Can Parallels Meet? Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin on the Jewish Post-Emancipatory Quest for Political Freedom

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 ◽  
pp. 27-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arie M Dubnov
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-214
Author(s):  
Edson kretle Santos ◽  
Ricardo Corrêa de Araujo

Este artigo pretende confrontar duas noções acerca da noção de liberdade, temática central na Filosofia Política. De um lado, partiremos de algumas reflexões do liberalismo político, onde no primeiro momento, exploraremos a obra Dois Conceitos de Liberdade (Two Concepts of Liberty), de Isaiah Berlin. Para esse autor a liberdade negativa (negative liberty - “estar livre de”) e, não a liberdade positiva (positive liberty - “estar livre para”), deve ser a maior preocupação dos corpos políticos, ou seja, o Estado deve existir para evitar que a liberdade individual seja reduzida pela própria interferência do Estado ou de outros sujeitos. De encontro a essa ideia, e ancorados em Arendt, desejamos sustentar que um dos grandes problemas do liberalismo político é a não ação (negative liberty), isto é, a falta de participação do cidadão nos assuntos e nas decisões políticas. Ao mostrar isso, defenderemos em Arendt o papel central da liberdade positiva (political freedom) da ação e da fala, e, consequentemente, a possibilidade de um republicanismo cívico como alternativa ao isolamento e apatia políticas gestados pela liberdade burguesa, uma vez que, para Arendt, a aposta de Berlin e da tradição liberal são insuficientes para pensarmos os acontecimentos da política contemporânea. Palavras-chave: Política; Liberdade; Liberalismo; Cidadania; Arendt.


Think ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (48) ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Kei Hiruta

Amid the ongoing political turmoil, symbolized by the recent violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, books and articles abound today to encourage us to re-read anti-totalitarian classics ‘for our times’. But what do we find in this body of work originally written in response to Nazism and Stalinism? Do we find a democratic consensus forged by a shared anti-totalitarian commitment? I doubt it. Considering the cases of Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt, this article highlights discord beneath what may today appear like a post-war democratic consensus. I argue that the anti-totalitarian literature of the last century encompassed multiple political philosophies, which sometimes differed irreconcilably from each other.


Author(s):  
B. Parekh

Hannah Arendt was one of the leading political thinkers of the twentieth century. She observed Nazi totalitarianism at close quarters and devoted much of her life to making sense of it. In her view it mobilized the atomized masses around a simple-minded ideology, and devised a form of rule in which bureaucratically minded officials performed murderous deeds with a clear conscience. For Arendt the only way to avoid totalitarianism was to establish a well-ordered political community that encouraged public participation and institutionalized political freedom. She considered politics to be one of the highest human activities because it enabled citizens to reflect on their collective life, to give meaning to their personal lives and to develop a creative and cohesive community. She was deeply worried that the economically obsessed modern age discouraged political activity, and created morally superficial people susceptible to the appeal of mindless adventurism.


Author(s):  
Cindy Horst ◽  
Odin Lysaker

AbstractThe radical uncertainty that refugees face because of war, flight and exile often dramatically shapes their participation in society. Violent conflict and human rights abuses are not just disproportionately experienced by, but can also create, political subjects. Such life events can transform the motivations, sense of responsibility and political actions of individuals with refugee backgrounds. In this article, we explore the links between civil–political engagement and the life stories of such individuals, analysing our empirical data through themes in the work of Hannah Arendt. We make three central points. First, we highlight the possibility of refugees as ‘vanguard’, playing a leading role in the struggle against dark times. Second, we illustrate the importance of expanding the idea of ‘the political’ through Arendt’s understanding of political action as narrative. And, third, we explore the political freedom and hope that stem from the possibility of ‘new beginnings’.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wang Wen-Sheng

AbstractThis paper begins with a discussion of the thesis that politics is a kind of téchne (art), as Aristotle states. He defines téchne as being the opposite of túche (chance). Hence, politics is neither an exact science nor an accidental opinion; it is, rather, a teachable art or skill (Kunstlehre). Based on this theme, the paper investigates how Hannah Arendt interprets political freedom in the public sphere as the will of the plural citizens, facing an uncertain future, attempting to still the disquiet of the collective ego. A comparison between Arendt and Heidegger could be made if we further investigate Heidegger’s understanding of political freedom in the public sphere based on his comprehension of the will of Da-sein and the enowning (Ereignis) of Being.


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-44
Author(s):  
Seyla Benhabib

My new book, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration. Playing Chess With History From Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin, considers the intertwined lives and work of Jewish intellectuals as they make their escape from war-torn Europe into new countries. Although the group which I consider, including Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Judith Shklar, Albert Hirschman and Isaiah Berlin, have a unique profile as migrants because of their formidable education and intellectual capital, I argue that their lives are still exemplary for many of the dilemmas and risks faced by all migrants. In the reply to critics, I consider such issues as the intellectual relations between Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer; differences between Arendt’s and Adorno’s views of an interpretive social science; and why international law played such an important role in the imagination of Jewish intellectuals. A further question involves the generalizability of the experience of Jewish otherness in European culture. Liberal societies always designate some others as their constitutive exterior. How continuous is the experience of emigré Jewish intellectuals with the exclusion of ethnic and racial minorities in our societies? Finally, if the founding of the State of Israel has by no means resolved the problems of statelessness but re-created it for the Palestinian population, what kind of political stance should we assume vis-à-vis this reality today?


2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Moreault

This article analyses the reasons why the political ideas of Rosa Luxemburg must find, according to Hannah Arendt, their place in the education of political scientists in the countries of the West. For Arendt, two ideas of Luxemburg are pre-eminent: the theory of justice and the theory of political action. Justice is an essential idea to found a common world while political action establishes political freedom. Thus, the political theory of Rosa Luxemburg rejects not only the political thought of Lenin, but constitutes a good criticism of the modern political party systems. Finally, the author demonstrates that Arendt appropriated Luxemburg's non-Marxist political theses as a true expression of political freedom not bound by domination.


Living Law ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 237-284
Author(s):  
Miguel Vatter

This chapter discusses the relation between Arendt’s conception of Judaism, its relation to the history of the Jewish people, and her theory of republicanism. The chapter argues that Arendt follows Martin Buber’s lead, who was the first 20th-century thinker to explicitly identify the anarchic core of Jewish political theology. Buber conceives God’s Kingship as the inner meaning of the Jewish faith and articulates this Kingship in the post-Weberian terms of the idea of charismatic leadership. In contrast with Heidegger’s political theology in the 1930s, which attempts to determine peoplehood as a function of opening a space for the manifestation of the gods of the Earth, the chapter shows that Arendt recovers Roman civil religion in order to unify republican federalism with an anarchic conception of political freedom.


Author(s):  
Seyla Benhabib

This introductory chapter outlines the entanglement of Jewish intellectuals and others as they confronted exile, migration, and, in some cases, statelessness. These intellectuals include Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Albert Hirschmann, Varian Fry, Judith Shklar, Carl J. Friedrich, and Isaiah Berlin. They faced these challenges because of their Jewish origins, regardless of whether they themselves identified as Jewish, whether they were believers, or whether they were practicing Jews or not. Meanwhile, the chapter considers that for German Jews, the experience of belonging and not belonging, of being rendered migrants and internal exiles in their own country, began in the mid-nineteenth century, with the granting of certain civil rights to Jews residing in German territories. Lastly, the chapter presents a brief layout of the succeeding chapters' content.


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