The Normativity of Public Freedom: Arendt, Exemplarity, Judgment

Abstract

Democracies today are experiencing a crisis of exemplarity. The horizon of figures in our political imaginations is being turned over, revised, innovated, condensed, and expanded with such intensity that it can seem that any presumption of commonality with our peers can feel dangerously optimistic. This condition can make shared orientation feel fragile, even precarious. Yet it is less a symptom of democratic waywardness than an expression of political freedom itself: of citizens struggling to shape the world that, in turn, shapes them. Responding to this condition is therefore not only an empirical but a theoretical task. If examples inform our normative horizons, how can they serve as standards for justice without collapsing into moralist abstraction or realist resignation?

This dissertation positions Hannah Arendt as uniquely responsive to this circle and the crisis it names. Against traditions that either reduce exemplars to illustrations of principles or deny their normative power altogether, Arendt locates exemplarity at the very heart of judgment, the ‘most political of our mental faculties.’ By reconstructing her scattered but insistent appeals to exemplarity across her unfinished writings on judgment, I argue that Arendt redeems the circle of exemplarity as a worldly practice of critical judgment: a reflective mode of responsiveness that orients freedom and responsibility toward building more just worlds.

Chapter One re-reads The Human Condition to dislodge the view that Arendt was uniformly hostile to standards in politics. I argue that her rejection of instrumentalism in fact prepares the ground for exemplarity as a non-instrumental kind of standard appropriate to plurality and natality. Chapter Two clarifies the objective axis of exemplarity: how exemplary appearances disclose emergent norms that make an indeterminate claim to be followed in the imaginations of spectators. Chapter three develops the subjective axis: how responsiveness to exemplarity becomes responsibility for action. Here I introduce the concept of heautonomy, drawn from Kant, to describe how citizens cultivate democratic agency by reflectively selecting examples as company in view of their own appearing in the world as potential examples to be followed. Across these chapters, I show why examples that affirm freedom and equality are worthy of public endorsement from within the resources of judgment itself.