Hannah Arendt. Break in Tradition and time of accion

Abstract

Hannah Arendt's thesis that Totalitarianism constitutes a rupture with the bonds of Western tradition is well known, insofar as its actions have exploded the categories of political thought and the patterns of moral judgment. This rupture implies the difficult task of understanding the nature of the totalitarian phenomenon without the help of traditional categories, so that Arendt argues that this phenomenon constitutes an irreducible novelty. However, the author points out that this cesura should not be understood as the insertion of new ideas in the world of human affairs, but that it has brought to light the ruin of the categories belonging to the tradition of Western political thought. This paper tries to show that, with these theses, Arendt tries to point out that what, since its beginnings, the Western tradition has not been able to think, and that totalitarianism has completely eliminated, is a reflection on action and its specific temporality. In this way, the rupture with the bonds of tradition can mean the opportunity to elaborate a true thought around action that takes into account both its specific temporality, which is founded on the event of natality, and the consequence of this for the narration and construction of History.