Freedom, Natality, and the Loss of the World in Hannah Arendt’s America
The United States of America is not merely a sovereign state, but a political and affective project bound to a specific promise of freedom, action, and the immutable experience of wonder. In the final lines of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald glimpses precisely this promise: that ‘for a transitory, enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent … face to face, for the last time in history, with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder’ (Fitzgerald 112). That moment, mythic, fleeting, and wholly American, contains the essence of the republic’s founding, for beyond its flag, its laws, and its borders is an act of collective imagination, a world borne of speech, deliberation, and action in concert. In that luminous space of wonder lies what Hannah Arendt calls the ‘space of appearances,’ a faith that not only might man create beyond himself but that he might be granted the chance to appear among others in freedom, to begin something together that could not be begun alone (Between Past and Future 154).
It is poignant, then, that Fitzgerald professes the ‘discovery’ of America as the experience of wonder ‘for the last time in history’ because today, this dream stands in crisis (Fitzgerald 112). In this essay, I argue that the American Dream has lost its foundational character as a world-building act grounded in freedom and appearance. Instead, it has become a commodified spectacle. Drawing on Arendt’s concept of natality and the crisis of culture, I explore how this transformation has emptied the Dream of its affective force. If some idea of America is to be reclaimed, it lies first in reflection upon what kind of promise it once made, what kind of failure it has become, and whether something — some world, some space, some appearance — might still be reclaimed from the wreckage.
Arendt identifies three principles – religion, authority, and tradition – that are foundational to Western thought (Between Past and Future 124). These worked in tandem to confer legitimacy on successive political societies, from Rome to the Catholic Church. They served as justifications for power: religion grounded ‘the domination of human affairs by something outside its own realm,’ tradition mythologised continuity as sacred, and authority, in turn, enabled governance and power without the use of coercion (114). The trinity only functions in amalgamation, and ‘wherever one of the elements of the Roman trinity … was doubted or eliminated, the remaining two were no longer secure’ (128).
The American project, however, broke from all three. Unlike other modern revolutions, which ended ‘either in restoration or tyranny,’ the American founding succeeded without prior basis precisely because it made no recourse to inherited traditions or divine mandate (141). Instead, from the moment of its revolutionary conception, America was engaged in the act of collective world-building – the fragile creating a space where action, speech, and plurality could appear and endure. As read in the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’ (US 1776).
To declare such truths as ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’ as self-evident is already to make a powerful epistemological claim, but to declare that ‘[w]e hold’ them specifically to be self-evident is to ground their truth not in natural authority, but in the authority of the collective ‘We’ (US 1776). These rights are lasting not because they are inherited but solely because ‘We,’ the Founding Fathers, speak them into existence and declare them lasting truths.In other words, the American project has lasting authority because it was formulated in an act of collective deliberation. Because it is based solely on the authority of men acting together in concert, it can constantly be repeated because collective action is inherent to living and being on the earth and sharing in the collective faculties of life.
In this revolutionary, declarative gesture — uncertain, fragile, dazzling — Arendt clarifies her idea of natality: the miracle of beginning.
‘Man does not possess freedom so much as he, or better his coming into the world, is equated with the appearance of freedom in the universe; man is free because he is a beginning and was so created after the universe had already come into existence’ (Between Past and Future 167).
The act of birth continually reaffirms man’s freedom ‘[b]ecause [man] is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the same’ (167). As equated with collective action, freedom becomes itself a dream: a belief in new beginnings and a shared project of freedom grounded in mutual appearance, plurality, speech, and action. Therefore, Arendt argues that with this basis in natality, the American Dream becomes inseparable from action and freedom. In this way, she posits that freedom is not merely will but faith in America as a project believed into being (166).
To lose this faith in the freedom of man and ‘the human capacity which corresponds to this power’ is to lose the moral structure that once augmented judgement, action, and responsibility (168). If the American Revolution succeeded because of faith in collective action, then precisely for that reason, it must also necessitate conscious and effortful maintenance – continual renewal, continual action, and continual faith in plurality and appearance. If the American Dream collapses into myth or is replaced by apathy or technocracy, that whole miracle that Arendt found in the Gospels can and will vanish (168). Once that happens, the Dream ceases to ground itself in human natality and the particular form of collective freedom that accompanies it.
Instead, it stakes a false claim to a revolutionary tradition, creating an effective America far removed from that collective ‘space of appearances’ (154). In America today, I argue that those foundational ideals, that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ have become a cultural commodity rather than a point of unification (US 1776). Instead, political polarisation, the end of fact-based discourse, and the reduction of patriotism to sloganeering have replaced a common faith in the American Dream. What has vanished, then, is not merely belief but the public-facing conditions under which belief was once possible. In this respect, the idea of America is no longer ‘common,’ and its principles are not spoken to be believed but performed to be consumed.
