Hannah Arendt and Politics

Offers a new perspective on Arendt as a political thinker as well as a political actorProvides succinct, critical summaries of Arendt's major works and how they have been readShares insights into the main controversies of Arendt's lifetime and their resolutionPresents an overview of interpretive approaches to Arendt's work and its relevance todayHannah Arendt has been classified as a critical theorist, a phenomenologist, an anti-feminist, a feminist ally, a democratic theorist, a republican theorist, a Heidegerrian, and a nostalgic Hellenophile. This book responds to these perspectives in two ways. First, we recognize that one can legitimately derive all these positionings from one or another of her writings; second, we insist nevertheless and precisely because all these approaches play some role in her work that her readers ought to follow her own claim that she 'does not belong to any club'. Instead, we introduce her works as exercises in political thinking, treating her as a dialogue partner, whose judgments and opinions remain open for reflection and discussion.