Abstract
Rights for Arendt are part of this man-made, artificial world. Thus, for her, we have a responsibility to care for and maintain political rights. This is the impertive her politics expresses. However, what Arendt considers an “appropriate” right for our care is clouded by her unease with “the social”: when the social creeps into the field of concern, political rights are destabilized. The introduction of this idea of “the social” raises some very serious concerns about exactly what Arendt accepts as “political,” and about whom she will accept as political actors. Because of this concern with the social, she will make a distinction between the “good man” and the “good citizen”—an echo of her Augustinian neighbor. She limits the political to the abstracted concerns of the citizen, and, for her, it is only when we can overcome the messiness of everyday interests that we might be able to be appropriately engaged. Much as she articulated a purified neighbor of futurity in Love and Saint Augustine, in On Revolution she reasons that we must sacrifice “man” to “citizen.”
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Notes
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, London and New York: Penguin Books, 1963, p. 218.
Hannah Arendt, “What is Existential Philosophy?” (1946), in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1994, p. 186.
George Kateb, “Existential Values in Arendt’s Treatment of Evil and Morality,” Social Research 74:3, Fall 2007, 811–54, p. 825.
Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, “Existentialism Politicized: Arendt’s Debt to Jaspers,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994, p. 163.
Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996, p. 23.
Margaret Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974, p. 2.
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 192.
Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” in Responsibility and Judgment, New York: Schocken Books, 1983, p. 205.
Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” in Men in Dark Times, San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt, Brace, 1968, p. 14.
Hannah Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution: A Commentary,” in Crises of the Republic, New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, 1972, p. 203.
Sheldon S. Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994, p. 290.
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, “Justice: On Relating Private and Public,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994, p. 276.
Margaret Canovan, “Politics as Culture: Hannah Arendt and the Public Realm,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994, p. 187.
Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 242.
Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994, p. 58.
Garrath, Williams, “Love and Responsibility: A Political Ethic for Hannah Arendt,” Political Studies. 46:5, December 1998, 937–50. p. 945.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, New York: Schocken Books, 1995, p. 18.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, London, and San Diego: Harcourt, 1968, p. 301.
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© 2014 Marilyn LaFay
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LaFay, M. (2014). On Revolution: The Fragility of Rights. In: Hannah Arendt and the Specter of Totalitarianism. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137382245_6
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