Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault on History, Tradition, and Modernity

Abstract This article interrogates the different ways in which Arendt and Foucault seek to conceptualize tradition in their work. First, it analyses Arendt’s approach, arguing that she put forward three overlapping accounts of the Western tradition – one that criticized the alienating effects of post-seventeenth-century science, one that criticized the Western philosophical tradition as a whole for favouring ‘making’ and ‘contemplation’ over ‘action’, and one that sought to explain the advent of totalitarianism through the stresses that imperialism and racism put upon Western political thought. These approaches are then contrasted with Foucault’s. It is argued that he differed significantly in not believing that there was one Western tradition, laid less stress on totalitarianism, was more of a historicist, and distinguished less between the ‘political’ and the ‘social’. Nevertheless there were important overlaps between Arendt and Foucault’s approaches. Both were critical of the instrumentalizing and technocratic effects of modern science, both stressed the importance of unpredictable events in history, and both believed that examining the Western tradition critically offered important alternatives for modern politics – though neither thought that these would lead to any simple gaining of liberal ‘autonomy’.