Linda M. G. Zerilli

We feel our freedom : Imagination and judgment in the thought of Hannah Arendt

Critics of Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy argue that Arendt fails to address the most important problem of political judgment, namely, validity. This essay shows that Arendt does indeed have an answer to the problem that preoccupies her critics, with one important caveat: she does not think that validity is the all-important problem of political judgment—the affirmation of human freedom is.

Doing Without Knowing: Feminism's Politics of the Ordinary

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. Wittgenstein

Value Pluralism and the Problem of Judgment: Farewell to Public Reason

This essay examines the significantly different approaches of John Rawls and Hannah Arendt to the problem of judgment in democratic theory and practice.

Toward a Feminist Theory of Judgment

I n her well-known essay “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” Susan Moller Okin takes up “the claim, made in the context of basically liberal democracies, that minority cultures or ways of life are not sufficiently protected by the practice of ensuring the individual rights of their members, and as a consequence [that] these should also be protected through special group rights or privileges” (1999, 10–11). Insofar as most (especially non-Western, nonliberal) cultures are characterized by gender practices and ideologies that strongly disadvantage women, says Okin, “group rights are potentially, and in many cases actually, antifeminist” (12). Thus, she concludes, “a liberal defense of human rights must give priority to the rights of individuals, not minority cultures or groups” (17). Proceeding in this way, it is not difficult for Okin to make a reasonable case against multiculturalism, understood as the extension of special rights to cultural groups, for the latter tend in her view to discriminate against women. But what counts as discrimination? Critics accuse Okin of an ethnocentric account of traditional cultures that is informed by contestable liberal conceptions of autonomy, freedom, and equality. Persuasive though these critiques may be, at the end of the day Okin’s argument cannot be easily dismissed. What continues to resonate in her essay, long after the various criticisms have been made, is something Okin herself nowhere explicitly states but nevertheless implies: we (feminists and citizens of Western democracies) need to make judgments about cultural and political practices not always our own and, where appropriate, declare them “bad for women” and refuse them our political support. Needless to say, in the context of an American feminism that has, with some good reason, been accused of a deeply biased approach to non-

Machiavelli's Sisters Women and “the Conversation” of Political Theory

If one is a woman, one is often surprised by a sudden splitting of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical. Virginia Woolf

Castoriadis, Arendt, and the Problem of the New

Readers familiar with the work of Hannah Arendt will recognize in the title of this essay a phrase from The Life of the Mind. “The problem of the new” concerns the difficulty we have imagining an event that would not be what Kant called “the continuation of a preceding series.” 1 In Arendt’s telling, this problem haunts the entire spectrum of Western philosophy as well as political theory and praxis. At bottom, says Arendt, the new confronts us with the problem of freedom, with radical contingency: the “abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed that cannot be accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and effect and is inexplicable in Aristotelian categories of potentiality and actuality.” 2 Although thinkers like Kant knew that “an act can only be called free if it is not affected or caused by anything preceding it,” writes Arendt, they could not explain it within what they saw as the “unbreakable sequence of the time continuum,” within which every act appears as the continuation of a series. 3 So unable have philosophers been “to conceive of radical novelty and unpredictability,” says Arendt citing Henri Bergson, that

‘Philosophy’s Gaudy Dress’ Rhetoric and Fantasy in the Lockean Social Contract

John Locke famously sets the arts of rhetoric at odds with the pursuit of knowledge. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Grassi, this article shows that Locke’s epistemological and political arguments are parasitic on the very tropes and figures he would exclude in any serious discourse. Accordingly, Locke’s attack on the divine right of kings and his famous argument for the social contract is read as exhibiting a rhetorical structure. This structure is crucial to Locke’s critique of heteronomy and his attempt to facilitate the identification of oneself as a free subject.

Begriffe und Konzepte

Das Agonale, von gr. agon (Wettstreit), ist ein von Arendt an der griechischen Polis entwickelter Aspekt der Offentlichkeit als Erscheinungsraum Handelnder. Der Begriff selbst findet sich bei Arendt nur gelegentlich, und zwar adjektiviert (als »agonaler Geist« VA 187), wurde aber von der Sache her fur die Arendt-Rezeption bedeutsam (so unter Abzug der maskulinistischen Komponenten bei Honig 1995, 1993; kritischer Villa 1999; Benhabib 1998, 201 unterscheidet zwischen einem agonalen und einem kommunikativen Handlungsmodell bei Arendt). Arendt zufolge eroffnete die Polis ihren Mitgliedern einen Erscheinungsraum »des heftigsten und unerbittlichsten Wettstreits« (VA 42), in dem jeder in Tat, Wort und Leistung Vortreffliches zu leisten hatte, um sich vor den anderen auszuzeichnen. Dieses Sich-Auszeichnen durch Sich-an-Anderen-Messen (VA 187) unterscheidet die griechische Polis von der modernen Gesellschaft, in der das Sich-Verhalten freies Handeln weitgehend verdrangt hat.

