Arendt’s Accounts of Action and Authority

Abstract

This chapter covers Hannah Arendt's Nietzschean conception of the self as multiplicity and of identity. Arendt presents the bifurcations between the determinism of the natural body (in the private realm) and the freedom of the acting self (in the public realm) as attributes of individual selves. The chapter elaborates on the notion of promising and forgiveness as mechanisms that constrain action. Moreover, Arendt theorizes political authority as part of a broader conception of politics and political action that gives pride of place to virtuosity as self-display and to virtù as enmity toward (too much) order. The chapter also notes that the irresistibility of the law marks the closure of political space and the beginning of despotism, which correlates to Arendt's virtù theories of politics.