Natalia Belyaeva 

The origins of Hannah Arendt’s sensus communis as «community sense»

It is a commonplace in modern Arendtian scholarship to address her theory of judgement to either Aristotle’s «phronesis» or Kant’s aesthetic «sensus communis». This paper sets out to unfold the transformations of the notion sensus communis in its relation to Hannah Arendt’s concept of «community sense». In order to elucidate different levels of this concept I will explore three main tendencies in its history and deepen my interest in Cicero’s concept of decorum, which was undeservedly omitted by previous scholarship. This work does not, therefore, offer a traditional historical approach to Arendt’s theory of judgement, but rather offers a new account of the understanding of «the political sense par exellence». It claims that reading Arendt hermeneutically we may trace her interest that was not explicitly displayed in her work.