International Journal of Academic and Applied Research (IJAAR) ISSN: 2000-005X Vol. 3 Issue 3, March – 2019, Pages: 1-7 http://www.ijeais.org/ijaar 1 Hannah Arendt on the Destruction of Public Realm in Modernity: A Case with Modern Democracy Eugene Anowai PhD (Louvain), Stephen Chukwujekwu PhD (Louvain) Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University Igbariam, Anambra State-Nigeria 07032852434 & 07011114446 Email: chukwueloka@yahoo.co.uk & anowaieugene@gmail.com Abstract:This article examines the writings of one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century, Hannah Arendt, and specifically focuses on her views regarding the distinction between the private and the public and the transformation of the public to the social by modernity. The whole of her critique on modernity is related to her reading of the politics of totalitarianism. For Arendt, totalitarianism was an entirely characteristic product of modernity. It is not simply that she is deconstructing political modernity, she is trying to re-construct the manner of politicking based on the fact of human plurality. What Arendt repeatedly calls for, is for us to realize the human condition of plurality as a prerequisite for constituting one's own life in the world. Rather than modernity's homogeneity, it is plurality that enables humans to appear as unique individuals instead of as a species of animals. Humans escape their lonely imagination and experience reality in a world that is shared with others and even build the world among each other. The aim of this article is to promote interest in this reading of Arendt and to show how her ideas especially plurality (that is, relating, experiencing and dialoguing with others) could fruitfully contribute to improving modern politics of representative democracy. 1. INTRODUCTION Hannah Arendt's critique of political modernity seeks to make genuine political experiences possible. Modernity claims for its legitimacy not only the triumphs of science and the achievements of technology, but also all citations of the emancipation of mankind from diseases, natural catastrophes, economic crises and repression-conditioned neurosis; the emancipation of the humiliated and downtrodden, the elevation of standard of living, the establishment of judicial fairness and democracy, the elimination of hunger and misery, pain and suffering – in a word, the emancipation from ―Evil‖. But then, all this refers to that which is useful to the self, which seeks satisfaction in itself. In the course of modern centuries, this has become the obvious meaning of human endeavour to such an extent that even the professional questioners and most philosophers have come to accept this criterion as self-evident and selflegitimizing. However, modernity is characterised in its essence by a peculiar understanding of freedom, but the concept of freedom in general, nonetheless, is not exclusively modern. What we present here is Hannah Arendt's critique of modernity with particular attention to its concept of freedom as it affects man as a ―Homo Politicus‖ in our cotemporary age. Her critique of modernity, contrary to the view of her critics, is to show that modernity in its pursuit of the freedom of the absolved subject has given rise to world alienation and earth alienation and blurred the dividing line between the private realm (necessity) and the public realm (politics). Hence, it withdraws humanity from worldly existence, depriving it of authentic public reality which is a conditio sine qua non for authentic politics. Consequently, homogeneity and conformity have replaced plurality and freedom. Therefore, this work shall argue in its conclusion that her relentless effort to clarify and secure the theoretical conditions for the possibility of the political against all that might conspire to destroy it are in the end relevant and wellconceived. 2. HANNAH ARENDT'S MAJOR CONCERN Arendt's concern, as anyone who is familiar with her writing would know, was to defend politics as the sphere within which the highest form of human freedom could be achieved. Despite appearances, ambiguities and ambivalence plagued modernity from the beginning; for many, the Enlightenment promise of freedom through the development of rationality resulted in disenchantment. Unintended effects of modernization became evident, and a cultural reaction against it was established by the end of the nineteenth century. By the late twentieth century heated theoretical debate was creating a decisive split between those who would still come to terms with modernity and those who pronounced a shift to post-modernity. Appalled by what she observed in her own Germany, she argued that totalitarian mass movements were an unprecedented form of terror, unlike any previous forms of tyranny or despotism. For modern totalitarianism necessitated a rethinking of the Enlightenment project, cast doubt on the very notion of scientific and technological progress, and exposed a ―radical evil‖ at the very centre of modernity. This is evinced in the modern calculative quest to dominate and reduce phenomena to instrumental matter to be worked upon and incorporated into the human project of technological mastery. Hannah Arendt is a theorist of ruptures, reversals and distinctions: ruptures within the history of the West, International Journal of Academic and Applied Research (IJAAR) ISSN: 2000-005X Vol. 3 Issue 3, March – 2019, Pages: 1-7 http://www.ijeais.org/ijaar 2 reversals of human activities and their location, and the categorical distinctions necessary for their conceptual illumination. Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Human Condition, where Hannah Arendt outlines the three central human activities of labour, work, and action, which are each grounded in corresponding given ―conditions‖ of human existence: life, worldliness, and plurality. 3. THE DESTRUCTION OF PUBLIC SPHERE IN MODERNITY The rise of the private activities of labour and work to a place of political dominance entails the eclipse of the public realm and of political action. She refers to this as the rise of the social, the rise of reproductive labour and a revised idea of natality. This account of ruptures in the history of Western philosophy points towards the retreat of human freedom and potentialities through the reduction of difference and plurality to the sameness and conformity of the private and anti-political activities of production and consumption. Her endeavour was not to protect the private sphere of free, rights-bearing, rational, autonomous agents, who engage in politics only so as to preserve their privacy; rather she critiques the modern reversal of the relative importance of those activities which correspond to the private realm and those of the public. She criticizes the public of distorting the distinction between the private and the public and the transformation of the public to the social by modernity. As indicated above, in her book, The Human Condition, Arendt describes the phenomenology of three forms of human activities that pertain to the ―vita activa‖ and corresponds to one of the basic conditions of human lifei. These activities are labour, work and action. She explains  labour' as the activity which corresponds to the biological processes of the human body (growth, metabolism and decay) and whose condition is life itself. The second activity is  work' which provides artificial (unnatural) world of things outlasting and transcending individual life, whose human condition is worldliness. Action is the third and the highest human activity and the only one that takes place between men without the intermediary of things. Action corresponds to the human condition of plurality, which is the conditio per quem of all political life, and can be explained as the possibility of a shared, collective, deliberative, active intervention in our fate, in what would otherwise be the byproduct of private decisions‖ii. Hannah Arendt stipulates that all three activities and their conditions are closely connected to the most general conditions of human existence: birth and death; natality and mortality. Along with these basic human activities, Arendt describes the forums with which such activities take place. They are specifically: the Public Sphere, the Private Sphere and the Social. 4. THE PUBLIC SPHERE The public is the political and Arendt refers to it as the locus in which mutual and genuine relationships between peers occur, corresponding to the polis life and citizenship characterized by freedom and individuality. iii This is ―the place everybody needs the other in order to distinguish himself or herself and show in deed and word that he or she is unique (thereby becoming immortal) where a remedy for futility of action and speech is offered.‖iv Arendt explains that a public realm "cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life span of mortal men"v. And she goes on to explain, It is the publicity of the public realm which can absorb and make shine through the centuries whatever men may want to save from the natural ruin of time. Through many ages before us-but now not any more-men entered the public realm because they wanted something of their own or something they had in common with others to be more permanent than their earthly lives. Without this concern with a public realm that extends across history from the past into the future, what becomes of political action based on the common good, rather than private interests? With the loss of any concern with immortality, have we witnessed not merely the erosion, but the irrevocable death of the public realm? And perhaps most importantly of all, without the existence of a public, can there still exist, in something more than name only, a republic? There is perhaps no clearer testimony to the loss of the public realm in the modern age than the almost complete loss of authentic concern with immortality, a loss somewhat overshadowed by the simultaneous loss of the metaphysical concern with eternity." Hannah Arendt was one of the first to remark upon the loss of the public realm, or what Jürgen Habermas called the public sphere. As indicated by the terms realm and sphere, along with related phrases such as public space and public sector, we are