The Possibility of Politics: Hannah Arendt, The Public, and the Fragility of the Common World

This thesis develops Arendt's concept of "the public" as the necessary condition for the practice of politics.Through an engagement with both the notion of plurality, which lies at the core of Arendt's thought, and her concepts of common sense and the world, it understands the Arendtian public realm as the combination of both public space and public spirit.This not only distinguishes Arendt's concern for politics from the Habermasian sociological-institutional model, but equally explains some of her more contentious arguments about modernity.In the 'dark times' of totalitarian rule, the public spirit is left without a public space.Conversely, the condition of 'the social' is better understood as public space without public spirit.This thesis, as an examination of the conditions of politics, clarifies a key strand of Arendt's work while laying the groundwork for an analysis of Arendt's thoughts on the practice of politics itself.iii of surveillance and domination.3 These developments are neither novel nor unheralded; Arendt's careful diagnosis of modernity and her phenomenological excavation of the conditions of human life in the world contain in nuce both the origins of and potential survival strategies for the crises of our time.Arendt's thought, permeated with a deep and abiding concern for the common world, never loses sight of the precariousness of the human condition.Human beings, as both conditioned and conditioning creatures, have the extraordinary ability to shape their surroundings and alter the things that, in turn, shape them.4 Her underlying optimism at the resilience and potentiality of human beings is tempered by the dangerous, disruptive idea that there could be a set of conditions imposed on human beings that alters -and perhaps might even preclude entirely -the possibility of politics.The experience of Nazi totalitarianism and the concentration camps, according to Arendt, demonstrated the vulnerability and malleability of human beings when their condition is so horrendously disfigured as to reduce them to "bundles of reactions."5 In our post-totalitarian world, politics -that concern for the common world and the activities that preserve it -can no longer be taken for granted.Because of her astute recognition of the challenges facing modern political communities in the post-Holocaust and post-Hiroshima world, as well as her deep commitments to the political 3 As I write this introduction, the world is slowly becoming aware of the internment camps in north-west China, in which up to a million ethnic Uighurs are being detained for 're-education.'Despite the Chinese government's repeated denials, satellite imagery and a slim paper trail (cf.Samuel 2018), as well as eyewitness accounts (cf.Kuo 2018, Regencia 2018) confirm the brutal conditions of the camps, where detainees are kept.The tools of mass surveillance, including biometrics and QR codes, are far beyond anything seen in Arendt's life; while re-education camps are naturally not the same as concentration camps, the possibilities for surveillance and domination in the information age outstrip Arendt's worst fears.See especially reports from Human Rights Watch (2018) and the UN's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (2018).4 HC 9. 5 OT 438.26 Habermas, "Further Reflections," 442.27 Craig Calhoun, "Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, 2. 28 Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," 117; note 14, p. 139.29 Cf. both Benhabib's "The Embattled Public Sphere: Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Beyond," Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, no.90 (1997): 2 and "Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas" in Habermas and the Public Sphere, 73ff.42 Cf.especially Kimberley F. Curtis, "Aesthetic Foundations of Democratic Politics in the Works of Hannah Arendt," in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics and Ibid, Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).Curtis' work, while an excellent evaluation, perhaps overaestheticizes Arendt's thought and ignores the other constitutive experiences of the world and the other.In Our Sense of the Real, the aesthetic experience of wonder is the underpinning force behind Arendt's political theory.While this is certainly present in Arendt, it belies the latter's own admission that the experience of wonder -especially as a catalyst for thought -is not the primary drive behind the phenomenon of thinking (cf.esp.LotM-T 191).Curtis does not differentiate between the phenomenal and the aesthetic; this, in my opinion, is the reason why her work does not fully unify the deliberativist and agonist positions.That said, her observations, for the most, part, are spot on.We will treat Curtis' arguments in more detail in chapter one.43 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 4.

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