Law and Stability in Hannah Arendt's Political Thoughts

This work is an investigation of Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on politics and law focusing on stability. In her thoughts, the stability of the world that makes human actions immortal plays an equally important role as change by beginning anew. In this research, we can see that it is a legal framework which mediates between change and stability in a body politic. The world is changed and stabilized by human actions. It has been recognized that promises ensure the stability of the world. Arendt, however, criticizes that human actions to keep promises are misunderstood in occidental tradition as obedience or conformity. The traditional view on stability has regarded changeless permanence as stability and dealt with people like an affair of things. Because of this perspective, politics has been identified as an order and punishment enforced by a ruler rather than a promise amongst people as a consequence of free judgment. As modern society has risen, human actions have disappeared in the realm of politics but the idea of legal certainty and conformity of social members has remained. Totalitarian terror was the ideology used to rule people in a realm where human politics was impossible. The institutional theory of law, which has tried to overcome such way of ruling, does not recognize changes of law made by citizens’ judgment. Arendt regards stability as immortality. Mortal men are able to achieve immortality by amalgamating the permanence of memories with the durability of things. The promise commencing body politics is scribed in laws. Citizens draw the founders’ spirit and authority from the legal framework, just as spectators can interpret the artists’ purpose and beauty from a work of art. The Arendt’s concept of law limits and, at the same time, inspires actions. Law forms a political realm by setting a primary standard to recognize crimes. Subsequently, citizens make sure law guarantees human plurality, a principle of equality and distinctiveness, by examining the validity of law with their own judgment. Therefore, only the citizens, who enjoy their political life in the body politics without any dissent, support the legal framework. In this point of view, punishment is bestowed a political meaning as a fear that inspires law-abiding actions outside the realm of law. The legal framework that ensures equality, distinctiveness, and fear becomes an order that secures the body politics and achieves authority. The political meaning of crimes, on the other hand, is not an action of breaking positive laws but one that goes against the principles of the body politics. Thus, civil disobedience and revolution is differentiated from sheer crimes because they are an action to change the rule of the game or even begin anew.