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The Public Realm and the Public Self

The Political Theory of Hannah Arendt

By Shiraz Dossa
Subjects Political Science
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Paperback : 9781554581528, 168 pages, October 2008

Table of contents

Table of Contents for
The Public Realm and the Public Self: The Political Theory of Hannah Arend by Shiraz Dossa

Preface

Abbreviations

Hannah Arendt as a Political Theorist

Literary Political Theory

Method and Imagination

Tradition and the Past

Politics and Political Theory

The Holocaust

Homer

Vita Activa: Nature and Politics

Human Nature

The Human Condition

The Public and the Private

Necessity and Violence

The Public Realm

Freedom and Action

The Public Self

Public Space and Human Status

Morality and Politics

Billy Budd

Robespierre

Eichmann

Appendix: The Life of the Mind

Selected writings on Arendt

Index

Description

From the time she set the intellectual world on fire with her reflections on Eichmann (1963), Hannah Arendt has been seen, essentially, as a literary commentator who had interesting things to say about political and cultural matters. In this critical study, Shiraz Dossa argues that Arendt is a political theorist in the sense in which Aristotle is a theorist, and that the key to her political theory lies in the twin notions of the “public realm” and the “public self”.

In this work, the author explains how Arendt’s unconventional and controversial views make sense on the terrain of her political theory. He shows that her judgement on thinkers, actors, and events as diverse as Plato, Marx, Machiavelli, Freud, Conrad, Hobbes, Hitler, the Holocaust, the French Revolution, and European colonialism flow directly from her political theory.

Tracing the origins of this theory to Homer and Periclean Athens, Dossa underlines Arendt’s unique contribution to reinventing the idea and the ideal of citizenship, reminding us that the public realm is the locus of friendship, community, identity, and in a certain sense, humanity. Arendt believes that no one who prefets his or her private interest to public affairs in the old sense can claim to be fully human or truly excellent.

Reviews

``This project is worth attending to given the resurgence of (moral) communitarianism in contemporary political thought. And, its shortcomings notwithstanding, Shiraz Dossa's The Public Realm and the Public Self provides a thoughtful and incisive commentary on many of the complex and elusive commitments that characterize Arendt's political programmatic. ''

- Political Theory

``This is in my view a work of unusual excellence. What is most impressive in this work is Dr. Dossa's finely tuned critical posture, which acknowledges and elucidates Arendt's stature as an innovative thinker, immersed in and yet profoundly at odds with the classical Greek tradition. He then proceeds to do with Arendt's thought what she has done with the thought of Plato and Aristotle: Dossa articulates what in his view are some fundamental flaws in Arendt's thought, and makes a compelling argument to support his contentions.''

- Christian Bay