Comment on Hannah Arendt’s conception of the ‘political’. (150 words) (2012, 12 Marks)
The tradition from Plato to Max Weber equates politics with rule: who commands and who obeys. Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1958; Between Past and Future, 1961) breaks with it. The political is the space in which plural, equal persons act and speak together, and it is valued for the freedom it realises, not for what it administers.
What the Political Is
- Action and speech among peers. Only action goes on directly between people, and through it each discloses who they are, not merely what they are.
- A space of appearance. It arises wherever people act together and vanishes when they disperse. The polis is the people organised by acting together, wherever they happen to be, not a place.
- Plurality and natality. Equals can understand one another; distinct persons have something to say; each newcomer can begin something unforeseen.
- Freedom is worldly. The raison d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action. It is not inner free will, and not sovereignty, which denies plurality.
What It Is Not
- Not rule. Command-obedience treats politics as fabrication, with citizens as material for a blueprint.
- Not the social. Managing the life process makes politics housekeeping; behaviour replaces action.
- Not violence. Violence is mute and instrumental; power is acting in concert.
Illustration
- M. K. Gandhi‘s Salt Satyagraha (1930) fits her categories: a public act before witnesses, word matched by deed, a beginning no calculation of forces predicted. She added in On Violence that against Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler the same strategy would have met massacre. Action needs a surviving public realm.
- The farmers’ protest (2020–21) sustained a year-long assembly at Delhi’s borders and won repeal of the three farm laws in November 2021. Its demands were economic, which Arendt would call “social”; argued in public, they still became politics.
Critique
- Empty of content. Bhikhu Parekh and Jürgen Habermas object that excluding interest, bargaining and economics leaves a politics that decides nothing and cannot describe real states.
- Exclusion. Feminists and Seyla Benhabib note that consigning household and body to the pre-political hides domination. The Greek model was free because slaves and women laboured.
- Poverty. Where most people are poor, a politics without the social question serves the few.
Conclusion
Arendt’s boundary is untenable as a line between subjects, but defensible as one between modes. The same question can be administered or argued among equals, and only the second is politics. That distinction, not her Greek model, is her lasting contribution.