Essay Sample on Understanding Freedom

Introduction

Freedom of individuals is one of the cherished political values in the western world. It is a value that should be safeguarded in the modern world. This is the absence of restraint for people to think or act for themselves. Individual freedom is characterized by people being free from government regulations or oppression. Individualists prefer independence and self-reliance as opposed to external interference on their interests from institutions like governments (Leoni, 2012). For the value to work in any given nation there is a need for citizens to develop individual responsibility as well. The power of an individual, evident through self-determination, can change with time. The magnitude of individual freedom is not fixed, it can expand or shrink, and sometimes it can disappear. Individual freedom allows people to be independent by governing themselves. The freedom to an individual is defined by their beliefs and thoughts.

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Individual freedom is based on two notions, virtue and will. Arendt defines political freedom as freedom in an exceptional way away from the Christian belief of freedom as a free will (Dossa, 1980). She blames traditional understanding as it has misinterpreted freedom as independence. Political power must be associated with the action of a strong State capable of control and the total protection of the citizen. This is because the modern State has shown great weaknesses in its function of being a protector of social coexistence, which explains her reaction against classical liberalism in her theory of the limited State. Arendt has served as a foundation for directing the political at present through consensus and the permanent establishment of spaces of recognition in public action that allow true practices of politics. This pretension marks a direct criticism of totalitarian regimes, which it identifies as expressions of non-politics. Its theoretical developments seek to ask for a sense of the political far from the demonstration of politics by Schmitt.

Hannah Arendt is that thinker of the political that elaborates her doctrine starting from the realistic perspective of society. It elaborates its proposal based on interpretative keys such as power, action, violence, among others, issues that impact both own and strangers of the political issue. Although based on these assumptions, her work is difficult to reference with any school or current of political thought; Arendt is interested in the uniqueness and novelty that shows the actions and thinking of man; from this perspective, his doctrine can be framed within phenomenology and especially within the existential phenomenology of politics (Leoni, 2012).

Arendt was aware that in a pluralist society, conflicts are more acute (Dossa, 1980). She points out that politics refers, first of all, to the problem of the condition of actions, in the indispensable definition of collective goals. Therefore, the criterion distinguishes the political should be sought in the conditions that enable the coordination of actors, the political refers to the public consensus legitimizing the use of law and order but does not mean that Arendt attempts a new form of social contract in a different perspective. On the contrary, she is not part of this conceptualization of human nature, since both attribute to its content of absolute value, be it of badness in Hobbes or of goodness in Rousseau, when relating it to the field of the political. Because both distinctions lead inexorably to the conflict reflected in the legitimate use of the violence.

Arendt establishes that the conciliation between power and legality occurs in totalitarian ideologies fundamentally by the use of a scientific language that aims to explain everything, by an ideology that is immune to criticism and because all events follow the organized logic of the ideas (Yeatman, 2011). That is, everything is explained from the "truth" exposed in its theoretical system in which the end is always clear. The concepts of justice, harmony, legality would be given from the moment that the direction of the movement towards its "end" is respected and followed. It is important to point out that for Arendt, totalitarianism is not an external threat, but comes from within.

Modernity undertook in the realm of the political, the greatest rupture with the classical and medieval paradigm, by placing man in the realization of the public in a pre-social state or of nature that supposed malignancy of the human race where the laws did not exist, making it necessary to establish the social contract or citizen agreement to maintain and preserve the safety and life of individuals. The ideal of Justice necessarily depends on the construction of the State that is wanted, as State culture is a reflection of the traditions socio-political inherited essentially from modernity. The position of Arendt in relation to the State as a total homogenizing power of individual freedom, by maintaining total control of the economic and social instances to stand above these, denies in the individual the free possibility of public action becoming a despotic form of unjustifiable government. Modern governments in democratic nations protect individual liberties, which lead to peaceful coexistence (Yeatman, 2011). Through Arendt's perspective, the government becomes a critical institution for individuals to enjoy freedom.

References

Dossa, S. (1980). Human status and politics: Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 13(2), 309-323.

Leoni, B. (2012). Freedom and the Law. Liberty Fund.

Yeatman, A. (2011). Individuality and politics: thinking with and beyond Hannah Arendt. Action and Appearance: Ethics and the Politics of Writing in Hannah Arendt, 69-86.