Francesca Lidia Viano, King s College, University of Cambridge

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1 162 American Political Thought Winter 2017 to say new things. He thus places Tocqueville, a pioneer in studying the political impact of associations and private agencies in America, in dialogue with Moisei Ostrogorski, the Russian political scientist best known for his systematic study of American parties, and the German sociologist and scholar of political parties Robert Michels. He might have included the Norwegian American economist Thorstein Veblen as well, who once identified the engine of social development in the incongruence between ideas and institutions. Indeed, Liberty and Coercion s discussion of the American case suggests that such institutional tensions also have political consequences, shaping the way in which power is exerted, managed, and distributed outside constitutional structures. This is a remarkable book that should enjoy a wide readership and inspire exciting new scholarship in fields beyond its own. Francesca Lidia Viano, King s College, University of Cambridge Richard H. King. Arendt and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Pp $ Hannah Arendt ( ) occupies a peculiar place in American consciousness. Nonacademics are most likely to be aware of her work through Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, a book that continues to generate surprisingly bitter controversy even half a century after its first publication. While some of the nastiness has subsided, the personal nature of the controversy continues to echo in many recent scholarly attacks on Arendt (works by the late David Cesarini, Deborah Lipstadt, and Richard Wolin come to mind). Defenders of Arendt thus find themselves still fighting a broad and persistent (and often willful) misinterpretation of what Arendt actually said. Richard H. King s Arendt and America is essential reading for anyone interested in Arendt, the Eichmann controversy, and the role the latter plays in determining her American reception, both past and present. King, who is a professor emeritus at the University of Nottingham, illuminates Arendt s relationship with the New York intellectuals of the 1940s and 1950s, the reasons why many of them turned against her with the publication of Eichmann, and the various fronts on which the controversy has been fought to this day. As he acknowledges in this admirably researched and thorough (sometimes a bit too thorough there is more review of the literature than necessary) work, King is a defender of Arendt. However, he is a defender who gives her critics a fair hearing before rendering his own judicious assessment of the validity of their

2 Book Reviews 163 critiques. He is also quick to point out that Arendt herself was partially to blame, largely because she failed to spell out adequately what exactly she meant by the phrase the banality of evil. King s book is not, however, Eichmann-centric in its treatment of Arendt. Indeed, anyone who reads King will discover that the Eichmann book, while Arendt s best known, is also perhaps the least representative of her works. A trial report supplemented with substantial historical background, Eichmann was in fact written by a political theorist whose main contributions are to be found in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution (1963), and two essay collections Between Past and Future (1968) and Crises of the Republic (1970). It is on these works, and not Eichmann, that Arendt s reputation as a thinker actually rests. While hardly presenting Eichmann as a fluke, King s book succeeds in placing it in the broader context of her work as a wide-ranging political thinker. He shows us how Eichmann is continuous with, while also constituting a notable departure from, her main concerns as a political thinker: totalitarianism; freedom, equality, and the public realm; the antipolitical nature of mass culture and society; and the vital importance of widespread political participation and a durable constitutional framework for any viable republic. King s angle of vision his exploration of Arendt s work in terms of her American experience and her American reception deepens our understanding of how she articulated and developed her thinking on many of these topics. He reveals if not for the first time, certainly in the greatest depth the American roots of many of her ideas. A student of American culture and race relations, King appears to have read virtually everything Arendt wrote, as well as virtually every significant response to (or appropriation of) her work. This approach has both its advantages and disadvantages. Placing a theoretical work in its immediate historical and discursive context helps us avoid some of the more egregious misinterpretations of any given text. But it also has the effect of foreshortening the interpretative context and, as a result, underestimating the extent to which virtually all important works of political theory are the product of a serious (and often contentious) dialogue with previous canonical thinkers, thinkers who are often quite distant in place and time. Arendt was very concerned with what she called the great tradition of Western philosophy and political theory, a tradition that runs, in her view, from Plato and Aristotle up through Marx and Nietzsche (who, in her view, jointly brought it to a close). Her immediate American interlocutors may well have contributed to her understanding of American society and politics, and thereby the shaping of her work. However, the meat of her oeuvre comes from arguments with, and creative appropriations of, earlier and far more famous figures. In Arendt s case, Plato, Aristotle, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche,

3 164 American Political Thought Winter 2017 and Heidegger are all essential touchstones. (If her published work didn t already confirm this fact, the publication of her Denktagebuch in 2002 certainly does.) This is not to say that these figures are left out of King s account. However, equal and sometimes substantially more space is given to figures such as Dwight MacDonald and David Reisman. The former was important to Arendt as she shaped her thought about collective guilt and responsibility in two essays from the 1940s; the latter, for instructive exchanges concerning mass society and American conformism. Earlier figures with a distinctly American profile (if not necessarily provenance) such as John Dewey and Alexis de Tocqueville also get a fair amount of space the latter legitimately, the former only because he exerted great influence on the American philosophical community and on some of the New York intellectuals, such as Daniel Bell. Arendt herself has nothing to say about pragmatism and probably shared German philosophy s low opinion of it. Tocqueville, on the other hand, clearly was an influence, and King is right to stress his importance to Arendt. In addition to magnifying and, in some cases, overstating the influence of Arendt s American interlocutors, King s approach also has the effect of making certain issues, such as race, appear more central to Arendt s thinking than they in fact were. To be sure, in The Origins of Totalitarianism she had focused on race and what she called race thinking, the better to highlight the role it played in European imperialism. She also made a much-commented-on misstep when she published an essay in Dissent entitled Reflections on Little Rock (1957). Drawing on the framers separation-of-powers doctrine, Arendt argued that federally enforced integration of public schools in Little Rock was a mistake, and that separate but equal would better give blacks what they wanted and needed. King s lengthy investigation of the Reflections essay will be of special interest to those who have concluded that only a racist could have made such an argument. Indeed, a few recent books have taken Reflections on Little Rock as their departure point for the broader consideration of Arendt s thought. In this instance, King s contextualizing and America-centric approach pays off handsomely. He is able, on the one hand, to show that Arendt s position was theoretically driven by considerations she had learned from Tocqueville and Montesquieu, while, on the other, also showing that there was quite a mixed reaction, much of it from nonracist liberals, to the federal government s intervention in Little Rock. King s thoughtful account of this episode all the more persuasive coming from a scholar of American culture and race relations is helpful in deflating some of the more irresponsible criticisms some have made concerning Arendt and race. Race also comes up, albeit more artificially, in King s chapter The Revolutionary Traditions, which examines the origins of and response to On Rev-

