On Hannah Arendt's Understanding of Society or the Social: Resisting Unprecedented Crises

Hannah Arendt stated in The Human Condition her intention to understand society or the social as well as provide criticism on society and salvage the political to promote appreciation of and resistance against unprecedented crises. In her pursuing an understanding of society, she has adapted a unique method tracing back to the distinction between the public and the private in ancient Greece as the origin of society, and then referring to the history of theories on society presented by John Locke, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and sociologists Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer.

 In this paper, I will interpret her understanding of society based on the above method and argue that society is fundamentally ruled by the biological life process. Therefore, human life and activities in society are regulated based on whether each person contributes to the sustenance of the life process and multiplication of lives. This interpretation can link Arendt’s understanding of society in The Human Condition with her descriptions on unprecedented crises in her other writings, especially The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt has stated that when people are extremely forced to contribute to a function of the life process, an ideology forms out of ideas of race, body, and other biological things contributable to such a function. By rise of such an ideology, People not contributable to the function have been removed to a condition of complete rightlessness in imperialism and concentration camps in totalitarianism. Moreover, to accelerate the function of the life process, humans apply nuclear fission to harness nuclear power at the risk of irreversible danger, “to act into nature”.

In addition, this paper outlines my attempt to search for a normative theory in her arguments on resisting unprecedented crises by focusing on her concepts of forgiveness and promise.