1. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1954, 1968), 87.

2. Hannah Arendt, “The Image of Hell,”Commentary 2 (1946): 291-95, at 292.

3. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 26.

4. Hannah Arendt, “Notes for Six Lectures” esp. “The Great Tradition and the Nature of Totalitarianism,” (presented at the New School, March 18-April 22, 1953).

5. Hannah Arendt, “A Reply” [to Eric Voegelin's review of Origins of Totalitarianism], Review of Politics 15 (1953): 76-84, at 79. Although positivists in Arendt's time may have modeled their research more closely after that of objective science, few political scientists today sustain the belief that theories can be perfectly detached from the commitments of the scientist who espouses them, and few deny that methodology and results are mutually conditioning. If read for her critique of positivism, these early essays would be of little interest because they address a well-worn debate—and not very persuasively at that. But the attraction of these essays is not for the case she makes against positivism as for the case she makes on behalf of storytelling. Arendt is exceptional that she actually tells stories about Dreyfus and Disraeli, uses passages from Proust, and refers to Lawrence of Arabia in support of the theoretical claims she makes in Origins.

6. Seyla Benhabib argues that “the historiography of National Socialist totalitarianism presented Arendt with extremely difficult methodological dilemmas with normative dimensions, and that while reflecting upon these dilemmas Arendt developed a conception of political theory as `storytelling.' ” See, “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative,”Social Research 57 (1990): 167-96, at 170.

7. Hannah Arendt, “Action and the Pursuit of Happiness” (paper delivered at the American Political Science Association, Library of Congress, 11).

8. Ernst Vollrath, “Hannah Arendt and the Method of Political Thinking,”Social Research 44 (Spring 1977): 160-82, at 161. Along with Benhabib, Vollrath's essay is a noteworthy exception, as is David Luban, “Explaining Dark Times: Hannah Arendt's Theory of Theory,”Social Research 50 (1983): 215-47.

9. Hannah Arendt, “Reply,” 77.

10. Vollrath, “Hannah Arendt and the Method of Political Thinking,” 162.

11. See, for example, Martin Jay, “Hannah Arendt: Opposing Views,”Partisan Review 45 (1978): 348-80.

12. Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).

13. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,”Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 575-99, at 581.

14. Ibid.

15. Although there are similarities between the pluralist and contested quality of Arendt's storytelling and Haraway's “situated knowledges,” there are also significant differences. To note just one, the distinction that Arendt makes between the public and social realms rules out some of the questions that Haraway considers crucial to “situating” knowledge claims and “embodying” objectivity. As the focus of this essay is the work of Hannah Arendt, it is beyond its scope to pursue this comparison here. Consequently, it is important to make it clear that in mentioning Haraway I mean to do no more than suggest partial affinities between her work and that of Hannah Arendt. Because my own thinking about the epistemological contributions of Arendt's storytelling has obviously been influenced by Haraway's “situated knowledges,” it is important and necessary to acknowledge the connection, even without making a precise comparison and contrast between them. I treat this comparison more fully in an unpublished conference paper, “Situated Impartiality: Exploring the Intersection of Feminism, Poststructuralism, and Political Philosophy.”

16. For an accessible history of the problem, see Richard Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976). For a discussion of the intersection of this debate with contemporary feminist theory, see Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo, eds., Gender/Body/Knowledge (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989).

17. Tracy Strong, The Idea of Political Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 119-20.

18. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 7.

19. Ibid., 184.

20. Vollrath, “Hannah Arendt and the Method of Political Thinking,” 165.

21. Luban, “Explaining Dark Times,” 248.

22. Ibid., 228.

23. Ibid., 247.

24. Eric Voegelin, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,”Review of Politics 15 (1953): 68-76.

25. Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics” (Arendt papers, Library of Congress, 1954), 32.

26. Arendt, “Action and the Pursuit of Happiness,” 2-3.

27. Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, edited by Melvyn Hill (New York: St. Martin's, 1979), 336-37.

28. Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” (draft, Library of Congress, 1964), 27.

29. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 28.

30. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 201.

