Political Theory – What is it good for?! – Hannah Arendt’s and John Dewey’s proposals for harmonizing political theory and political practice in their Reconstruction of Political Theory

In my paper, I elaborate a comparison of the political theories of Hannah Arendt and John Dewey, thereby contributing to today’s debate within theory of democracy, deducing the contents of an integrated action theory of the political, certainly being implied within Arendt’s and Dewey’s theories of democracy, but not explicitly articulated by the two authors. This investigation is a hypothetical dialogue between Arendt and Dewey about their political theories, investigating critically and reconstructing by means of a comparative perspective the commonalities and differences of their perspectives. In order to do this, I conceive of Arendt’s and Dewey’s political thinking broadly, envisioned as an ever-ongoing active process and life-practice, utilizing their published works as well as unpublished source material of the Hannah Arendt Papers and John Dewey Papers for my argument. I have evaluated this material in person in the USA. What we get from this is a better understanding of how to do political theory in a way that can meaningfully inform and guide political practice and action, reflecting critically on the problems and on the prospects of re-uniting political theory with political practice in an inclusive and democratic way. This way, my research is not only of theoretical scholarly interest, but it also emphasizes that Arendt’s and Dewey’s approaches to doing political theory are still highly practically relevant, and especially today, for giving productive answers in face of the numerous challenges to democracy in our time. As added value for research, I will be determining how Arendt and Dewey aimed at a Reconstruction of Political Theory along four theoretical dimensions. This way, they intended to re-align political theory and political practice, giving an exemplary model of doing public political philosophy. Axiology, epistemology, methodology, and ontology are foundational aspects of any political theory. These also can be deduced from my deep analytical engagement in comparing the political theories by Hannah Arendt and John Dewey. In addition, their theories are 1) analytical-descriptive, 2) normative-prescriptive, 3) (self-)critical, and 4) (re-) constructive and interventionist. Apparently, the political, for Arendt and Dewey, constitutes itself within symbolic interaction and by its means, which establishes the shared tenets of meaning and our intersubjective references to the world. Always, the political is being constituted in language and in action (whereby speech is a special case of action) and moderated by these means, which also means that it does not merely share the qualities of any other random physical object. Instead, the political appears to us – and, as well, it is actively constituted by ourselves – in action, and, more precisely, within symbolic interaction. It is in this "in-between", or, as Dewey would have put it, within associations and interactions, that the political emerges. In this context, both Arendt and Dewey take their starting points from the primacy of action and of worldly appearance. The political, therefore, for both Arendt and Dewey, is the agonal visualization and making visible of individual distinction in the public space.