actions. Because, as Arendt points out, as long as ”we are unable to say what anything is without distinguishing it from something else”,[6] we must first look into what action is not, and on the background of this, try to obtain an understanding of action itself.

First, in Arendt’s tripartite conceptual scheme, to bake bread in order to eat it would be an instance of labour, because it is motivated or driven by sheer necessity. In order to survive as human beings, biologically speaking, we need, among other things, but perhaps most importantly, food. The things we do, and the activities we engage in, in order to obtain food and the other things we need to survive, Arendt calls labour, and by labelling is so, she wishes to distinguish it from not only action, but also work. Labour is, in Arendt’s own words, ”man’s metabolism with nature” and its products, which are not proper products at all, because they have no lasting quality – they do not, in other words, ”stay in the world long enough to become a part of it” – are consumed immediately. This labouring activity, like baking bread in order to eat it, is ”concentrated exclusively on life and its maintenance”, i.e. the sole purpose for which it is perpetuated, is to keep the labourer herself (the animal laborans in Arendt’s vocabulary) alive. Because of this narrowly defined goal, labour as an activity ”is oblivious of the world to the point of worldlessness”.[7] Whereas a world necessarily surpass what is in it, the labouring activity, having consumption and continued labour as its sole end, does not contain any surplus element, no in-between, which can ”relate and separate men at the same time”.[8] As Arendt says, ”[o]ne must eat in order to labor and must labor in order to eat”,[9] and as such, labour is a wholly self-contained and cyclical activity, and the construction of a world is therefore neither necessary nor possible.

Second, to make a chair in order to have a place to sit, although many people wouldn’t hesitate to call this an action, according to Arendt, however, it is not. Rather, it is an instance of what she calls work. The distinction between the two activities work and labour is notoriously difficult to pin down, partly because this distinction is not well established in the philosophical tradition, and to a large extent is of Arendt’s own making, but also, as Arendt herself points out, the two activities ”seem to overlap in certain important areas to such an extent that the unanimous agreement with which both public and learned opinion have identified these two different matters seem well justified”.[10] However, while labour, as we saw, is marked by dire biological necessity and ”produces” objects for immediate consumption, work is a more mediated, and therefore also more complex, activity. It is not marked by necessity, but utility, and it produces objects to be used for some other purpose than the immediate satisfaction of biological needs. The making of a chair, therefore, which is, of course, just one among indefinitely many possible instances of work, are not motivated by dire necessity. Rather, it is, like a tool, a means to an end, which might, but need not, have anything to do with consumption and sheer subsistence. One might very well sit on a chair while having dinner, but a chair has many other functions as well, and in any case, one does not eat the chair itself. The key quality, therefore, distinguishing the products of work from the ”products” of labour, it that the former has a permanence, durability and solidity that the latter does not possess. In producing a chair, for example, a person (homo faber in Arendt’s vocabulary) makes something non-ephemeral, i.e. something which has the inherent ability to last for a long period of time and, at least potentially, subsist long after the person who made it herself has ceased to exist. In this way, a whole range of permanent things are created which contain the surplus element, the in-between, that the ”products” of labour lack. And this again makes is adequate to speak of a world in which homo faber, the fabricating man, lives. Differently put, by working upon, and transforming natural things, like a tree, into a durable man-made thing, like a chair, an emphatically human world of objects is created, which potentially surpass, moreover, both temporally and spatially, the life of the craftsman herself. However, it is possible to come up with objects which apparently contain elements of both labour and work; objects, that is, like a field of corn, which is, at the same time, both for consumption and a means to and end. And for our purposes at least, it is interesting to look at what labouring activity and work have in common, in order to see what separates them from action. And, a striking feature unifying work and labour, is their predictable and explainable character. That is to say, because both activities are determined by factors external to the person actually engaging in the activities, and, consequently, once these external factors are known, it is possible, at least in principle, to predict what the person in question will do, and explain why she does it. Moreover, both labour and work are performed solitarily. This is not to say, of course, that every time someone bakes bread or makes a chair, they do it alone. Such a claim would surely be absurd. The point is only that these activities do not presuppose the presence, participation or cooperation of other people, but can conceivably be carried out in total isolation. And, in the case of division of labour, if a product is in fact made in cooperation with other people – if, for example, I mixes the wheat and the water, while you do the kneading – an organizational and therefore political element is being introduced in the labouring process, which does not, however, pertain to the labouring activity qua labour:

Specialization of work and division of labor have in common only the general principle of organization, which itself has nothing to do with either work or labor but owes its origin to the strictly political sphere of life, to the fact of man’s capacity to act and to act together in concert.[11]

The predictability, explainability and solitariness pertaining to the two activities of work and labour are worth stressing because it is exactly this that separates these activities form action. Whereas labour is the activity providing for the sheer biological subsistence of the labourer herself, and whereas work is the capacity to produce permanent, durable and solid use objects, action is the ability to take an initiative and begin something new. To object, at this point, that to bake bread or to make a chair is indeed also to begin something new, would be to miss the point. Because, just as labour is a response to the necessities imposed upon human beings by its biological needs, work is simply the implementation of means appropriate to a previously given end. To act, however, is to begin something new in a radically different fashion. By action, Arendt means the emphatically human capacity to let something come into being which was formerly not there. Action, consequently, is not to be regarded as a mere response to some externally given factors; by its very nature, action is not a reactive or derivative activity. Rather, the motivating force lies in the agent herself – she, and nothing else, is the one initiating something in the first place. And the fact that action is the capacity to begin something new, implies that it is, at the same time, essentially unpredictable and unexplainable. As Arendt puts it,

[t]he new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from hum, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.[12]

To initiate, therefore, a political demonstration against the G-20 summit could, in Arendt’s restricted sense of the term, qualify as an action. To actually carry out a demonstration is neither a way to provide for one’s own survival, nor an implementation of a means in order to reach a given goal. Rather, the person initiating a demonstration (man qua man, in Arendt’s vocabulary, distinguishing it from man qua animal laborans and man qua homo faber) is beginning something new which has an inherent meaning of its own, and which, moreover, discloses or reveals her own unique identity, i.e. who in contradistinction to what she is. And by acting, the person immerses herself in, and help construct, an intersubjectively shared world of human relations – what Arendt calls ”the realm of human affairs”.[13] Action, as opposed to work and labour, but like the activity of speech, is therefore an essentially non-solitary activity; it presupposes the presence and participation of other human beings, which are all equally unique and distinct. Action, therefore, ”corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world”.[14] Furthermore, whereas labour is performed for the purpose of sheer subsistence, and work for some purpose of utility, action has no extrinsic or exogenous purpose. Rather, it is the activity itself, i.e. the revealing of unique and distinct human beings in their capacity to being something new, that is its sole purpose and raison d’être.

Whereas action, thus conceptualized, can be said to be the most important element in Arendt’s understanding of politics – that politics, as Margaret Canovan claims, is action – a further examination into what it means to act collectively seems to be required. Because, although action involves the self-disclosure of an individual vis-à-vis her peers, and although this ”revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for nor against them”,[15] it seems to be an important difference between the experience of acting vis-à-vis one’s peers and in concert with one’s peers. And while the first form of togetherness seems to imply individuality, the second form is the one actually describing collective action. More to the point, while it seems unproblematic to assume that action, in order to be an individualistic activity, involves the presence of other human beings, it seems to be far more problematic to think of action as both an individualistic and a collective activity at the same time. How, one may ask, can someone act in concert with other human beings without at the same time renouncing at least some of their uniqueness and distinctness? By explicitly stating that politics as action implies neither force nor violence (something that would eliminate the uniqueness and distinctness of the actor and hence reduce her action to mere work), Arendt tries to bridge this apparent gap with a highly ingenious notion of power. In Arendt’s view, power is the ability, ”not just to act, but to act in concert”.[16] However, it is notoriously difficult to pin down exactly how, if not by means of violence, this acting-in-concert comes about. In fact, this seems to be an unresolved tension underlying Arendt’s understanding of politics. To return to the example of the activist initiating a demonstration against the G-20 summit, while the initiation itself may retain every quality of uniqueness and distinctiveness, the demonstration, in order to be a real demonstration, i.e. a collective act, seems to presuppose the submission of more than one individual under a common cause or purpose. And such a submission, moreover, seems to threaten exactly the uniqueness and distinctiveness of the individuals actually participating in the demonstration. And this, in turn, seems to threaten to reduce the demonstration to an instance of work rather than action, i.e. to reduce it to the mere implementation of means appropriate to a previously given end. While there seems to be a real tension, therefore, in the Arendtian understanding of politics as collective action, this does not necessarily undermine her phenomenological description of politics as such.

