Flirtations with Wissenschaft: Thinking thinking and thinking politics in, and out of, the work of Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt writes reticently and rarely about her approach to thinking thinking and thinking politics. This essay takes elaboration of her style of reasoning as its primary problem by probing what Arendt does rather than what she endorses. The essay addresses anew the possibilities of, and prospects for, an interpretive approach to the study of politics by revisiting the early and subsequent work of Charles Taylor and William Connolly in chapter one. Their criticisms of the fact/value dichotomy in behavioral analysis suggested a convergence between political theory and the other subdisciplines of political science, but this transformation has been thwarted in political theory by the hegemony of normative theorizing. Arendt practices a style of reasoning she learns from Nietzsche, and to see her debt to him we must understand that all genealogies are not genealogies of morals. In chapter two, her improvisational appropriation of Nietzsche's style of reasoning is explicated. The edifice of categories governing The Human Condition is read as a counter-thought posed against and in order to make us think present political events---the edifice is read, that is, as a variation on Nietzsche's presentation of the thought of eternal return. In chapter three, the essay thinks with and out of Arendt's work and presents a critical description of the current political conflict over physician-assisted suicide. Working from her description of modern communities as societies of laborers and jobholders, economic assumptions animating the advocacy of assisted suicide and the purportedly noneconomic substantive due process jurisprudence of privacy more generally are examined. This exercise in critical description is offered as an example of how the relationship between political theory and the rest of political science might be renegotiated.