Hannah Arendt

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ID: 338308
2026
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Abstract
Assistant Professor of English, School of Liberal Arts This article is on an outstanding 20th-century woman thinker: Hannah Arendt, whose highly interdisciplinary scholarship has made it difficult for critics to figure out her disciplinary allegiance. One question that comes up here is: What was she then? Or rather, who was she? Was she a political philosopher, or a sociologist or a historian of politics, or a political poet, or a political scientist, or a liberal or a conservative writer? According to Boyers Lowell and Reuben Garner, she defies and transcends disciplinary boundaries by writing across disciplines. Amy Allen lists the qualifiers assigned to her as: a phenomenologist, a postmodernist, a reluctant modernist, an anti-modernist, a critical social theorist, a proto-feminist theorist, and an anti-feminist. Samantha Rose Hill reminds of the paradoxes of being Hannah Arendt, who is simultaneously “a poetic thinker” though not “a poet”; who is “not a philosopher” but engages in philosophical thinking; who is “not a biographer” yet has written biographies; and who is “not a journalist, critic, essayist, book reviewer, editor or political activist” even though she has performed these activities at different stages of her life. Her public reputation as an eminent scholar of Holocaust studies does not discount the fact that she was also “a private person,” as Mary McCarthy proclaims. For Hans Jonas, she was a “genius for friendship” who, as Elizabeth Young-Bruehl observes, considered friendship to be “the center of her life.” Therefore, Arendt was a member of different circles of friendship during her lifetime. The first of these is of the thinking “peer group” constituted by her communist husband, existentialist teachers such as Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, German Zionist friend Kurt Blumenfeld, literary critic Walter Benjamin, novelist Hermann Bloch, and theologian Paul Tillich. The second is that of “the American intellectual friends” such as Randell Jarrell, Alfred Kazin, Dwight Macdonald, Philip Rahv, Robert Lowell, Harold Rosenberg, Mary McCarthy, and W. H. Auden. Finally, the last is of the “tribe” consisting of German-speaking friends: Blucher’s friends from the communist Brandler Group, Arendt’s university friends, the couple’s Paris acquaintances, and German speakers they met during their early days in America. Each friend has left a lifelong impression on Arendt’s life, her experiences, her ideas, and the corpus of her writings.
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Authors Natasa Thoudam
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Journal Oxford University Press eBooks
Year 2026
DOI
10.1093/9780197859049.003.0226
URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197859049.003.0226
Keywords Keywords not found

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