ABSTRACT
Among the 20th-century thinkers, Hannah Arendt was one of the most influential, both in highlighting the dark side of modernity and in positively indicating a path for action and freedom within a relational, rather than individualistic, perspective. This essay acknowledges and examines in some depth Arendt’s legacy as a contribution to our idea of ‘generative social action’. Starting from her critique of the desertification of our common world, due to the transformation of the whole society into a ‘laboring-consuming’ society, we investigate some crucial notions in Arendt’s work (namely natality, plurality, promise and mutual contract, and forgiveness) in order to highlight how the broader conception of Arendt’s ‘free acting’ opens the way to a generative idea of freedom. In particular, we show how this idea of free acting, which through the amor mundi develops between past and future, combining individual initiative and mutual cooperation, reveals the same features of ‘inter-temporality’, ‘authorization’ and ‘exemplarity’ that lay at the core of the complex theoretical construct of ‘social generativity’.
