Hannah Arendt and his political thinking
Hannah Arendt was a philosopher and political theoretical Jew that was born in Hannover in 1906. It was subsequently nationalized in the United States. Apart from being a philosopher and political theoretical, he was also a journalist.
Among his most important works, the following are:
- The origins of totalitarianism (1951): a different regime of the past, formerly authoritarianism, totalitarianism is something new. A sum between idolology and terrorism. It also covers the issue of concentration fields. Tell what happens in a totalitarian regime and how it is built. It is based in Germany from the 30s.
- The human condition (1958): It is the most studied work. The human condition is a work of philosophy and anthropology, it is a positive work. It is a work in which it is tried to explain how to get out of an authoritarian regime, such as reconstructing a life outside of it. The setback of a totalitarian regime is what we consider as active life, where we can include work and action. Thus defend a life with meaning, not any life. Try to make a meaning of legal existence. He always tells us that we are social beings, because each existence is political. She wants to change the negative world. She works on a different policy conception than we have today and to which people had at the time. Has distrust of politics.
- Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963): It is an essay on the trials of war crimes in particular, those committed by Adolf Eichmann, war criminal. It covers the thoughts and functioning of a cold mind from Eichmann, concluding that criminals were not normal people like the rest, they called them psychopaths, people with a vision of the reality distorted by the way they acted and witha traumatic past that could have led them to be as they were. Analyze the judgments about these crimes and evil. In this work he used the expression "banality of evil" for the first time.
- About the Revolution (1963): Talk about revolutions, although it mentions others, the French and American Revolution stands out. Hannah Arendt understands the need to create something new, a new society.
- Between the past and the future (1961): it is a work in which he reflects on political aspects.
- The life of the Spirit (1978): It was a work published after his death, he is unfinished. It focused on the study of the three pillars of the spirit that were thought, judgment and will.
- Responsibility and judgment (2003): It covers an investigation into morality and its philosophy. Try to understand our ability to differentiate between good and evil and to judge.
- What is politics (2005): his political thinking was very affected by the twenties. He talked about philosophical and political shock and the emergence of totalitarianism in Germany. This book is made up of edited manuscripts of Hannah Arendt.
Hannah is part of a group of very important German thinkers. Always speak from your experience, write why you know. Distinguishes between writing a dialogue and a letter, there is a time and distance difference. Hannah reflects on a word, an event. Hannah Arendt is guided by common sense.
Write at the end of your life, as a reflection, that the people we live and discuss with our lives. She has the thought of her husband, the discrepancy between technology and our thinking has a different step. Anders studies how our emotions have a slow regime.
As for his life and his thinking we can emphasize that Hannah Arendt had a political thought from the beginning to the end of his days. She was married to her first husband Gunthern Anders, who together with him were both students from Heidegger and Karla Jaspers, outstanding members of a group of German Jewish thinkers who also belonged to Hans Jonas and Walter Benjamin. The battle of cherries is a brief volume, a collection of Anders impressionist memories, memories of the Berlin period with Hannah Arendt, which while they argued about various aspects of life that worried both thinkers, such as philosophy, politics, militancy ofintellectuals … ate cherries.
The most significant difference between both thinkers was to cross the barriers and borders geographically speaking but also in disciplines. Anders was a journalist, philosopher, essayist, writer and music expert. On the other hand, Hannah Arendt did not want to be considered as a philosopher but as a political theoretical. He has always combined journalistic activity with philosophical activity.
He also states in an interview on a German television, that this activity was aimed at understanding new events. For Hannah, understanding means putting a perspective to be able to reflect on the relationships of conditions. The period in which these thinkers write is a period marked by world wars, the use of the atomic bomb, totalitarianism and persecution of the Jews. All these thinkers must do everything possible to survive, look for a hole in the world. Makes a distinction between the types of responsibility:
- Legal responsibility: It is the responsibility of the people who were in a regime, a political system.
- MORAL RESPONSIBILITY: feel responsible for my own presence, your inner court.
- Metaphysical responsibility: everyone’s responsibility for being witnesses, being there, when an event happens and doing nothing. Solidarity between human beings.
For Arendt every human being is different, something new in the world, when it is born, something new is born in life, for each of us something new begins. In a totalitarian regime, a dead person cannot be recognized, a corpse. It characterizes us that each of us can be in a different way. The most important characteristics of the human being is the improbability, in a totalitarian regime it is not possible, since, it is being conditioned and suppressing. Not only in totalitarian regimes is not possible, but also in our daily lives. Works a lot with the concepts of the premodern world.
One of the political issues on which all Hannah Arendt’s work is based is on belonging and the uncertainty of not knowing that it is lost by not being part of something. There are several concepts referred to when talking about the belonging between which it is worth highlighting: State, minorities, refugees … Other reflections were about human rights.
This issue of belonging associates it with the stateless and refugees, those who can escape their land and be welcomed by others while seeing the disaster of their countries and how all their belongings are taken. Some are lucky and can escape other sites while others are not welcomed. This is why, when reflecting on human rights, it focuses on the rights of the state. This world makes us feel that we have something in common with what surrounds us, but in turn makes us see all the differences present.
Power for us is the concentration of power. For Hannah Arendt it is something different. Power is a possibility of maintaining the public sphere, the space between citizen and state. Politics needs isonomy and Isegoria. This is important because in the Greek world not everyone had this isonomy and isoegoria, women did not possess either of the two. This is what equality means in the legal sense and equal words in public. Power is understood in turn in the sense of dynamis or potentia.
For Hannah, power does not consist of an individual characteristic, for her power only exists in groups and will remain while the group remains united. For a person to be in power it is necessary that he has been put there by a certain number of people, people who have chosen him to represent them and act in his name. This power will disappear by dissolving the group of people.
As for violence, Arendt proposes that power is also the power of conscience and acting according to common sense. Still has prejudices towards politics. Every time men want to do something together, the power that arises in the infra arises. From here your concept of power arises.
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