Hannah Arendt did not like sociology and made no exception for Weber's concept of “ideal type.” She thought it prevented sociologists from focusing on what was especially important about phenomena under scrutiny, substituting for their unique qualities features arrived at through simplifying generalizations. But this was a misunderstanding. The ideal type has little in common with average type, which Arendt presumed it to be. It is a method for identifying productive questions by, first, constructing a concept of the phenomenon one wishes to understand on the basis of its best- known and most obvious characteristics, as it would have been, if these characteristics and these characteristics alone were allowed to develop out of their fundamental principles, unthwarted by historical contingencies, and using this “ideal type” as a measuring rod for the importance of actual historical characteristics. The larger the deviation from the ideal type, the more important it is to focus on it (Weber 1978). Were we to construct the ideal type of the work of Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind would stick out like a sore thumb. The author of The Human Condition, of Eichmann in Jerusalem, of Rahel Varnhagen and certainly of The Origins of Totalitarianism, is unrecognizable in it. The Life of the Mind is in no way representative of Arendt's canon, however varied it may be considered, it seems to contradict the representative works in almost every line; it is completely out of character. Precisely for this reason, it is significant for the understanding of this canon and this character. More than any other, it invites one to transform Arendt's work into an object of sociological study.

The book was composed between 1970 and December 1975, when Arendt died (having finished two of the three planned volumes). Was it her intellectual testament? The fact that the book originated as a prestigious lecture course – the Gifford Lectures – which Arendt was unquestionably invited to give because of her contributions to political theory, and the interpretation of totalitarianism in the first place, but chose to devote to a subject that nobody expected of her, lends credence to this idea. This makes using The Life of the Mind as the complement to the ideal type of Arendt's work of interest to intellectual historians and anyone seeking a key to the interpretation of her entire body of work.