Hannah Arendt and Federalism

Abstract

This chapter discusses the relation between Arendt’s conception of Judaism, its relation to the history of the Jewish people, and her theory of republicanism. The chapter argues that Arendt follows Martin Buber’s lead, who was the first 20th-century thinker to explicitly identify the anarchic core of Jewish political theology. Buber conceives God’s Kingship as the inner meaning of the Jewish faith and articulates this Kingship in the post-Weberian terms of the idea of charismatic leadership. In contrast with Heidegger’s political theology in the 1930s, which attempts to determine peoplehood as a function of opening a space for the manifestation of the gods of the Earth, the chapter shows that Arendt recovers Roman civil religion in order to unify republican federalism with an anarchic conception of political freedom.