Acción e institución en el pensamiento político de Hannah Arendt: lecturas de Sobre la Revolución

Abstract

***Agency and institution of Hannah Arendt’s political thinking: reading On Revolution***

As Margaret Canovan points out, On Revolution has been one of the least read and least understood books of Hannah Arendt and our Latin American countries has not been the exception to this rule. However, this text is of great importance to explore some questions of Arendt's thought that, although they have continuity, find less development in her other books. In On Revolution, Arendt focuses her attention on the institutional dimension of revolutionary political action. This is essential for a more conprehensive portrait of Hannah Arendt's political thinking as well as for mobilizing it in order to reflect about our Latin American political realities. In this work we propose certain elements of analysis of the political thought of Hannah Arendt, as they appear in her work On Revolution. We will frame our reading between two interpretations which, in our view, are equally interesting, strongly influential in the Latin American context and which are essential references on the understanding of Arendt's work, but which differ in their interpretation of her political thinking and in particular as to the place which political institutions occupy in it. These are the interpretations of Étienne Tassin on the paradoxes of Arendt's understanding of the revolution and those of Margaret Canovan on the new arendtian republicanism. Then we will develop some keys to our own reading of On Revolution that stand in between both positions. Finally, we will offer a conclusion recapitulating the most significant points of our argument.