Abstract

This dissertation explores the educational significance of Hannah Arendt's rethinking of the relationship between politics and morality. We tend to assume that teaching individuals to be more moral will make the world a better place. Arendt contends that the opposite is true. It is in the process of world building, i.e. engaging with others "for the sake of the shared world" that we learn what it means to live ethically amidst others. In other words, politics is not peripheral to ethics; it is central to our efforts to learn to live together in the condition of human plurality. The trouble is that many of the central precepts of the moral domain are at odds with the morally unsettling demands of political life. This dissertation suggests that coming to grips with the disjunction between the demands of political life and the governing precepts of the moral domain is essential to understanding the role of education in the wake of the moral collapse of this century. The ethic that emerges in the course of our political engagements with one another is disconcerting, not least because it takes its bearings from the very perplexities of political action from which the traditions of moral and political philosophy have traditionally sought to protect us. This dissertation suggests a need for educators to better understand the perplexities of political action if we are to prepare students for the challenges of building and sustaining a genuinely shared world, and of learning what living together in the twin conditions of equality and plurality demands of us. ;I examine four dimensions of Arendt's political ethic: her critique of the political shortcomings of conscience; her attempt to derive a political ethic from the conditions of political action rather than from the potentially anti-political preoccupations of morality; her inquiry into the nature of political subjectivity; and her insights into education in light of the disjunction between moral preoccupations and the morally unsettling demands of political action. Arendt makes the case for an ethic that can withstand "the perplexities of action" and her writings call for an approach to education that prepares students for these perplexities within the context of the necessary protectiveness of the educational realm