Hannah Arendt e Isaiah Berlin: duas concepções da liberdade.

Abstract

This work intends to establish a comparison between the concepts of freedom/liberty of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin. Arendt offers a defense of political freedom, opposed to liberal theories, classical or modern. For her, freedom is the human capacity to initiate processes and to act in the public sphere with other individuals. Isaiah Berlin, in turn, believes that negative liberty, which is the non-interference in individual lives by third parties in order to be able to choose between alternatives, is essential to politics. Berlin presents the problem through a dichotomy – positive liberty or negative liberty – while Arendt's position can be interpreted as an alternative to Berlin’s posture. Still, the central concern of the two thinkers, namely, to offer a philosophical and political reflection that provides intellectual resources to take citizens away from the serfdom of despotic and totalitarian regimes remains the same.