Arendt’s Machiavellian moment

Abstract

In this article, I offer a reassessment of the influence of two disparate bodies of thought – republicanism and existentialism – on Hannah Arendt. Arendt, I argue, is not involved in an ‘agonistic appropriation’ of Heidegger. Arendt identifies two opposed attitudes in Heidegger’s work. The first Promethean moment places Heidegger squarely in the tradition of Western political philosophy, and the second seemingly correcting for this recommends a quietism. Arendt rejects both these attitudes. Machiavelli rather than Heidegger, I argue, is the key influence on Arendt's political thought. Through a reading of Arendt’s published works and her unpublished 1955 lecture notes on Machiavelli I show that the central categories of Arendt’s thought emerge from her meditation on Machiavelli’s texts. Arendt finds in Machiavelli a performative understanding of politics, an accurate understanding of the connection between morality and politics, and a primacy given to politics that she thought it deserves.

“Nothing much had happened”: Settler colonialism in Hannah Arendt

“…When she does acknowledge such forms of violence, Arendt thinks of it as an origin , and not a continual relation (of domination, or otherwise) between Indigenous peoples and settlers. Unlike one of her touchstones Machiavelli, who emphasizes the need for “re-founding and returning to beginnings,” Arendt’s acknowledgment contains disavowal within it in that she wants to push violence back to the distant origins of the state (Baluch, 2014: 164). Arendt’s depictions contrast with the insights key to settler-colonial studies, which have shown how settler expansionism endures and is reproduced through social structures and institutions woven into the polity over time.…”

Arendt in the Platformised World: Labour, Work and Action on Digital Platforms

“…His writings-from the standpoint of the political outcast-depict precisely the type of political thought she demands: as an end to itself rather than measured with the yardstick of philosophy (Heuer et al, 2011, p. 198). Machiavelli's understanding of the political as performative, primary and amoral, is crucial to the coherence of Arendt's work (Baluch, 2014). She concurs with the notion that "all subjects should be debated" or reasoned, a guiding principle of Machiavellian thought (Machiavelli, 1531(Machiavelli, /1989, and a precursor to her own radical embrace of plurality as the conditio per quam of (political) life (Arendt, 1958.…”