referring here to a kind of environment, or as Arendt puts it, "the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it"vi. The private realm is defined in relation (and opposition) to the public, but both are differentiated from the natural environment according to Arendt. Both are human artifacts, human inventions: ―To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it: the world like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time‖vii The table is an apt metaphor, as it has the connotation of civilized discourse, and a willingness to sit down for peaceful negotiation. Indeed, it is much more than a metaphor, as the table does create a shared space for individuals, a medium, if you will, around which they can communicate. But the table also keeps individuals separate from one another, establishing a buffer zone that allows for a sense of safety in the company of individuals who might otherwise be threatening. Sitting at a table restricts the possibilities of sudden movement, providing some assurance that the person seated across from you will not suddenly spring at you with sword or knife in hand, especially if both International Journal of Academic and Applied Research (IJAAR) ISSN: 2000-005X Vol. 3 Issue 3, March – 2019, Pages: 1-7 http://www.ijeais.org/ijaar 3 parties keep their hands visible on the table top. No wonder, then, that as the practice of sitting around a table for a meal emerges in the Middle Ages, it becomes the focal point for what Norbert Elias refers to as the civilizing process. The table is a medium, an in-between, as Arendt puts it, and each medium in its own way serves as a means by which individuals connect and relate to one another, and also are separated and kept apart from one another. Arendt criticizes modern individuality on the grounds of the victory of ―particulars‖ in the form of process-oriented thinking. For Arendt, a life without public activity does not address the temporal problem of finitude or what she calls the human ―repugnance for futility.‖viii Futility (although not worthlessness) pertains to every activity that continues indefinitely without an ―end-in-itself.‖ I argue that her work is addressed to the problem of sustaining distinctiveness in the face of social conformity or normalization. Arendt believes that individuation is gained through action in the face of normalization. Her temporal reading of activity can be fruitfully read in comparison to similar aspects of post-structuralist thought. She uses the words ―general‖ and ―universal‖ interchangeably in her political writings. This leads some commentators (like Barnouw Dagmarix and Disch Lisa Janex) to suggest that generality means for Arendt what is shared in a specific community, not the universality of a common rationality. 5. THE PRIVATE SPHERE Arendt contrasts the public with the private sphere, corresponding to the household, governed with necessity and driven by wants and needs and generally by life itself.xi Hence, the private is the centre of vital production including not only economic concerns but also bodily functions and species reproduction.xii Under this natural community, ―the labour of man to provide nourishment and the labour of the woman in giving birth‖ are subject to and born of the same necessity and urgency of life.xiii Arendt argues ―that in ancient times, the private sphere facilitated the hide away of these labourers and their laborious-devoted-to-bodilyfunction lives (especially women and slaves) and their segregation from the community‖xiv The root meaning of privacy is the same as privative and deprived, as lacking a role in or access to the public arena. For Arendt, privacy provides the space for the individual's thoughtful contemplation, but must serve as a backstage region, to use Erving Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor, for the staging of public action, political activity involving collective deliberation and cooperation. Underlying this is the essential point that the public and the private are interdependent, which is why "the barbarian," or member of a tribal society, has neither. Conceptions of both the public and the private are tied to the nascent notion of the individual, of identity separate from the group, which only began to form following the introduction of writing and the advent of literacy. Writing, as Eric Havelock put it, "separates the knower from the known," allowing for objective distance from one's tradition and tribe, and from one's own thoughts. This inward turn opens the door to the idea of the private individual, while the act of reading and writing itself requires a degree of isolation. Readers read alone and apart from one another, even if they read the exact same text at the exact same time. Listeners constitute a group, a collectivity, as an audience (which is a singular noun, whereas readers are plural). A public then is dependent on the existence of the private individual, as the public is composed of individuals who govern themselves because they can think for themselves, speak their own minds, and deliberate as equals. Equality too is linked to writing, as it is with