ABSTRACT
In addition to what was going on politically while Arendt began work on what would become The Human Condition, two important intellectual influences seem to have been shaping her thought. “Seem to,” because these influences-authorities of a sort for Arendt-were never acknowledged as such publicly by her. Though she often referred to and quoted great thinkers of the past, Arendt rarely acknowledged any major sources of her own ideas. Being neither an academic critic commenting on the great texts nor a historian of ideas in the usual sense, she mostly spoke in her own voice about the substantive issues. Yet there were authorities hidden behind that voice; it was not unproblematically her own, for her relationship to those authorities was deeply ambivalent. That this was so in relation to Heidegger we have already seen, and the issue has received detailed attention in recent scholarship.2 Two other great thinkers from the tradition of political theory, however, seem to have decisively shaped her ideas in this period, though in different ways: Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx. Tocqueville’s influence can only be surmised as extremely likely in light of
the striking parallels between The Human Condition and his Democracy in America (Tocqueville 1969), but it cannot be established with certainty, since Arendt never publicly acknowledged his importance to her. Marx, by contrast, plays a prominent role in The Human Condition, which is not surprising, since the book was initially to be a study of his contribution to totalitarianism. Marx appears in the book almost exclusively as the object of Arendt’s severe criticism, but there is something odd about that criticism. Although its overall thrust may well be valid and is surely defensible, its detailed formulations are almost always mistaken, sometimes blatantly so. Arendt’s account of Marx, moreover, leaves out about half of that admittedly inconsistent thinker, and what is missing from her Marx remarkably resembles Arendt’s own ideas in The Human Condition, particularly those about the social. Indeed, what makes Arendt’s hidden intellectual debts important for this study at
all is the extent to which they occur in the very terrain occupied by the social as Blob.3
