Hannah Arendt And Private Freedom

In the late Nineteenth century, women were beginning to become more progressive in their actions. They began to stand up for themselves and fight for their rights. In the late 1850’s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the more prominent women to do so. She worked with Susan B. Anthony to deliver a majority of the population the rights that they rightfully deserved. Her actions are important in the United States’ History because they helped to encourage women to form the Women’s Suffrage Movement. Many Scholars have written about her, but simply with a different lens of focus. For example, they have written about her use of the bicycle in her campaign and her unique stance on religion. It is important to continue studying her actions because the issues she was fighting for back then, such as: the abolition of capital punishment, and an end to police brutality, are still issues today. Perhaps if the people of the United States today collectively took after her intrepid and forward thinking attitude in life, there could be more positive change in this country.

This paper will accomplish two tasks. First, it will briefly outline the main points of Thomas Nagel’s argument in “Personal Rights and Public Space”. Secondly, it will examine and discuss the portion of his argument that I find to be the most problematic.

The Public Realm involves the interaction between individuals, specifically in the form of politics. The freedom of necessity is a major component in Arendt’s description of the Public Realm. Within this realm, social interaction and politics are carried out in the form of Arendt’s third and most important human activity, action. Arendt defines all social and political interactions as a form of Action because they require one person to share an idea or thought through two means. Firstly the individual must be able to verbalize his or her thoughts. “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.” (Arendt, 179) The second requirement is a personal identity. Because of this requirement, all of the necessities for life must be dealt with prior to action. Without the freedom of life’s necessities humans are nothing more than animals slaving away with no regard to anything greater than survival.

in her lifetime which helped her develop into a strong woman. She aspired to challenge

Hannah’s background as a Holocaust survivor is important for understanding the experience of the Holocaust. Her story provides unique insight on the Holocaust outside of concentration camps, dispels myths, and captivates the emotional aura of living during the Holocaust. Hannah’s story is one of resistance, danger, and the importance of family.

Arendt explains that the ultimate power of a totalitarian government is the acceptance of the ideology being propagated. The laws that are put into place in totalitarian government are not to empower the people and protect their rights. Instead, the laws tell the people what they must do, not what they must not do. Arendt tells how the law of nature is the foundation for Hitler's Nazis, and the law of history for Russia's communist regimes. According to Arendt, both the Nazi and communist regimes maintained that those laws gave them justification for their cruelty. These laws of nature and history are not permanent or stable. They are in motion to keep history and nature moving, so that it progresses without ever stopping. <p>Arendt claims that these laws of motion sustain the terror fueling the totalitarian government. Arendt says that terror is the realization and execution of these laws with nothing standing in its way. Throughout the selection, Arendt speaks of terror. Terror is essential for the state to keep its power, or else it will fall. According to Arendt, in a totalitarian state terror terminates individuality among the people. Individual men become a mass of humankind, in the eyes of the state. "Terror exists neither for nor against men", claims Arendt, "it substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between individual men a band of iron which holds them so tightly

Wolff (1970) defines a state as a group of persons who have the right to exercise supreme authority within a territory, over a population. He proposes In the Defense of Anarchism, men are autonomous, as higher degrees of autonomy is achieved, a man will resist the claim that states have authority over him. This illustrates the puzzle of Political obligation and can be explained through the appeal to consent.

Thesis: A key concept to understanding Hannah Arendt’s “Total Domination” is the essence of terror and the importance of concentration camps in maintaining the Nazi totalitarian state.

The most alarming thing about Arendt's book is that she is able to make a compelling case that the greatest evils of mankind are committed by ordinary people. Her work forces one to look at the world and realize that the Holocaust was not an isolated incident committed by blood thirsty sociopaths. One must realize that the decision making processes that created an environment accepting of the "Final Solution" is still alive an well today as it has been throughout history. The weight of personal moral choice

Good people can cause severe harm if their motives are influenced by the values shared in a public corporation or are a result of manipulation controlled by the law. Bob Henderson’s ability to satisfy his interests to obtain success by dismissing social responsibility and contributing to the rise in obesity is wrong. Hannah Arendt founded the theory “The banality evil’ through analyzing Adolf Eichmann’s case during the time of the Holocaust. Eichmann and Henderson share similarities of both being ordinary men who influenced large scale harm. The intent of this essay will be to compare and contrast the perception of evil and discuss at which point radical evil may be mistaken for banal evil.

The term `freedom' is often associated with the notion of living free of restraint and having an unfettered liberty to engage in rational actions with a sense that that our actions will not be controlled or interfered with. Given the above definition of freedom and the principles of positive and negative freedom, this essay shall seek to demonstrate that while they do not experience freedom fully, the proles are more free than Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This essay shall also discuss the reasons why we consider freedom to be important with a particular focus on our assumptions of human nature and its components.

With detailed reference to the novel, how do you view this in relation to individual freedom?

According to Rosenfeld Arendt “famously gets a lot of her past wrong” (Rosenfeld 220). However, Rosenfeld’s study of Arendt’s work is not to find error rather depict the history of the writing of the French enlightenment. The “Truth in Politics” written by Arendt “provides a tour of various ancient and early modern thinkers, from Herodotus to Spinoza to James Madison, and of events in the profound and recent past to name a few” (qtd. in Rosenfeld 221).

In the center Simone de Beauvoir’s understanding of freedom is the understanding that people cannot achieve an authentic existence if they do not help others achieve and understand freedom. For her a person lives in a word full of other people and he or she cannot live his or her life if he/she does not respect the freedom of others. For De Beauvoir freedom is an ambiguity. The ambiguity is the fact that people make their own choices and they them self judge if they are right or wrong. A person can make a decision he thinks is right in the moment but that decision can later on look wrong.

The general understanding of democracy is that it is a state of leadership where citizens of a country participate equally either directly or by representative individuals in the establishment of laws, which run the society. However, like many other forms of leadership, democracy has its cons and may not give the citizens the necessary freedoms that they think they have. Different philosophers have different insights on democracy in terms of concepts such as liberty, which they embraced. This paper will look at Benjamin Barber and Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of democracy contrasting their definition in terms of citizenship, obligation, rights and duties of each individual in the society declaring whose idea of democracy creates a compelling vision (Terchek & Conte, 2001).