A incongruência das categorias sociais em Hannah Arendt: pobreza e ralé como determinaões de vidas supérfluas

Abstract

This study examines the status of social categories — specifically poverty and the "mob" — within Hannah Arendt’s political thought and their implications for the atrophy of the modern public sphere. The problem lies in the inherent confusion between the private and public spheres caused by the rise of the social which, driven by the urgency of necessity, has converted politics into the administrative management of survival. We sustain that Arendt’s phenomenological rigor, while attempting to safeguard the autonomy of the political, creates an aporia by neglecting the power structures of capital, resulting in the fabrication of human "superfluity." This research is justified by the need to re-evaluate the boundaries between oikos and action, aiming for a diagnosis of the failure of the political that does not sacrifice the demands for social justice. The architecture of this thesis unfolds through four fundamental axes. In the first chapter, we recover the phenomenological sense of politics as a space of appearance and plurality, analyzing how the social sphere and mass society promoted the shrinking of the public sphere; in this scenario, we examine the mediating function of education, understanding it as the essential process that allows the individual to transition from the private realm to responsibility for the common world. Moving forward, in the second chapter, we deepen the distinction between the public and private spheres to investigate how the triumph of the animal laborans transmuted poverty into a cog of consumption and the "mob" into a social residue, culminating in the phenomenon of human superfluity. In the third chapter, we establish an analytical cleavage between the concepts of the social sphere and the "social question," taking modern revolutions and the 1956 Hungarian uprising as evidence that material stability and instruction operate as indispensable pre-political conditions for the eruption of freedom. Finally, in the fourth chapter, we deal with the zone of tension between Marx’s political economy and Arendt’s theory of action, contrasting the anatomy of capitalist exploitation with the dignity of political acting. We conclude by introducing a critique of the absence of a theory of justice within Arendt’s theoretical body, questioning the viability of a freedom that ignores the material roots and the urgencies of human existence.