The aim of the article is to examine the role that memory and oblivion, forgiveness and unforgiveness play in Hannah Arendt’s thought in relation to acts of violence in the political sphere. Political communities do not always decide to remember the crimes they have committed or the wrongs they have suffered, but neither can they always forget their mutual harms, even when there is already peace between them. Without striving to exhaust the entire subject matter of Arendt’s work, I would like to illustrate the difficulty of understanding the role forgiveness plays in her thought as well as to indicate possible solutions when forgiveness becomes unachievable within the framework of her considerations. Her reflection can be divided into two stages. The first is a focus on the idea of radical evil and the need to forgive perpetrators for their crimes. Second, under the influence of the Adolf Eichmann trial, she developed the idea of the banality of evil. This idea points to situations so terrible that they transcend all human moral judgment, making forgiveness impossible. However, even when the moral possibility of individual forgiveness has been rejected, when the legal possibility of seeking justice has been exhausted and when victims and perpetrators in the community are still unable to live together peacefully, Arendt’s thought leads us to the possibility of political reconciliation.
The main purpose of this article is to compare the liberal and republican understanding of the role of political culture. The reconstruction of the liberal and republican elements of the political sphere demonstrates how these theories present the role of citizenship, government and democracy, thus revealing differences in the concepts of political culture. Firstly, the liberal concept of political culture is described as a practice that allows citizens to fulfil their individual interests. Liberal political culture helps to integrate people in the institutional framework, thus enabling them to realize their individual preferences without the state’s pressure to choose one particular model of a good life. Secondly, the republican model of political culture is analysed. It stresses citizens’ engagement in the public sphere and the role of positive freedom, based on an active search for common good and the cultivation of common practices supporting the state’s paternalistic techniques of integration. This type of culture allows citizens to achieve common moral development. In conclusion, it is argued that in the age of galloping globalization, these two normative models do not fit perfectly well into the Western social and political landscape because today we live in communities which embrace both the liberal and republican elements of political culture. Thus, it is demonstrated that there is some space for compromise between these two approaches, i.e. liberal republican culture.
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