Sovereignty and plurality : Hannah Arendt's critique of the nation-state

dc.contributor.author	Osadchuk, Darren Peter	en_US
dc.date.accessioned	2024-08-15T16:37:02Z
dc.date.available	2024-08-15T16:37:02Z
dc.date.copyright	1998	en_US
dc.date.issued	1998
dc.degree.department	Department of Political Science
dc.degree.level	Master of Arts M.A.	en
dc.description.abstract	Hannah Arendt's political theory is a sustained attempt to rethink forms of politics centred on sovereign states. This thesis argues that according to Arendt, the sovereign state, epitomized by Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, was disrupted by international movements that prevented the state from ensuring the physical safety of its population and from creating a vibrant public sphere. As the nation-state matured, it was forced to rely on the trans-national Jewish population for financial support, contradicting the principle of equality at its heart. Human rights became national rights : supposedly universal claims became dependent upon citizenship in a state capable of protecting them. As Arendt shows, states were weakened by imperialist movements, the precursors of twentieth-century totalitarianism. Arendt argues that the ideal of the nation-state cannot be redeemed by sovereignty : politics is a fundamentally pluralistic activity, which entails a freedom inconsistent with sovereignty.
dc.format.extent	121 pages
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1828/19191
dc.rights	Available to the World Wide Web	en_US
dc.title	Sovereignty and plurality : Hannah Arendt's critique of the nation-state	en_US
dc.type	Thesis	en_US

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