Arendt’s Disappointments and Our New Beginnings: Citizenship and Democracy Reimagined

Hannah Arendt’s recurring disenchantment with conventional political discourses, protocols and practices led her to redefine politics and recommend alternative public realms. Her repeated emphases on freedom, plurality (or pluralism), critique, agonistic exchanges, natality (or new beginnings), equality and the virtuosity of citizen-statesmen, contribute to a reimagination of democracy that bears on current crises facing political progressives. Arendt was ambiguous at times, yet invariably discerning, prescient and radical. Her adaptation of the pariah’s perspective allowed her to proffer telling analyses of her times and, strangely, of ours.