Globality, plurality and freedom: the Arendtian perspective

Abstract

This article reconstructs Hannah Arendt’s theory of political freedom in the context of her analysis of globality. In a first step it is shown that Arendt builds her theory of political freedom around the core concepts of plurality, action, sovereignty and judgment. This theory arises out of Arendt’s experience and understanding of totalitarianism. This experience also underpins Arendt’s analysis of the ‘global condition’. Having argued in her analysis of totalitarianism that the modern state in the form of the nation-state had become compromised as the space of political freedom since its development in the early nineteenth century, Arendt asks in which alternative space, in the post-totalitarian global age, freedom can be located. In her tentative answer, Arendt develops a political and philosophical understanding of federalism. Going back to Thomas Jefferson’s discussion of ‘elementary republics’, Arendt attempts to combine her notion of participatory citizenship with the idea of confederal structures of ward republics. Reflections upon the conditions of the possibility of the interrelationships between such confederations lead Arendt back to Karl Jasper’s notion of ‘limitless communication’. This notion opens her analysis up to contemporary ‘intercultural’ arguments.