Page - 75 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

76 | www.limina-graz.eu Isabella Guanzini | Ideas of Freedom “The new governmental reason needs freedom therefore, the new art of government consumes freedom. It consumes freedom, which means that it must produce it. It must produce it, it must organize it. The new art of government therefore appears as the management of freedom, not in the sense of the imperative: “be free,” with the immediate contradiction that this imperative may contain. The formula of liberalism is not “be free.” Liberalism formulates simply the following: I am going to produce what you need to be free. I am going to see to it that you are free to be free” (Foucault 2008, 63). Hence liberty is not a given nor a disposition, but rather something that is organized and fabricated in every instant. The dispositifs of the new gov- ernmental reason have brought about an unprecedented anthropological transformation alimented by an imaginary notion of liberty, which is em- phatically produced but, at the same time, cynically consumed. Exit from Slavery – Vita Activa The last move of this attempt to analyse the distinction between ancient and modern liberty (as well as the latter’s deviations) will rely on the re- flections of an important political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, whose work represents an ideal synthesis and contemporary re-elaboration of the debate initiated by Constant’s speech. In the dramatic age of the cri- sis of politics, which due to her Jewish origins she spent in exile in New York, Arendt turns precisely to the ancient Greek polis as the source of in- spiration for grounding a new mode of being in the world. Her enterprise does not represent a pure archaeological rehabilitation of the experience of the ancient politeia, but rather a rigorous reflection on the meaning of life in common and the possibility of an authentic experience of freedom. Her “untimely Greekness” provides critical categories for an analysis of the present aimed at denouncing the modern expropriation of the rights of citizenship and the disappearance of direct democracy, i.  e. of politics in the proper sense of the word. It is in her book The Human Condition (Arendt 1998) where, in continuity with her reflection on the causes and the ascendency of the totalitarian re- gimes, Arendt engages the deep transformation of public life in the West- “Untimely Greekness”: Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the present