3min chapter

In Our Time cover image

Hannah Arendt

In Our Time

CHAPTER

American Civil Disobedience

She was a curostible life, although she was a great distance from her and ruptured him. She thought you could recreate voluntary associations which were sort of small groups of people making new things. But she also understood that it was under threat. There could be no going back to the Greek idea of the polist. Not in the 1960s, it would look like Star Trek.

00:00
Speaker 3
She was a curostible life, although she was a great distance from her and ruptured him, she was prepared to defend him intellectually later on some of his ideas. But let's stay with her. Lindsay, how does she try to say, look, we are where we are now, everything, not everything. A massive society has been destroyed by these two great totalitarianisms and these two wars. If we go back to the Greek, we can maybe just about haul it two and a half millennia across time and reset it for now. How did you go about that?
Speaker 1
Well, I'm not sure she did. I don't think she does that straightforwardly. What she liked, what she affirmed about America was the Republic tradition. So she thought you could recreate voluntary associations, which were sort of small groups of people making new things, and she liked America, she liked the notion of republicanism with a small historic notion of republicanism, because that was possible. But she also understood that it was under threat. There could be no going back to the Greek idea of the polist. Not in the 1960s, it would look like Star Trek. People on the deck having these great philosophical discussions, why they visited people in time and space who were doing all the work. I mean, that's the only way you could have the Greek polist in the 1960s. But what you could have, and she did see this as under threat all the time, is she wrote very persuasively about Nixon and Watergate, and lying in politics, is what constantly needed protecting was the idea of there should be places where dissent and creation of the new are possible. So I was rereading her essay on civil disobedience, American civil disobedience this week, which is fascinating. She says, you know, disobedience isn't just breaking the law. Sometimes you need civil disobedience to make the law be the thing it can be. So it's a kind of way of restoring the republic, acknowledging the republics in crisis, but that will take smaller groups of active citizens. So she was very supportive of the student movement in the 1960s. She didn't like it when they got involved in big ideologies. She didn't really like the violence, but the idea that you could form, you know, she said, you know, to all societies are based on the notion of consent. So even when you're consenting, you know, there's a possibility of dissent. That's your responsibility. So that's where she saw possibility. She really did think that the American model held out the opportunity for something greater than it already was. And she was very, very protective of it as well.

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