Reading Arendt’s on revolution after the fall of the wall

Abstract

The article revisits Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution and the historical events of the American revolution so as to recast what Arendt called “the age’s problems”. Although every political actor claims that its policies are the incarnation of the united will of the nation in a democracy, the door to antipolitics is opened if the symbolic – and therefore contested – nature of the sovereign people is reduced to its temporary reality. That is the crucial lesson to be drawn still today from The Origins of Totalitarianism, which can be read as an attempt to think the most extreme expression of antipolitics. KEY WORDS – Antipolitics. Arendt. Democracy. Revolution.