Hannah Arendt is sometimes regarded as an important source of, or inspiration behind, contemporary communitarian political thought. There is some measure of truth to this view, but to think of her political theory as distinctively communitarian is more than a little misleading. For what characterizes communitarianism as a philosophical challenge to liberalism is a highlighting of how the self is constituted by collective or group identity, and an argument that insufficient concern with thick shared identities marks a central deficiency of liberal-individualist conceptions of political community. If, however, a properly communitarian argument emphasizes the collective constitution of selfhood, and the political salience of the shared identity so constituted, one would expect communitarians to exhibit significant sympathy for the politics of nationalism - a form of politics that places shared identity and thick communal attachments at the very core of its understanding of political life. Yet, as we shall see, Arendt's thought shows itself to be, in this respect, pronouncedly anti-communitarian. Thus an examination of Arendt's stance toward nationalism should help to clarify those aspects of her thought that are located at the furthest remove from specifically communitarian concerns. Though the Arendtian and communitarian critiques of liberalism do overlap in important ways, there is a fundamental respect in which Arendt's criticisms of liberalism are motivated by a very different set of theoretical concerns than those characteristic of the communitarian critique.