Benhabib Clarifies Arendt, and the FYW Course Engaged in Practical Discourse
Previous post on Hannah Arendt and action = promise + forgiveness If I accept Arendt's proposition that action requires promise and forgiveness in an ideal public, or even to nurture a nascent public, then I also need to define that public as an associative one, not an agonistic one, such as our current social constitution today. Seyla Benhabib explains this where he argues that Arendt's vision of public is a liberal one, in the Kantian sense, such that liberalism is a culture where the question of legitimacy is paramount and necessarily consistent. Calling upon Ackerman “Whenever anybody questions the legitimacy of another’s power, the power holder must respond not by suppressing the questioner but by giving a reason that explains why he is more entitled to the resource than the questioner is” [Ackerman 14]. Ackerman understands liberalism as a way of talking about power, as a political culture of public dialogue based on certain kinds of conversational constraints. The m...