We now need to elaborate more fully on this phenomenological description. In order to see the implications of Arendt's understanding of politics, and also to see the importance of the remarks made by the two presidential candidates in the 2008 American election campaign, we need to explicate another crucial distinction in Arendt’s conceptual framework, viz. the distinction between the public and the private sphere, and, subsequently, her view of the emergence of the social.

Drawing heavily upon a phenomenological analysis of the political life and experiences of the citizens of the polis of Greek antiquity, and making a ”distinction between a private and a public sphere of life [which] corresponds to the household and the political realms”,[17] Arendt makes the claim that, whereas the private sphere is the sphere in which people pursues and secures their own survival – a sphere, accordingly, marked by the strict biological necessity of animal laborans – it is only in the public sphere that action, and therefore also politics, becomes possible. It is, of course, hardly controversial to say that politics takes place in the public sphere, but in the context of Arendt’s own understanding of this sphere, as well as her rather restricted understanding of what it means to act, the distinctness and originality of Arendt’s understanding of politics becomes evident.

In the highly influential tradition of liberal political philosophy, articulated perhaps most succinctly by the tradition’s grand of father, John Stuart Mill, politics is an activity concerned with the well-being and freedom of the individual. Freedom, in this tradition, is assumed to be enjoyed first and foremost in the private sphere, and, consequently, is conceived of as a kind of non-interference. This becomes evident in the articulation of Mill’s famous liberty principle, which is thought to be the normative bedrock of politics, and which announces that ”you may justifiably limit a person’s freedom of action only if they threaten harm to another.”[18] As such, the freedom that politics is supposed to serve and protect, is presumed to be either freedom from or freedom to something: Freedom from the unwanted interference of other people, and freedom to do whatever one wishes to do. And moreover, it is the task of politicians qua politicians to ensure that the individual’s freedom is not interfered with, and that the individual, to the point at which her freedom threatens the freedom of others, is at liberty to do whatever she pleases. Politics, in this view, is instrumental and hence does not possess any intrinsic value. On the contrary, if the private liberty of the individual is thought to be the raison d’être of politics, politics itself is seemingly reduced to what Arendt calls work, i.e. the implementation of the appropriate means in the pursuit of an essentially non-political end (non-political, exactly, because it concerns the private and not the public sphere). And as such, politics, being executed for the sake of the private, is reduced to the demiurgic activities of administration, management and governance. Arendt, obviously, takes issue with this understanding of politics. In fact, she inverts the liberal order of priority, by claiming that it is the private that exists for the sake of the public, i.e. the political, sphere, and not vice versa. And this, moreover, she does by criticizing the liberal tradition’s conflation of the two notions of liberty and freedom. What thinkers like John Stuart Mill lumps together and treats as interchangeable notions, in Arendt’s view, actually refers two wholly different experiences. According to Arendt, as we have seen, the private sphere is the sphere of labour and necessity, and as necessity is thought to stand in contradiction to both liberty and freedom, this sphere is simply not the locus of these two experiences. However, an individual may be liberated from the burden of labour, e.g., by forcing others to provide the food and the other necessities she needs in order to survive as a biological creature. Survival, accordingly, may be secured, and, in such a situation, an individual may appropriately be said to enjoy liberty. Freedom, on the other hand, is not a state, like liberty – is neither, that is to say, freedom from, nor freedom to – but refers, in Arendt’s phenomenological description, to the realization of a human being’s capacity to take an initiative vis-à-vis equals and begin something new in the intersubjectively shared world of human affairs. Freedom, accordingly, being a potential, may be actualized through action. As Arendt puts it,

