Thought-Factory.net Philosophical Conversations Public Opinion philosophy.com Junk for code
hegel
"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
RECENT ENTRIES
SEARCH
ARCHIVES
Library
Links - weblogs
Links - Political Rationalities
Links - Resources: Philosophy
Public Discussion
Resources
Cafe Philosophy
Philosophy Centres
Links - Resources: Other
Links - Web Connections
Other
www.thought-factory.net
'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Arendt's republicanism « Previous | |Next »
May 22, 2006

A quote from this paper about the political tradition Arendt worked within:

The German tradition of republicanism differed insofar from the one that started from Machiavelli and the Scottish Enlightenment as the latter had rejected the agrarian presuppositions of Aristotelian republicanism with the notion 'commercial society' be the basis of modern republics. Arendt (following the German republican tradition that included.... amongst others Kant, Nietzsche and Weber) re-emphasized a distinction which the proponents of the 'commercial republic' had rejected, namely that of politics as the realm of freedom vs. economics as the realm of necessity and un-freedom. Arendt sees the political sphere as 'the stage for individual actions among peers' while 'the social' is the extension of the patriarchal family (oikos) and the realm of public housekeeping (oikonomia). This distinction is Janus-faced: it is, on one hand, apologetic to the extent that it tends to naturalize and legitimize the existence of un-freedom in the social sphere, including slavery; but it is also, on the other hand, critical to the extent that it makes visible that political liberty based on the separation of the political from the social leaves the un-freedom of the latter unchallenged. Arendt believed that the major wrong of the modern world was that the (social) realm of necessity was continually expanding into the (political) realm of freedom: the whole world seemed to turn into a big quasi-family, crushing the fragile realms of freedom with the naturalized inequality typical of the despotism within the oikos.

Politics as the realm of freedom vs. economics as the realm of necessity and un-freedom--there's the distinctive voice of Arendt.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:37 PM | | Comments (2)
Comments

Comments

I can agree with that. It is one of the reasons why I think 'rights' like dignity, or a free education should not be in a bill of rights. They are social obligations, not political rights.

I think politics has expanded into all parts of life as the monopoly on violence is seductive, and minorities/majorities seek to use it to coerce their opinions on others through legislation. That is in direct opposition to individual or minority freedom.

Cameron,
for Arendt it is economics that has invaded all aspects of social life.

This theme of the "social" counterposed to politics as heroic action with the social coded as economic modernization with humanity sucked into the accelerating process of capitalist production and consumption as described by Marx. These economic concerns have come to the centre of public attention and public policy.