ABSTRACT
Arendt’s political theory, with its strict divide between the public/political sphere and the private/social sphere, famously bans pity and compassion as well as goodness and love from the public/political sphere (Kateb 1984; Birmingham 1995). Arendt argues that compassion is politically corrosive because, straying outside its legitimate private and social domain, compassion champions the incursion of social and moral concerns into the political sphere, where, according to Arendt, they are strictly off limits. This position is highly controversial and heated debates about it are ongoing. While one should acknowledge that Arendt’s position can be defended, particularly from a Kantian perspective, my argument in this chapter claims that any such defence remains deeply unsatisfactory so long as the problem of invisibility, exposed by Arendt’s position, is ignored or inadequately addressed.
