Feeling Plurality. How Affectability Leads to Political Judgment

During the second half of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt’s writings have fundamentally shaped critical approaches to political theory. Widely recognized as a thinker of a rational political order, the place of emotions and affects in Arendt’s work is mostly ignored in the reception and interpretation of her theory. This paper focuses on the connection between affectability and political judgment. It shows how Arendt uses the method of enlarged mentality in order to make the plurality of lived experience visible. Arendt has often written down the question “How would I feel […] if I were in their place?” and established a political judgment by taking other people’s standpoints, not only in terms of abstract thinking but also affectively. This paper claims that plurality does not only mean differences in arguments or judgements but also in people’s affective response to the world. Arendt tried to grasp this affective dimension via representative thinking – and failed more than once. By analyzing her essay “Reflections on Little Rock” and its aftermath, the paper is going to show the limits of representing affective experiences’ plurality and how ignoring these limitations led Arendt to a wrong political judgment.