the introduction of codified law made possible by writing that we gain the idea that we are all equal in relation to the same set of rules and commandments. Public and private then have their roots in antiquity, but do not become fully formed until the modern era, following the introduction of the printing press, which also opened the door for the modern ideology of individualism. As public and private have a common origin, so too are they commonly at risk due to the same forces. Politically, totalitarianism seeks to remove all of the barriers that make private life possible, at the same time that the public sphere is dismantled to create a single homogenous field of power through surveillance. Economically, in ancient Greece, the center of public life was the agora, which also served as the marketplace, but only a few years before Arendt published The Human Condition, the modern marketplace began to be referred to as the private sector, as corporations usurped the human invention of private identity, and have systemically undermined the last vestiges of the public sphere as they seek to create a single homogenous field of consumption through the manufacture of desire. We might well wonder why corporate executives for the most part have been allowed to escape the heavy media scrutiny that political leaders and other celebrities are subjected to. Underlying the general blurring and dissolution of the private and the public that we have been experiencing is the electronic media environment, which has undermined, superseded, and short-circuited the media environment associated with literacy and print. In place of individualism, which was based on the compartmentalization of private life kept separate from the public sphere, we have personalization, which involves providing open access to personal data, history, and activity, and the persona itself. In the absence of boundaries, honesty becomes of the highest value, but it is typically the honesty of self-disclosure, narcissistic self-revelation in the interests of self-promotion, as when celebrities go on talk shows to confess to personal problems as part of what is, or seems to be, an imagerevitalization strategy. Openness in communication is treasured, even though indiscriminate openness can be damaging rather than healing depending on the context and manner in which it is approached. Transparency is put forth as a basic principle, and while awareness that we are being International Journal of Academic and Applied Research (IJAAR) ISSN: 2000-005X Vol. 3 Issue 3, March – 2019, Pages: 1-7 http://www.ijeais.org/ijaar 4 observed generally results in more ethical behavior than would otherwise occur, there are times when some amount of secrecy in politics is needed for successful negotiation. 6. THE SOCIAL The emergence of society-the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices-from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen. Not only would we not agree with the Greeks that a life spent in the privacy of "one's own" (idion), outside the world of the common, is "idiotic" by definition, or with the Romans to whom privacy offered but a temporary refuge from the business of the res publica; we call private today a sphere of intimacy whose beginnings we may be able to trace back to late Roman antiquity, though hardly to any period of Greek antiquity, but whose peculiar manifoldness and variety were certainly unknown to any period prior to the modern age. According to Arendt, ―the emergency of the modern age and especially the enrichment of the private sphere and the rise of a modern concept of privacy (initiated by Rousseau's theory of individuality), which in contrast to the ancient understanding was not understood as deprivation but as the shelter of intimacy, there emerged a third realm, the social, which is neither private nor public and whose function was to stand against the private and yet be different from the public,‖xv although representing the collective and the impersonal, the social realm is characterized by conformism, demanding ―that its members act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest‖ and expecting from them ―a certain kind of behaviour, imposing innumerable and various rules, all which tend to  normalise' its members to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.‖xvi This modern monolithic type of society and its conformism allows for only one interest and one opinion and is rooted in the ―one-ness of man-kind.‖xvii According to D' entreves, Arendt's idea of one-ness, represented by the social, makes our identities precarious and our realities more doubtful, as we can no longer provide a coherent narrative about who we really are.xviii Although the public is that which allows for the expression of the very self, the rise of the social realm banished action and speech (as a means to express oneself) into the sphere of the intimate and the private.