Arendt on Freedom, Liberation, and Revolution

Kei Hiruta

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030116941
• eBook ISBN: 9783030116958
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice

This edited volume focuses on what Hannah Arendt famously called "the raison d'être of politics": freedom. The unique collection of essays clarifies her flagship idea of political freedom in relation to other key Arendtian themes such as liberation, revolution, civil disobedience, and the right to have rights.

In addressing these, contributors to this volume juxtapose Arendt with a number of thinkers from Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls and Philip Pettit to Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon and Geoffroy de Lagasnerie. They also consider the continuing relevance of Arendt's work to some of the most dramatic events in recent years, including the current global refugee crisis, the Arab uprisings of the 2010s, and the ongoing crisis of liberal democracy in the West and beyond.

Contributors include Keith Breen, Joan Cocks, Tal Correm, Christian J. Emden, Patrick Hayden, Kei Hiruta, Anthony F. Lang Jr., Shmuel Lederman, Miriam Leonard, Natasha Saunders, William Smith, and Shiyu Zhang.

© The Author(s) 2019

Kei Hiruta (ed.)Arendt on Freedom, Liberation, and RevolutionPhilosophers in Depthhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11695-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Kei Hiruta¹

(1)

Oxford University, Oxford, UK

Kei Hiruta

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

This volume examines Hannah Arendt’s theory of freedom and its implications for contemporary political philosophy, thought, and practice. It has three distinct goals. First, it aims to elucidate Arendt’s flagship idea of political freedom in relation to its closely connected ideas. Chief among these are liberation and revolution, which Arendt repeatedly discusses when she attempts to explicate what freedom is and what it is not. But the relevant ideas also include (total) domination, oppression, violence, slavery, colonialism, exclusion and statelessness on the one hand, and action, speech, plurality, equality, solidarity, rights, inclusion and citizenship on the other hand. Thus, although “What Is Freedom?” and On Revolution naturally serve as frequent points of reference in this volume, Arendt’s other texts from her wartime contributions to Aufbau to her final and unfinished work The Life of the Mind are discussed to illuminate her theory of freedom. This is an unusual, if not entirely novel, interpretive angle in Arendt scholarship. Whereas her discussion of freedom is typically read as part of her justly well-known theory of action, this volume presents Arendt first and foremost as a theorist of freedom. It addresses the following central questions from a variety of perspectives: What is freedom? What are the chief threats to freedom and how should we counter them? And what institutional arrangements do we need if we are to house freedom in Arendt’s sense of the term?

The second aim of this volume is to consider Arendt’s theory of freedom and its continuing relevance (or lack thereof) in light of recent political experiences. It takes its cue from Arendt’s phenomenological conviction: “What is the subject of our thought? Experience! Nothing else!”¹ By “recent” experiences I do not mean Trump-era, although the specter of Trumpism haunts many of the pages that follow. Rather, this volume considers some of the most notable events over the past decade, including the failed revolution in Egypt, the ongoing crisis of liberal democracy across the West and beyond, and the worst forced displacement crises on record with 25.4 million refugees and 3.1 million asylum seekers now living around the globe.² Admittedly, this is a small sample of problems that constitute the new dark time in which we live today. There are certainly other relevant experiences that are worth considering and yet fall outside the scope of this volume. Nevertheless, the ones I have mentioned deserve special attention because they have sparked off much talk about Arendt’s life and work in recent years, when enthusiasts hail her as “the go-to thinker to cite” today, while detractors dismiss reference to Arendt as “always the mark of an imposter.”³ This volume distances itself from such day-to-day proclamation of Arendt’s significance or insignificance in the popular media. Taking a moderately skeptical stance toward the current Arendt hype, it does what academic research is meant to do. It carefully examines Arendt’s texts and their contexts on the one hand and rigorously analyzes available evidence about recent political experiences on the other hand. In so doing, it considers how her ideas might illuminate, and might in turn be illuminated by, some of the major events in the world today that seems increasingly alien to democratic citizens and uninhabitable to both human and non-human animals.

