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.
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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.