On the Greek state, the notion of "the dignity of work", and the relationship between political instinct

Abstract

This work aims at establishing a connection between some central points of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition and a youthful text by Friedrich Nietzsche entitled The Greek State. Although the choice of these pieces finds its reasons both in the differences between them and in their points of contact, we consider that the most natural articulation is to start by mentioning some of the latter: The emergence in the Modern Age of the idea of ??“dignity of work”, of what Arendt would call “the theoretical glorification of work”, is perhaps the first of these points of contact, and this provides us with a new branch from which to grasp to advance in establishing a deeper connection between the two works. The role of slavery in ancient Greece, the figures of the slave and the free man, the schism between the weighting of the artist's work and the contemplation of the work, and the relationship between state and art are the neuralgic points that, from a Or otherwise, both texts present as part of their argumentative skeleton and that invite comparative analysis.