PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HANNAH ARENDT

Abstract

This article focuses on the ancient and modern meanings of the “public” and the “private” spaces – carefully analyzed by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition –, and on the way in which these meanings appeared, also on how they reflect themselves in establishing the relation public-private. The perspectives of the relation between “public” and “private” shade away the tendency of “being together”, alienating the public space from that spectacular attribute of the commonly shared deliberations, bringing the decisions towards an absolute sovereignty. Whereas in the ancient Greece the question of the conflict between the “public” and the “private” has appeared, through the shading of the private sphere and through the over-bidding of the public one, in the Western exegesis the inability to make a distinction between the public and the private did not have the same explanations, but it is rather based on an interpretation and transfer gap. The author acknowledges the decline of the “public” to its extinction in the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, as being due to the modern loss of the meaning and practice of the political action.

Keywords

• public
• private
• political
• social
• Hannah Arendt