Reflections on freedom and liberation in Hannah Arendt from the lecture Freedom to be free
Keywords:
Revolution. Freedom. Liberation. Necessity. Hannah Arendt.Abstract
Arendt's sentence that the raison d'être of politics is freedom is the argumentative thread that underpins the lecture The Freedom to Be Free, given in the 1960s. In it, Hannah Arendt analyzes the meaning of politics through investigation into revolutions, whether those already listed in On the Revolution, namely the American and French, or in light of those that broke out after the Second World War, as is the case of the Hungarian Revolution. The justification for this approach lies in the observation that revolutionary events, in addition to being sparks of political illumination in times of public darkness, also highlight the differences between freedom and liberation, demonstrating that when the latter becomes the driving force of political movements, pre-political needs invade the public scene, often reverberating in terror. The consequence of this inversion is the dissolution of the public sphere as a fruitful field for deliberation and, consequently, the impossibility of men enjoying public freedom. Based on this argument, the objective of the article is to analyze the difference between freedom and liberation, highlighting why liberation from misery and its inherent invisibility must necessarily precede the establishment of a regime in which individuals will have the conditions to enjoy the double vertex of freedom as an end in itself: both independence in relation to oppression and fear and the overcoming of indigence.
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