How Common is our Common World? Hannah Arendt and the Rise of the Social

Based on Hannah Arendt’s distinction between the public and the private, the paper argues that it is possible to reconcile her seemingly elite democracy with the political ideals upon which the polis is constructed, namely, plurality, freedom and action. Such reconciliation is possible when the political is understood as the space between people, rather than as a carefully constructed physical space that excludes all aspects of privacy. Likewise, the paper argues that the rise of the social represents not only the colonialization of the political, but also a democratic expansion of those, who like Arendt herself might have been formerly excluded from political participation in our common world. keywords: Arendt, world, politics, freedom, public, private, social