Propriety and Appropriation in Hannah Arendt

Abstract

Hannah Arendt's political thought is marked by a rigorous distinction between the private and public spheres of relations. Nevertheless, Arendt sustains a non-private feature of private life, especially linked to the political sense of property. In her critical diagnosis of modernity, present in The Human Condition, she argues that the dissolution of this fundamental link, the modern understanding of politics as a proprietary society (liberalism) and the conversion of wealth into collective concern make up the framework of a " socialized humanity”, that is, of societies entangled in life in its elementary or biological dimension to the detriment of worldliness and politics