Arendt, Hannah. "Freedom and Politics: A Lecture". Chicago Review, Vol.14, No.1 (1960): 28-46.

Arendt, Hannah. "Freedom and Politics: A Lecture". Chicago Review, Vol.14, No.1 (1960): 28-46.

• Without freedom, political life is meaningless; freedom is a necessary precondition for politics and the field of experiencing freedom is through political action (28).
• Arendt draws a distinction between freedom, free will, and inner freedom. Inner freedom is a modern phenomenon which allows an individual to feel free even when constrained mentally and physically. Freedom refers to the external freedoms of physical or verbal action, while free will refers to an essential human faculty (28).
• Freedom is firstly defined negatively, by an absence of the restrictions which would prevent movement or action (29). However, freedom also has positive requirements, mainly in that to express freedom a person must have a similar community of people in the same state of freedom, from which they can form a political community (30).
• Although a political community requires freedom, not every gathering of men is necessarily characterized by freedom. In despotic societies or the privacy of a patriarchal household where a public space for action does not exist, men cannot express themselves politically making the society unfree. In these societies, life is not based on freedom, but on preservation and the necessities of life (30).
• The rise of totalitarian societies presents a serious challenge to this conception of the connection between freedom and politics, as they have claimed to extend the political sphere to all areas of human life, but at the same time deprived entire nations of basic freedoms. Furthermore, many liberal thinkers would argue that freedom is 'freedom from politics', making the concepts contradictory rather than complimentary (30).
• To understand why freedom is a necessary condition for politics, Arendt further elaborates on what 'freedom' is within her philosophical framework: it is not the freedom to make value judgement -- that is free will -- nor is it the freedom to command power -- because that is a matter of strength or weakness (32). Freedom is only the 'freedom to act', with that action being for self-satisfying because of its motivation by a higher principle -- such as love, glory, or hatred (33).
• Courage is one of the primary principles which motivates action, because so much courage is required to leave the private sphere and enter public life. This is because by design, the public sphere is meant to reflect collective concerns not attached to individuals, and thus disregards the principles of individual security on which the private sphere is based (35).
• Government is composed of actions and needs continuous action to sustain itself. As such, it is the equivalent of a performance, because both consist of self-satisfying actions which are continuously necessary to sustain the whole (34).
• The beginning of the modern political tradition of freedom which Arendt opposes begins with Christian conceptions of freedom as synonymous with free will and therefore private experiences in dialogue with one's self. This is a sharp contrast to the solely political concepts of freedom in Greek or Roman philosophy, and with Arendt's own beliefs (37).
• The concept of free will within the modern philosophical tradition actually entails two 'wills', which are in conflict with one another. For the essence of free will is being able to resist the temptations and desires of one's darker side. Therefore, free will is defined by the interplay between two different 'wills', and moreover by the limitation of freedoms and potentialities. Free will is exerted only in that it limits and controls freedom of action (39).
• The dominance of this conceptualization of free will and freedom has resulted in the present discourse in modern philosophical tradition where 'will' is equated with rulership and the ability to force others to act within that will, in other words by the domination of another's will over free will. Their concept of freedom is thus defined in terms of the lack of domination of free will by a foreign will, meaning that increased individualism is equivalent to additional freedom (41).
• Totalitarianism and the associated mass society are dangerous not only because they threaten to extinguish civil freedoms and subsume human individuality into a dehumanized collective, but because they demolish the public space needed for action and politics. They replace these processes with logic and predetermined policies, threatening to destroy the potential for human freedom and original action, but subordinating humanity to natural processes (45).
• Since action and politics are goals unto themselves, their destruction under totalitarianism through reduction to natural laws and automatic processes would be terrible. While not underemphasizing the previous point, getting rid of these properties would also rob man of one of the essential things which makes us human (46).