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Hannah Arendt's Constitutionalism
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Hannah Arendt's Constitutionalism

A special issue of Laws (ISSN 2075-471X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2024 | Viewed by 4124

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Roger Berkowitz

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Guest Editor
Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504, USA
Interests: Justice and Jurisprudence; Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant, Plato, Aristotle; dignity; history and philosophy of science; politics and aesthetics
Dr. Shmuel Lederman

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
The Weiss-Livnat Center for Holocaust Research and Education, University of Haifa, Haifa 3498838, Israel
Interests: political theory, particularly Hannah Arendt, John S. Mill; participatory democracy; genocide studies; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Two central chapters in Hannah Arendt's last book On Revolution set the American constitutional tradition at the center of her inquiry into the founding and preservation of political freedom. In "Foundation I: Constitutio Libertatis", Arendt argues that the central innovation of the American revolution was the constitutional embrace of federalism and the "consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politics of the republic". It is the constitution’s federal principle that allows for the multiplication and flourishing of power within a stable system. The following chapter, "Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saeculorum", offers an original reading of the Supreme Court as the successor of the Roman Senate. The Court's authority allowed the Constitution to come to be worshipped in a way that tied together permanence and change. The combination of power and authority that the U.S. Constitution allows is, Arendt argues, the modern condition for the possibility of founding free government.

Hannah Arendt's reflections on constitutionalism and its implication for domestic and international law, as well as for the relations between countries and between different groups within countries, have garnered renewed interest in recent years. One may think for example of the collection of essays Hannah Arendt and the Law, edited by Marco Goldoni and Chris McCorkindale (2012), Christian Volk's Arendtian Constitutionalism (2015), recent explorations into the tensions between constituent power and constituted power in Arendt's work (Muldoon 2016; Popp-Madsen 2021) and various other essays on this topic that came out in the past decade. This scholarship has opened up new horizons for thinking about Arendt's contribution to constitutional and legal thought and highlighted the way that focusing on these aspects of Arendt's thought allows for new and important perspectives on her political theory as a whole.

This Special Issue seeks to bring Arendt's contribution to constitutional and legal thought and the role these topics play in her thought into a sharper focus. We invite contributions from researchers who are interested in Arendt's constitutional thinking; how she saw constitutions as essential to the ambition of founding freedom; the way she challenged or complemented other constitutional thinkers; the relations between her reflections on (most famously) the American constitution and her understanding of the meaning of politics, federalism and civil disobedience; her support for a council system; and other related topics in Arendt's political theory or in conversation with it.

Prof. Dr. Roger Berkowitz
Dr. Shmuel Lederman
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Laws is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Published Papers (2 papers)

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12 pages, 239 KiB  
Article
The Law as Fragment
by Kimberly Maslin
Laws 2024, 13(2), 12; https://doi.org/10.3390/laws13020012 - 29 Feb 2024
Viewed by 794
Abstract
When Hannah Arendt writes about the law, she does so as a political theorist, genocide survivor and critic of modernity. She also writes as a phenomenologist, which is to say, she is mindful not only that people create the law, but that law [...] Read more.
When Hannah Arendt writes about the law, she does so as a political theorist, genocide survivor and critic of modernity. She also writes as a phenomenologist, which is to say, she is mindful not only that people create the law, but that law constitutes a people. In Origins, she calls attention to the importance of the rule of law in the emergence of totalitarianism. In On Revolution, she seeks a way of grounding political authority in something other than an Absolute. In the process, Arendt looks to another group of intellectuals who grappled with the nature of authority under conditions of modernity—the Early German Romantics. Romantic fragments are philosophical, poetic, even musical. For Arendt, the most highly valued fragments are historical because these fragments provide not only protection against totalitarianism but also a possible solution to the problem of authority. In this article, I explore Arendt’s interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as a historical fragment. She draws on a phenomenological approach to fragments, found primarily in the work of Rahel Varnhagen and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, to create a resilient yet malleable basis for authority, thereby grounding political authority in concrete historical events, rather than in human nature. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hannah Arendt's Constitutionalism)

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25 pages, 341 KiB  
Essay
Privacy, Property, and Third-Party Esteem in Arendt’s Constitutionalism
by Emmett McGroarty and Brendan McGroarty
Laws 2023, 12(5), 75; https://doi.org/10.3390/laws12050075 - 23 Aug 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1071
Abstract
In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt makes the case that a constitution must account for the need of the human person to participate in the building of society, both as a primordial and continual action of founding. This paper draws on Arendt’s insight [...] Read more.
In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt makes the case that a constitution must account for the need of the human person to participate in the building of society, both as a primordial and continual action of founding. This paper draws on Arendt’s insight on the relationship between privacy and the notion of property, both of which the constitution must protect, as it is dependent on those notions. Property in its fullest sense is the means by which a person interacts with others and establishes a society. Particularly important for this notion of engagement are the concepts of shame and the love of goodness. The actor emerges from the private sphere to interact with others on the strength of the secrecy and confidentiality of her intimate, private relationships. Property is therefore essential to human flourishing and happiness. Following this, the activity of constructing the public forum on the basis of the private is an important feature of Arendt’s constitutionalism. Human Action showers third-party esteem on the actor’s family and friends, binding them to the constitutional structure and strengthening familial relationships and social cohesion. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hannah Arendt's Constitutionalism)
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