From Love to Care: Arendt’s Amor Mundi in the Ethical Turn

• Author: Lucien Ferguson
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221097426
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221097426

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(6) 939 –963

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917221097426

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Article

From Love to Care:

Arendt’s Amor Mundi

in the Ethical Turn

Lucien Ferguson1

Abstract

This article offers a novel account of a key concept in Hannah Arendt’s

political thought: amor mundi. In political theory’s ethical turn, theorists

have increasingly turned to amor mundi as a source of ethical guidance and

inspiration for politics. However, in doing so, they have elided Arendt’s

distinct understanding of care. This article recovers Arendt’s understanding

of amor mundi as care for the world by reconstructing the central concerns

of her dissertation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, and tracing them to the

“Crisis” essays of Between Past and Future. It shows that amor mundi emerges

in the dissertation as part of a question: if love is our fundamental orientation

toward the world, how can we love the world without instrumentalizing it?

The two “Crisis” essays provide the following answer: if love is to avoid—

and perhaps militate against—the instrumentalization of the world, it must

take the form of care. Following this analysis, this article contends that the

contribution of amor mundi to the ethical turn is best understood, not as

the ethos needed to guide action in the political realm, but as a key pre-

or nonpolitical ethos needed to conserve the world where politics takes

place—and thus the very possibility of politics.

Keywords

Arendt, love, care, amor mundi, ethical turn

1Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Lucien Ferguson, Northwestern University, Scott Hall, 2nd Floor, Evanston, IL 60208-0001,

USA.

Email: lucien.ferguson@nlaw.northwestern.edu

1097426PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221097426Political TheoryFerguson

research-article2022

940 Political Theory 50(6)

“Which of the warring gods should we serve? Or, should we serve perhaps

an entirely different god, and who is he?” (Weber [1919] 1946, 153). If Max

Weber’s early-twentieth-century provocations still seem to haunt political

theory, it is because profound cultural, social, and religious diversity con-

tinues, alongside instrumental rationality, to be an enduring feature of capi-

talist society. The fact of pluralism poses a series of difficult challenges to

theorists interested in articulating normative grounds and guidance for

political life: How might we acknowledge, affirm, and even adjudicate

claims based on competing and potentially irreconcilable values? How

might we conceptualize the spaces and sensibilities needed for starkly

divergent opinions to experience productive confrontation? Wrestling with

these problems has increasingly led political theorists to unsettle the cate-

gory of “ethics” itself with an eye toward mapping its complex encounters

with politics in a polytheistic age (Rancière 2006; Geuss 2008; Myers 2013;

Vázquez-Arroyo 2016).

The recent ascendency of ethics and ethical theory—or what is now

widely acknowledged as political theory’s “ethical turn”—has involved,

inter alia, a substantial reconsideration of “ethos”—usually understood as

affect, spirit, disposition, or attitude—as a source of inspiration and guid-

ance for contemporary politics. Here, a number of theorists have found

Hannah Arendt’s writings particularly fruitful (Habermas 1977; Connolly

1999; Benhabib 2003; Myers 2013; Honig 2017). Indeed, as several com-

mentators note, Arendt theorizes in terms of ethos.1 On the one hand, she

wagers her diagnosis of modern world crisis on a genealogy of its conquest

by distinct, instrumentalist ethe: the attitudes she calls homo faber, animal

laborans, and “mass man” ([1958] 1998; [1960] 2006a). On the other, as has

become common knowledge, she responds to this diagnosis by proffering an

alternative attitude, one she calls “amor mundi” (Bernauer 1987, v–ix).

Arendt’s concept of amor mundi has increasingly become important for

theorists in the ethical turn (Connolly 1999; Myers 2013; Honig 2017;

Galloway 2021). In so doing, however, it poses an obdurate vexation to con-

temporary political theory. While amor mundi frequently appears in Arendt’s

1. Arendt, readers note, theorizes ethos through a constellation of ethical terms:

for example, “mentality” (Pitkin 1998, 178-183); “attitude” (Dietz 2002, 170);

and “ideal types” (Benhabib 2003, 131). These categories, alongside others like

“spirit,” “disposition,” “character,” and “bearing” offer an anchoring vocabulary

for ethos talk in the ethical turn (Myers 2013, 3–8).