31. Benjamin Barber, The Conquest of Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 183.

32. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin, 1963, 1983), 86.

33. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 6.

34. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Subsequent references to this work appear in the form of page sources.

35. Arendt, “Notes for Six Lectures,” esp. “The Great Tradition and the Nature of Totalitarianism.”

36. Luban, “Explaining Dark Times,” 218.

37. Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,”Partisan Review 20 (1953): 377-92, at 382.

38. The Black Book: The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People, compiled and edited by the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the Vaad Leumi, and the American Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists and Scientists (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1946). Quoted in Hannah Arendt, “The Image of Hell [review of The Black Book]”Commentary 2 (1946): 291-95, at 291.

39. Ibid., 292.

40. Letter to David Riesman, dated June 13, 1949.

41. See also the preface to Between Past and Future, where Arendt argues that it is not by logical consistency or accurate description that one tells the truth but by critical thinking.

42. Draft of memo A to Underwood, probably August 1946, Library of Congress.

43. Draft research outline, “The Elements of Shame. Antisemitism—Imperialism—Racism,” August 1946, Library of Congress.

44. Draft of Memo A to Mary Underwood, probably August 1946, Library of Congress.

45. Ibid.

46. Hannah Arendt, “Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps,”Jewish Social Studies 12 (1950): 49-64, at 49.

47. Ibid., 50.

48. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 87.

49. Arendt, “Social Science Techniques,” 61.

50. Ibid., 60.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid., 61.

53. Arendt, “The Image of Hell,” 292.

54. Luban's “Explaining Dark Times” is a noteworthy exception. This essay is a most illuminating explication of Arendt's critique of positive social science. Although Luban criticizes Arendt for relying too much on passing references to theoretical physics and too little on explicit argument, nonetheless he draws from Arendt's various assertions about social science a more plausible critique of positivism than she makes herself.

55. See Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” in Rationalism in Politics (New York: Methuen, 1962, 1981).

56. Arendt, “Social Science Techniques,” 50, 51, 58.

57. Arendt, “The Image of Hell,” 292.

58. Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative,” 186.

59. In England, the book appeared as The Burden of Our Times, a title less in the style of social science than that which appeared in the United States but still missing the allusion of the working version.

60. Hannah Arendt, “Outline,” for Mary Underwood, probably August 1946, Library of Congress.

61. Similarly, Seyla Benhabib calls the term origins a “misnomer” for the work, in which Arendt makes it “clear that she is not concerned to establish some inevitable continuity between the past and the present of such a nature that one has to view what happened as what had to happen.” In “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative,” 171.

62. Hannah Arendt, Antisemitism (San Diego: Harvest, 1951, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951, 1968), x.

63. This is exactly the point on which she is taken to task by critics who see her as a Cold War ideologist. See Benjamin R. Barber et al., Totalitarianism in Perspective: Three Views (New York: Praeger, 1969).

64. Arendt, Antisemitism, x.

65. Ibid., xi.

66. Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding” (typescript, Library of Congress, undated), 7.

67. Arendt, “Understanding and Politics.”

68. Voegelin, “[Review of] Origins,” 70.

69. Ibid., 69.

70. Ibid., emphasis added.

71. Ibid., 74.

72. Arendt, “Reply,” 77.

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid., 77-78.

75. Ibid., 78-79, emphasis added.

76. Voegelin, “[Review of] Origins,” 74.

77. Arendt, “Reply,” 83.

78. Ibid., 79.

79. Ibid., 78.

80. Ibid., 79, 78.

81. Ibid., 79.

82. Hannah Arendt, “The Archimedean Point” (published transcript of a lecture for the University of Michigan College of Engineers, 1968).

83. J. Peter Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 197.

84. Arendt, “The Archimedean Point,” 6.

85. Ibid., 25. For related discussions of the epistemological status of political understanding, see William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Tracy Strong, The Idea of Political Theory, chaps. 1, 3.

