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Hannah Arendt (Germany 1906-United States 1975) is one of the most important political thinkers of the twentieth century and is mostly known for her writings on political action, evil, and totalitarianism. She studied philosophy in Marburg and Heidelberg, Germany, with such renowned German philosophers as Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers (Young-Bruehl 1982, 44, 48). Arendt's political awakening took place when the Nazis ascended to power in Germany, and she joined the resistance movement. In 1937, she fled the Nazi regime first to France and then to the United States, where she lived the rest of her life and produced the majority of her intellectual work (Arendt 2000, 6-7; Young-Bruehl 1982, 92, 113). Arendt never systematically developed a theory of law. However, nearly all her works deal with some aspect of law, and in recent years scholars across academic disciplines have brought to light the insights and importance of Arendt's legal thought (for instance Goldoni and McCorkindale 2012; Volk 2015). Arendt lived through the Second World War and saw how traditional, political, and legal concepts became unable to respond to the horrific events. She was concerned to find novel ways of orienting ourselves politically and legally in a post-totalitarian world. This entry introduces key aspects of Arendt's jurisprudential thinking through three themes that all shed light on the boundaries of law: law and politics, the problem of human rights, and law and evil, exemplified by the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Law and Politics: Arendt's Constitutionalism Arendt traces to ancient Greece the roots of the conception of law as a stabilizing and polityconstitutive force. In her reading, for the Greeks, law, nomos, was the ground of the political life in the polis that had to be erected before politics could take place (Arendt 2005, 182-183). Laws are artifacts comparable to houses, public squares, and books. They form the stable, nonpolitical foundations of the public space in which political action and freedom may continuously appear, and demarcate this space from what lies outside it, the private sphere and other polities. In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt distinguishes lawmaking from politics and emphasizes that for the Greeks, "the lawmaker was like the builder of the city wall, someone who had to do and finish
This chapter presents a reading of Hannah Arendt’s constitutional thinking from the perspective of the paradox of constituent power. The paradox at issue here is that, on the one hand, in order to exercise its constituent power, ‘the people’ needs some kind of representation, but on the other hand, all forms of representation are determinations of collective existence and held, in a constitutional democracy, to derive their power from ‘the people’. At stake in constitutional democracy is the contingency of representations of ‘the people’ and the possibility of their modification in response to claims that exclusion from or inclusion within ‘the people’ is violent and alienating. This chapter argues that the paradox ‘glimmers’ in Arendt’s work: it almost crystallizes into an account of the tensions present in ‘the act of founding’, but the ambiguities are again obscured by her republican ideal of constitutio libertatis. The chapter also traces an implication of this ‘glimmering’ in Arendt’s work that is problematic from the perspective of political pluralism: her ‘civilisationalism’.
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