History and survival in Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, progress became a genuinely historical concept, and thus emerged the awareness that history consisted of a process that depended exclusively on the actions of the human race and whose end implied its unlimited perfection. In this constellation, the reflections of Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt warned about the political dangers to which the adherence to the idea of progress, as well as that specific way of understanding history, led. This paper develops these reflections and at the same time proposes to show the political solutions of both thinkers in the face of this danger. The central thesis is that both Benjamin and Arendt elaborate a particular way of understanding history and its transmissibility, under the sign of a survival or Nachleben