Sitting on a bench in Central Park, Hannah Arendt wrote with feverish hands and eyes that seemed to see beyond the buzz of the city, as if politics were not a set of abstract rules but a collective breath born of action, of shared gesture, of plurality becoming freedom; and at the same time, thousands of miles away and decades later, Amartya Sen, with the calm of a teapot gurgling on a Cambridge table, noted that economics could not be reduced to numbers and graphs, but must be understood as a capacity, as a concrete possibility of living a life worth living, and that justice was not an abstract concept but a daily practice, a measuring of life by the choices it allows.

The twentieth century, with its ruins and its promises, had confronted them with a world oscillating between totalitarianism and inflated markets, between the fear of the Leviathan and the intoxication of profit, yet both, albeit with different styles, had insisted on a common point: freedom is never a luxury, but a foundation, and is expressed not only in votes or GDP, but in the ability to act together, to build public spaces and private opportunities that restore dignity to existence.

Arendt, with her cutting voice and her experience as an exile marked by the darkness of totalitarianism, understood that politics could not be reduced to bureaucracy or the calculation of power, but had to be understood as action, as the continuous birth of something new in the shared space of the public square, where plurality is not an obstacle but the very condition of freedom. Sen, raised among the temples and poverty of India, had instead seen that the economy could not simply measure growth, but had to question people's real capabilities, their ability to choose, to study, to care for oneself, to live with dignity, and that development was not an accumulation of wealth but an expansion of freedom.

Two images, then: the square and the market, which are not opposed but intertwined, because freedom is not just a voice raised in public space, but also a concrete possibility of living a dignified life; and if the square without a market risks being an empty cry, the market without the square becomes a blind mechanism that devours lives without restoring meaning.

Today, at a time when the public square seems to dissolve into digital flows and the market expands to encompass our very attention, the dialogue between Arendt and Sen becomes more urgent than ever: it reminds us that politics is not bureaucracy and the economy is not profit, but both are invisible structures that support collective life, and that without action and without ability, freedom is reduced to an empty word, a slogan that no longer illuminates any path.

The climate crisis, global inequalities, technology that is reshaping relationships and markets that are colonizing every space of life present us with a radical challenge: to rethink freedom not as a privilege of the few, but as a condition for all, and to recognize that it always arises from a combination of action and ability, of the public square and the market, of voice and choice.

Thus, if Arendt invites us not to forget that politics is acting together and that freedom is plurality, and if Sen reminds us that the economy must measure itself against real life and that development is freedom, then our task is to build cities that are simultaneously squares and markets, public spaces and private opportunities, places where freedom is not an abstract concept but a daily experience, and where dignity is not a luxury but a right.

Ultimately, their legacy tells us that freedom is never a gift bestowed from above, but a continuous effort, a fragile yet powerful interweaving that renews itself every day. If we want it to survive the crises of the present, we must learn to experience it not just as a word, but as action and ability, as a marketplace and a marketplace, as a collective breath and an individual opportunity.

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

• Origins: Born on October 14, 1906 in Linden, a suburb of Hanover, into a bourgeois Jewish family.

• Education: He studied philosophy with masters such as Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Karl Jaspers.

• Exile: Forced to leave Nazi Germany in 1933, she lived in France and then in the United States, where she obtained citizenship.

• Main works:

  • The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) , a pioneering analysis of totalitarian regimes.

  • Vita activa. The human condition (1958) , a reflection on action and plurality.

  • The Banality of Evil. Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) , a report on the Eichmann trial which sparked much debate.

• Academic career: He taught at prestigious American universities, including Berkeley, Princeton, Chicago and the New School for Social Research.

• Death: He died in New York on December 4, 1975, at the age of 69.

Arendt remains one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century, remembered for her ability to link personal biography and philosophical reflection.

Amartya Sen (1933)

• Origins: Born on November 3, 1933, in Santiniketan, West Bengal, India, on a university campus founded by Rabindranath Tagore.

• Education: He studied at Presidency College, Calcutta, and obtained a PhD in economics from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1959.

• Academic career:

  • Professor in India (Calcutta, Delhi).

  • Lecturer at the London School of Economics (1971–1977).

  • Professor at Oxford (1977–1988).

  • Since 1988 Lamont University Professor at Harvard.

• Theoretical contributions:

  • He revolutionized welfare economics and the theory of justice.

  • He developed the capabilities approach , according to which development is measured not only in terms of economic growth, but in the real possibility of people to live a dignified life.

• Awards: Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998, for his studies on poverty, famine and human development.

• Personal life: He married three times and had four children.

Sen is today considered one of the most influential thinkers in the fields of economics and social philosophy, with a direct impact on development policies and the fight against inequality.

Time and History
Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism

In "The Origins of Totalitarianism," published in 1951, German philosopher Hannah Arendt explores the origins and development of totalitarian regimes in Hitler's Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Totalitarianism is a new concept, the only one born in 1900, which defines a form of absolute domination unprecedented in history. It is a system of power completely different from the authoritarian regimes known as despotism, tyranny, and dictatorship. The essence of totalitarianism, for Hannah Arendt, lies in the terror perpetrated in the concentration camps and is rooted in anti-Semitism, imperialism, and racism. With this book, the German thinker, a witness to the tragedy of her time, attempts to explain the evil that marked the 20th century and to highlight the aberrant originality of the totalitarian phenomenon.

Arendt and Sen embody two complementary perspectives: the former showed how freedom arises from political action and plurality, the latter demonstrated that it is rooted in the concrete capacities to live with dignity.