Hannah Arendt, 100 Years Later:
Quoting Sophocles's suggestion that freedom can "endow life with splendor," Arendt called freedom the raison d'etre of politics. The highest political action, she thought, is free speech in public about public affairs.Benjamin Balint/Forward 06.10.06
Hence Arendt's lofty regard for the wisdom of the American Revolution - and her fear that contemporary Americans are in danger of forgetting it. For such people as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, she wrote, "life in Congress, the joys of discourse, of legislation, of transacting business, of persuading and being persuaded, were a foretaste of eternal bliss." A sophisticated indulgence of those joys and freedoms - together with an awareness of the urgent necessity to protect them where they are threatened - may be just the thing to counter the bleak vision of eternal bliss that animates today's would-be totalitarians.
