¿Qué es la libertad?

by Hannah Arendt, Vicente Ordóñez Roig (Contributor), Ana Luisa Poljak Zorzut (Translator)

88 pages, Paperback

Published May 21, 2025

About the author

Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. She is best known for two works that had a major impact both within and outside the academic community. The first, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon. The second, The Human Condition, published in 1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the fundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work, action). In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a number of influential essays on topics such as the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging).

Reviews

[Leyre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me ha costado, pero lo he conseguido.
Arendt detalla en este ensayo las siguientes ideas:
- La tradición filosófica redujo la libertad a un asunto individual, como sinónimo de libre albedrío.
- La libertad solo se da cuando se ejerce en público, en comunidad.
- Es cuando querer y poder coinciden que se da la libertad.
- Al nacer, el hombre trae consigo la posibilidad de iniciar algo que no existía, y al actuar sobre esa posibilidad se manifiesta su libertad.

Todo esto me ha hecho preguntarme: ¿no hay libertad si esta solo se da en el ámbito privado?, ¿debe la libertad cambiar necesariamente la realidad?, ¿aunque empecemos algo que no existe, somos realmente libres si nacemos en unas circunstancias que no elegimos?

Lo que más ha resonado en mí es la idea de que la libertad solo es cuando querer y poder concurren.

[Eva Soler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quien espere un ensayo de filosofía política, se va a encontrar con un breve texto sobre cuál es el ámbito de estudio de la libertad, si más cercano al de la voluntad o al del cristiano libre albedrío.