32 Pages Posted: 19 Aug 2013 Last revised: 23 Aug 2013

Date Written: 2013

Abstract

Max Weber and Hannah Arendt are usually read together as theorists of the political, attacking the modern assimilation of politics to economics. They are taken to differ only in how they conceive the political: Weber, as domination, and Arendt, as action. This paper argues that readers have missed relevant differences in their thought because they have not compared Weber’s neo-Kantian philosophy of value with Arendt’s phenomenological method. Through such a comparison, this paper advances two claims. First, it argues that Arendt, unlike Weber, is a theorist not of the political but rather of the possibility of non-subsumptive relationships between politics and the economic. Second, it argues that Arendt has a more nuanced view of domination than either her admirers or critics admit. Against Weber’s charismatic politics of the extraordinary, Arendt thus opens space for a radical democratic critique of political economy, even if she does not always pursue the implications of her insights.