one possesses a clear potential for action: the events of the night may set off a life-defining chain of events. Action, in fact, constitutes those rare moments in life—weddings, births, career choices, interventions, conversion experiences—where we know we are “laying it all on the line,” so to speak, risking our life as we currently know it in order to initiate a course of action that expresses our “whoness,” our unique identity, in a richer and deeper way than how our lives existed before. Action is certainly not equivalent to our capacity for free choice:145 whether or not I choose to spend my Sunday morning working out, sleeping in, or going to church is far from an instance of action. Indeed, it is not even clear if there is an unambiguous moment of choice involved in a particular action. Arendt notes that, while action clearly involves some kind of initiation on the part of the actor, it also has to be “carried through,” and this carrying through is just as much a part of the act or event.146 When a recent college graduate acts in undertaking to go to graduate school or decides to start his own business, it is not clear that there was ever one specific moment of choice or initiation; rather, there might be a series of progressive choices and courses of action undertaken that when taken together amount to an action. What matters is not the specific instances, but rather whether there is a self-defining act that the actor can recount in the story of his or her life.
Moreover, while this “carrying through” of the action can be performed by the actor to a certain extent, it can probably never be done completely alone: other actors must also help see the action through with that actor. Since action always occurs in what Arendt calls the “web of human relationships,” the meaning and thus the final outcome of the act is never up to the actor alone—who can at best force events in a particular direction—but probably even more so to other actors with whom he or she interacts.147 Consider the recovery movement. Very often, the fact that addicts or trauma victims were able to transcend their history and begin establishing a meaningful life for themselves and their family could never have been predicted on the basis of existing antecedent causes. In fact, very often those who know them best have long since given up hope that they will ever change. The recovery movement illustrates the profoundly intersubjective nature of action that Arendt continually points to: Addicts are the initiators of the act, they take the first step; but in many ways it is the support—the “carrying through,” as it were—that they receive from their peers in the movement that allows them to, if not overcome completely, at least gain some kind of power over their addictions or traumas.148
But all this does not mean that Arendt understood action to be an unadulterated good—far from it, in fact. Arendt was quite aware that action has dark and dangerous elements: suicide or abandonment, after all, are certainly moments of action.149 Action is often the source of the greatest tragedies of our lives, moments where something precious is lost or destroyed. Indeed, in a variety of places, including The Human Condition, Arendt also points to the burdensome character of action.150 Her polemically laudatory comments in The Human Condition and elsewhere at times obscure the fact that action undertaken in the wrong spirit can be a profoundly dark activity, whose results may be both dangerous and immoral (Hitler’s “final solution,” after all, was no doubt an action).151 Arendt believed humans were generally ambivalent about their freedom, often experiencing it as heartbreaking and overwhelming,152 and in modernity this has led to a “flight into impotency, a desperate desire to be relieved entirely of the ability to act.”153
There in fact seems to be an essential element of the tragic in Arendt’s conception of human agency. The victories achieved in our life stories only have meaning against the experience of failure; moments of joy have a bittersweet depth drawn from the knowledge of griefs that preceded them and that inevitably await us. The heroism and elitism that Arendtian action is often simplistically interpreted with are, in fact, leavened by a recognition of the persistence of sorrow and defeat in a world of profoundly flawed and mortal human beings. It seems that what animated Arendt’s reflections on the limits of the human condition was a desire to give the full scope of human agency its due, to reckon with the fact that it is our sadness and disappointments as much as our accomplishments and moments of joy that make us fully human and thus capable of appreciating others with the courage to act.
This essentially tragic element of human action was the basis for Arendt’s challenge to the modern understanding of politics as sovereignty and its fundamental objective: success. Arendt believed there was something inhuman in the modern obsession with the idea that success defined the fundamental criteria of action. Because of its essential conditioning by speech, the defining characteristic of action can never be the sovereignty of success, but instead non-sovereign political categories such as historical greatness and commitment to the preservation of the common world. This, of course, does not mean that success is not a factor in actors’ deliberations concerning courses of action. But it does imply that success cannot be the fundamental criterion of political judgment, for success can never redeem action. A successful course of action—genocide, for instance—may successfully achieve the short-term intentions of the actors, but it will never be redeemable in speech. The judgment of (authentic) history will inevitably come to view it as despicable. To illustrate this, Arendt often quoted a favorite line from Cato: “The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated cause pleased Cato.”154 What she means by this is that, in the course of history, tragedy and defeat may be as world disclosing and world preserving as any victory. “Man,” she writes,
cannot defend himself against the blows of fate, against the chicanery of the gods, but he can resist them in speech and respond to them, and though the response changes nothing … such words belong to the event as such. If words are of equal rank with the event, if, as is said at the end of Antigone, “great words” answer and requite “great blows struck from on high,” then what happens is itself something great and worthy of remembrance and fame … our downfall can become a deed if we hurl words against it even as we perish.155
If we consider defining political moments of recent memory, it is indeed evident that success or failure is not what defines the significance and meaning of the event itself and its consequences for our world. The election of Barack Obama may have been a moment of success in American race relations, but it was not merely the success of the endeavor that bore its meaning: it was what the event disclosed to and about American politics at that moment. Yet historically, certain moments of defeat in American race relations were at least as world defining: the violence done to the peaceful protesters of the civil rights movement or the assassination of Martin Luther King probably did more to force American politics to consistently recognize the question of race than anything Barack Obama will ever do. This, of course, does not mean that success is not often a necessity; it does, however, mean that success could never be the essential criterion of human agency.
Political Athanatizein
I turn now to how Arendt reintroduced human agency back into historical reflection, a project that centered on reviving political athanatizein. Benjamin Constant famously drew the distinction between the liberty of the moderns and the liberty of the ancients. The liberty of the moderns, perhaps best exemplified by Rawls currently, is a private liberty that politics protects through the guarantee of certain basic rights and liberties and, increasingly, on certain baseline conditions of social equality. Arendt remains the most prominent modern proponent of the liberty of the ancients, which located the arena of free human action not in a private sphere made secure by politics but in the arena of politics itself. According to Arendt, political action had once afforded a much more profound, meaningful, and consequential realm of human freedom than modern private liberty, which, having located freedom in private life, in her view rendered freedom impotent and insignificant and therefore unremarkable.
Many readings of Arendt’s political thought focus on what she calls the “condition of plurality”: her current Wikipedia page (ca. 2015), for instance, characterizes her political thought by pointing to her statement of the “conditio per quam … of all political life”: the fact that “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”156 Though broadly accurate, I argue here that focusing on plurality does not capture the full meaning of what Arendt had in mind by the notion of the political, that the political for