Freedom is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all. Without it, political life as such would be meaningless. The raison d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action.[19]

Liberation is therefore neither identical with freedom, nor the ultimate aim of politics. Rather, liberation from the burdensome and arduous aspects of life is conceived as a precondition for both freedom and political action. And freedom, i.e. the realization of human beings’ capacity to act, moreover, being a potential that can never be secured but must always be enacted, is thought to be, not the external goal of politics, but an integral part of political activity itself.

The liberal reduction of politics to administration, management and governance, i.e. to an activity which has some kind of utility as its raison d’être, and which, therefore, may appropriately be called a form of work as opposed to action, is explained, by Arendt, as the consequence of the extension of the private sphere and the marginalization of a distinct public sphere by the emergence of the social. Totally unknown to the Greek experience of life, the emergence of a distinct social sphere in modern times fundamentally altered the meaning of politics. While politics, in Greek antiquity, was an activity with a purpose of its own, i.e. the spontaneous self-disclosure of individuals capable of taking an initiative and being something new, in modern times, Arendt argues, politics has lost this inherent value. From Thomas Aquinas onwards, the meaning of politics has gradually been transformed into the management, the ”housekeeping”, of society – expressed, perhaps most clearly, in the overwhelming importance of economics (which means, literally, household or housekeeping) on the political agenda. As Arendt puts it,

[S]ince with the rise of society, that is, the rise of the ”household” (oikia) or of economic activities to the public realm, housekeeping and all matters pertaining formerly to the private sphere of the family have become a ”collective” concern. In the modern world, the two realms indeed constantly flow into each other like waves in the never-resting stream of the life process itself.

Instead, therefore, of being conceived as a sphere of action where people can come together as equals and show themselves as unique and distinct individuals, the public sphere, in the modern experience, has been colonialized, as it were, by economic concerns. And although such an understanding of politics, by being concerned with the necessities of life at a collective level, may be well suited to explain the incessant strive for liberation from the arduous and burdensome aspects of life, it can nonetheless never capture freedom understood as a realization of one’s human potential qua man to take an initiative and begin something new in the world.

By juxtaposing the Greek experience of politics as action with the modern experience of politics as management, we seem to have put ourselves in a position where an assessment of the significance of the fact that the economy turned into the most important issue in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, is realizable. From an Arendtian perspective, the fact that the most important political issues are economic in character can be seen as evidence for her assertion that the emergence and growth of the social has marginalized politics as action. And curiously enough, it seems to be a close correspondence between this Arendtian understanding of politics, and John McCain’s understanding of politics. For, if to go to Washington in order to fix the economy, would be to ”set politics aside”,[20] then politics undeniably must be something else than just the management of the national economy. And as such, Arendt’s understanding of politics seems to capture aspects of political experience that other conceptualizations of politics, such as the liberal, seem to downplay. Arguably, it would be difficult to understand the remarks made by John McCain, were we to assume that politics was, for example, simply the administration of public affairs according to some principle. Moreover, although Barack Obama refused to give in to his counterpart’s call for a suspension of his campaign, it is interesting to note that his justification for doing so was due to his reluctance to withdraw form the public sphere. As already quoted, Obama claimed that the time of crisis was exactly the time when ”the American people need to hear from the person who, in approximately 40 days, will be responsible for dealing with this mess”.[21] And this reluctance to withdraw from the public sphere seems to correspond with Arendt’s phenomenological description of politics as an activity in which individuals disclose themselves as unique and distinct human beings vis-à-vis their peers. A presidential campaign, such as the American, can accordingly be interpreted, in Arendtian terms, as an effort on the part of the candidates to show who in contradistinction with merely what they are, and thus, phenomenologically speaking, Arendt’s understanding of politics as action seems to highlight certain experiences pertaining to political life which seems to be downplayed to the point of neglect by the dominant tradition of liberal political philosophy. And although there are surely many aspects of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign which is not well captured by the Arendtian understanding of politics, e.g., how the campaigns are both individual initiatives and collective acts at the same times, Arendt, as Margaret Canovan points out, ”is surely justified in over-emphasizing what the trends of our time might incline us to forget altogether”.[22]

