The Joy of Living and Acting Together as Equals: Arendt on Republican Equality

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Thought and Philosophy I

Abstract

While past republicans were for the most part elitist and exclusionary, contemporary republicans are typically relational egalitarians who seek to create a society of equals. This paper recovers Hannah Arendt’s understudied and original contribution to the understanding of the republican ideal of relational equality, fleshing out its potential contribution to recent conversations on egalitarian republicanism.

The influence of Arendt’s work over the republican revival has been acknowledged, but her own conception of the republic was widely misunderstood and confused with her account of the Athenian polis. The agonal and Aristocratic political culture of the polis, as famously described in Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958), is based on the basic human experience of distinction. It prioritizes the ambition to rise above others through competition for excellence. By contrast, the republic, which she associates in particular with Roman and American republicanism, is a form of association that politicizes the basic human experience of equality.

In reconstructing Arendt’s idea of the republic, we draw on materials from the 1950s, which remained unpublished in her lifetime, and were meant, at one point, to be included in a book project “reexamining the old question of forms of government, their principles and their modes of action”. In these texts, Arendt rethinks Montesquieu’s account of republican government by discarding his emphasis on popular sovereignty and redefining the nature and principle of republican government as realizing the basic human experience of living and acting together with one’s equals. Republican laws, according to Arendt, are distinguished by being designed to divide power equally – not only between the branches of government, but also among citizens. The public sphere of the republic, according to her account, is dominated by a political culture in which citizens are inspired by the joy of acting together with their equals for shared political goals.

In distinction from the two dominant strands of the recent republican revival, which highlighted either civic virtue or liberty as non-domination as distinctive ideals of republicanism, Arendt suggests that republicanism is distinguished by politicizing equality. While her account of republican equality is similar in some ways to recent accounts of relational equality, it offers contemporary egalitarian republicanism potential insights into the dynamic, active nature of equality in the republic.

Authors

• Tom Alfia, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Yiftah Elazar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem