Hannah Arendt and the Revolution Of Ones (original) (raw)
Related papers
2006
For partisans of a contemporary wave of interest in the rediscovery of ‘the political’, the thought of Hannah Arendt offers a seemingly ineluctable intellectual resource. Inasmuch as the problem of totalitarianism is at the core of Arendt’s thought, her sympathy towards this attempt to enlist her in the service of this cause must be imagined to bear heavily upon the place of ‘the political’ in her treatment of totalitarianism itself. This note on Arendt’s thinking on the political thereby proceeds from the claim that there are, at heart, two divergent conceptions of totalitarianism in the cumulative literature on the subject. The first of these, I want to argue, is presently the dominant conception of totalitarianism. It is the dominant conception in social science, among historians and (to a lesser extent) among political theorists. Moreover, it has a special kind of import, in the light of at least two things. At one level, it is informed by the attempt to fashion plausible accoun...
Hannah Arendt: Plural Agency, Political Power, and Spontaneity
The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Agency, 2020
Engaging with the work of the philosopher who is best known for her work on the “active life” (vita activa), Hannah Arendt, this entry deals with a particular type of agency that is rarely accounted for in phenomenology: political agency. For Arendt human beings are actors only in particular instances, that is: if one follows the standard account of agency as entailing the capacity for intentional and goal-directed action, which the author calls the model of agency as sovereignty. Whereas the non-sovereignty of animal laborans (‘working man’) precludes political agency, this is entirely different when people act as citizens (‘acting men’). Even if they are not sovereign, Arendt does not deny their agency. She takes great pains to argue that as soon and as long as people act in public space, they are neither determined, nor themselves determining sovereign actors. Drawing on her two major philosophical works, The Human Condition (1958) and The Life of the Mind (1971/1978), I demonstrate that Arendt conceives of political agency as plural agency and untangle why, in her view, agency precludes sovereignty in the public domain and why non-sovereignty is even the condition of citizens’ power and freedom when they act in the presence of each other. The hypothesis that this contribution seeks to defend is that acknowledging Arendt’s distinctively phenomenological approach of politics is crucial for understanding her account of the question of human agency, particularly political agency. I start with a reconstruction of the features of Arendt’s phenomenology which additionally allows for an introduction of the notion that is key to understanding her account of political agency: plurality. Section 2 proceeds with a discussion of the distribution of agency and sovereignty across the various human activities. Whereas section 3 highlights the non-sovereignty of political agency, contra the metaphysical prejudices and fallacies, section 4 demonstrates its agentic dimension, contra (neo-)Nietzschean post-metaphysical thought. The agentic dimension of Arendtian plural agency is finally (section 5) fleshed out by a discussion of the phenomena of power and freedom as the manifestations of respectively the interaction and the initiative dimension of political action.
The public realm and revolution: Hannah Arendt between theory and praxis
Estudos Ibero-Americanos
The main goal of our paper is to analyze Arendt's idea of the influence of revolutions on the public real by examining its theoretical and practical scope. In the course of our analysis, we will also answer the question whether Arendt's understanding of revolution could be used in the modern context. After a critical investigation of Arendt's idea of revolution and of her thesis about the impact of revolution on the public realm, we will briefly investigate several examples of modern revolutions from an 'Arendtian' standpoint in order to draw a conclusion about the current applicability of Arendt's key arguments concerning violence, power, social issues, collective political action and communication.
Jurnal Ledalero
This article aims to map out Hannah Arendt's proposal on democratic political action as a solution to the problem of totalitarianism. For this purpose, the article will consist of three parts. The first part will deal with the problem of totalitarianism as reflected in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The second part will deal with Arendt's philosophical proposal of democracy as political action against totalitarianism as its enemy. It argues that freedom and constitution are the basis of people's political action in public space for the sake of nation and community. The third part will deal with the problem of human rights and Arendt's proposal of political natality. According to the principle of natality, people as subjects of politics are capable to find their own ways to preserve their own life. Human transcendence is actualized in time frame. As conclusion, the paper will discuss the contribution of Arendt's thoughts of people's transcendence and its implications in facing the mob-rule.