This issue of Social Research continues to examine the same theme, philosophy and politics, as the last one (Winter 1989).  This one is longer, and its introduction will be shorter.  The same general information contained in the introduction to the earlier issue holds for this one as well.
    This issue contains two essays, one by Sheldon Wolin and the other by Richard Bernstein, dealing with Richard Rorty.  The first is a sharp critique of the notion of "postmodern" democracy that Wolin finds in Rorty.  Bernstein's paper is a more sympathetic account of Rorty's philosophy in general, and, as far as politics is concerned, Bernstein is appreciative of Rorty's "knack for raising and compelling us to face some of the most intractable problems of our time," even when answers to those problems are not forthcoming.  In this respect Bernstein likens Rorty to Socrates.  Socrates is pretty much the subject of Hannah Arendt's hitherto unpublished essay that follows.  Without a doubt this piece of Arendt's contains one of what Margaret Canovan in the next essay calls her "sketches for a kind of myth of a philosophical Fall."  Canovan reflects on the implications of Arendt's own reflections on the tensions that exist between philosophy and politics.  Seyla Benhabib's paper is concerned with tensions in Arendt herself, seen here as both a "modernist" and "antimodernist" thinker.  Thus Benhabib deals with Arendt's relation to the past, and discerns an intimate connection between her political theory and her "storytelling" or "redemptive" narratives, as exemplified in the analysis of the structure of The Origins of Totalitarianism.  Frank Edler's essay seems to me to provide a needed corrective to a lot that has been written about Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis, not attempting so much to show that there was or was not some relation between the content of his philosophy and Nazi ideology, but speculating - through focusing on Heidegger's "revolutionary" understanding of language itself - as to why Heidegger may "have plunged into politics" at all.  My own piece deals with the split in Arendt's thought between thinking and acting, and some of its "moral" implications.
    A few words about Hannah Arendt's essay on "Philosophy and Politics" remain to be said.  It is a part of a series of lectures written in 1954, and was never prepared for publication by the author.  The manuscript I have worked from is a heavily annotated version, by Arendt, of the original.  The annotated manuscript contains many unnumbered pages, some handwritten, and to an extent it is guesswork as to where, exactly, they belong.  Readers of Arendt's published work will remark in this essay phrases and suggestions of themes that Arendt developed later in The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, and The Life of the Mind, but she never merely repeated herself.  To give just one example: in the present essay (p. 76), she cites the same phrase from Pericles' Funeral Oration that she does in the essay on "The Crisis in Culture" in Between Past and Future, but there the emphasis is on the first half of the sentence, and here it is on the second.  But this essay also contains thoughts that occur nowhere else in Arendt's work, at least as far as I know.  Again, to give a single example, on page 79 she writes that "persuasion is not the opposite of rule by violence, it is only another form of it."  That is a striking thought, indeed, and it is absolutely present in the annotated manuscript; but one cannot but wonder if it is entirely consistent, not only with her other published writings, but with the rest of this essay, and if she would have kept it.  Perhaps what one can say is that Arendt was not one to buy mere consistency at the price of thinking.  Finally, it should be noted that this present essay is only one of many manuscripts in the collection of her papers in the Library of Congress in which Arendt treats of the relations of philosophy and politics.  It is not a theme that she often addressed explicitly in her published works, but it appears more and more to have been a topic of fundamental concern to her.  The Library of Congress papers are currently being prepared for publication.

    Philosophy and Politics II

    Introduction                                                        Jerome Kohn,
                                                                                Guest Editor                                                                     3

    Democracy in the Discourse of
    Postmodernism                                                  Sheldon S. Wolin                                                                5

    Rorty's Liberal Utopia                                       Richard J. Bernstein                                                          31

    Philosophy and Politics                                     Hannah Arendt                                                                  73

    Thinking/Acting                                                Jerome Kohn                                                                    105

    Socrates or Heidegger? Hannah
    Arendt's Reflections on
    Philosophy and Politics                                    Margaret Canovan                                                            135

    Hannah Arendt and the
    Redemptive Power of Narrative                       Seyla Benhabib                                                                   167

    Philosophy, Language, and
    Politics: Heidegger's Attempt to
    Steal the Language of the
    Revolution in 1933-34                                       Frank H.W. Edler                                                             197
 
 

Hannah Arendt taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago, and was University Professor in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research from 1968 until her death in 1975.  Her books include The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution (1963), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1964), The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968), Between Past and Future (1968), Men in Dark Times (1968), and The Life of the Mind (1975).

Seyla Benhabib is associate professor of philosophy and women's studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  She wrote Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Crtitical Theory (1986).

Richard J. Bernstein is the Vera List Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research.  His most recent book is Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (1983).

Margaret Canova, senior lecturer in politics at the University of Keele in England, is the author of The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (1974)

Frank H.W. Edler is adjunct professor in the general studies program at Adelphi Univeristy, Garden City, N.Y.

Jerome Kohn is professor of philosophy at the Cooper Union in New York City and lecturer in liberal studies in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research.  He is currently editing the unpublished and uncollected works of Hannah Arendt.

Sheldon S. Wolin, who taught politics at the University of California at Berkeley and at Princeton University, is the author, most recently, of The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (1989).