5 - Morals and politics in a post-totalitarian age
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2009
Summary
Just as The Origins of Totalitarianism was to have been followed by a companion work investigating the seeds of Marxist totalitarianism, so The Human Condition was to have had a sequel, the Introduction into Politics, which was to have been a systematic attempt to deal anew with many of the traditional themes of political thought. Like the Marx book, this remained unwritten but helped to feed the works that Arendt did publish. Of these completed works, many were essays, some of them collected in Between Past and Future and Men in Dark Times. Some of them were prompted by specific events, like Arendt's book on the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, or like the reflections on American politics in the era of the Vietnam War that appeared under the heading Crises of the Republic. The most substantial, On Revolution, published in 1963, was something of a hybrid. Prompted partly by specific events, it was in no sense limited to these events, but bound together with the thread of revolution many strands of reflection that had their origins in the experience of totalitarianism, and that informed Arendt's uncompleted project for the renewal of political thought.
How best to explicate the dense web of thinking represented by these books and essays presents a problem for the commentator. In particular, should On Revolution be given the same sort of detailed exposition accorded in earlier chapters of the present study to Totalitarianism and The Human Condition? The intellectual weight of this least-understood and least-valued of Arendt's books would certainly merit such treatment.
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- Hannah ArendtA Reinterpretation of her Political Thought, pp. 155 - 200Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992