Abstract
AbstractHannah Arendt was a German‐Jewish scholar who, after emigrating to the United States during World War II, became one of the most influential and controversial political theorists of the twentieth century. Originally a student of philosophy and theology, Arendt's interest in politics was intensified by the rise of National Socialism, and she made her name with a study of totalitarianism, an unprecedented form of government whose appearance, she would later say, helped to reveal the limits of traditional political philosophy. The topics and genres of Arendt's writing ranged widely, from her dissertation on Augustine and erudite treatises likeThe Human Condition, to essays reflecting on current events such as the publication of the Pentagon Papers or the school desegregation struggle in the American South, to biographical profiles of public figures as different as Bertolt Brecht and Pope John. Across this diverse corpus, Arendt displayed an abiding interest in the prospects for public life in the modern world, as well as a distinctive way of bringing political theory to bear on contemporary problems. Eschewing the personae of expert advisor, utopian visionary, and philosopher‐queen, she was first and foremost an interpreter, diagnosing the ways in which inherited theoretical frameworks obscured the shape and the stakes of current political situations, and crafting new terms through which to parse those situations, often through the transformative (sometimes tendentious) reappropriation of earlier thinkers’ ideas. This approach frequently put Arendt at odds with more than one side of an existing debate, making her difficult to classify and exposing her to an unusual measure of misunderstanding even among her admirers.