86. For a discussion of this controversy, see John Finley, Three Essays on Thucydides (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). Finley's reading of Thucydides supports Arendt's position. He argues that the work is neither a simple fabrication nor a literally accurate report but, rather, a “possible picture of men's attitude” toward the events of the war (p. 3). Thucydides offers a representation of things that could have been said in a work that “in style as well as in thought carries the imprint of the past itself' (p.89).

87. Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory, 197, emphasis added.

88. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 51.

89. Ibid.

90. Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory, 199.

91. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 191.

92. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 13. (hereafter Lectures)

93. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 136.

94. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 257.

95. Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative,” 182-83.

96. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 73.

97. Ibid., 194.

98. Paul Guyer also connects the discussion of “crystallization” to contingency. He argues that Kant uses crystallization to argue that the “mechanical processes of nature” are sufficient to account for the existence of natural forms, and so “the actual existence of beautiful forms in nature does not require us to attribute any actual intentions to nature or its creator.”Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 349.

99. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 15. Subsequent references to this work appear in the form of page sources.

100. Paul Guyer, “Pleasure and Society in Kant's Theory of Judgment,” in Essays in Kant's Aesthetics, edited by Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 21-54, at 23. Also, Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 279-82.

101. Arendt, Lectures, 42.

102. Ibid.

103. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 136. As Guyer notes, the claim that common sense is a practice is only one of the three ways that Kant defines that concept in the text. Kant and the Claims of Taste, 280-81. This definition is most important for the purposes of this essay, however, because it is the one on which Arendt focuses in Lectures.

104. Arendt, Lectures, 43-44.

105. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 136, emphasis added.

106. Dagmar Barnouw remarks upon another instance of what I would call creative appropriation in Arendt's translation of allgemein as “general.” Barnouw notes that it is customary in Kant scholarship to translate the term as “universal,” although it can also mean “general,”“common,” or “public.” It is used idiomatically to indicate widespread belief or common consent rather than universal truth. Barnouw claims that Arendt's decision to draw on its idiomatic use is a deliberate departure from “the desirable universal standpoint in Kant's meaning [which] is located above rather than in community.” Dagmar Barnouw, Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 21-22.

107. Arendt, Lectures, 43.

108. There is also some ambiguity in Arendt's account of judgment, as Ronald Beiner has noted. Whereas in Arendt's earlier writings publicity has literally to do with the public space, in the Kant lectures it can be internal to the mind of the theorist. She writes that critical thinking is “still a solitary business, [though it] does not cut itself off from `all others.' [Rather,] by the force of imagination it makes the others present and thus moves in a space that is potentially public, open to all sides” (Arendt, Lectures, 43). Beiner takes this passage to mean that Arendt has simply imported into her own work Kant's ambiguity over the difference between imputation and actual communication. Although a full discussion of Beiner's work is beyond the scope of this essay, I disagree with Beiner and also with Benjamin Barber who claim that in her last writings Arendt retreats from politics to the rationalism of the solitary spectator. As I argue in the following pages, there are significant differences between Arendt's and Kant's conceptions of the imagination. See Benjamin R. Barber, The Conquest of Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), chap. 8.

109. Arendt, Lectures, 42.

110. In arguing that Arendt assigns the practice of enlarged thinking to the storyteller, I disagree strongly with Ronald Beiner. He reads the Kant lectures as a shift “from the representative thought and enlarged mentality of political agents to the spectatorship and retrospective judgment of historians and storytellers.” See Beiner, ed., “Interpretive Essay,” in Lectures, 91. As I have argued throughout this essay, the problem of historical writing as Arendt sees it is precisely that the historian is not a spectator of the past who is disengaged from the problem of action but a critic who tells the story of the past in the midst of present questions.

111. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959, 1968), 97, emphasis added.

112. Benjamin, Illuminations, 87.

113. Ibid., 89.

114. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 241.

115. For an account of something quite similar, see Maria Lugones, “Playfulness, `World'-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” in Gloria Anzaldua, ed., Making Face, Making Soul (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books, 1990).

116. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929, 1957), 4.

117. Ibid., 3.

118. Ibid., 4.

119. Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” 6.

120. Arendt, The Human Condition, 5.

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