Conclusion

To sum up, Hannah Arendt’s understanding of politics can be exposed through an inquiry into her understanding of what she conceptualizes as one of three fundamental human activities, i.e. through an inquiry into her concept of action. Action, being the activity that distinguishes human beings from all other living creatures, is the ability to begin something new and thereby to disclose one’s uniqueness and distinctness in the context of other equally unique and distinct human beings. As such, arguably, action is a highly individualistic affair. However, politics, being the ability not just to act vis-à-vis, but in concert with other human beings, is an emphatically collective, as opposed to individual affair. In this paper, I have endeavoured to expose this tension, i.e. this apparent gap between the individualistic character of action and the undeniable collective character of politics, in Arendt’s work, and I have expressed doubts as to whether Arendt’s own attempt to bridge this gap with a highly ingenious notion of power, is successful. In other words, I have suggested that Arendt's notion of politics of action may be inconsistent.

However, and as I have tried to show, this lurking inconsistency does not necessarily contaminate the other parts of Arendt's phenomenological description of political life. By taking the experiences of the citizens in the polis of Greek antiquity, Arendt’s work lets a highly original understanding of politics come to the fore. And thus, by reversing the liberal credo that politics is done for the sake of the private individual, Arendt apparently attempts to restore the meaning of politics as it was experienced in Greek antiquity. Of course, Arendt is aware of the fact that much has happened since Pericles held his funeral oration, and especially the emergence and growth of the social, so central to the modern notion of politics, has fundamentally altered the meaning of political life. However, by juxtaposing the political experiences of Greek antiquity and the political experiences of the modern world, Arendt's understanding of politics seem to be a quite successful attempt to capture and articulate some political experiences which the dominant liberal tradition of political thinking has downplayed to the point of neglect.

The question of whether Arendt's understanding of politics is right, consequently, cannot be answered unequivocally. What can be said, however, is that phenomenologically speaking, Arendt is certainly justified in restoring and highlighting these political experiences, and, as we have seen in the case of the 2008 American presidential campaign, Arendtian insights may be useful in an interpretation of why the two candidates acted and spoke as they did.

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[1]Elisabeth Bumiller and Jeff Zeleny, ”First Debate Up in Air as McCain Steps Off the Trail” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/us/politics/25campaign.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all (20.04.09)

[2] ibid.

[3] ibid.

[4] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, [1094b13-1095a7]

[5] This apparent tension between the everyday use of the action and Arendt’s use of it, comes to the fore when she finds herself forced to describe labour as well as work and action as activities – a word with obvious etymological ties to the concept of action.

[6] Arendt, The Human Condition, 176

[7] ibid., 118

[8] ibid., 52

[9] ibid., 143

[10] ibid., 138

[11] ibid., 123

[12] ibid., 178

[13] ibid., 25

[14] ibid., 7

[15] ibid., 180

[16] Arendt, On Violence, 44

[17] Arendt, The Human Condition, 28

[18] Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, 106

[19] cited in Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, 8

[20] Bumiller and Zeleny, ” First Debate Up in Air as McCain Steps Off the Trail”

[21] ibid.

[22] Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, 125