Hannah Arendt

Freedom in the story of a lifetime

Abstract

Hannah Arendt's first book, dedicated to Rahel Varnhagen, offers the opportunity to reflect on the interweaving of first and second birth, one of the central themes of Vita activa (1958). Arendt's theory of political action delivers an idea of freedom which is not an affirmation of the power of the ego against what resists its control. A freedom which maintains its power of innovation intact with respect to any fixation and automatism, but remains bound to reality because in the latter it opens up space of the search for something that goes beyond pure happening, opens up the space for the search for meaning.