Ricerc@Sapienza

What can we still learn from Hannah Arendt’s political categories and reflections on the public realm in an era that sees the growing spread of populisms? The large critical literature on Arendt’s work has been spreading over the years a sort of standardized vision, according to which Arendt was a nostalgic and anti-modern thinker, whose aim was to rehabilitate the greek polis model against the modern decline of the public sphere, so that very few of her conceptual categories are still useful to understand contemporary phenomena. The purpose of these notes is to offer a different reading of the complex relationship between Arendt and the modern age. With the help of most recent literature – characterised by a more critic approach to her work – it seems possible, quite to the contrary, to draw from Arendt’s thought a deep “modernist” attitude, not just regarding her judgement on modernity, but above all in terms of upto-dateness of some of her suggestions. The most important consequence for the purpose of the reflections we are proposing here can be probably found in the impact
that the strategies of simplification and polarization of the public – political and mediatic – discourse adopted by contemporary populisms can exert upon the publics who are less “equipped” for contextualizing those distorted or simplifying messages which are better known at nowadays as “fake news”. And the weakening of the critical sense seems to find broad
consonance not only with the foreseeable reduction of political and social pluralism, but also with such phenomena as the
growth of perceived insecurity and individualism, stigmatization of “the different”, erosion of social capital and political
participation.