Arendt calls this the demise of ‘judgement’ Invoking Kant, she argues that ‘the capacity to judge is … the ability to see things not only from one’s own point of view but in the perspective of all those who happen to be present; even that judgement may be one of the fundamental abilities of man as a public realm, in the common world’ (221). It is thus a public act, performed in the company of others, requiring not just opinion but appearance, not just ‘subjective private conditions,’ but a common world in which truths can be tested and seen (220). The Dream, in other words, only persists when it can be spoken into being, and to be spoken into being, a public space needs to exist where such deliberation can take place and a communal agreement on not only what is good and what is bad, but on whether the Dream is common to them, too.
That commonality and respect for judgment is quickly disappearing. For instance, ‘Make America Great Again’ is not a call to judgment but a retreat into nostalgia: it invokes a subjective positionality that negates the very premise of anticipated communication with others ‘with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement,’ by presupposing not deliberation, but a declinist, totalitarian subjectivity (220). Moreover, a fractured media landscape, political polarisation, and growing extremist voices on both sides of the political spectrum result in a pervasive ‘culture war’ in which agreement on what is and is not real, and at that, the capacity to deliberate, disappears. With that, judgement becomes impossible, and what Arendt feared most – replacing public life with ideology, of action with performance – has thus come to pass. When the public world disappears, so too does the ability to start anew. Without judgment, there is no space of appearances, and the Dream recedes into unreality, longed for, but no longer believed. Once fragile but powerful because it demanded faith, America as the affective experience that drove a revolutionary founding has now been a flattened cultural commodity.
Arendt calls this collapse the ‘loss of the world,’ the ‘restriction or elimination of the public sphere of action and speech in favor of the private world of introspection and the private pursuit of economic interests’ and ‘the rise of the social out of a previous distinction between the public and the private.’ (Tömmel & d’Entreves, emphasis mine). In the social, Arendt sees the dissolution of collective belonging, replaced by an age ‘where homogeneity and conformity have replaced plurality and freedom, and where isolation and loneliness have eroded human solidarity and all spontaneous forms of living together’ (Tömmel & d’Entreves). This fatigue with the very conception of a shared world marks the ultimate collapse of the American ideal. When there is no shared object, common truth, or place to appear left, the only dream remains: flight – not to act, but to leave.
Thus, America, in its exhaustion, prepares the ground for departure. In her chapter on ‘The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,’ Arendt writes that man’s desire to leave the Earth is not a triumph of spirit but a ‘rebellion against human existence’ — a symptom of the Dream’s terminal fatigue wherein ‘the Earth, the very quintessence of the human condition,’ becomes something to be escaped, rather than shared (Between Past and Future 261, The Human Condition 2). I speak to Arendt’s critiques here figuratively: rather than critiquing the literal act of space travel, I seek to understand the abandonment of the American Dream as a form of metaphysical departure – a drift away from the ground of plurality, of worldliness, of shared life. What began as a project of mutual foundation, declared in the words ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident,’ now appears in its most modern form as an exit strategy (US 1776).
If the Dream has drifted, our task is not to follow it into orbit but to call it home. What is required is not restoration but a second founding. To begin again is to reclaim the conditions of appearance by rebuilding the fragile space in which freedom becomes possible. It requires a new commitment to worldliness, shared space, acceptance of plurality, and the risk of speech. The American Dream must be understood as the problematic, often silent work of remaining here with others, even when belief falters.
Here, I must return to faith: the public, relational faith that makes freedom possible in the shared space of action and appearance. In the same way that Arendt identified faith as the engine that ‘remov[ed] mountains’ in the Gospels, the power to act into uncertainty is crucial to the survival of the American project (Between Past and Future 168). It persists even in acts of stubbornness, a continual reassertion of presence, appearance, and action in concert. To have faith is to appear when the world has collapsed and say, ‘Still, I am here,’ and to remain, in Arendt’s sense, is not to cling to a ruined past but to insist on the conditions under which beginning remains possible. It is to reclaim the Dream as an unfinished act of world-making, always fragile, contingent, and dependent on a willingness to appear.
In the end, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is not a tragic figure because he dreams, but because he dreams alone. What he longs for is a world in which that longing might be shared, made real in the eyes of another.
‘Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms farther, and one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’ (Fitzgerald 112).
That, too, is what America once was: not a perfect union, but a promise that power might still arise where people gather in good faith. In this way, the Dream is not dead. To recover it is not to recover purity or perfection, but possibility. Face to face with wonder, Arendt looks upon the monumental tragedy of the American Dream and yet can locate, even stubbornly, some space for hope, a continual capacity not to escape but to begin again. Not to return to the Dream as it was, but to remake it, together and in public, to act as if it were still possible to believe in freedom, that space of appearances, that wild, brilliant air.
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Penguin Books, 2006.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64317/pg64317-images.html, Accessed 8 Apr. 2025.
Tömmel, Tatjana, and Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves. “Hannah Arendt.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 12 Feb. 2024, plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/.
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