Political Promises (New Edition)

What is the meaning of politics?
The answer is very simple, very clear:
The meaning of politics is freedom.
Yet today, this answer is neither self-evident nor immediately comprehensible.

The experiences brought by totalitarianism and the atomic bomb ignited the question of the meaning of politics in the current era. Underlying our current prejudices about politics are hope and fear: the fear that humanity will destroy itself through politics, through the armed force it wields. Connected to this fear is hope, hope that humanity will regain its reason, not to eliminate humans from the world, but to eliminate politics from the world.

Hannah Arendt critically examined the entire Western tradition of political thought, finding that this tradition failed to adequately explain human action. This tradition began with Plato and Aristotle: ever since Socrates was condemned to death, thinkers have all valued philosophical truth over political insight, viewing politics as a means to achieve higher goals. Machiavelli's work was the first sign of thoroughly exploring the practicality of philosophy, and Hobbes was the first to propose a philosophy that was useless for philosophy, yet claimed to stem from common sense. Marx attempted to invert this tradition. Because of Marx's inversion, this tradition truly reached its end.

Political philosophy, like all branches of philosophy, cannot deny its origin in "the astonishment at things as they are." Although philosophers are inevitably alienated from the daily life of human affairs, if true political philosophy is to be achieved, the plurality of people who constitute the entire realm of human affairs, including its greatness and its misery, must become the object of astonished projection. In the words of the Bible, philosophers must accept miracles, that God created not Man with a capital M, but "He created them male and female."