Being political and the reconstruction of public discourse: Hannah Arendt on experience, history and the spectator

This study analyses a number of Hannah Arendt’s books and essays written over four<br/>decades and suggests that a common thread can be detected that links together the<br/>different stages of her thought. The need to do this follows from having to treat with<br/>caution Arendt’s own judgement that in the mid-1930s her thinking changed when she<br/>became political. In relation to writings she produced throughout her life, what can be<br/>seen is that she was actually preoccupied by one and the same question, namely, what<br/>it means to be with other people, she just looked for answers in different places and<br/>used different methods. The study shows how in her dissertation on Saint Augustine’s<br/>treatment of love and such early published pieces as ‘The Enlightenment and the<br/>Jewish Question’ and her commentary on Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Arendt was already<br/>challenging Heidegger’s ontology, in Being and Time, of ‘being-with-one-another’.<br/>Her thinking at this time was purely empirical though, dependent upon interpretations<br/>of history alone. Her later work, The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human<br/>Condition, for instance, reveal that Arendt’s political conversion amounted to the<br/>realisation that ontology and history are as necessary to each other as Kant’s concepts<br/>and intuitions. Her defence of plurality therefore, represented both a reaction to the<br/>evils of totalitarianism on the grounds that it is an anti-political form of government,<br/>and a revised challenge to Heidegger’s assessment of das Man on his own terms. In<br/>addition though, Arendt’s depiction of public space and public discourse, suggested<br/>that choosing to be with others politically, is an antidote to the solitude of the<br/>individual engendered by mass society.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Ph.D.

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Southampton

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Leader, Jonathan W.

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Roemer, Nils
• Brinkmann, Tobias
• Reiter, Andrea
• Owen, David