Civic Virtue In Republican

In the 1950s, the Western academia has started a a trend of republicanism revival. Until now, it was still on the rise. Many thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit and so on have made totally different theoretical response to it. However, the strong appeal for citizen virtue is always one of the major concern for them.The worship of virtue is our country's fine tradition since the ancient times. However, on the one hand, the May 4th Movement caused "China obtains the liberation from its ancient and isolated civilization". Meanwhile, it has actually to a certain extent created the "culture rupture", the "Individualism", the "Rights First" had made a great clamour. Following it was the "Loss of merit" and the "Absence of value"; on the other hand, although the country has always laid stress on the construction of the civil society, the progress is very slow. The flimsy awareness of the citizenship, the lack of public domain, the public life can hardly restrain, which is the long-standing and universal problems in our country. Therefore, "reassert the republican tradition" and resume the discourse power is not only helpful in getting rid of all sorts of predicaments and the prevalent abuse, but is also highly important to promote the course of political modernization in our country.This paper selected Arendt's political philosophy as the analytic object and was organized around the theme of civic virtue by the integrated application of system analysis, specification analysis, documentary analysis and comparative analysis methods. It revealed the worry for the lack of civic virtue in modern society through a deep exploration of liberalism's limitation, it clearly marked the Republicanism's amendment of Liberalism by elaborating the meaning and essential features of republicanism. Therefore, the revival of republicanism is a useful attempt to recover our lost virtue. Of course, it also pointed out the social background and actual need of Hannah Arendt's thoughts on civic virtue systematically. Then, it clarified the specific meaning, the value orientation and the function configuration of "action" through the specification analysis of Arendt's Action Theory. Next, it used the function configuration of "action" as a reference and spawned the specific content of civic virtue. Furthermore, based on the arrangement and integration of a large number of Arendt's works, it focused on mining the intellectual resources of her political philosophy and discussed her unique view on the generation for civic virtue from three dimensions of the mental mechanism, institutional support and social soil. Finally, on the basis of above theoretical explanation, it tried to inquire the practical significance of Hannah Arendt's theory in the Chinese perspective by using comparative analysis method. This was achieved respectively from the reference and transcendence of Arendt, which will undoutedly beneficial to the building of civil society and political modernization in our country.