Actors, Spectators, and Power in Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Political Judgement

Abstract

Readers of Hannah Arendt's political theory have always found it difficult to integrate her writings on political judgment into her political theory as a whole. This is primarily because Arendt's judging subject seems to be at odds with the way that she frames the acting subject. In response to this problem, this article identifies an implicit Kantianism within Arendt's political theory, which can be employed in understanding the role of political judgement and its relation to action in Arendt. I suggest that, in order to ground the judgement of the actor, Arendt appeals to a version of Kantian reflective judgement, as it appears in Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement. I then argue that although Arendt attempts to distance herself from the Kantian transcendental, she also seems to lean on theoretical formulations that correlate to the sublime feeling in the spectator, also found in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Finally, I relate these two ways of judging to the notion of power as Arendt discusses it in The Human Condition. I suggest that it is through power that political judgment appears in the world, as the clash between the reflective judgment of the actor and the philosophical judgment of the spectator.