Poder, autoridade e constituição : fundação e conservação do corpo político no pensamento de Hannah Arendt

Abstract

The present study analyzes the differentiation and the interdependence between power and authority according to Hannah Arendt's thought, aiming at showing how such fundamental political concepts represent not only a mere antagonism between dimensions separated into isolated compartments, but also an inseparable differential link, as they are differed from one another as long as they are kept related. If, on one hand, power is related to the agonistic, performative and pre-institutional character of the action and its endless capability to establish relations between men, giving birth to new processes over the preexisting human relations, on the other hand, authority expresses men's capability to found and preserve an ordinary world which, without any need of coercion or persuasion, keeps the continuity of their foundations and institutions, expressing a relative permanence and recognition before the ever-changing, fragile and inconstant human affairs. Therefore, even if power and authority express seemingly paradoxical aspects, Arendt recognizes that the coexistence between such notions is that enables existence of the public space itself, as it is in the game, which is tense many times, between the organized forms and the organizing force that the political sphere takes place. However, according to the arendtian diagnosis, with the advent of the secularism, authority, taken in its Roman expression and understood in light of the political philosophy built upon the Greek tradition and its Christian appropriation, would no longer have phenomenic reality. Authority, as it was understood until then, would have gotten lost along with the belief in a transcendent world, could not be recovered or restored. This, however, does not mean that the modern age has obliterated any possibility of providing stability for a granted legal organization or the continuity for the institutions of a political body. Thinking over the modern revolutions, Arendt not only exalted the way such events granted full visibility to power and liberty, but also the way a new stabilizing factor derived from them, which is able to guarantee, without the transcendence resource, the endurance of the political body. The author saw in the American Foundation not only the possibility of the political action, but also the moment in which the Constitution was given birth, which, in turn, took from this primitive occurrence the consent that will support the future continuity of the institutions and laws. However, the Constitution, as a modern expression of the authority, cannot annul the capability that institutes the power before the free and active citizens' collective actions, who are apt to instigate a radical discontinuity with the institutions and the current laws. Thus, the public space stability must be able to hold the participative and deliberative dissent, as Arendt attempts to think of the preservation of a political body that does not subdue the spaces for resistance, expression, discussion and collective action, such as in civil demonstrations, so that authority would only have a reason to exist in its coexistence with power, trying its own juridical-institutional order legitimacy and establishing the tension between the political representation and the political participation, like in the council government systems.