Chapter 7 - Social Justice and Feminist Agency

Summary

When in 1995 the volume of essays Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt was published, the case became clear: feminists, too, could read Arendt and use her works and ideas for their reflections. This was not because there had not been feminist contributions to Arendt research (or Arendtian contributions to feminist research), of which perhaps Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, a book-length study of Arendt’s storytelling by Lisa Disch (1994) deserves special attention, but because Bonnie Honig edited a volume whose topics ranged from Arendt’s depreciation of the social to the feminist potential of her account of the public; from her figure of a conscious pariah to her controversial, to say the least, presentation of Africa and African Americans. It was the first collection of essays fully devoted to Arendt and feminism.

The reason for this volume’s being a milestone in Arendt research was that her writings were seemingly inapt for linking with feminist thinking. For feminist theorists, she has been, and to a certain extent remains until today, either a riddle or a critical figure. The early feminist reception of her work was very negative, especially with respect to her distinction between the private and the public, since the central feminist claim—popularized first through the title of a 1970 essay by Carol Hanisch, “Personal is Political”—was that the private was precisely political. Arendt’s, then seen as rigid, distinction between the public and the private was a red flag to feminists who did not spare her their criticism (Rich 1979: 211–12; O’Brien 1981: 100; Pitkin 1981: 338; Markus 1987: 76; cf. Young-Bruehl 1996: 307). This changed in the 1990s, when, according to the approach of “thinking with Arendt against Arendt” (Benhabib 1988), new generation of feminist scholars interpreted her works afresh and discovered multiple facets of her thought to be fruitful for feminist reflection. This includes a shift of focus from the role feminism plays in Arendt to the role Arendt plays in feminism (Honig 1995a: 3). In this way, the feminist reception of Arendt in the last three decades predominantly applies Arendt’s concepts to current issues relevant to feminist debate (e.g. Allen 1999b; Zerilli 2005a; Schott 2010; Borren 2013; Gardiner 2013; Kruks 2017; Robaszkiewicz 2018).