Roads to republicanism

Although the reflections prompted by Arendt's study of totalitarianism led her in many different directions, her thought trains have more than a common origin to hold them together. These various strands of thought are like loops, starting from the same point and meeting again after taking different paths, and the place at which they converge is occupied by Arendt's distinctive version of republicanism. We have now explored three different routes to this conclusion. In the first, reflecting upon totalitarianism, Marxism and the ‘unnatural growth of the natural’ in modern society, Arendt suggested that human beings are in danger of being swept away by the automatic forces that they themselves accelerate or let loose, and stand in urgent need of bulwarks against these forces, in the shape of a stable institutional world in which laws are not totalitarian laws of motion but secure fences inside which men can dwell.

Alongside this argument for the rebuilding of civilised politics in opposition to barbarism, we traced another strand of thinking, also set off by totalitarianism, about the human condition and the deficiencies of traditional political thought, and saw how Arendt insisted that, contrary to traditional assumptions, human beings are plural creatures who want to act and to disclose themselves, and need a political space of appearance in order to do it.