Abstract

We can pinpoint almost to the day the moment at which Hannah Arendt became a political theorist, and we can name with precision the experiences that made her one. Born in 1906, she had led a substantially apolitical life until Hitler gained power and she fled Germany in 1933. In Paris, she became an activist, busy in Jewish refugee affairs but with little time for abstract reflection. The end of the war and her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism marked a new but still only transitional phase in her life. The work is best understood as a piece of…