Man In The Public Realm

Arendt was one of the most unique characters among the ideologists of the 20 th century, and many of her concepts and judgment have caused great controversy in the intellectual community. Arendt, as a Jew with the firsthand experience of Nazi terror, had profound and thorough reflection on the tradition of western thought, criticized the equal view of liberalism, reused the political experience of polis, reshaped the plurality image of man, and promoted the equality of excellence. Besides, Arendt had created a lot of works in her life, but she did not specifically and systematically discuss equality. Therefore, it is quite necessary to summarize the equality scattered in many articles.The paper takes the commentary article Reflections on Little Rock that Arendt published in the 1960 s as the breakthrough point, and the controversial article vividly demonstrated her equality view. She divided human activities into three realms, namely, public realm, social realm and private realm. The legitimacy of the equality was limited to the public realm, while other realms were filled with homogenous tendency, which made people become a kind of animal economicus, or one- dimensional man in the words of Marcuse.In Arendt's opinion, it is the plurality of man that guarantees the existence of the public realm, which is equal space, and the equality is worldly, rather than “naturally”. So it is different from the equality in Christianity, and the equality of liberalism. By contract, private realm is mandatory space, in which people are driven by their wants and needs, and are always at the mercy of necessity. Social realm is the expansion product of oikia; demand and conformism become the reason of union of people, and what occupy the realm is the “rhythm of life”--production and consumption. Thus, man is like puppets. After the plurality is expelled, the boundary between public realm and private realm collapses. In order to repair public realm, Arendt put forward the idea of council system based on Jefferson's design. The kind of multi-level shape of pyramid composed of councils at different levels rules out the dominance of single general will, and makes doxa be expressed, plurality be repaired, and equality of public realm be rebuilt. Arendt's idea of equality stems from her phenomenology thinking method, and the equality of plurality is the result of reunderstanding people through the thinking without banister. However, there are still some shortcomings in Arendt's theory, such as limitations in the definition of public realm, and the conception of the council system. In general, her mind still has important reference significance for the China to construct the society equality at present.