Hannah Arendt's early writings, focused on Jewish politics in the 1930s and 1940s, are in many ways her most directly political work. Yet certain problematic concepts in these texts, notably the idea of the “Jewish nation,” have led many to disregard it. A shift in the themes of Arendt's work following the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 has resulted in further divisions being drawn between the pre- and post-Origins work. This essay opposes both these positions. By mapping out the causes and development of Arendt's thought on the “Jewish nation,” in particular through her critical engagement with Zionism and her support of a binational or federal political solution in Israel and Palestine, the influence of Arendt's early thought on Jewish politics is shown to form the basis of a more general theory of politics, further developed in her later work on the nature of the political.
The influence of the ancient Greek world on Hannah Arendt's thought is well-documented, yet her interest in the politics of the Roman Republic is often considered less central to her work. This paper explores Arendt's analysis of both these political worlds, with a particular emphasis on what this comparison can tells us about her understanding of the role of violence in politics. Arendt has generally been understood to structurally exclude violence from the political, in part due to the claims she makes in her later essay 'On Violence.' Yet in her portrayal of Roman politics, and her preference for this political system above the Greeks' (in certain respects), a genuinely political engagement with violence can be discerned. The paper claims that this particular case study indicates the framework of the vita activa, set out by Arendt in The Human Condition, should be reinterpreted, particularly insofar as 'fabrication' or 'work' here appears as something that is legitimately part of the political, and incorporates within it some forms of violence. The claims that violence is structurally anti-political, this paper concludes, are temporally specific to a twentieth century context, rather than constituting a foundational 'rule' of political practice for Arendt. Arendt's portrayal of the Greek polis as a space which categorically excluded violence from the political sphere can be seen as either the root of these claims, or a key exemplar of the political, as it exists in its fullest form. 7 However, in her outline of the Roman understanding of the relationship between violence and politics, which is in certain respects diametrically opposed to the Greek conceptualisation, she is no less admiring, considering it, in fact, to be an important feature of the Romans' more pragmatic and sustainable politics. Thus, as this paper will seek to show, Arendt's work on Rome offers another way into understanding the relationship between violence and politics which enables an engagement between violence and the political. It focuses on the comparison between Greek and Roman politics as an example of how, in her depiction of political practice, a different realisation of the relationship between politics and violence emerges to the highly abstract conceptualisation offered in 'On Violence.' 8 But although this is just one example from Arendt's vast oeuvre, it is particularly illuminating on the question of how in reality violence and politics meet, and an example which forces us to reconsider Arendt's idea of violence in the political sphere in a broader sense. 4 This approach builds on the work of Patricia Owens, who has also convincingly written on the political relevance of war in Arendt's work on Rome. 9 She argues, in her 2009 work Between War and Politics, that whilst violence (here, warfare) is outside the realm of politics, it is constitutively exterior, that is, violent engagements may positively influence the political space of action. This study develops this line of argument further, drawing on Arendt's portrayal of th...
Arendt's work on civil disobedience sets out an optimistic portrayal of the possibilities of such forms of action in re-energizing the spirit of American politics in the late twentieth century. Civil disobedience should not simply be tolerated, she argued, but incorporated into the legal structure of the American political system. Her work is usually seen to promote an idea of civil disobedience that is thus bound to existing constitutional principles and essentially nonviolent. However, by looking at Arendt's discussion and critique of various practices of civil disobedience in 1960s and 1970s America, specifically in relation to the nonviolence movement influenced by Martin Luther King, and on the other side, the more militant Black Power movement, a different idea of civil disobedience emerges. This paper argues that whilst, for Arendt, civil disobedience within America certainly possesses the constitutionally restorative potential she assigns to it, in a broader sensetheoretically, globally, and even in terms of alternative ideologies within Americaher conception of civil disobedience is in itself neither necessarily constitutional, nor nonviolent. It is, instead, a form of revolutionary action, whose limits are set only by politics itself, and specifically, Arendt's criterion of publicity.
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