ABSTRACT
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin’s work takes us to the heart of why politics matters, situating political thinking within the sense of powerlessness and alienation that marks the modern condition. Pitkin outlines this condition by observing that social structures and processes have become so large in scale and so regular in their operations that they appear beyond our intervention. As they grow in complexity, they seem increasingly independent of our collective participation in them; so “objectified,” their effects seem ever more inevitable, and even natural. We thus become subjected, as it were, to our own everyday actions, unwilling to act otherwise, or blind to our power to do so. In such a condition, we both suffer by and are alienated from our collective powers in myriad domains of our lives: work, consumption, political institutions and movements, gendered relations, and so on. Deepening our plight, as we become more subject to broad, systematic effects, we increasingly lionize and fetishize an isolated and isolating individualism-and call it “freedom.” Our capacity for co-action and willingness to accept its responsibilities are thereby further diminished. Some are prone to thinking about these problems in terms of human nature or
as effects of institutional intransigency. Others find some person or group, powerful or hidden or both, to blame for them. These approaches, Pitkin notes, tend only still further to diminish our sense of our power over and responsibility for these problems. Pitkin instead characterizes these problems as resulting from a “drift” in our activities toward troubling ends. This drift appears in various guises as “we watch with horror the approach of nuclear war, of ecological disaster, of world famine. Yet,” she points out, “these disasters are not approaching us, it is we who are approaching them by our continuing activities. To avert them we only have to stop doing what we do.” Thus she frames the solution as one of changing our activities, our institutions, and these troubling ends, “deliberately, in accord with our intentions, to achieve certain goals” (Pitkin 1987b, p. 283). The question,
then, is whether and how we can marshal our collective and deliberate powers to address the problems. Answers to this question will raise further ones about who “we” are, how to act, and with whom in mind-all of which demand we exercise our capacity to judge. While science, philosophy, and theory can help us to distinguish those things that are open to our intervention from those that are not, our judgments must be further informed by political thinking that reflects our practical concerns and shared experiences. In addressing these problems, Pitkin’s work calls for and models a distinctive
approach to political thinking, one that is both radical and democratic. A classical approach to political theorizing, exemplified in many “canonical” texts of political theory, leans on broad, systematic generalizations that ultimately distort the subject matter of politics. According to Pitkin, as political thinkers we instead ought to embrace plurality, ambiguity, and contradiction. Our work must speak to concerns that affect not only a small group, but also other people, some of whom may be quite distant strangers to us, whose lives are none the less connected to our own. In order to be political, our thinking must not only speak to matters that affect these wider communities, but also support a community’s participatory action on behalf of its common interest. Pitkin thus presents a wide constellation of concerns as intrinsic to political thinking. Only by keeping this constellation in mind-contradiction, plurality, and particular contexts on the one hand, widespread connectedness on the other-and only by recognizing tensions among these concerns, can we support the kind of judgment and action that makes political thinking a truly public endeavor. Staying with ambivalence, but always attuned to the need for thinking to enable
and inform practical judgments about what to do, Pitkin reveals the dilemmas of theorizing as relatedly conceptual, historical, and psychological. Her close textual and historical analyses of canonical works seek not only to get at the meaning of texts, but also to explore ways that the tensions underlying and supporting public engagement are intrinsic to political thinking. She furthermore explores sources of these tensions in the fundamental human experience of growing up, with its dual tasks of developing autonomy and learning mutuality. She studies the temptation presented by theoretical writing to flee from the ambivalence engendered by these many tensions and to ignore the dilemmas they present for political thinking. For Pitkin, and for others inspired by her work, political thinking is the activity of exploring the tensions in the shared dimensions of our lives while staying with the inevitable multi-sidedness of our attempts to do so. This, according to Pitkin, is the kind of thinking suited to the political radicalism that can address the modern condition. On this note, Pitkin explains that:
Our thinking must be . . . radical, cutting through conventions and clichés to the real roots of our troubles, seeing social arrangements large-scale and longrange, as if from the outside . . . Yet the thinking must also be political, in the sense of oriented to action, practical, speaking in a meaningful way to those capable of making the necessary changes.
