What can Hannah Arendt's writings offer to current thinking on the environment? Although there are some obvious connections between her work and current issues in environmental ethics, not very much has been written on the topic. This article argues that Arendt's philosophy is particularly fruitful for environmental thinking because she explicitly links the material and biological conditions of human existence with the political conditions of human freedom. This is articulated in the article as the requirement of both constrained consumption and (...) unconstrained deliberation. The article elaborates these notions before concluding that Arendt's philosophy uniquely combines the existential task of self-understanding with the practical task of confronting our environmental challenges. (shrink)

This article puts Arendt’s conception of non-human animal appearance into a productive dialogue with recent developments in critical animal studies and animal rights theory within which notions such as agency, zoopolis, and animal agora play an important role. By reinterpreting the animal condition in Arendt’s account of the human condition, it demonstrates her potential contribution to political theory in a world where non-human-animals and nature are seen as making claims of entry into the political community. By emphasizing Arendt’s later work, (...) in which she expresses an openness towards the possibility that non-human animals are drawn to appear, the article indicates how Arendt might help us, both to rethink the boundaries of the political community beyond the human species, and to recognize the political agency of non-human animals. (shrink)

The paper offers a new model of politics adequate for the Anthropocene epoch. It uses the concept of 'heterotopia' to argue for the environmental potential of Arendtian political philosophy. The adopted meaning of heterotopia combines its Foucauldian (as interpreted by L. De Cauter and M. Dehaene) and medical sources. It is argued that, thus understood, the concept can be applied to the Arendtian idea of judgment. In this capacity, the concept of heterotopia is both politically foundational and environmentally relevant. It (...) helps us maintain the idea of politics as humanely construed activity, while recognising that political actors are also natural beings, whose actions draw on and affect the non-human world. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, authority is the shape educational responsibility assumes. In our time, authority in Arendt’s sense is under pressure. The figure of Greta Thunberg shows the failure of adult generations, taken collectively, to take responsibility for the world and present and future generations of newcomers. However, in reflecting on Arendt’s use of authority, we argue that her account of authority also requires amendments. Arendt’s situating of educational authority in-between past and future adequately captures its temporal dimension. We make explicit (...) another, spatial, dimension: authority in-between world and earth. Arendt’s neglect of the material earth also has implications for the relational dimension of authority. Arendt’s authority depends on a dichotomy between the private and the public sphere. This is problematic. First, we agree with Arendt’s feminist critics that the personal can be made into the site of the political. Second, we point once more to Thunberg, the child, taking the public stage, thereby contesting the division between public and private. In response, we situate the relational dimension of authority in-between private and public. The three dimensions of educational authority taken together imply that it is situated in-between domains that cannot be reduced to each other or taken as absolutes: past and future, world and earth, and the private and public sphere. This brings us to our concept of ambiguous authority, which expresses the Arendtian nature of our reflections and the ways in which we seek to renew her original insights on educational authority. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt famously argued that acts of violence are corrosive to a free and plural politics. However, the broader implications of her critique of violence are less well known. Reading her concept of violence comprehensively, with regard to (ostensibly non-political) labor and work as well as action, this article reveals its broader relevance for contemporary political thought: the political question of violence lies at the heart of our ecological crisis and is crucial for the social structure of labor domination. While (...) Arendtian politics is without normative guarantees, the conceptual distinction between instrumental violence and free politics is crucial, because it renders the political judgment of violence possible. In every realm of human activity, the refusal to acknowledge violence stunts our capacity to care for the world. (shrink)