Whether or not this is a convincing account of the nature of freedom it clearly stands in stark contrast to the liberal view. The liberal considers power the enemy of freedom, whether exercised formally by government or informally by society through public opinion. The less this power is exercised the more room there is for freedom. Similarly, liberals presume individuality flourishes best in an atmosphere of extreme tolerance where criticism and censure is kept to a minimum. Against this view Arendt insisted that individuals require the assistance of others in establishing their individuality. This assistance does not merely consist in encouragement, but necessarily involves comment and criticism. And this is why the pursuit of individuality requires courage. For it is always possible that what will be disclosed is that one is a coward or a fool.

On the other hand, the liberal conception of individuality circumvents such untoward results by embracing no standards and placing all experiments in living on a par with the result that each individual is encouraged to do his or her own thing, however mindless or silly. This is perhaps best epitomized by adolescent sub-cultures in industrialized democracies where the bizarre is often conflated with the profound and criticism of lifestyle equated with fascism. But it also exercises its influence in adult society where tolerance is often confused with indifference.

If Arendt found such thinking wrong headed she nevertheless recognized there were good reasons why it proves so attractive. For, in her words, "the disappearance of the gulf that the ancients had to cross daily to transcend the narrow realm of the household and 'rise' into the realm of politics is an essentially modern phenomenon."28 A great deal is packed into this statement.

There is first of all the distinction between the household and politics. In the Greek polis, the former constituted the realm of necessity or, more simply, economics. Its principle object was to secure the means of subsistence. The household was also the realm of privacy where one could seek refuge from the pressures of politics and enjoy the pleasures of intimacy. In contrast to the household which was given over to the struggle with necessity, politics was the realm of freedom where individuals discovered who they were, where they established their individuality.

Arendt argued that the distinction between the public and the private, between politics and economics, which was so firmly established in the polis, has disappeared in modern times. It disappeared when the health of the economy became a preoccupation of the state. The function of politics was no longer to advance freedom in the sense of disclosure but to administer the realm of necessity which, because it was now conceived as not this or that particular household but as all households loosely joined by the market, had become coeval with society itself.

This was a new form of society: the household writ large. Unlike the polis which encouraged individuality, it exercised enormous pressures for conformism. And it was because of "the leveling demands of the social"29 that romantics like Rousseau, and "moral liberation" liberals such as J.S. Mill, portrayed society as at war with the individual.

Ironically, the household came to be viewed as the only sure refuge against these growing pressures. Privacy acquired a new importance. Instead of being identified as the realm of necessity, the focus of economic activity, the household became the realm of intimacy, a shelter from society and a haven for unhampered individuality.

For Arendt it was no coincidence that a romantic individualism hostile to society eventually turned to intimacy as a rich source of individuality. It was only behind closed doors that the individual could find relief from the incessant pressures of society and express his or her "real" self.30 But if a retreat into privacy was an understandable response to the rise of the social, for Arendt it was also an escape from freedom. The notable absence of courage on the liberal's list of virtues indicates how far liberalism has strayed from what Arendt took to be the authentic meaning of freedom. Nor did Arendt consider this of slight consequence.

The rise of mass society not only spelled the end of politics as a realm of freedom but established the basis for a new brand of politics whose hideous features are meticulously traced by Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Advanced nations fortunate enough to have escaped this fate face another which, though not so hideous, Arendt finds equally disturbing. This fate is the reduction of human life to the level of "animal laborans." We have, she writes, "almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of 'making a living.'"31

Arendt was not only troubled by the prospect that eventually all of mankind might be subjected to either the dehumanization of totalitarianism or the mindlessness of the "Keynesian nightmare", she also feared that eventually human plurality might no longer have a place in the world. For the loss of human plurality, the capacity of men and women to establish a unique identity, which for Arendt meant very much the same thing as establishing one's humanity, would mean an end to a human way of relating to the world and to each other.

Arendt was convinced that the only safeguard against such a catastrophe is the recovery of the lost meaning of freedom. And, at the very least, this would involve the establishment of an authentic political realm. What exactly would this entail?

Before attempting to answer this question it is necessary to point out that whatever it entails it could very well make the world a much more dangerous place: so much so that even those who sympathize with Arendt's critique of the 'laboring society' might conclude that her cure could easily prove worse than the disease.