‖xix Arendt remarks that the rise of the social is accompanied by a very strong form of social control whereby members are being homogenised, levelled and their behaviour, rather than action, ―normalised‖. One of Arendt's most important contributions concerns her idea of appearance. In her words, Without a space of appearance and without trusting in action and speech as a mode of being together, neither the reality of one's self, of one's own identity, nor the reality of the surrounding world can be established beyond doubt. The human sense of reality demands that men actualise the sheer passive given-ness of their being, not in order to change it but in order to make articulate and call into full existence what otherwise they would have to suffer passively anyhow. This actualisation resides and comes to pass in those activities that exist only in sheer activity.xx But homogeneity and subordination to social norms reaffirm what she coined as ―the loss of appearance‖, namely the making of members of the society conform to external norms and expectations, thereby violating their action and sense of reality and consequently incur world alienation. 7. MODERNITY AND ALIENATION The emergency of the social led to the condition that Arendt calls ―world alienation‖. This is the bestowal of subjectivity with the power to determine reality at the cost of making reality a purely private matter. Hence, with the help of modernity, the social realm conquered the public realm, replacing action with behaviour, reserving the public realm to serve as the only place where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were.‖xxi In Arendt's view, ―modernity and the new age have permitted the abstraction of man from his created world by his preoccupation with science to conquer nature and left the political space to the ravages of untamed necessity.‖xxii This situation resulted in the victory of animal laborans over homo faber and the eclipse of the distinction between the private and the public, between economy and polity, between oikos and polisxxiii Consequently, Arendt advocates for the recognition of the intrinsic value of the public realm and more generally the recovery and revitalization of that realm. The recovery of the public lost in modernity is an attempt to save the modern world from its growing futility and from its great emphasis on labour and consumption. It is an attempt to remind us of those values and activities that enable us to share the world (rather than the life) we live in common. In all, Arendt sees in modernity the evolvement of the social sphere with its requirement of social conformism and the idea of oneness, the loss of appearance and the inability to be seen and act freely. 8. WORLD ALIENATION: FIRST STAGE OF MODERNITY We would say that Arendt defends the uncommon claim that people in modernity are alienated from the world. This is uncommon in the sense that most of us find secularization, utilitarianism, consumerism, materialism, science, technology and so on characteristic of this time and, in these words, the concentration on life's daily worries and pleasures is reflected in a number of different ways. The crucial question then is: what has she in mind when she International Journal of Academic and Applied Research (IJAAR) ISSN: 2000-005X Vol. 3 Issue 3, March – 2019, Pages: 1-7 http://www.ijeais.org/ijaar 5 speaks of modernity's alienation of the world? This we shall discover as we progress. In view, alienation has confronted man from different angles: philosophical, political and economic and the worst of all is world alienation, which marooned man in the island of instrument amidst the ocean of the members of the species of mankind. There his cherished companion is loneliness. The world and its correlative condition, worldliness are part of what Arendt considers to be the condition. In contradistinction to nature, the world is the artificial environment of humanly created objects, institutions, and settings that provides with an abode upon this earth, with a shelter from natural elements, and insofar as it is relatively stable and permanent, with a sense of belonging, of being at home with our surroundings.xxiv World in her idiom is a typical human construction and is contracted with the cyclical natural process of rising, shining and decaying. Pieter Tijmes stresses the point when he says, ―when Hannah Arendt speaks about the world, it is not physical world she refers to. Her concept of world separates human beings from and protects them against nature.‖xxv Man is naturally artificial. According to Arendt, not the natural, but the artificial is specifically human. ―civilization gives man the opportunity to transcend the animal species and consists precisely in building a world: a world of ploughed fields, roads and hedges instead of a wild landscape: a world of building instead of the open air, a world of language and culture, of communities and traditions, a world of art, law, religion and all the rest of the man-made things that outlive the men who made them and form the inheritance of human race‖xxvi. Certainly, this creation is more permanent than the individual and represents some certain stability for him. Each new generation inherits this specifically human and relatively stable context and adds her part of the cultural wed that she hands down to the