The location of freedom: Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault
Date
1999
Authors
Vo-Quang, Edouard
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Abstract
In the thesis, I discuss Hannah Arendt's conception of freedom. More particularly, I discuss her restriction of freedom to the public realm, and argue, using some of Michel Foucault's analyses of power and freedom, that this very restriction is problematic. But just as Foucault's analyses render Arendt's categories problematic, so they point to ways in which her analysis of freedom may be enriched or revised. It is this revision that I undertake in the thesis. I argue, through a comparison of Arendt' s discussion of freedom with Jurgen Habermas's historical analysis of the public realm, that Arendt's categories can be read as temporal categories (instead of the somewhat standard interpretation of them as spatial categories), and that by so ' temporalizing' her categories, one ' liberates' Arendtian freedom from its restriction to the public realm.