Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I TOTALITARIANISM AND NATIONALISM
- PART II POLITICAL EVIL AND THE HOLOCAUST
- PART III FREEDOM AND POLITICAL ACTION
- PART IV ARENDT AND THE ANCIENTS
- 7 Arendt’s Hellenism
- 8 Athens and Rome
- 9 Equality and elitism in Arendt
- PART V REVOLUTION AND CONSTITUTION
- PART VI JUDGMENT, PHILOSOPHY, AND THINKING
- Select bibliography
- Index
8 - Athens and Rome
from PART IV - ARENDT AND THE ANCIENTS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I TOTALITARIANISM AND NATIONALISM
- PART II POLITICAL EVIL AND THE HOLOCAUST
- PART III FREEDOM AND POLITICAL ACTION
- PART IV ARENDT AND THE ANCIENTS
- 7 Arendt’s Hellenism
- 8 Athens and Rome
- 9 Equality and elitism in Arendt
- PART V REVOLUTION AND CONSTITUTION
- PART VI JUDGMENT, PHILOSOPHY, AND THINKING
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is not unusual among the readers of Hannah Arendt to ascribe to her an exclusively performative conception of action and consequently to suspect a certain Graecomania in her meditations on the constitutive features of the political realm. Those readers would contend that, by reason of her distinction between genuine action and every mode of production of works or tangible results, Arendt limited the notion of action to the spontaneity of a pure performance which essentially consists in the glory of its ephemeral appearance. Consequently her political thought, so they argue, would have been excessively focused on the model of the Greek city. In short it would have been affected by a Graecomania of which those readers find evidence in her comments on the funeral oration attributed to Pericles by Thucydides. Indeed, referring to that oration in The Human Condition, Arendt claims that the Athenians ascribed a “twofold function” to the institution of their polis: (1) “to multiply the occasions to win 'immortal fame,' that is, to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness” (p. 197), and (2) “to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech,” thanks to “the organization of the polis, physically secured by the wall around the City and physiognomically guaranteed by its laws,” an organization which was a kind of “organized remembrance” (pp. 197-198).
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt , pp. 165 - 177Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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