next generation. It is obvious that without such a stable human world, our lives would lack points of reference by which to orient us. Our identities would be difficult to sustain, and our actions would not form coherent stories. Instead, we will be part of the endless cycles of nature, part of the endless flux. But we find out that the world provides us with a touchstone of reality. And since it is lived in common with others, our experience can become objective by being shared, our senses can be confirmed by the testimony of others, and our selfidentity can be sustained by intersubjective acknowledgement. ―The reality of the world and of the self can thus be secured only by sharing our existence with others, that is, by living in a world which is public and common‖xxvii But the question is: what happens then when this world is lost? That is when we find ourselves in that unfortunate condition that Arendt calls world alienation. ―The first and most important consequence would be that we lose our sense of being at home in the world and with that, our identity, our sense of reality, and the possibility of endowing our existence with meaning.‖xxviii So, in order to live meaningful lives, our human environment must present certain features (e.g. relative familiarity, stability, permanence) that enable our expectation to be satisfied in a non-random manner. Another consequence of the world alienation is that, lacking a world in common, the individual is thrown back upon himself into private sphere of introspection which, being devoid of agreed-upon standards, can never provide secure principle of conduct. Moreover, being thrown back upon ourselves means also losing ourselves, losing the faith in our senses and, ultimately, in our reason, a condition that Arendt insists on calling world alienation, though it might well be defined as self-alienation. The result is that, alienated from ourselves and from others, we become doubtful of our experiences and of the reality of the world.xxix These extreme developments are also encouraged by another serious phenomenon arising from ―world alienation‖: restriction or elimination of the public sphere (which we shall treat in much detail in the later chapters), the sphere of appearance, where the words and the deeds of the individual can be preserved for posterity and identity of each disclosed and sustained. Being at home in the world is in fact one of the pre-conditions for the constitution of a public realm. With the loss of the world, framework for public activities can never come into being, nor can those capacities that flourished within it such as judgement, common sense, impartiality, and memory. Arendt's analysis is determined by her desire to preserve the autonomy of action from instrumentalising attitude of homo faber. She puts forward two main causes of world alienation as expropriation and wealth accumulation. 9. EARTH ALIENATION: THE SECOND STAGE OF MODERNITY While world alienation determined the sense and the development of modern society, earth alienation became and remained the hallmark of modern science. It represents an intensification of the trends identified with world alienation. It was partly induced by the discovery of America and the subsequent exploration of the whole earth, culminating in the invention of the airplane and in the conquest of space. This had the unintended effect of making the earth seem much smaller to the point where modern man could see it as mere ball from which he could detach himself and view it from a point in space. She introduces this theme by a discussion of Rene Descartes' method of doubt and of Copernicus and Galileo's ―alienation‖ of the earth, their dislocation of it, from their imaginary Archimedean point beyond it. She quotes Copernicus's words about ―the virile man standing in the sun...overlooking the planets‖ and seeing the earth move with them. She unequivocally takes Descartes' doubt and his thoughts about himself as a thinker, as much as his analytical-geometrical physics as expressions of this International Journal of Academic and Applied Research (IJAAR) ISSN: 2000-005X Vol. 3 Issue 3, March – 2019, Pages: 1-7 http://www.ijeais.org/ijaar 6 alienation of the familiar world brought about by the new science. Whitehead is also quoted as likening the new sciences' beginnings in the discovery of telescope and in Galileo's use of it to ―a babe...born in a manger,‖xxx a great happening with little stir. Going further, she adds: ―Like the birth in the manger, which spelled not the end of antiquity but the beginning of something so unexpectedly and unpredictably new that neither hope nor fear could have anticipated it, these first tentative glances into the universe through an instrument, at once adjusted to human senses and destined to uncover what definitely and forever must lie beyond them, set the stage for an entirely new world‖xxxi The proximate cause however was the invention of the telescope, which besides destroying man's faith in the evidence of the senses established an Archimedean standpoint from which the earth could be viewed as part of an infinite universe. 