Arendt's Judgment. Jonathan Peter Schwartz

political action might involve in concrete terms is much broader than has often been assumed. Since fabrication is her fundamental category for dealing with the question of violence, it is then evident that she did not reject all instances of violence as possible instances of political action. After all, she repeatedly points to the French Resistance as an exemplary political action, which obviously involved quite a lot of violent activities,¹⁸⁹ not to mention, as we will see in Chapter 2, the empire-building activities of Romans.

      When we understand the special sense in which Arendtian political action is ateleological, the occasional accusation that it is aestheticized or narcissistic evaporates. Arendt continually noted that political action is essentially always concerned with maintaining and preserving the world.¹⁹⁰ In the 1963 “Introduction into Politics” course, she refers to political action as having amor mundi, and writes, “What do I mean by ‘politically minded’? … Very generally, I mean by it to care more for the world, which was before we appeared and which will be after we disappear, than for ourselves, for our immediate interests and for our life.”¹⁹¹ Only political action is capable of changing the world, and it therefore is the only kind of action that is capable of preserving and maintaining the world when necessary.¹⁹² She writes that “the world … is irrevocably delivered up to the ruin of time unless human beings are determined to intervene, to alter, to create what is new.… Because the world is made by mortals, it wears out, and because it continuously changes its inhabitants it runs the risk of becoming as mortal as they. To preserve the world … it must be constantly set right anew.”¹⁹³ Political action, in other words, has to somehow change the world by beginning new initiatives, and yet it also must affirm and maintain that same world. This is why Arendt argues that politics is never concerned with our individual interests: to act politically is always to act for the sake of a common world that separates and relates the individual actors within it, always with the goal of preserving and affirming that world while also changing it in the hope that our action will leave behind a mark of some kind in that world.

      True political actors, then are always acting both for the opportunity to achieve immortality and to maintain and preserve the common world.¹⁹⁴ In Arendt’s view, only action geared toward caring for the world was action worthy of political athanatizein. Some of Arendt’s most articulate discussions of this dual-natured sense of the ateleology of political action come in a 1955 set of lectures on Machiavelli. Given that these lectures occur during the same time she was researching The Human Condition and anticipate many themes discussed in later essays such as “What Is Freedom?” we can be sure that the ideas in the Machiavelli lectures were foundational for her more apparently “aesthetic” account of political action in The Human Condition. Consider this passage:

      [The] greatness of this world is constituted through virtù and fortuna. Fortuna is a constellation in the world which is visible only for virtù; fortuna is the appearing of the world, the shining up of the world, the smiling of the world. It invites man to show his excellence.… World and man are bound together like man and wife: action fits man into the world like eyes fit us to see the sun.… Action shows the world’s fortuna and man’s virtù at one and the same time.¹⁹⁵