The Power of Talking

“We become more just and more pious by thinking and talking about justice and piety.”

— Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis Character of Modern Society”

Hannah Arendt holds a fundamental belief in the power of talking.

Following Socrates, Arendt affirms that simply talking with others about courage can make one more courageous; engaging another on questions of justice can inspire one to act justly; and conversing about piety can lead one to be pious. Arendt’s belief in the salutary power of talking goes to the heart of her political theory and her inquiry into judgment as the human faculty that can help re-imagine a common political world. We have to talk with one another and ourselves in order to embrace fully the plurality of human existence. And in talking and judging we build the connections that re-imagine the common world and give meaning to justice.

Nowhere does Arendt make this claim about the power of talking more directly than in her contribution to a symposium on “The Crisis Character of Modern Society” in February 1966. The hope expressed by the conveners was that by gathering together thinkers who had navigated the crisis of totalitarianism, the crisis of education, the crisis of racial unrest, the crisis of atheism, the crisis of imperialism, and the crisis of the Vietnam war, there might emerge “some standards, some guidance…