Arendt and the Social: A Modern Flaw?

According to Arendt, socioeconomic issues should be divorced from politics. This claim can only be puzzling today, when socioeconomic issues are at the very core of politics. Indeed, Arendt’s sharp distinction between the political and the social space strikes many as nonsensical, if not outrageous. Habermas goes so far as to argue that it ‘leads to absurdities’. For Habermas, Arendt’s ideas cannot be applied to the modern world. The inadequacy of her view, he holds, depends on her revival of Aristotelian praxis , which would condemn her to an inevitable anachronism. In this paper, I argue that Habermas misreads Arendt. I claim that Arendt can help us understand the modern erosion of public space and how to rescue politics from such deterioration. I consider two features of her conception of politics: the notion of ‘respect’ and the ‘self-containedness’ of action, both derived from Aristotle’s concepts of ‘political friendship’ and ‘self-contained praxis ’.