Society & Politics

Opinions now travel in a few seconds. Camps form before an argument has had time to appear. Each remains among those who already think as he does, and calls that a public life. One might believe that we have never been so political.

An honest question then remains: what remains of politics, when we no longer share a world?

Hannah Arendt called the common world that which lies between us — not what each feels in private, not what each possesses, but what appears for several, and can be spoken of because it is there for all. A world in common is not a consensus. It is the condition under which disagreement is still possible, because it bears on something that is the same for each. When that world withdraws, when there are only juxtapositions of solitudes, politics does not become more intense. It ceases.

One does not do politics by having an opinion. One does it by appearing before others, in a space that is not already decided, and by taking on the consequences of a common life. The retreat into the private, the contempt for politics as a dirty word, the reduction of the public to a spectacle one consumes: all these have the same result. The common world is not destroyed by tyranny alone. It is also destroyed by the habit of no longer inhabiting it.

Politics is then more modest than the art of winning. It is the work of keeping a common world inhabitable, and of living together as more than a juxtaposition of solitudes.