Study On Hannah Arendt's View Of Political Freedom

Freedom is an eternal topic in politics.As one of the most creative thinkers in the 20 th century,Arendt had her own special perspective on freedom.However,Arendt's way of writing is so different from others: she never intended to build up a logical system,so that her views about freedom were basically scattered in her works,which aroused a controversy on decoding her views about freedom in the academic community.This paper takes Arendt's views on political freedom as the main line and sorts the very corn points of her political philosophy to try thoroughly interpreting her unique perspective on political freedom and clarifying some already involved but still unclear problems among some domestic researchers.Arendt's freedom concept differs from the traditional internal freedom.As neither a pure liberalist nor a firm anti-liberalist,as a whole,Arendt held almost the same intensely critical attitude toward liberalism and modernity.Her freedom thought can only be labeled as“political freedom” if it has to be limited.She did believe that freedom and politics are undivided and freedom is the reason why politics exists.On her perspective,“political freedom” is the freedom coming out of the active community life,which means that: the experience domain of freedom is public community and the approach to freedom is actions.Arendt studied freedom under the background of modernity,and she thought that the only right reason of revolution is freedom and the goal of revelation is to a build a country on freedom.Politics,modernity and revolution are the three core words in Arendt's thoughts,and this paper tries to explore her views on freedom based on these three core words.As we know from the above narration,Arendt's freedom perspective is literally the concept of political freedom,so that the manifesting space of freedom should be public domain,not private or social domain,and also the approach to freedom is actions for actions aim to establish a harmonious political domain.Because of Arendt's firsthand experience from the dark periods,she expressed the introspection of totalitarianism in nearly all her works.She pointed that the vertex of political crisis is the time when the whole world is covered bytotalitarianism,under which circumstances the public domains are totally destroyed,humans completely lost the capability of actions and humans have no freedom at all.Arendt realized that totalitarianism just breaks out in modern times when liberalism prevails,therefore she criticized the willing freedom and internal freedom which are advocated by liberalism,and at the same time she enriched her freedom concept by using diverse political concepts.Through sorting Arendt's freedom thought and comparing it with Strauss',we can easily find that she belongs to classical republicanism if we have to make a classification of her uniquely innovative thoughts.Either from her freedom perspective or her other core thoughts,Arendt is eager to recover the lost classical republican spirits,appeal for the return of politics and arouse humans' mental life.Arendt' introspection on liberalism is based on her introspection on modernity whose crisis is mainly reflected in political crisis,so the sorting of Arendt' freedom thought would be helpful for us to find out good solutions on how to deal with modern social crises.