Consider Arendt's repeated claim that what distinguishes an authentic act of disclosure from ordinary behavior is its greatness. "[dba3()Adba3()]ction can be judged only by the criterion of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis."32

For the moment we shall ignore the implied elitism of this view—greatness, by definition, can only be enjoyed by a few—and simply ask what would life be like in a society dedicated to such a proposition? Would even the ancient polis which Arendt offered as a model of authentic politics prove too tame to measure up?

Indeed, given Arendt’s emphasis on greatness and achieving the extraordinary, would not the Homeric rather than the Attic Greeks offer the best example of a people for whom the achievement of greatness and "immortal fame" was the primary object of life. As the legend of Achilles attests, the life of the warrior naturally offers greater opportunities for valor, greater tests for courage and leadership, than the tame enterprise of deliberative politics. What, after all, is the revelatory power of Pericles' funeral oration in comparison with the drama of Achilles victory over Hector. Perhaps in his speeches Pericles expresses high ideals, but through heroic action Achilles appears in all his complexity: powerful, courageous, rash, contemptuous, and hardhearted.

Of course, Pericles was a civilized man and Achilles a marauding bandit, which is perhaps why Arendt uses Achilles for illustrative purposes only. She meant to defend freedom, but only in the context of civilization. Even so, Arendt did not minimize the dangers inherent in the politics she praised. For it is a politics that teaches men how to bring forth "what is great and radiant ..."33

It is power, the ability of men to act in concert, which enables political actors to achieve great things. Nor did Arendt hesitate to acknowledge that power "has an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across boundaries."34 Knowing full well what dangers this can pose she adds that moderation is "one of the political virtues par excellence."35 But what guarantee do we have that the thirst for disclosure will be tempered with moderation? Apparently none.

The very boundlessness of the freedom Arendt defended might appear so frightening to some as to render the safe banality of the consumer society attractive by contrast. According to A.O. Hirschman, it is precisely the banality of avarice that made it so attractive to many eighteenth century thinkers who, unlike Adam Smith, offered a political rather than an economic defense of capitalism. For it was the capacity of the "love of gain" to tame wild political passions, to make even the prince desire wealth in preference to power, that attracted their attention. For this reason they viewed the prospect of the triumph of capitalism with considerable optimism. It held out the promise of social and political peace.36 And the contemporary critique of capitalist societies as intolerably dull and too tame to be inspiring merely attests to the accuracy of the prediction of these earlier thinkers. Nor is it obvious that banality is too high a price to pay for social tranquility: a point easily lost on those who have never experienced the terror of political chaos.

But is it fair to burden Arendt's concept of freedom with this implication? Perhaps not. For her account of action as greatness is open to more than one interpretation. For example, while Arendt claims that "action needs for its full appearance the shining brightness we once called glory ...,"37 she goes on to argue that "the greatest that man can achieve is his own appearance and actualization."38 This suggests that it is the act of disclosure itself,the willingness to take the risk, rather than the quality of the act that actually constitutes greatness.

Arendt claimed that the disclosure of "Who somebody is or was," can be known "only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero—his biography, in other words; everything else we know of him, including the work he may have produced and left behind tells us only what he is or was."39 In this context, the hero of a story is merely the person about whom a story is told, not someone who has achieved great things. And it appears that Arendt believed an individual can achieve some from of greatness simply by being the hero of a story in this more restricted sense

That Arendt thought it appropriate to attribute greatness to mere disclosure, regardless of what is disclosed, is perhaps explained by her belief that disclosure requires courage because one never knows for sure of the consequences, of the sort of person who will be disclosed. "The hero the story discloses needs no heroic qualities... The connotation of courage,... is in fact already present in a willingness to act and speak at all, to insert one’s self into the world and begin a story of one's own." Arendt went so far as to insist that the "extent of this original courage," that is the courage to risk disclosure, "without which action and speech and therefore, according to the Greeks, freedom, would not be possible at all, is not less great and may even be greater if the 'hero' happens to be a coward."40 Presumably it would take greater courage for the coward to risk disclosure because he is more likely than others to disclose what is shameful.

