ABSTRACT
By almost all the available evidence, we are witnessing a widespread turning away from public life. The prevailing disillusionment with established leadership and institutions produces not protest but withdrawal into privacy, yet privatization manifestly is not providing the comfort and security we seek. And all that anyone seems able to muster for calling people back to the care of this republic is the familiar and incompatible pair of devices: the exhortation to civic duty, and the appeal to self-interest. Neither seems to be doing much good. The left diagnoses a “legitimation crisis,” but has its own difficulties in summoning up a public movement. Hardly anyone today would know what to make of Tocqueville’s simple observation that taking away politics from the American would be taking away half his life, let alone Aristotle’s definition of man as the political animal. The possibility that public participation might be intrinsically rewarding, a fulfillment of our nature rather than a burden, is pursued by almost no one. This essay attempts to pursue it through a critical reexamination of the meaning of public and private in the thought of Hannah Arendt, the political theorist who wrote most powerfully on that theme in our time, and who tried hardest to renew our access to politics as a positive gratification, a “public happiness.”
