Hannah Arendt’s radical politics: beyond actually existing democracies

In Brazil as in many other parts of the world, Hannah Arendt’s thought has been  frequently mentioned and assessed in juridical discussions (Lafer 1988; 1993). In fact, her  work contains many passages in which she discusses juridical matters, often in close  connection with questioning the perplexities engendered by totalitarianism. We may for  example, take her discussions concerning the crisis of the Rights of Man in the context of  the twentieth century’s growing legion of refugees and displaced persons, or her reflections  on Adolf Eichmann’s trial, which raise the issue of crimes committed against humanity  within the death factories of the concentration camps (Arendt 1965). In spite of Arendt’s  unquestionable contributions to these juridical-political debates, we should stress that her  reflections on those matters are pervaded by her criticism concerning the limitations of the  positive juridical order and of representative democracy as powerful and adequate antidotes to the political crisis of our time. Nothing could be further from Arendt’s political thinking  than to conceive of liberal democracy – that is, our actually existing democracies of mass  manipulation and market oriented values – and the juridical field of Law as exclusive  grounding instances for the active exercise of political citizenship.

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