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VALUE SYSTEMS REQUIRE MAJORITY SUPPORT
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VALUE SYSTEMS REQUIRE MAJORITY SUPPORT1. MUST HAVE SUPPORT OF MANY INDIVIDUALS TO REVERE VALUES Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, CRISES OF THE REPUBLIC, 1969, p. 68. What had been decided inforo conscienhiae has now become part of public opinion, and although this particular group of civil disobedients may still claim the initial validation--their consciences--they actually rely no longer on themselves alone. In the market place, the fate of conscience is not much different from the fate of the philosopher’s truth: it becomes an opinion, indistinguishable from other opinions. And the strength of opinion does not depend on conscience, but on the number of those with whom it is associated--“unanimous agreement that ‘X’ is an evil...[sic] adds credence to the believe that ‘X’ is an evil.” 2. PUBLIC SUPPORT NECESSARY TO MAKE SENSE OF PUBLIC VALUES Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, THE HUMAN CONDITION, 1958, p. 35. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word “privacy,” and this is partly due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modem individualism. However, it seems even more important that modern privacy is at least as sharply opposed to the social realm--unknown to the ancients who considered its content a private matter--as it is to the political, properly speaking.
Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, ON VIOLENCE, 1970, p. 44. When we say of somebody that his is “in power” we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name. The moment of the group, from which the power originated to begin with (potestas in populo, without a people or group there is no power), disappears, “his power” also vanishes.
1. VALUES SIGNIFICANCE LIES IN SOCIETAL ACCEPTANCE Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE, 1954, p. 33. The term “value” owes its origin to the sociological trend which even before Marx was quite manifest in the relatively new science of classical economy. Marx was still aware of the fact, which the social sciences have since forgotten, that nobody “seen in his isolation produces values,” but that products “become values only in their social relationship.” His distinction between “use value” and “exchange value” reflects the distinction between things as men use and produce them and their value in society, and his insistence on the greater authenticity of use values, his frequent description of the rise of exchange value s a kind of original sin at the beginning of market production reflect his own helpless and, as it were, blind recognition of the inevitability of an impending “devaluation of all values.” 2. MUST NOT LOOK TO THE ENDS OF ACTION TO DETERMINE VALUES Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, CRISES OF THE REPUBLIC, 1969, p. 62-63. Our legal codes distinguish between crimes in which indictment is mandatory, because the community as a whole has been violated and offenses in which only doers and sufferers are involved, who may or may not want to sue. In the case of the former, the states of mind of those involved are irrelevant, except insofar as intent is part of the overt act, or mitigating circumstances are taken into account; it makes no difference whether the one who suffered is willing to forgive or the one who did is entirely unlikely to do it again.
Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, THE HUMAN CONDITION, 1958, p.206-207. Similarly, the attempt to eliminate action because of its uncertainty and to save human affairs from their frailty by dealing with them as thought they were or could become the planned products of human making has first of all resulted in channeling the human capacity for action, for beginning new and spontaneous processes which without men never would come into existence, into an attitude toward nature which up to the latest stage of the modern age had been one of exploring natural laws and fabricating objects out of natural material. FREEDOM IS THE CENTRAL VALUE IN SOCIETY1. FREEDOM IS A SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH OF OUR POLITICAL SYSTEM Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE, 1954, p. 143. In its simplest form, the difficulty may be summed up as the contradiction between our consciousness and conscience, telling us that we are free and hence responsible, and our everyday experience in the outer world, in which we orient ourselves according to the principle of causality. In all practical and especially in political matters we hold human freedom to be a self-evident truth, and it is upon this axiomatic assumption that laws are laid down in human communities, that decisions are taken, that judgments are passed. 2. VALUE OF FREEDOM IS THE DIRECT AIM OF POLITICAL ACTION Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE, 1954, p. 146. Freedom, moreover, is not only one among the many problems and phenomena of the political realm properly speaking, such as justice, or power, or equality; freedom, which the only seldom--in times of crisis or revolution--becomes the direct aim of political action, is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all. Without it, political life as such would be meaningless. The mson d’être of politics is freedom and its field of experience is action.
Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE, 1954, p. 146. The field where freedom has always been known, not as a problem, to be sure, but as a fact of everyday life, is the political realm. And even today, whether we know it or not, the question of politics and the fact that man is a being endowed with the gift of action must always be present to our mind when we speak of the problem of freedom; for action and politics, among all capabilities and potentialities of human life, are the only things of which we could not even conceive without at least assuming that freedom exists, and we can hardly touch a single political issue without, implicitly or explicitly, touching upon an issue of man’s liberty.
Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, ON REVOLUTION, 1963, p. 121. To be sure, this passion for freedom for its own sake, for the sole “pleasure to be able to speak, to act, to breathe” (Tocqueville), can arise only where men are already free in the sense that they do not have a master. And the trouble is that this passion for public or political freedom can so easily be mistaken for the perhaps much more vehement, but politically essentially sterile, passionate hatred of masters, the longing of the oppressed for liberation. Such hatred, no doubt, is as old as recorded history and probably even older; it has never yet resulted in revolution since it is incapable of even grasping, let alone realizing, the central idea of revolution, which is the foundation of freedom, that is, the foundation of a body politic which guarantees the space where freedom can appear. 5. FREEDOM IS AN IMPORTANT VALUE FOR LIBERATION Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, ON REVOLUTION, 1963, p. 26. But this difficulty in drawing the line between liberation and freedom in any set of historical circumstances does not mean that liberation and freedom are the same, or that those liberties which are won as the result of liberation tell the whole story of freedom even though those who tried their hand at both liberation and the foundation of freedom more often than not did not distinguish between these matters very clearly either. The men of the eighteenth-century revolutions had a perfect right to this lack of clarity; it was in the very nature of their enterprise that they discovered their own capacity and desire for the “charms of liberty,” as John Jay once called them, only the very act of liberation. For the acts and deeds which liberation demanded from them threw them into public business, where, intentionally or more often unexpectedly, they began to constitute that space of appearances where freedom can unfold it charms and become a visible, tangible reality. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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