Abstract

The dissertation reconstructs and critically evaluates Hannah Arendt's political philosophy with respect to four major themes: modernity, action, judgment, citizenship. ;In the first chapter I examine Arendt's conception of modernity, highlight its key features, and criticize Arendt's understanding of nature, process, and the social. I also show the importance of Heidegger and Benjamin for Arendt's historical methodology, which she conceived in terms of a hermeneutic recovery of the past after the loss or erosion of tradition. ;In the second chapter I examine Arendt's theory of action, focusing on the links between action, narrative, and remembrance. I argue that Arendt's theory of action incorporates two models, an expressive and a communicative one, and that she was not able to integrate these two models in a satisfactory manner. ;In the third chapter I examine Arendt's theory of judgment. I distinguish two models of judgment, one from the standpoint of the vita activa, the other from the standpoint of the vita contemplativa, and show that both are developed in the light of Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment. I then respond to three important critiques concerning, respectively, the status of judgment within the vita activa; the appropriateness of Kant's aesthetics; Arendt's own conception of knowledge and rationality. ;In the fourth chapter I examine Arendt's conception of citizenship in relation to the public sphere, political agency and collective identity, political culture. I identify three features of the public sphere and show their connection to Arendt's conception of citizenship. I then focus on the issues of political agency and collective identity and show how they are linked to the practice of citizenship. Lastly, I look at conditions for the flourishing of political culture and identify them with the reactivation of citizenship and democratic participation. ;In conclusion I argue that Arendt's political philosophy articulates the historical experience and the normative presuppositions of participatory democracy, and that it remains essential for the reactivation of public life in the modern world