Fondazione senza fondamento. L'antica Roma nel pensiero di Hannah Arendt.

The present work aims to explore Hannah Arendt’s thought from the point of view of her republicanism. In order to go into this aspect of her thought our analyses focus on the many places of her work where Arendt deals with ancient Romans’ political experience. This topic is often overlooked by critics in favor of better-known paradigm of the Greek “polis”. Phenomenological essentialism and political discourse in Arendt are always linked each other. Her political republicanism is rooted into a phenomenological essentialism becauase of the radicalism of a thought that starts form the interrogation about totalitarianism. Through the model of the Greek polis and the Roman paradigm Arendt deconstructs the categorical apparatus of modernity and outlines her own political phenomenology, her reconstruction of existential meaning and immanent structures of the political “praxis”. The proper awareness of the importance of reflection on the “romanitas” in the development of Arendt’s thought has been given by publication of personal notes: the Denktagebuch, in 2002. This material shows a continuing interest for the conceptual horizon of the Roman’s political experience, especially intense during the first half of the Fifties, when Arendt devoted to reading the works of Cicero. These are crucial years for the work of Arendt, years of gestation of the main political texts. The material contained in Denktagebuch reveals the deep roots of the theories developed in publical essays, showing preparatory work fueled by the intense reflection and recording of Latin authors like Cicero, Virgil, Lucan, Tacito. The present work is based largely on this material. It highlights the points where Arendt’s reflections on ancient Rome reveals more coherent with the phenomenology of politics that emerges in the works given to the press. Through a detailed analysis of Arendt’s reflection on Cicero, the present work emphasizes the theme of Arendt’s republicanism and the theme of the formal structures of the political like the legal sphere (“ius”, “lex”) and the central theme of the foundation. Theese analyses allows to complicate the grecocentric assumptions of the model of the polis and, therefore, the overdetermination that often seems to have the theme of “pure spontaneity practices”, often understood by the interpreters as a pure “event” unstructured. In a sense we can say that if the Greek model carries a post-modern reading of Arendt, the Roman one allows to read the arendtian idea of praxis in a more coherent Republican horizon, enphasizing especialliy the concpet of “law” and that of foundation of the public sphere. The present work follows closely Arendt’s attempt to give a new meaning to the theme of “law” through the help of the ancient Romans, especially of Cicero. The Roman paradigm, moreover, is put in constant comparison with Arendt’s essay on modern revolutions, read back through the meta-paradigm of “liberty of the ancients” and “liberty of the moderns”. The present work tries to highlights the presence in Arendt’s thougth of an existential conflict – even before politics – with the two kinds of liberties, both rooted in a phenomenology of existentil acts. The conflict emerges in the essay about revolutions throurgh definte opossitions: that between the civil and political rights; between freedom and liberation; private comfort and pubic happiness, representative government and republic. The present work tries to shows that in Arendt the first term of theese comparisons is a supporter of the modern “un-politics” trend that for Arendt is responsible of the Totalitarian drift of the Twentieth Century.