Arendt and Rancière: Freedom, Emancipation, and Struggle

Arendt’s and Rancière’s political views are apt to be treated as the opposite. Arendt believes that politics is separate from other human activities and autonomous from them. On the contrary, Rancière believes that politics has no specificity in terms of realm, issue, or subject. However, the tension between them points to some boundaries in contemporary political theory regarding expectations from politics and the quest to reappropriate it. Their conception of the social set limits political action in different ways. For Arendt, the meaning of politics is freedom, but she does not relate it to the struggle against the current inequalities. For Rancière, politics is a struggle for emancipation that verifies equality, but he separates it from new beginnings for the future. In this article, we analyze the positions of both theorists in contemporary political theory, which have similar boundaries despite the presence of some opposite themes. Thus, the purpose of this article is to examine, through a dialog between two thinkers, the connection between politics as freedom in Arendt and as emancipation in Rancière, focusing on the struggle to transform given unequal conditions.