This places action in a new light. As a vehicle for disclosure it need do no more than reveal the "who" of the agent, which is essentially a story or biography. Nor need this "who" be inspiring to qualify as a disclosure. Often it is not, as in the case of the coward. And when people relate to each other "in sheer human togetherness" this "disclosure of who" somebody is "is implicit in everything somebody says and does."41 And it is in this sense that she claimed that "every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a story with beginning and end..."42

To avoid the misunderstanding that disclosure occurs only when individuals attempt something great, Arendt emphasized that it occurs more often as not when the primary aim of action is the advancement of worldly interests. In fact, Arendt readily admits that the focus of "most words and deeds" is "worldly interests."43 It is not what acts are about that is important, rather it is what they disclose. Of course, for the pursuit of worldly interests to result in disclosure there must exist an audience ready and eager to judge and criticize. No doubt, unalloyed greed would receive short shrift in such an atmosphere, and the content of disclosure would hardly be flattering. Nevertheless, individuals would truly disclose who they are.

The more Arendt explains the nature of disclosure, the more the concept of greatness as ordinarily understood recedes into the background. For instance, we are told that, for most, disclosure does not occur, as with Achilles, through "one supreme act" aimed at "winning 'immortal fame'." Rather "we disclose ourselves piecemeal..."44 And it is by means of such piecemeal disclosures that acts produce "stories with or without intention as naturally as fabrication produces tangible things."45

This goes some way in cleansing the concept of disclosure of the taint of elitism. Anyone can achieve disclosure so long as they possess the requisite courage. That, of course, is a very large "if" and indicates the distance that still remains, even under a non-elitist interpretation of disclosure, between Arendt's concept of freedom and the liberal view. The liberal wants people left alone, for it is assumed that freedom is maximized by reducing restraints. Arendt, on the other hand, linked freedom to disclosure, and disclosure necessitates judgment by one’s peers. Judgment is obviously constraining, especially when negative. To risk it requires courage.

It requires something else as well. Disclosure is impossible in the absence of a judging audience. Where no such audience exists, where people react to, rather than collectively assess conduct, disclosure cannot occur. And this is another respect in which Arendt's concept of freedom differs from liberal view. The liberal focuses on privacy as the realm in which freedom is most secure; Arendt singles out the public realm for this function. Privacy exists wherever there is a place to hide. The public realm must be created and exists only as a form of "human relating," a form of relating which requires that participants understand its point. In the public realm both actors and audience recognize that action aims at disclosure. Judgment, the assessment of an individual's identity, occurs as a matter of course.

An appeal for the establishment of a public realm therefore runs counter to the very spirit of liberalism since it calls for an increase in the type of restraints liberals have fought hard to remove: and to increase them in a dramatic way since they would not occur haphazardly or as simple reactions to non-conformity, but as an inherent feature of relating in public.

For Arendt this is all necessary to achieve disclosure. And disclosure is necessary if we are to achieve "individuality." Liberals, of course, are also eager to promote individuality, but their conception of individuality differs from Arendt's. In The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt gives the impression that, romantic pretensions aside, it is the desire for status and respectability which animates modern individuality.

In her chapter "The Jews and Society," Arendt examines the rules governing Jewish assimilation into respectable eighteenth and early nineteenth century European society. Jews were "not to behave like ordinary Jews." Moreover, they were expected to demonstrate that they were "new specimens of humanity."46 In short, Jews were not only required to prove they were exceptions to their race but exceptions to all races. They had to be "exceptional specimens of humanity."47 They had to be better educated, more intelligent, and more individualistic than others before they could be accepted as equals.

Arendt found it intriguing how "closely the assimilation of Jews into society followed the precepts Goethe had proposed for the education of his Wilhelm Meister, a novel which was to become the great model of middle-class education."48 The hero of Goethe's novel is a young burgher who receives his education under the watchful eye of a nobleman who intends to prepare him for entrance into the aristocracy, to teach him how "to present and represent his individuality, and thereby advance from the modest status of a burgher's son into a nobleman."49 The association of individuality with class mobility is striking and suggests that nineteenth century (and perhaps twentieth century) middle class enthusiasm for individuality may not have been entirely genuine.

