Daniele Bassi – “L’altra tradizione. Violenza e potere in Andrea Caffi e Hannah Arendt” (2023)
Edizioni ETS – Collana POLIS
“A concept of power and law […] that does not identify power with domination nor law with command.” This is how Hannah Arendt described, in 1969, the essence of “another tradition,” a minority and alternative to the “great tradition of Western political thought.” In light of this notion, whose genealogy is thoroughly reconstructed, this essay offers an original comparison between Arendt herself and Andrea Caffi. The reading of Caffi’s works, a socialist-libertarian and multifaceted, eccentric author, benefits from an unprecedented hermeneutic approach, which fully highlights his difficult theoretical-political positioning. This interpretative endeavor is far from one-directional: on the one hand, it partially rescues Caffi from the oblivion to which he seems to have been condemned, while on the other hand, it problematizes Arendt’s work, freeing it from the more canonizing and neutralizing interpretations of her thought, and projecting her legacy into areas so far unfamiliar to the field of Arendtian studies.