The risks of political impotence in the republic: a reading of Arendt and Tocqueville
Keywords:
republicanism, equality, political powerlessness, powerAbstract
In what is considered her most "republican" work, On Revolution, of 1963, based on the analysis of the American and French Revolutions, Hannah Arendt focuses her reflection on the preservation and legitimization of the power generated by the new body politic born of the revolution. And also to another central question: how to prevent the egalitarian structure of the republic from slipping into the impotence of all, a threat that, in a previous text, from 1953, she had pointed out as the great risk of regimes based on equality? The danger of the political impotence of individuals in a democratic society is also a theme present in the reflections of Tocqueville, an author with whom Arendt shows a strong confluence in On Revolution, although he mentions it sparingly. This article aims to show how the problem of the powerlessness of citizens in egalitarian regimes is approached in an approximate way by the two authors and the confluences in the thought of both not only in the sense of thinking the ways for the institutionalization and preservation of power in the republic, but also the means to ensure a broad citizen participation in the public sphere, in order to preserve the republican public spirit.
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