Politics as the Space of the New: Action, Freedom, and Resistance (Arendtian Notes)

Abstract

This article proposes an intensive reading of the conceptual constellation structuring Hannah Arendt's political philosophy. The analysis focuses with particular attention on the conception of politics as the locus originarius of freedom understood as initium, a space of appearance and constitution of the common. Through an immanent hermeneutic of the author's major works (articulated with rigorously selected secondary literature), it is argued that politics is not exhausted in the functional management of social life or in juridical-normative ordering. It is affirmed as inaugural praxis, founded upon plurality and the human capacity to act with others. The distinction between labor, work, and action; the critique of the substitution of the political by the social; the thematization of civil disobedience as an instituting gesture of a new common world; as well as the negative function of thought – cogitatio – as a safeguard against the banality of evil, constitute the axes of problematization. The analysis demonstrates that politics, within Arendtian thought, is inseparable from appearance, contingency, and shared responsibility. The article concludes by underscoring the critical relevance of Arendt's thought for diagnosing contemporary forms of de-substantialization of the public sphere and for reconceptualizing democracy as a form of life. The latter, in turn, is founded upon plural action (Mitsein), ethical resistance, and the continuous creation of spaces of freedom (Erscheinungsraum).