The law, the common and the human condition in Hannah Arendt’s thought

Abstract

The article discusses the issue of law in Hannah Arendt based on its connection with the theme of the common. The idea is to guide us through the paradigmatic dimension of the refugee (outlaw) and thus to mediate the discussion about the common through Arendt’s understanding of the human condition present seminally in the text “We refugees” (1943), in the section “The decline of the nation-state and the end of the rights of man” in Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and explicitly thematized in the book The Human Condition(1958). In choosing this path, we broaden the discussion of the common beyond the simple opposition between the public and the private, as seems to happen in the case of those who interpret chapter II of The Human Condition from the liberal perspective. Law will therefore appear as the dimension responsible for organizing our insertion in the community through the constitutive activities of our human condition: work, action, opinion and thought.

Keywords: law, common, human condition, world, public.