Promises, Promises: The Abyss of Freedom and the Loss of the Political in the Work of Hannah Arendt

Abstract

The effort to recapture the lost spirit of revolution must, to a certain extent, consist in the attempt at thinking together and combining meaningfully what our present vocabulary presents to us in terms of opposition and contradiction. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 225-26 Once again we find the paradox dominating the whole of social action: Freedom exists because society does not achieve constitution as a structural objective order; but any social action tends towards the constitution of that impossible object, and thus towards the elimination of the conditions of liberty itself. Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 44 Have you ever asked yourselves sufficiently how much the erection of every ideal on earth has?… If a temple is to be erected a temple must be destroyed: That is the law—let anyone who can show me a case in which it is not fulfilled!. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, sec. 24. © 1994, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.