Abstract

The article seeks on the one hand, to trace the relationship between will and freedom in Arendt’s work, particularly in three texts: ‘What Is Freedom?’ (1954), ‘Freedom and Politics, a Lecture’ (1958) and The Life of the Mind (1975). This relationship—and in particular Arendt’s treatment of the will—is a rather unexplored theme in the hermeneutics of her work. It will be argued that although there is an important change in her way of thinking about the will between the lectures on freedom and the last work, written more than fifteen years later—a change that has an impact on how freedom appears in these texts—and although she affirms a link between freedom and the body, Arendt maintains her misgivings about the body. Secondly, the article seeks to unpack how she treats the early-moderns at this junction, and particularly Spinoza. Or rather, how Spinoza is downplayed in his possible importance, even as the Dutchman would reinforce Arendt’s critique of the identification between freedom and self-sovereignty in modernity and its depoliticising effect.