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Prgteface WE DO NOT SAY that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all. This, then, is the kind of city for which these men, who could not bear the thought of losing her, nobly fought and nobly died. Thucydides* These are some of the fine words spoken by Pericles in the course of his funeral oration. The city is Athens, the occasion is the death of those who died in its defence, and the purpose, to praise the noble city and its noble citizens in their hour of grief and glory. Pericles' words make it plain that the main business and the greatness of Athens has to do with public affairs: with the affairs common to all. His words deftly essay a manner of life at once arduous and full of risk yet filled with the joys of friendship and common striving towards excellence. But above all Pericles lauds the citizen, the zoon politikon, as the heart and the soul of the city. This is the city of courageous and fair public men, the city of men who prefer community and public conversation, to privacy, wealth and meretricious gossip. Athens as Pericles describes it is both fact and fiction. Athenian practice is the source of his remarks but the essence of his praiseworthy picture is provided by his imagination nurtured on the grand poetry of Homer. Pericles paints Athens and Athenians in the heroic mould of Homer. He exaggerates rather than distorts, embellishes rather than plainly states the greatness of Athens and its way of life. His words are spoken at the beginning of the end: they seek to present to posterity Athens and its citizens at their best. Periclean Athens and its celebration of the public life of the potis—its democratic temper, the virile virtuosity of its citizens, its keen passion for competitive excellence—is the powerful image at the heart of Hannah Arendt's political theory. In all facets and in almost all of her writings, this * History of the Peloponmsian War (Harmondsworth: 1972), 147-148. Vll viii PUBLIC REALM AND PUBLIC SELF image of the Athenian polls and the greatness of its ways appears again and again. For her it is not an aesthetic ideal to be admired for its own sake, although that element is certainly present. Her evident purpose is to critically resurrect the Periclean ideal of citizenship as an intrinsically worthy part of human life and worthy of imitation by modern men. Thus she devotes a substantial part of her theoretical effort to unravelling the fastidious character of politics within the context of the human condition. For Arendt politics, in its classically ancient sense, takes in a large chunk of the life men share together and it endows that life with peculiar human meaning. Politics is a particular and meaningful manner of living together; properly understood it is rewarding as well as practical. Without politics men will survive but that is all they will do. In the absence of politics individual and social life will be poor in moral wealth and human excellence. This is in part what lies hidden in the glory that was once Athens. Hidden because both the tradition of political theory and the modern age, in the main, attach hardly any significance to the shared life of citizenship, to the Athenian ideal of politics. From Plato to Marx, Machiavelli and young Marx the decisive exceptions , the tradition of political theory either ignores or argues against the ideals of ancient citizenship. Vita activa and particularly the greatness of political action do not receive their due meed in the tradition. This is true, according to Arendt, in spite of the fact that the modern tradition marks the rediscovery of the vita activa after centuries of subservience to the vita contemplativa of Plato and Christianity. For the modern tradition extols not action and politics, but the life of labour (satisfaction of needs and wants) and work (fabricating things and objects). At the same time the ideals which characterized the birth of the modern age in the seventeenth century were, and continue to be, essentially economic and materialistic. Wedded to the ideals of progress and happiness , the modern spirit is fundamentally hostile to the life of true citizenship . To the extent that they were deeply commited to personal happiness, even the Romantics shared this spirit despite their hostility to progress. Liberalism, its ancient constitutional...

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