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10 - Arendt’s constitutional politics

from PART V - REVOLUTION AND CONSTITUTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Dana Villa
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Summary

In what sense (if any) is man a political animal? Hannah Arendt is commonly thought to have made more of the Aristotelian characterization than anyone else in twentieth-century philosophy. I do not mean that she is a good expositor of Aristotle: in fact she is often criticized on that front. I mean that she took the content of Aristotle's claim very seriously, particularly the question of what exactly in man's nature is political and what is not.

Historically, Arendt argued, humans have found their greatest fulfillment in politics. For people like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, “life in Congress, the joys of discourse, of legislation, of transacting business, of persuading and being persuaded, were . . . no less conclusively a foretaste of eternal bliss than the delights of contemplation had been for medieval piety.” In politics, such men found something which managed to redeem human life from the cyclical futility of birth, reproduction, and death. Without that something, their existence would be as uniform and pointless as the life of any animal; or its point would be the biological process itself, the endless repetition of generation after generation. In politics, by contrast, our humanity gives us the chance to transcend the merely natural and to undertake unique initiatives that flare up in the public realm and linger indefinitely in memory and history.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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