Filozofija i filozofija politike
PHILOSOPHY AND PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS

Summary/Abstract: Philosophy of politics is currently going through an extremely grave crisis. The crisis of the political is apparent everywhere. Political interpretation in the conditions of the contemporary age is seriously shaken. This in turn brings into question the segment of society which is an essential part of the cultural identity of the West. One might say that, throughout the 20th century, no one inquired into the position of politics as thoroughly as Hannah Arendt. Her major contribution had to do with understanding the relation between philosophy and the application of its principles in politics, and her basic estimation was that the application of principles of philosophical thought on politics had devastating consequences. Although philosophy as metaphysics, since Plato and Hegel, contributed greatly to consideration of the political, Hannah Arendt was nonetheless of the opinion that the original sense of the political was lost in such philosophy and that the application of principles of philosophical thought on politics caused the political to be forgotten. The text provides a brief outline of Plato’s perception of the relation between philosophy and politics, postulating the philosophical ideal that the veritable political community (polis) must be measured according to philosophical thought, and on the basis of principles of constitution of thought itself. On the other hand, Aristotle calls upon the ethos of the existing polis, but he always analyses the political under the primacy of philosophical principles. Arendt thus deems that Aristotle also considers the relevant knowledge of the political to be philosophical. She points out that political philosophy always discriminated against opinion and variety, and consequently also against the political as such. Aristotle and Kant are partly excluded from this judgment. Since the political categories created in the philosophy of politics determine our understanding of politics to this day, Arendt subjects them to criticism. Her different understanding of the political is manifest in her analyses of the fundamental political categories (government, power, force, authority, freedom), which can be adequately grasped only on the basis of relations between people, and not of some substantial and unquestionable domain.

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