Hannah Arendt. Society and politics/Hannah Arendt. La sociedad y la política/Hannah Arendt. A sociedade e a politica

Hannah Arendt is considered one of the most relevant political thinkers of the twentieth century. Her controversial position regarding some crucial political events of the century puzzled her readers, triggered fruitful discussions, and made it difficult to define Arendt as a political thinker. Her uncompromising thesis regarding the autonomous status of the political sphere led her to set a perplexing and unbridgeable gap between social demands and the political domain. In this context, I shall examine the position of Martin Jay and Maurizio Passerin D'Entreves. The first one defines Arendt as a political existentialist, whereas the latter more accurately posits her in the tradition of modern republican thinkers. By way of conclusion, I would like to suggest that a possible way to detach the Political from the Social, and submit its autonomous status, is to relate it to joyful activities.