Hannah Arendt’s conception of Modernity

Hannah’s The Human Condition and the essays in Between past and future articulate a
negative conception of modernity. She is concerned with the shrouding of tradition, religion
and authority in the modern era but offers suggestions to address the questions of meaning ,
identity and value.

Arendt characterizes modernity by the loss of the world by which she means elimination of the
public sphere of action and speech in favor of the private sphere of introspection and pursuit of
economic interest. Modernity obscured the distinction between the public and the private
realm and lead to the rise of the Social. It lead to the victory of the animal laborans over the
homo faber and the classical conception of man as zoon politikon. It is the age of bureaucratic
administration and anonymous labor, rather than politics and action; totalitarian forms of
government( Nazism and Stalinism) that institutionalize terror emerged and the vitality of
history has been affected as modern age conceives it as a “ natural process” rather than a fabric
of actions and events. In the modern era homogeneity and conformity have replaced the
plurality and freedom and it has eroded all forms of living together.

Arendt construes modernity negatively most probably because of her experience of

Totalitarianism in the twentieth century. In the Origins of Totalitarianism she claimed that the
phenomenon of totalitarianism has broken the continuity of the occidental history and
rendered meaningless most of our moral and political categories.  Faced with the tragic events of
the Holocaust and the Gulag, we can no longer go back to traditional concepts and values, so as to
explain the unprecedented by means of precedents. Arendt attempts to rescue the past and not the
traditions from the “ deadly impact of the new thoughts” so that we can restore meaning to the
present and make judgments regarding the contemporary situations “ without a banister”.

She borrowed hermeneutic strategy from Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger and employed it
to re- establish links with the past. She took Benjamin’s idea of fragmented historiography to
identify the moments of rupture and recover the lost potentials of the past in the hope that they
may find actualization in the present . From Heidegger she took the idea of deconstructive reading
of western philosophical tradition to access the original meaning of our categories from the
incrustation of traditions.

Arendt’s return to the original experience of the Greek polis represents an attempt to break the fetters
of a worn-out tradition and to rediscover a past over which tradition has no longer a claim. This will
make the past meaningful again and it will serve as an inspiration for those who are encountering the
unprecedented in the contemporary scenario with “ new thoughts”.