Reworked version (tightened, not softened):

Politics, for Arendt, is a practice of collective self-governance grounded in participation. It depends on mediated perspective-making and perspective-taking, and on action that is answerable to thought—what she understands as conscience in action, or the inner dialogue through which one asks what one is, in fact, doing. Evil, on this account, does not primarily arise from malice or conviction but from acting without thinking, and from a failure of perspective-taking.

The capacity to take perspectives, however, is not merely an individual faculty. It is sustained—or undermined—by social norms, material affordances, shared practices, and institutional structures, many of which are weak, degraded, or absent. Where these conditions erode, the space for judgment collapses.

As George Kateb observes, following Arendt, genuinely political—or joint—action “takes place only where there is a common commitment to the reality, beauty, and sufficiency of the world—the world ‘out there.’” Such action is oriented toward “the creation or conservation or augmentation of a suitable world for itself.” Politics, in this sense, is inseparable from worldliness: from a shared attachment to a common reality that can be judged, contested, and cared for.

In short, Arendt calls for a disciplined, reflective engagement with plurality—one that fosters joint action grounded in thoughtful judgment and sustained by a commitment to a world held in common.

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Why this works:

• It keeps thinking, judgment, perspective-taking, and worldliness tightly linked.

• It avoids presenting Arendt as naively participatory or consensus-driven.

• It foregrounds the material and institutional fragility of political judgment—important given your broader concerns about modern unmediation.

• It leaves space for critique (especially of whether such conditions still exist) without importing redemption or optimism.

If you want, the next step could be:

• Putting Arendt into tension with Agamben’s account of unworlding, or

• Asking whether Arendt’s reliance on a “common world” quietly presupposes precisely the socio-material supports you suggest no longer hold.

Put Arendt into tension with Agamben’s account of unworlding.

This tension cuts very deep, because Arendt and Agamben diagnose a similar historical catastrophe while locating its decisive rupture in almost opposite places.

Arendt’s political ontology presupposes worldliness: a durable, shared “in-between” constituted by institutions, practices, objects, narratives, and spaces that both separate and relate us. Politics exists only where this world can appear—where plurality is stabilized enough to allow perspective-taking, judgment, and action answerable to thought. Totalitarianism, for Arendt, is catastrophic because it destroys the world: it collapses the space between people, erodes common sense (sensus communis), and replaces mediated reality with ideological consistency. Even the banality of evil depends on this destruction—thoughtlessness becomes possible when the worldly supports of judgment are gone. Crucially, however, Arendt retains a normative orientation: the task of politics is the reconstitution of the world through action, judgment, and care for appearances.

Agamben radicalizes the diagnosis by shifting the site of destruction. For him, the decisive operation is not primarily the erosion of political culture or judgment, but the juridico-political unworlding of life itself. Modern politics does not merely damage the common world; it produces a zone in which the distinction between world and non-world collapses. Through states of exception, biopolitical capture, and the logic of inclusion by exclusion, life is stripped of its worldly form and rendered bare—no longer situated within a shared horizon of meaning, but exposed to power without mediation. Where Arendt sees worldlessness as the condition that enables evil, Agamben sees unworlding as the very modus operandi of modern sovereignty.

This creates a sharp tension. Arendt’s politics depends on the possibility that the world, though damaged, can be restored or renewed through action. Agamben is far less confident that such a world still exists—or can be reconstituted—under contemporary conditions. The camp, for Agamben, is not an aberration but the hidden paradigm of modern political space; it is not simply a site where worldliness is absent, but where the political form of worldhood has been structurally replaced by administrative exposure. From this perspective, Arendt’s appeal to judgment, conscience, and plurality risks presupposing the very worldly conditions that biopolitics has already undone.

At the same time, Agamben’s position generates its own impasse. If the world has been structurally unmade, then Arendt’s insistence on thinking, judgment, and appearance can seem politically naïve—but Agamben’s alternative often stalls at diagnosis. His gestures toward form-of-life, inoperativity, or profanation point toward a politics beyond sovereignty, yet remain thin when measured against Arendt’s concrete account of action, responsibility, and shared reality. Where Arendt risks moralism without sufficient structural critique, Agamben risks paralysis without a viable account of collective re-worlding.

Seen together, the tension is not simply theoretical but practical. Arendt asks: How can we act and judge so as to sustain a common world? Agamben replies: What if the very conditions of worldhood have been neutralized by the political order itself? The unresolved question that emerges between them—and that neither fully answers—is whether politics today can still take the form of worldly action among plural perspectives, or whether it must begin from a more austere task: bearing witness to unworlding without prematurely redeeming it through the language of participation, conscience, or shared meaning.

This is precisely where a broader concern with unmediation, degraded affordances, and the fragility of perspective-taking finds its sharpest articulation: Arendt offers a demanding ethic of world-care; Agamben exposes the possibility that the world to be cared for has already been structurally withdrawn.

Ask whether Arendt’s reliance on a “common world” quietly presupposes precisely the socio-material supports you suggest no longer hold.

Pressing that question reveals a fault line that runs through Arendt’s political thought without ever quite being acknowledged.

Arendt’s appeal to a common world does quiet work. It presupposes not only plurality in the abstract, but a dense mesh of socio-material supports: relatively stable institutions, shared objects of concern, durable spaces of appearance, linguistic and narrative continuity, and practices that train judgment and perspective-taking over time. Sensus communis is not a natural endowment; it is cultivated through worldliness. Yet Arendt tends to treat the erosion of these conditions as a political disaster rather than as an ongoing structural feature of modernity.

This is where the tension sharpens. Arendt diagnoses totalitarianism as world-destroying, but she often writes as if worldlessness were an exception—an extreme rupture after which re-worlding remains imaginable through action, remembrance, and judgment. What remains underexamined is whether the modern political economy, media ecology, and administrative state systematically undermine the very affordances her politics requires prior to any overt totalitarian break. If the common world is already thinned, fragmented, or replaced by functional equivalence and procedural abstraction, then appeals to conscience, plurality, and participation risk floating free of the material conditions that once sustained them.

Put differently: Arendt’s political normativity may depend on a world that is no longer available. The “space of appearance” assumes spaces that endure; perspective-taking assumes shared reference points; judgment assumes a public reality that resists total instrumentalization. If these are eroded not episodically but structurally—through mass mediation, bureaucratic governance, and biopolitical management—then the failure of thinking she associates with evil may not be a moral lapse so much as a condition produced by unworlding itself.

From this angle, Arendt’s insistence on responsibility and judgment risks mislocating blame. It frames political collapse primarily in terms of thoughtlessness rather than in terms of the socio-material deprivation of thinking’s conditions. This does not invalidate her account, but it exposes a limit: her ethics of world-care may quietly rely on the persistence of a world capable of being cared for.

This is precisely where Agamben’s intervention bites. His account of unworlding suggests that the common world is not merely fragile but actively neutralized—rendered inoperative by structures that strip life of its mediations and reduce political space to zones of management and exposure. If that diagnosis holds, then Arendt’s politics may function less as a practicable program than as a regulative memory: a reminder of what politics once required, rather than a map of how it can now be enacted.

The unresolved question, then, is not simply whether Arendt is right about politics, but whether her conception of a common world is anachronistic—whether it names a condition whose disappearance she registers but whose structural impossibility she never fully confronts.

gpt