Allegories of America, Narratives; Metaphysics; Politics, Narratives; Metaphysics; Politics

Author

Dolan; Frederick M.

Year

1994

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Language

English

Pages

ISBN

978-1-50172-624-8

Link

Last Update

26-Mar-2026

Keywords

Political Science ; History

Description

In Hannah Arendt’s reading of the founding of the American Republic, the Declaration of Independence is a model of how to resolve what she calls the “spiritual perplexities” that accompany the Enlightenment’s sense of freedom from the authority of ancient traditions. According to her interpretation, the American revolutionaries faced, with inherited habits of thought, an entirely unprecedented concatenation of events beyond the capacity of that thought to address. The problem bequeathed by their sense of freedom from tradition was that such freedom brought with it the dissolution of the “absolutes” upon which political authority traditionally rested, thus raising the question...