This study seeks to resolve the paradox of Hannah Arendt's ideas; that she intended her work to liberate and empower and to restore our capacity for concerted political action whilst at the same time developed a metaphor of "the social" as an alien, all consuming monster appearing from outer space to gobble up human freedom. Arendt blames it - not us - for our public paralysis and depoliticization. The text traces Arendt's notion of "the social" from her earliest writings to "The Human Condition" and beyond, interpreting each work in its historical and personal context. The answer considers language and rhetoric, psychology and gender, authority and the nature of political theory itself. There are repeated challenges on established interpretations of Arendt's project, including the role in it of her teacher and lover Martin Heidegger and her supposed neglect of economic concerns.
