This essay engages with the problem of Arendt's historical style, particularly the style of Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and what Gersholm Scholem described as its lack of feeling for the suffering of others, its lack of Herzenstakt. Arendt thought that totalitarianism had changed the way in which history must be written; in particular, she thought that the extermination of the Jews of Europe meant that historical writing could no longer conform to classical standards of dispassion and withhold anger. In light of this claim, I examine anger in Arendt's writing in relation both to her reflections on the cognitive meaning of anger in On Violence, particularly the anger of the Black Power movement, but also (and more expansively) the tactlessness of her writing both about Eichmann and the survivor testimony that formed the 'background' to his trial. By drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer's arguments about the importance of tact, and the ancient Stoic formulation of sensus communis for the methodology of the human sciences, I read Arendt's tactless, abrasive style not as simply dismissive towards the suffering of others, but rather as a key expression of her understanding of political modernity. Arendt's tactlessness signals, I argue, what she thinks of as an abandonment of the political language of 'sentiment.' Again, such an abandonment, I argue, is a result of the pressure that totalitarianism had placed on the possibilities of political and historical writing.Thus you will avoid hatred from the offence by harming nobody gratuitously: from which sensus communis will protect you. SenecaThere is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalization. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. Hannah Arendt I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Herman MelvilleIs it possible to envisage a viable theory of tact in the humanities? Tact has a long history, and for writers like Hans-Georg Gadamer it is bound up with the recovery of the Roman idea of the sensus communis over the course of

This article places Hannah Arendt’s fundamental view of the instrumentality of violence in dialogue with Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ in order to demonstrate the importance for each of a notion of ‘mere life’ or ‘life itself’ to an understanding of the agency of violence in modernity. Arendt’s critique of vitalism is most fully developed in The Human Condition, where she describes an entanglement of the instrumental activity of homo faber with life and labour in the work of Bergson, Nietzsche and Marx. I suggest that Bergson’s treatment of life as creative evolution unexpectedly yields an accurate description of politics as spontaneous, unpredictable motion that Arendt takes as typical of modernity. Since Arendt also credits Bergson with a decisive influence on what she takes to be a growing commitment to the life-enhancing, creative potential of violence in the oppositional movements of the 1960s, which she explores in her late essay, On Violence, I trace out the continuity between Arendt’s earlier account of homo faber and her later critique of postmodern oppositional violence.

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