polis became “an intense and uninterrupted contest of all against all” and the domestic life of the citizens were poisoned with the pathos of mutual hatred and envy, “the national vice of ancient Greece.” This agonal spirit eventually brought the Greek city-states to ruin, as in this atmosphere of enmity they were incapable of forming saving alliances. As an antidote to this ultimate threat to the commonweal, Aristotle recommends friendship as the real bond of community and as a political virtue more basic than justice (so in Plato’s Republic), which is no longer necessary among friends. Friendship makes citizens equal partners in a common world and dispenses with the hierarchical relations of rulership. In the friendly dialogue between equal but radically different persons, one comes to understand the other’s point of view to the point of seeing the world as the other in fact sees it, by entering into the other’s unique opening to the world. Doxa here is no mere subjective illusion or sophistic distortion, but rather a “true opinion,” and therefore an insight, partial as it may be, into the very reality of the common world that constitutes our community.25
Such a community of free communication and interchange of opinion among friends, among mutually respected equals who are at once very different and other (often an exile becomes alien resident), may sound a bit utopian—Arendt notes that one prerequisite for such a community would be that each and every citizen “be articulate enough to show his opinion in its truthfulness and therefore to understand his fellow citizens”26—but it is precisely such communities that Arendt discovered in the 1940s and 1950s in New York intellectual circles centered around a particular magazine of public opinion, like Dwight Macdonald’s short-lived radical magazine, politics, or the small but interrelated cluster of periodicals to which Arendt herself was recruited to contribute her uniquely European perspective on current events, thus making her appearance on the pages of Commentary, Commonweal, Partisan Review, The New York Review of Books, and so on. These “oases of freedom” and enclaves of participatory democracy constitute the very models that exemplify her phenomenology of protopolitical communities of spontaneous democracy, in which consensus is established by lateral and not hierarchical relationships. The public realm is formed by spontaneous associations like town meetings and voluntary neighborhood associations that constitute the very cells of participatory democracy. “Some public interest concerns a specific group of people, those in a neighborhood or even in just one house or in a city or in some other sort of group. These people will then convene, and they are very capable of acting publicly in these matters, for they have an overview of them.”27 When the public matter at hand is resolved, they disband and dissolve back into their neighborhood life, only to reform into another public forum in the next community crisis. Who we are is thus disclosed in such public convenings in the company of others, in the
25. Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 82–84.
26. Ibid., 84.
27. Hannah Arendt, “A Conversation with Günter Gaus” (1964), Essays in Understanding, 1–23, esp. 22.