La pluralità è irrappresentabile? Il potere democratico nella teoria politica di Hannah Arendt

Nowadays, representative democracy is deprived of its political strength: the critique of representation and the democratic model proposed by Hannah Arendt – especially in On revolution (1963) and in Civil Disobedience (1970) – can provide an interesting comparison in order to clarify the notion of “participatory democracy” on which, particularly in the last ten years, political theories have focused. This paper intends to return to a critical reading of Arendt’s political philosophy, in order to verify whether some of her interpretative hypotheses can help us imagine some ways out of the current crisis of democracy, increasingly divided among the power of the élites, financial power and technocracy. Can they be an effective alternative to face the growing indifference and the actual lack of trust in politics? The contribution here proposed, without claiming to be exhaustive, will attempt to problematise and discuss these unresolved questions.