10. CONCLUSION Reflecting on the supremely important thought that Hannah Arendt has given us in her critique of modernity, we can say that her philosophy ignites a renewed appreciation for human worldliness and plurality that is incomparable in contemporary political thought. In a world like ours where, in some countries, religion has become political, and politics religion, in a world where the protectors of the citizens and the  city walls' have decided to be protected rather than to protect, living the commoners at the mercy of insecurity, in a world where custodians of people's resources have decided to embezzle and enrich themselves in the name of leadership, in a world where, through decrees, men are forced and compelled to undergo pain, in a world where the representative of citizens have decided to represent their personal opinions in public issues rather than that of the masses all in the name of modern representative democracy, the relevance of Arendt's critique of modernity remains indisputably unquestionable. 11. ENDNOTES i H. Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958), 7-9 ii Pikin, F. Hannah, ―Justice: on Relating Private and Public, Political Theory‖ 9 (3), 1981: 344, Conformism, Housekeeping, and the Attack of the Blob: the Origins of Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social, in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig, (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press), 5181. iii H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 32-33 iv H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 197. Despite this selfcentered motivation to act socially and the treating of other humans as means to one's ends, Arendt interestingly uses a social contract theory to explain what keeps members of the public together. Cf. Pitkin, F. Haanah, ―Justice: on relating Private and Public‖ 337. v H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 55. vi H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 52. vii H. Arendt, The Human Condition, viii H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 121. ix D. Barnouw, Visible Species: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience (Baltimore and London: John's Hopkins University Press, 1990), 21-22. x L. J. Dish, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994) 151152 xi H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 30 xii Arendt draws here from Hegel's conception of the system of needs, namely that sphere in which economic exchange activities for the sole satisfaction of exchangers' needs becomes the norm of human interaction. Cf. Benhabib, Seyla, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, London & New Delhi: Sage Pub. 1996), 24 xiii H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 30 xiv H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 72 xv H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 38 xvi H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 39-40 xvii H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 46 xviii D'entreves, Maurizio Passerin, The political of Hannah Arendt (London & NY: Routledge, 1994), 24. xix D'entreves, Maurizio Passerin, The political of Hannah Arendt, 49 xx D'entreves, Maurizio Passerin, The political of Hannah Arendt, 208 xxi D'entreves, Maurizio Passerin, The political of Hannah Arendt, 41 xxii M. O'Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (Boston, London & Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 100 xxiii Arendt's critique of modernity also consists of the argument that modernity brought about the fragmentation of the past and the loss of its relevance for the present, making it necessary to re-establish and redeem the meaning of the past, cf. D'entreves, op. cit., 29-32. International Journal of Academic and Applied Research (IJAAR) ISSN: 2000-005X Vol. 3 Issue 3, March – 2019, Pages: 1-7 http://www.ijeais.org/ijaar 7 xxiv D'entreves, Maurizio Passerin, The political of Hannah Arendt,37 xxv P. Tijmes, The Archimedean Point and Eccentricity: Hannah Arendt's Philosophy of Science and Technology, Inquiry: An International Journal of Philosophy, vol. 35, nos. 3/4, 1992: 391 xxvi M. Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1974),81. xxvii M. Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, 81 xxviii H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 248-257 xxix Arendt associates the loss of faith in the senses and in reason with the rise of Cartesian doubt with its attempt to ground certainty in a systematic doubting of everything that is given or self-evident. This doubting led to introspection, since only by concentrating on the self could certainty be achieved and to the loss of common sense since experience was now radically privatised. See H. Arendt, The Human Condition,273-284 . xxx N. A. Whitehead, Sciences and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 12, quoted by Baier, A. C., in ―Ethics in Many Different Voices‖ in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, Larry May and Jerome Kohn (eds), (The MIT Press, 1996), 339. xxxi H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 257-258.