Individuality and politics : thinking with and beyond Hannah Arendt

I have sought to provide an account of Arendt’s conception of the integral relationship between individuality and the political, and, in so doing, to suggest that she offers a theoretical account of this relationship that liberalism does not. In exploring this relationship, we must be careful not to abstract one term of the relationship and consider it independently of the other. The political refers to the modality of relationship between human beings when they are invited to be co-present as the distinct beings that they are and to engage in the possibilities of the gift they enjoy – being born as distinct living beings who able to take initiative. Their appearance in being born as distinct beings is the condition of the appearance of their who-ness in action. If the private sphere is one in which individuals are present to each other in the simple gift of their existence, the public sphere, if and when exists, is a relational space wherein individuals can appear to each other in taking up their freedom as beings capable of action, of new beginnings.