ABSTRACT

The work of Bruce Springsteen challenges us to rethink our concept of “politics.” I am not sure if one can describe my own understanding of politics as “classical” or “republican,” but it is certainly rooted in the thinking of people working in that tradition, such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, the Founding Fathers, and, most importantly, Hannah Arendt. In her book The Human Condition , Arendt defines politics as people “acting and speaking together” (198). This entails more than congregating socially with one another; it involves the interaction of people in a public space where individuals actively make their unique identities known to one another out in the open where they can truly discover freedom in its active form. This pluralistic interaction drives the engine of politics and is ultimately the end of politics; great politicians are great not because they can order an action to occur, but because they can bring people together to interact with one another. This purely political experience—discovered by the Greeks and the colonial Americans and articulated well by Arendt—emphasizes both individuality and community. It is the individual’s duty to maintain his or her freedom of thought and action in order to add his or her voice to the polis; those who make the greatest contributions to the polis through bold individual action and coalition building are said to demonstrate arête, virtu, or what Tom Wolfe has more recently labeled “the Right Stuff.” At the same time, the individual cannot act alone but must act in public before the eyes of others, where words and actions take on meaning. They must work for the public (as opposed to private) good, which in the end means promoting politics, pluralism, and the public space, and they must interact with others. Politics ends when this community of interaction ceases to exist.