The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt

By turns radical and conservative, Hannah Arendt's work confounds the usual categories and defies conventional expectations. This book provides a comprehensive analytical and developmental study of the whole of Arendt's mature political philosophy, focusing especially on the development of her worksThe Human Condition, Between Past and Future, On Revolution, the Life of the Mind, and Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophyand explores her contributions to democratic theory and to contemporary postmodern and neo-Kantian political philosophy. Gottsegen argues that Arendt was primarily a theorist of political action, and that, at the heart of her thought, a new conception of political action emerges. And he shows how, to that end, Arendt endeavored to articulate in her major works a new conception of political action and participatory democracy that, together, might make politics a medium of human dignity, self-realization, and transcendence.