Overview
- Offers a close and compelling reading of Hannah Arendt's work
- Explores how to recognize beliefs in the presence of the divine in human action while respecting the plurality of political opinion
- Brings Arendt into conversation with modern life issues such as the increasing religiosity of global political life and divine justifications of violence
Part of the book series: International Political Theory (IPoT)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
- Hannah Arendt's theory of freedom and political action
- critique of sovereign rule
- critique of totalitarianism
- the ‘right to have rights'
- critique of sovereignty
- political theology
- philosophy of history
- international political theory
- divine elements in human beings
- contemporary secular politics
- teleological philosophies of history
- Hannah Arendt's daimon metaphor
- Hannah Arendt and Plato
- Hannah Arendt and Heidegger
- Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers
- Hannah Arendt and Kant
- Hannah Arendt and Marx
About this book
This book presents an account of Hannah Arendt’s performative and non-sovereign theory of freedom and political action, with special focus on action’s disclosure of the unique ‘who’ of each agent. It aims to illuminate Arendt’s critique of sovereign rule, totalitarianism, and world-alienation, her defense of a distinct political sphere for engaged citizen action and judgment, her conception of the ‘right to have rights,’ and her rejection of teleological philosophies of history. Arendt proposes that in modern, pluralistic, secular public spheres, no one metaphysical or religious idea can authoritatively validate political actions or opinions absolutely. At the same time, she sees action and thinking as revealing an inescapable existential illusion of a divine element in human beings, a notion represented well by the ‘daimon’ metaphor that appears in Arendt’s own work and in key works by Plato, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Kant, with which she engages. While providing a post-metaphysical theory of action and judgment, Arendt performs the fact that many of the legitimating concepts of contemporary secular politics retain a residual vocabulary of transcendence. This book will be of interest not only to Arendt scholars, but also to students of identity politics, the critique of sovereignty, international political theory, political theology, and the philosophy of history.
Reviews
“This is a rich and provocative account of Arendt’s concept of human action as both non-sovereign and un-moored in relation to traditional sources of authority and belief. Tchir’s emphasis on the daimonic dimension of ‘the who’ powerfully suggests the mysterious process of negotiation between thinking (withdrawing from the world of human affairs) and politics (engaging in this world) that characterises action.” (Professor Anna Yeatman, Western Sydney University, Australia)
“Hannah Arendt was a resolutely worldly thinker, but she could never shake what Trevor Tchir calls the "grammar of transcendence"—no more than Socrates could escape his daimon. This rich, erudite study tracks the figure of the daimon across a surprisingly wide range of Arendt's work—which, Tchir shows, can be read as a sustained attempt to transform this divine power into a figure of secular non-sovereignty. A compelling intervention.” (Dr. Patchen Markell, the University of Chicago, USA)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Trevor Tchir is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Algoma University,Canada.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Hannah Arendt's Theory of Political Action
Book Subtitle: Daimonic Disclosure of the ‘Who'
Authors: Trevor Tchir
Series Title: International Political Theory
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53438-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Political Science and International Studies, Political Science and International Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-53437-4Published: 30 May 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-85154-9Published: 01 August 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-53438-1Published: 20 May 2017
Series ISSN: 2662-6039
Series E-ISSN: 2662-6047
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 258
Topics: Political Theory, Political History, International Relations Theory, Political Philosophy