Hannah Arendt's The Promises Of Politics

Firmly defining politics can be just as difficult as it seems at times of forming any sort of political consensus. This is in part due to rhetorical nature of politics and also due to the competing visions of what politics are and its end aims. While some intellectuals such as Carl Schmitt might define politics and political motives purely in terms of conflict, reducing political distinctions simply to that of friend and enemy (Schmitt, 26), these definitions do not adequately explore the complex relationships or struggles that politics are often employed to address. As the writer Hannah Arendt agues in her book The Promises of Politics, “the meaning of politics, in the distinction to its end, is that men in their freedom can interact with

Schmitt for instance sees his distinction between friend and enemy as “the degree of intensity of a union or separation” for him such political distinctions need not draw from other moral, aesthetic, or economic distinctions (Schmitt, 26 – 27). Schmitt’s boiling down of political difference to such base definitions such as friend and enemy not only overlooks the complexity of stakeholder relationships in a community it intimates that the political can only be based on antagonism. Such a view overlooks the not only the complexity of arguments based around morality and economics, but says that such arguments cannot be constructive for all involved parties. An example of this might be the philosophical differences between altruism and objectivism and the respective moral grounding that each gives to either communism or capitalism respectively as an ideal way to organize economic activity. Political discourse over such topics is conducted not for its own sake or to draw lines in a conflict, it is done because each argument is a means of attempting to attain cohesion amongst your fellow citizens and maximize the lives of both the individual and the