Abstract

If there were any doubt concerning the fecundity, richness, indeed, ambiguity of Hannah Arendt’s oeuvre, it will be laid to rest by The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt. This collection of generally excellent articles on her work instantiates the plurality of perspectives that was so much a part of her philosophical position. It opens with Dana Villa’s “Introduction: The Development of Arendt’s Political Thought,” which begins with her work on totalitarianism and ends with her appropriation of Kant’s theory of judgment. Although necessarily sketchy, his presentation is eminently plausible. He notes the sometimes rigidity of Arendt’s distinctions, for example, the political and the social, but defends her opposition of the life of the mind and the life of the citizen. Villa remarks that she turns toward Athens for “the simple reason that [it was] the first flowering of democracy”. However, as the diversity of opinions concerning her relationship to the Greek polis testify, there is nothing simple in her relationship to Athens. In fact, it is this topic that could be read as a kind of leitmotif running through the work of most of her commentators. In this limited space I cannot comment on each of the articles contained in the collection. I will only mention those that I was particularly taken by.