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September 7, 2005
On one interpretation of Hannah Arendt her representation of modernity is characterised by the decline of the public sphere and the rise of a social sphere of economic activity and bureaucratic domination. She is seen as a critic of modernity working from the perspective of being an antimodernist, whose argument is it that an authentic politics (as freedom of action, public deliberation and disclosure) has been decisively lost in the modern era.
I find this interpretation questionable. Why cannot her conception of politics as performance and rhetoric be used today?
In On Revolution, Arendt refers back to the founding revolutionary moments of the American Republic in order to assert her version of a 'positive', participatory politics peopled by skilful, civic-minded political orators.
Ned Curthoys says that Arendt argues that:
It would be a mistake to think of America's political liberalism in negative terms, as freedom of movement or freedom from unjustified restraint in the pursuit of property. In the parlance of Arendt's phenomenological essentialism, such negative freedoms are the result of processes of liberation and emancipation from oppression; they are not the 'actual content of freedom' The positive content of freedom is never simply civil rights or the amelioration of social and economic grievances, but 'participation in public affairs and admission to the public realm'. Political freedom as participation does not so much consolidate as transform the animus of a collective cause. Arendt is enamoured by the American Revolution's transfiguration of its initial civic grievance, the argument for 'no taxation without representation' into a revolutionary possibility, the foundation of a new republican body politic and a declaration of inalienable human rights.
These political leaders, who founded the American republic disclosed the active political virtues---'personal integrity', an enlarged capacity for 'judgment', and 'physical courage'. So Arendt is able to step from classical Greece into modernity: she is not an antimodernist Grecophile theorist of the polis and its lost glory.
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