ABSTRACT
The essential problems posed by sociology, quite unlike those imagined by Hannah Arendt, were not alternative interpretations of totalitarianism, but locating examples of execution style gangster behavior in democratic as well as in authoritarian societies. The early years of Hannah Arendt are often described as her being an exemplary member of the German-Jewish emigre community at one end and more furtively as an arch devotee of the Wagnerian world of spiritual and symbolic love making at the other. Arendt lived in a professional world that encompassed sociology as well as politics and philosophy. She was not entrapped by what she felt to be the lesser fields of social research. The fact is that the discipline of sociology was arguably marginalized as a consequence of its social aims increasingly abstracted and removed from worldly matters. Peter Baehr's book is a major effort to situate Arendt's work in the history of ideas of her time.
