Arendt, Kant, and the Politics of Common Sense

Hannah Arendt is best known for her argument that political action is a form of revelatory praxis. Such action would not be possible without the non-objective judgments of a multiplicity of spectators. The Arendtian theory of political action therefore requires a theory of impartial but non-objective judgment. In an attempt to develop such a theory, Arendt at the end of her life turned to Kant's Critique of Judgment. However, Kant's aesthetic, reflective judgment is too formalistic to be successfully appropriated for the political realm. In the absence of a theoretical explanation of common reason, Arendt's categorical distinctions between politics and philosophy, the public and the private, and judgment and cognition remain unsubstantiated, with the result that her theory of political action is itself undermined.