In this connection it is worth noting Bruce Mazlish's difficulties in piecing together a biography of one of liberalism's founding fathers, James Mill. Not only is very little known about James Mill's youth, Mazlish concludes that James Mill himself conspired to prevent anything from being known, even by his son. Thus we find John Stuart Mill, after his father's death, inquiring from others whether they might know of the simple facts of his father's past: anything about his parents, schooling, etc. Mazlish sees in James Mill's attempts to turn his back on his past, to even conceal evidence of it, the "prototype of the 'self-made man,' who sought to pose as one practically sprung from his own loins."50

The motive for this, Mazlish tells us, was not simply to affirm one's independence but to challenge "ancestry as a justification for political or social power."51 It is a motive that reveals what seems to have been a tacit dimension of early liberalism. Individuality was not only embraced as a cultural ideal, but as an antidote for feelings of class inferiority. Only the self-made man, literally a man who has formed himself, deserved respectability for he alone did not owe what he was to an accident of birth. Thus could James Mill say in righteous indignation that it is the middle class, the "intelligent ... virtuous rank" who deserve respect for it is "the middle rank that gives to science, to art, and to legislation itself, their most distinguished ornaments, and is the chief source of all that has exalted and refined human nature..."52

Still one must separate motive from announced ideal. Yet, even at the level of ideal, liberal individuality seems defective simply because it is so formless. Either it consists in the flowering of innate personality traits which vary, like genetic endowment, from one individual to another, or it reduces to the observation that sensibility to pleasure and pain is idiosyncratic, different for different individuals, so that if people are left alone to follow the bent of their inclinations they naturally develop in different directions, become distinguishable individuals. The second interpretation makes individuality of some importance for utilitarianism: if differences in sensibility necessitate different experiments in living to maximize individual happiness, then needless conformity violates the principle of utility.53 Under either interpretation, individuality assumes the status of a preference. It has no standards, it is not open to judgment. Questions of value do not arise. Consequently it is impossible to assess whether a particular experiment in living is a success or a failure.54

In contrast to the liberal view, the virtue of Arendt's conception of liberty is that particular expressions of individuality, experiments in living, are open to judgment. What disclosure reveals may be good or bad; it is up to the audience to decide. On the other hand, it is something of a mystery how the audience arrives at a decision.

It is clear Arendt meant to foreclose every attempt to draw upon morality or tradition for help in making such decisions. The only "moral precepts" that can be "applied to action from the outside, from some supposedly higher faculty or from experiences outside action's own reach" are those that arise out of politics itself, namely "mutual promise or contract." Morality as "mores" or "customs and standards of behavior solidified through tradition and valid on the ground of agreements, both of which change with time," have no particular relevance.55 What the standards are, if any, that inform "mutual promise or contract," Arendt does not say save to imply they are the very standards of assessment that apply to assessments of disclosure. And this leaves us back where we started.

Perhaps if one pushes the analogy between action and a theatrical performance, it might appear that assessment hinges upon the unpredictable currents of popular aesthetics. Or, if one takes seriously the idea that “action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller,” the image of disclosure as fiction comes to mind: optimistically, serious fiction, imaginatively conceived and related in a craftsmanlike way; less optimistically, the low melodrama of the soap opera predicated on the unlikely (though unfortunately true) proposition that nothing fascinates as much as banality itself.

The idea of freedom as "virtuosity," that is the "excellence with which man answers the opportunities the world opens up before him,"56 might seem more promising. After all, as Machiavelli made clear, there are objective standards, and requisite virtues, associated with success. And while they vary with the enterprise in question, they are hardly capricious, although perhaps not always inspiring

On the other hand, if we free virtuosity from its Machiavellian connotation as virtO(u,') and concentrate on how a "man answers the opportunities the world opens up before him," that is the sort of person he reveals to the world whether or not he succeeds or fails-his courage, tenacity, humility, or even panache-we encounter what might be fairly described as distinctively human qualities, qualities to be found among the high and low, the stuff out of which enduring stories are made.

In The Human Condition, Arendt observes that among the Greeks speech was first conceived not as a "means of persuasion" but as "specifically human way of answering, talking back and measuring up to whatever happened or was done."57 Possibly she meant for this concept to embrace action in general. Action as disclosure would then reveal who someone is by revealing how a person measures up to the opportunities and pitfalls of life. This would extend the reach of action into the realm of even the humble who, though they do not achieve or attempt great things, are nevertheless capable of dignity even in defeat.

While I personally find this interpretation attractive, it invites an obvious objection: it seems empty of political content. And it is clear Arendt meant disclosure to be understood as a political concept: not a modern political concept (which for Arendt was something of a contradiction in terms) but a concept that illuminates and recaptures the meaning of politics as it was carried on in the Greek polis. On the other hand, this was a politics broadly conceived that crossed the boundaries of morality and prudence. Possibly it was broad enough to include disclosure as "measuring up" to the vicissitudes of life. Possibly not.