Historia y política en Hannah Arendt

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to show the analysis of Hannah Arendt's modern concept of history and the reasons she tries to destroy it. During the work I demonstrate that Arendt applies to the modern concept of history the deconstructive regression that Heidegger uses to dismantle the history of Western metaphysics. I exhibit that there are hermeneutical and political reasons for Arendt’s procedure. Hermeneutically Arendt wishes to understand a world where totalitarian atrocities have been possible. Politically he wants to recover the common world of human beings so that the free action of them is possible. This link between hermeneutics and politics motivates that, after the analysis of the totalitarian phenomenon of The Origins, Arendt starts a more ambitious project: the analysis of the modern age. As a result Arendt links the politics carried out by totalitarianism with a concept of history that emerged in modern times. My claim is that, in order to free the possibilities of understanding and of political action, Arendt not only analyzes, but destroys the modern concept of history and subsequently emerges the event as a new historical category, hermeneutics and politics. The general conclusion of my research is that Arendt achieves her goal only by half and this fundamentally for two reasons. First of all because, despite the repudiation of contemplation, Arendt does not manage to detach herself totally from the contemplative history (representative of the modern concept of history). Secondly, because her thinking is crossed by the phenomenological tension between typology and hermeneutics, which emerges when she poses the possibility of a history, a judgment and a policy built from the event.