A vida em comum: contrato social e sensus communis, a partir de Hannah Arendt

Abstract

This present dissertation addresses the issue concerning the employment of the social contract as metaphor to the constitution of political bodies, through a critical reading of contractarianist theories and out of Hannah Arendt’s thinking. It starts with a summary description of Modernity and Modern Science, according to Arendt’s understanding, as well as an analysis of the legal institute of the “contract”, out of law theory, positive legislation and of legal doctrine. The contractual formulations of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Jonh Locke (1632-1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) are presented in its more relevant aspects, in order to emphasize the inherent difficulties in such formulations, with regard to the obligation to comply with the original contract and, thus, with the employment of the contract as the grounding of the authority of the political body. The question concerning chance, contingency and necessity in the reading of the past is briefly discussed (in order to highlight and reflect on the difficulties that arise to the “retrospective sight”), as well as the private and public-politic spheres, according to Arendt’s understanding, from Greek antiquity, but also Roman. It is stressed then that, in Modernity, the contract is moved from the private sphere to the public sphere, thereby giving rise to the social sphere, which, according to Arendt, on the one hand, highlights the break between the active life (locus of human affairs) and contemplative life (locus of philosophical thinking), in the context of the Tradition of Western Thought, and on the other, it implies the emptying of politics, then reduced to a mere function of the social. The break in the tradition, understood as the “legacy of the past”, and, with it, the loss of references on which people rely in their judgments and actions, is also stressed. The Society (Civil), equivalent to the social sphere, is distinguished from the Political Body, which corresponds to the public-political sphere, thereby highlighting the two orders of interactions that people maintain with each other, in the course of their existence: affective as well as economic and social bonds, on the one hand; free relationships (without ties) with peers (equals) in the public sphere, therefore, political by definition, on the other. The Kantian aesthetic judgment is then examined, relating it to Arendt's conception of politics, in order to clarify that the judgment prescinds from traditional or ideological references, when mobilized by the Kantian maxims of thinking for oneself, of thinking extended and without contradiction with itself. Finally, the reasons why the Sensus communis is prescribed, and not the social contract, as the foundation of Politics and political bodies.