Abstract
The interest in Hanna Arendt's work has recently been extended to social science; however, it is claimed that Arendt's concept of politics is irrelevant for modern real politics and society because of her rigid and apparently old-fashioned distinction between public and private. In this paper, against these arguments, we reconsider her definition of public through intensive reading of her text in order to prove its original possibilities in sociology.
According to Arendt, the distinction between public and private is correspondent to the boundary of language/out-of-language rather than segmentation referred to as ordinal politics. Therefore, the public sphere is defined as a realm of language that consists of action and speech(= discourse) between individuals in plural. She rejected the concept of the politics that based on rational truth whose irresistible force destroys human freedom and considered only factual truth to be appropriate as the foundation of the politics. For Arendtian thought, factual truth is a key concept for its ambiguity; while out-of-language, factual truth is of the essence for politics, which consists of only language.
Hence, from the viewpoint of factual truth, Arendt not only divided language and out-of-language but also articulated these two realms. As a result, her distinction between public/private shows significant similarities with the boundary of system/environment(System/Umwelt) in theoretical sociology, especially the social system theory. The foundation of politics is parallel to the autopoietic system, and thus, we find Arendt's political thoughts in the resonance of the social system theory, which radically reconsiders the boundary of system/environment.
