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- Title
AMERİKAN FEDERALİSTLERİ, HANNAH ARENDT VE CUMHURİYETÇİLİK: TEMSİLİ DEMOKRASİYE KARŞI KONSEY SİSTEMİ.
- Authors
SEZER, Devrim; BAŞKIR, Ünsal Doğan
- Abstract
This article aims to investigate a topic that has largely been overlooked in the scholarly literature on social contract theory and republicanism: a comparative discussion of the republican perspectives of Hannah Arendt and the American federalists. We discuss two interrelated problems. Our purpose is 1) to explore their relationship to contract theory, and 2) to examine their perspectives on representative democracy through a comparative analysis of their interpretations of the republican principle. Let us recapitulate our two main arguments. First, on the one hand, the federalists followed the abstract and rationalist outlook of social contract theory and made an original contribution to this tradition with a pragmatic and procedural outlook; on the other hand, they inherited a series of problems, especially the problem of amnesia, from the same school of thought. Arendt, however, reminded us that the hypothetical and ahistorical assumptions constitute an obstacle to understanding the historical dimensions as well as the ontological origin of the concept of contract, and responded to the abstract and rationalist approach of contract theory with a 'contractarianism' that stresses the historical dimensions of contracts and the political legacies they inherit. Furthermore, she also questioned the conceptions of power and constitution that were transmitted from contract theory to the American federalists. Second, the perspectives of Arendt and the American federalists represent two important turning points in republican political philosophy. While the American federalists put on paper the first systematic defense of representative democracy, they completely detached the republican principle from citizen participation. Arendt, by contrast, reinterpreted the republican principle in the context of active citizenship and, like Rousseau, articulated a radical critique of representative democracy. Her most original contribution was to wholly identify the republican principle with public participation and to argue that the practice of active citizenship (i.e., political freedom) requires an institutional framework starting from the local level, a radical democratic and confederal participatory network she called the "council system".
- Publication
Academic Journal of Philosophy / Felsefi Düşün, 2022, Issue 19, p420
- ISSN
2148-0958
- Publication type
Article