Beyond Hannah Arendt's Reconceptualisation of Power: Towards a Solution of the Normative-Descriptive Problem in Political Philosophy

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PhD thesis will examine Hannah Arendt's reconceptualisation of power. My specific focus will concern whether her understanding of power, as 'action in concert' between people in the public realm, can be understood normatively as a way of discussing how political power should operate, or descriptively as a discussion of the way political power actually operates. This will situate Arendt within a wider debate concerning the relationship between normative and descriptive political theory, locating her understanding of power within this field (Brennan and Hamlin 2007, Bernstein 2012, Pietrzyk-Reeves 2017). This will also enable me to highlight the 'dissatisfaction' in Arendt's work with regards to the separation of normative and descriptive approaches to political theory and how, as a result, the more descriptive elements of her work must be developed further (Shapiro 1981, Canovan 1999, 2008). To reinforce this approach, I will examine the philosophical history of power itself, turning to Arendt's influences, such as Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger, in order to provide a genealogical account of how Arendt arrives at her unique reconceptualisation of power. This will provide an original contribution to Arendtian scholarship insofar as a detailed account of how Arendt arrives at her understanding of power has not yet been given. Providing such an account will allow me to problematise Arendt's work, pointing to its moral limitations and attempting to go beyond them by putting her work into dialogue with contemporary debates within Arendtian scholarship. (Reed 2019, Menge 2019).