Symposium on Linda Zerilli's Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom

Linda Zerilli’s Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom seeks to restore feminism’s “lost treasure”: the foundational and radical claim to political freedom. Zerilli proceeds from a vision of political actors that allows for the shaping power of their individual and collective imagination. People, she argues, can create forms or figures that are not already present in sensible experience or existing conceptual languages. They can interrupt or alter the system of representation, in judgment and debate, and as feminists, they can do so in the creative and conflictual heat of world-building. Zerilli explores the implications of this shift of vision through generous readings of other thinkers and political activists, including Hannah Arendt, Monique Wittig, Judith Butler, and the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, as well as an address to the contemporary feminist movement. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom is a work of political theory, written primarily with an audience of fellow theorists and academic feminists in mind. Yet, the book should be of great interest to sociologists. Zerilli is responding to two problems, or characteristic reductions, that have also troubled our discipline: the persistent assumption that political identity and action follow from and can be read off of demographic characteristics, and the rendering of the political as the mere realization of social determinants or the instantiation of state institutions. Sociologists are often inclined, by disciplinary reflex, toward enumerating preand nonpolitical causes that they then take to explain political actions or outcomes. When carried to the extreme, this tendency eradicates the place of politics itself. Zerilli’s is one text that can help us develop better ways to think about politics as practices of world-building that are not exhaustively determined in advance. We should welcome the potential applications to social science and history as well as to political theory and politics itself. That does not mean, of course, that sociologists do not have extensions, criticisms, and alternatives to offer. This symposium is an expanded version of an Author Meets Critics panel organized by Ann Shola Orloff for an annual conference of the American Sociological Association. In it, three sociologists—Myra Marx Ferree, Andreas Glaeser, and George Steinmetz—summarize, assess, and react to Zerilli’s text, and their very different responses are followed by the author’s rejoinder. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom is many things, including a startling break with both socially determined notions of gender politics and the more recent tradition of feminist identity politics, but we foreground it here as a productive challenge to—and dialogue with—sociological theory. The Editors

Response to Reply by Terrell Carver

In his reply to my essay Professor Carver claims that I have tackled ‘one of the persistent puzzles in political theory, namely how to reconcile Locke’s closely tested empiricist epistemology in the Essay on Human Understanding with his own Second Treatise of Government, where “the right rule of reason” is treated as comparatively unproblematic’, p. 469, this issue. That may well be an ongoing puzzle in Locke scholarship, but it was not the problem that motivated my essay. My primary concern was, rather, the persistent tendency to read Locke as a rationalist. This rationalist reading, which I associated with Jeremy Waldron among other Locke scholars, occludes Locke’s own deep entanglement in the very rhetorical practices he otherwise decries as being at odds with the proper use of reason. To contest this reading, I tried to develop not the ‘Freud’s-eye view’ of Locke’s work that Carver attributes to me but an account that shows why Locke’s ostensibly rationalist arguments would never get off the ground without the use of rhetorical figures. Following Ernesto Grassi, I wanted to contest the received idea of rhetoric as the mere form in which rational arguments are made and argue instead for the ancient and early modern humanist understanding of rhetoric as the source of inventive political and philosophical thinking, indeed, as the very ‘ground’ of rational thought. Missing the centrality I accord to this originary figuration or rhetorical grounding in Locke’s political argumentation, Carver claims that I attribute to the figure of the social contract both a novelty that, historically speaking, it did not have and far more importance than Locke himself gave it. But I say quite explicitly that Locke did not invent this figure of the contract (or ‘compact’, to use his preferred term), let alone the idea of consent as the basis for political society. My point was not to attribute to Locke the act of radical invention but rather to show, in conformity with insights gained from the rhetorical tradition, how he employs the figure of the contract to order a set of contrasts between lawful and unlawful forms of power and to lay bare for his readers the respective normative stakes