For Love of the World. Hannah Arendt’s political Legacy in an Age of Populism

Abstract

What can we still learn from Hannah Arendt’s political categories and reflections on the public realm in an era that sees the growing spread of populisms? The large critical literature on Arendt’s work has been spreading over the years a sort of standardized vision, according to which Arendt was a nostalgic and anti-modern thinker, whose aim was to rehabilitate the greek polis model against the modern decline of the public sphere, so that very few of her conceptual categories are still useful to understand contemporary phenomena. The purpose of these notes is to offer a different reading of the complex relationship between Arendt and the modern age. With the help of most recent literature – characterised by a more critic approach to her work – it seems possible, quite to the contrary, to draw from Arendt’s thought a deep “modernist” attitude, not just regarding her judgement on modernity, but above all in terms of upto- dateness of some of her suggestions.

Keywords

• arendt
• hannah arendt
• politics
• action
• public space
• power
• fake news
• populism
• history
• sociology