Freedom in Hannah Arendt

This research aims at examining the concept of freedom in Hannah Arendts thought. For this reason, I start this study with the essay What is Freedom?. In this text, the author presents freedom as belonging to political domain and refuses the Christian and liberal notion of freedom. That is, she denies freedom as free will or absence of constraints. Even though this is the authors most important text on the subject, it is not enough to understand all the properties of her concept of freedom. Therefore, we have to search for other author´s texts, like the book The Human Condition. In this book, Arendt analyses how work and economic issues were valued in the Modernity, bringing serious trouble to free acting. Yet, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the author shows the radicalism of the totalitarian experience. According to her, the totalitarian regime contributed to amplify the idea that freedom is not experienced in the political realm. In spite of this, Arendt affirms the connection between freedom and acting in a public scene based in the experiences of the Athenian Democracy, the Roman Republic and the modernity revolutions. She writes On Revolution to treat the freedom´s emergence in the Modernity and to show the hardness of founding and giving durability to the area where the free action is possible. I manifest throughout this dissertation several characteristics of the freedom concept, such as the relationship between this concept and Arendt´s political thought and between it and the philosophical tradition. Therefore, in the end of the text I resume this characteristics and relationship in order to interpret Arendt´s concept of freedom as a multifaceted conception. (AU)