Justice as World-Making: Creative Citizenship in H. Arendt

Abstract

This essay proposes a novel interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s political theory as a crucial contribution to a post-metaphysical, creative conception of justice and citizenship. It argues that Arendt’s phenomenology of plurality, amor mundi, and critical thinking can be read under the prism of world-making. Against both ideal abstraction and empirical cynicism, the essay reconstructs the modern ideal of deliberative participatory democracy as a dynamic equilibrium between ontological shared power of beginning (i.e., freedom), interhuman trust, and communicative openness. It further situates this Arendtian model within the republican and cosmopolitan traditions, drawing on Kant’s Perpetual Peaceand contemporary political theories that defend fostering democratic innovation and democratic cosmopolitanism under conditions of global interdependence, authoritarian populism, digital fragmentation, and ecological crisis. The essay concludes that the “cosmopolitan constitution” envisioned by Kant and renewed by Arendt remains humanity’s most demanding and hopeful vocation: the continuous creation of a habitable world for freedom