Private space and public space in the constitution of the social: notes on the thoutht of Hannah Arendt

Abstract

This article discusses the notion of public space in Hannah Arendt´s thought. In order to reconstruct its categories, the starting point of this article is Arendt´s thinking concerning totalitarianism, a central notion in her work. Starting from the problem raised by Il World War horror, in which the criterias of judgement between good and evil, true or false, were annihilated, the notion of public space refers to an experience in which men lost the "human world" as reference to their lives, in which the solitude and impotence of privatized lives predominated, and in which the sense of public freedom as a form of political sociability based upon the recognition of the other´s right to action and opinion was dissolved.