Third, this volume aims to examine Arendt’s theory of freedom comparatively by way of considering a variety of relevant writings in political thought broadly conceived, including, though not limited to, the mainstream post-Rawlsian branch of political theory. Unfortunately, there has been mutual indifference and mistrust between this branch and a smaller branch known as Arendt Studies. My emphasis is on “mutual.” On the one hand, a generation of political theorists trained in the Anglophone world in the last quarter of the twentieth century have had difficulties in appreciating works that do not fall within the Rawlsian framework. For a long time, they rationalized their intellectual parochialism by telling themselves the feel-good story that political theory had been dead until 1971 when Rawls single-handedly resuscitated it with A Theory of Justice.⁴ Fortunately, such parochialism is becoming a thing of the past, as the Rawls industry relocates to intellectual history,⁵ while Anglophone political theory is immersed in serious methodological discussion, searching for a new disciplinary identity.⁶ But old habits die hard, as evidenced by an enduring lack of willingness to engage with Arendt’s work on the part of many normatively and analytically oriented political theorists.⁷ On the other hand, their insularity has to some extent been reciprocated by Arendt scholars, who often find themselves locked in the “claustrophobia-inducing Arendt literature.”⁸ Arendt scholars’ readiness to revisit familiar terrains such as the Eichmann controversy and her complicated relationship to Heidegger is not quite matched by a readiness to move beyond their intellectual comfort zone. This volume is an attempt to redress this imbalance and demonstrate the benefit of crossing sub-disciplinary boundaries and exploring new paths of enquiry. By juxtaposing Arendt’s work with a number of thinkers from Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls and Philip Pettit to Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon and Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, it is hoped that the volume will help readers think creatively and courageously about freedom, liberation, and revolution.

This volume may be seen as consisting in three parts, although their boundaries are not rigid and individual chapters may be read as standalone essays. The first set of three chapters following this Introduction focuses on the idea of freedom, examining Arendtian political freedom in comparison with its rivals from T. H. Green’s freedom as self-perfection to Philip Pettit’s freedom as non-domination. The next three chapters are devoted to the theme of liberation, that is, how to free a person or a group of people from various forms of oppression and domination. It discusses a range of issues in liberatory politics, including civil disobedience, armed resistance, and the practices of refugee solidarity. Then, the subsequent three chapters turn to revolution, reconsidering Arendt’s work from new interpretive angles and, in one essay, examining its pertinence to the (failed) Egyptian revolution of the 2010s. Those nine chapters are followed by an epilogue that explores further research directions.

A brief overview of each chapter is now in order. In Chapter 2, I consider Arendt’s theory of freedom in comparison with its liberal rivals by way of scrutinizing her critical remarks on liberalism. Her remarks are fragmented and unsystematic, but close examination suggests that her criticism of liberal freedom is off the mark in several respects. She fails to appreciate the internal diversity of the liberal tradition and is consequently unable to see important affinity between her work and that of some liberal thinkers with republican inclinations. Similarly, Arendt’s simplistic understanding of liberal freedom as “freedom from politics” hardly does justice to either Berlinian negative liberty or Green’s idealist liberal freedom. Furthermore, her one-dimensional view of the liberal subject as a self-interest maximizer fails to account for the reality of political life in actually existing liberal democracies, as illustrated by recent examples of liberal activism in opposition to rising populism and racism. Yet, despite these problems, Arendt’s criticism of liberal freedom has the merit of highlighting some important weaknesses shared across various liberalisms, most notably their incomplete understanding of the totalitarian threat and their shared tendency to prioritize freedom as non-interference over its more “positive” counterparts. I conclude my essay with a plea for keeping both Arendt’s and liberal theories of freedom in reserve so as to counter diverse forms of domination and oppression that confront us in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 3 by Keith Breen examines Arendt’s theory of freedom in comparison with Philip Pettit’s neo-republican alternative. This is an overdue issue. Since his groundbreaking Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), Pettit has led a vigorous intellectual movement that has exerted transformative influence over academic political theory and considerable influence over real po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Hannah Arendt, Liberalism, and Freedom from Politics
• 3. Arendt, Republicanism, and Political Freedom
• 4. Romanticizing the Republic: Hannah Arendt on Freedom, Rights, and the Modern State
• 5. Resisting Injustice: Arendt on Civil Disobedience and the Social Contract
• 6. Hannah Arendt on National Liberation, Violence, and Federalism
• 7. Solidarity at the Margins: Arendt, Refugees, and the Inclusive Politics of World-Making
• 8. Arendt’s Revolutionary Antiquity
• 9. Constitutions Are the Answer!: Hannah Arendt and the Egyptian Revolution
• 10. The Centrality of the Council System in Arendt’s Political Theory
• 11. An Epilogue—Or Epitaph?—For Freedom, Liberation, Revolution
• Back Matter