4 Book Reviews 165 olution. Race is hardly a central concern of Arendt s theoretical-historical interpretation of the French and American Revolutions. Nevertheless, King takes her to task for contributing to an implicitly or potentially racist discourse, a discourse he sees as originating in Rousseau and Hegel. These two canonical thinkers, King maintains, were overly influenced by Aristotle sideaofa slave by nature. Rousseau suggested that some people are slavish and neither capable nor worthy of freedom, while Hegel suggested that the slave was a slave because he had failed to risk his life to fight to preserve his freedom. King sees both opinions as extremely baneful inheritances. More to the point, he sees them echoed in Arendt s claim (in On Revolution) that slave revolts are extremely rare, owing in part to the slave s acceptance of the relation of domination he finds himself in. Anyone who reads the word slave and immediately thinks of black slavery in the American South would probably want to take Rousseau, Hegel, and Arendt to task in much the way King does. The problem is that Rousseau, Hegel, and Arendt weren t thinking about chattel slavery in the United States when they made their respective points. In Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract, Rousseau writes about corrupt Europeans who had come to value amour propre and material gain over political freedom and their homeland; these were the (figurative, not literal) slaves he had in mind. In The Phenomenology of the Mind, Hegel s model was again European in origin. His master/slave dialectic mixes Homeric, Hobbesian, and Rousseauian influences in order to show how both the sense of self and social recognition emerge out of the historical experience of masterly domination. Hegel s presupposition is the simple fact that Greek and Roman slavery, as well as European lords and bondsmen from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution, had shaped virtually the entirety of Western culture and society. Finally, the inspiration of Arendt s point about the relative docility of the slave was also clearly classical. She was writing about how the ancients viewed the institution of slavery (namely, as something totally legitimate and socially necessary) and the effect that view had on slaves themselves. In short, none of these three thinkers suggest that slaves are naturally docile. Nor do they suggest that black slaves in America are proof of such a dubious thesis. I have taken race as one example of how King s America-centric view of Arendt can, on occasion, distort the relative priority of her concerns. The issues that matter most to us are often not the issues that attract Arendt s sustained interest. Indeed, the seeming idiosyncrasy of some of her more well-known distinctions such as that between the social and the political gives rise to totally predictable (and endlessly re-cycled) liberal, social democratic, and Marxist critiques, all of which owlishly assert that the social is political. The same noncomprehension also attends Arendt s hard-and-fast distinction between the public

5 166 American Political Thought Winter 2017 and the private. This is a distinction that obviously didn t sit well with secondwave feminists, or with anyone who believes that the personal is the political. Thankfully, King is too well informed to fall into any of these traps. He fully understands that Arendt s preference for making distinctions is just as valid a mode of thinking as the contemporary desire to blur them is. As King and others have pointed out, Arendt s passion was identifying the distinctiveness of political action, political space, and political relations. She wanted to recover a sense of the specificity of the political in a world where economic and sociological modes of thinking had all but extinguished it. Moreover, she thought, like Jefferson, that every citizen should have at least the chance to be a participator in the government of affairs (221). That meant that every citizen should have access to public spaces in which debate, deliberation, and some form of decision actually took place. Against our ingrained prejudice, she was adamant that the ruler/ ruled relationship was a deeply unpolitical one, derived from the ancient institution of slavery. Political relations are relations between equal citizens, carried out through argument and persuasive speech, not through the issuing of orders or the exercise of authoritative and coercive power. It was these aspects of Arendt s idiosyncratic view of the political realm that political theorists and students at Berkeley found inspiring in the late fifties and early sixties (she had been a visiting professor there). As King relates, there were places where Arendt was known, and is still known, not as the central figure in the Eichmann controversy, but rather as the twentieth-century political thinker who rescued the idea of political action from the pragmatic and technocratic mire into which it had sunk. In the past 30 years, her political thought has been steadily gaining attention around the world. Her international standing as a serious and challenging political thinker, it can be safely said, has never been higher. The occasional distortions of perspective brought about by looking at her through a distinctively American lens notwithstanding, this other Arendt comes through sharply and convincingly in King s admirable account. Dana Villa, University of Notre Dame Rogers M. Smith. Political Peoplehood: The Roles of Values, Interests, and Identities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Pp $ In Political Peoplehood: The Role of Values, Interests and Identities, Rogers Smith continues the work that he began in Civic Ideals, interrogating the intersections between political identity, public narrative, and institutional pol-