Inarticulate Authenticity

Thirty-six years ago, Robert Bellah and others, in their seminal book “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life” identified a problem and prophesied its social consequences - that of political and social polarization. We live in those prophesied consequences today. The problem, as Bellah and his co-authors identified it, was the tendency … Continue reading Inarticulate Authenticity

Hannah Arendt: Politics – Authenticity, Mass Society and the Private Realm

Arendt invokes the realm of privacy, which is the realm of persons who are significant others to the individual.  These significant others are the context for the emergence of an individual. In other words, the realm of privacy includes our social sphere where each of those significant others has a reciprocal relationship with each other.  Not only do these significant others constitute our identity as individuals, but each individual also has some responsibility to act as a significant other to the other members.  I would call this “community”.