“The Strangest of All Modern Societies”: Hannah Arendt on Science and Scientists

• In Event: Resisting Fascism

Abstract

The final chapter of Hannah Arendt’s 1958 masterpiece, The Human Condition, concludes with a curious pronouncement: “the capacity for action,” she writes, “is still with us, although it has become the exclusive prerogative of scientists.” Arendt’s narrative of modernity is bookended by two technoscientific events—Galileo’s use of the telescope and the launch of Sputnik—and she was deeply engaged with public debates about nuclear weapons and space exploration. Yet political theorists have paid scant attention to her writing on science and technology, nor have Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars engaged with her work (a lacuna in keeping with the curious lack of engagement between political theory and science studies).

This paper reconstructs two figurations of science and scientists that appear in Arendt’s thought. One is a familiar lamentation at scientists’ inability to “think what they are doing,” and a warning that modern science - as poesis grown monstrous - will terminate in a form of “earth alienation” reminiscent of the wordlessness described in Origins of Totalitarianism. But there are also fragments of a second narrative—of scientists as actors as well as makers, founders of a novel community—what Arendt calls “that strangest of all modern societies, the society of scientists and the republic of letters”—capable of generating authority by legislating its own norms and binding itself to the past.

By examining her account of two pivotal moments in early modern science (Galileo’s use of the telescope and the foundation of the Royal Society of London), I show that Arendt anticipated the claim by historians of science that modern solutions to the problem of political authority, and the problem of how to make authoritative knowledge, were “coproduced.”

A specifically political account of how scientific authority is constituted (and contested!) in the public realm is essential to understanding both the power and danger of populist critiques of the privilege accorded science and scientists.

Author

• Alexandra Catherine Neame, Stanford University