«The Freedom to Be Free»: Hannah Arendt on «Salvation» of the World of Politics

Russian Sociological Review. 2024. Vol. 23. No. 4. P. 249–258.

Дмитриев Т. А.

Publications of recent years and decades demonstrate that, in addition to writing monographs and publishing collections of articles, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), throughout her academic career in the United States, actively used the lecture genre and non-fiction articles to clarify and popularize the ideas of her political philosophy and her approach to the problems of our times. The publication of these lectures provides us with a fresh perspective on important aspects of her ideas regarding the political world and the role of political freedom, as reflected in the words and actions of humans in their common world. The focus of this paper is on Arendt’s lectures from the 1960s, which were dedicated to clarifying her two key works from the second half of the 1950s and the early 1960 — “The Human Condition (1958)” and “On Revolution (1963)” — as well as interpreting the central concepts of her political philosophy: Action, Freedom, Politics and Revolution. The article pays special attention to Arendt’s interpretation of human freedom as a gif and a miracle, which is proposed in these lectures. Freedom’s negative contribution to the world of human actions and words is to interrupt the automaticity of inertial social reproduction, while its positive contribution is to “save” the common political world for future generations.

Ключевые слова: свобода, action, действие, спасение, Ханна Арендт, Hannah Arendt, Secular Theology, salvation, freedom, revolution, революция, секулярная теология