ABSTRACT
In the Human Condition Arendt provides a way out of this problem in two moves that create a link between the undetermined and futural dimension of self-responsibility to responsibility for the futurity of others. Power, for Arendt, is not an excess of creative force arising from self-responsibility that tends to appropriate others in affirming oneself. This is sensibility and will to power, described as the force whereby whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends. The author's argument, with and beyond Arendt, is that the dulling of conscience and failure of personal responsibility of a populus in a democratic polity is an effect of government no longer assuming responsibility for maintaining the conditions necessary for human plurality. The basis of normativity, or the criterion of conscience, in both politics and morality in a secular democracy is not only the preservation of human dignity understood as the capacity for judgment in Arendt's sense.
