ABSTRACT
In the 1950s, Hannah Arendt began to focus on a specific aspect of politics. Political freedom is not a matter of the will or the intellect, or of background constitutions, laws, and rights, but a form of activity with others in public that is liberated from the “automatic processes” to which humans are subject and “within and against which” free citizens “assert” themselves. Freedom is the practice of freedom. Modern political theorists tend to overlook this realm of free action, according to Arendt, because they associate freedom with sovereignty: either the sovereign individual will in the Kantian tradition or the sovereign general will of a group in the Rousseauian tradition. Citizenship in a democracy consists in the participation of citizens in the ways in which their conduct is governed by the exercise of political power in any system or practice of governance.
