"Public Space and Political Experience is a powerful, erudite, and compelling argument for returning to Hannah Arendt today. Antonini reads Arendt as a great thinker of the singular experience of politics as freedom. Recognizing that the greatest danger to the world is not politics but the loss of faith in politics, the belief that politics always brings with it disaster and that an ideal world would be one without politics, Arendt stubbornly held to the promise of politics. Antonini beautifully captures Arendt’s enduring belief that it is only in the practice of politics, in the exchange of opinions on objects of common concern, that citizens can grasp the world as something that is objective and shared. The reduction of politics to a mere instrument or means to an end has led to a loss of the common world and only accelerated our contempt for politics. The remarkable achievement of this book is to show not only how we arrived at this point of total despair but also how we might move beyond it."
— Linda Zerilli, University of Chicago
"Aristotle understood that politics was a matter of learning how to live together well, but modern life, shaped by the liberal democratic worldview and neoliberal dogma, has seen the privatization of meaning. Theorists, like Arendt, who worked to restore the value of political life have been dismissed as nostalgic. Now Antonini offers a bold reading of Arendt as the thinker of our political future. He shows her historical phenomenologies of Greek, American, and French democracy as revealing the essential structures of a vibrant political sphere, pointing the way to a reinvigorated political life. Meaningful political experience is not only still possible--it's necessary."
— Anne O'Byrne, Stony Brook University
“Antonini’s work is a call to rethink politics—or more specifically, political experience—from an Arendtian lens. By weaving together central Arendtian concepts such as freedom, plurality, and action, Antonini addresses the loss of the common world and points to the possibility of recovering it. Indeed, Antonini offers an alternative that goes beyond partisan politics by further reconstructing Arendt's concepts of power and speech in their performative significance.”
— Yasemin Sari, University of Northern Iowa
"A remarkably clear and compelling account of key concepts in the thought of Hannah Arendt. Antonini shows how Arendt's distinctive understanding of political experience is central to her thought and an antidote to the ills of our own time."
— John McGowan, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill