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Give and takeArendt and the nomos of political communityFaculty of Philosophy, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands Appealing to the original meaning of the Greek term nomos, Hannah Arendt claims that a bounded legal space is constitutive for political community. Can this seemingly anachronistic claim be substantiated in the conceptually strong sense that every polity - the Greek city-state as much as a hypothetical world state - must constitute itself as a nomos? It is argued that whereas Arendt falls short of justifying this claim, a reflexive reading of nomos can do the trick: the space of political community is necessarily bounded because no polity is imaginable that does not raise a claim to an inside as the community’s own space. A world state, were it ever to be founded, would globalize nomos, not suppress it. Whence the political problem: how does a polity deal with its outside? This problem is particularly pressing because Carl Schmitt’s defense of nomos radically challenges Arendt’s position. A reinterpretation of her analyses of the foundation of a political community suggests how the representational structure of a politics of boundaries parries Schmitt’s challenge.
Key Words: citizen/foreigner • inside/outside • nomos • own/strange • reflexivity • representation • space
Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 32, No. 7,
881-901 (2006) |
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