ABSTRACT

Hannah Arendt’s philosophy has gained a remarkable popularity in the last three decades. It was about time. For one, for an immanent reason – Hannah Arendt is without doubt one of the most important political thinkers in the 20th century, but did not get the due recognition for it in the history of this discipline in many years. There is no need to discuss, here, why it took so long; it had something to do with the immanent dimension itself. But there are also contemporary reasons for the recent re-evaluation of Arendt’s work. For as high-quality as her political philosophy may be, it is for good reason that a philosophy of the political has become “all of the sudden” so intellectually attractive. To put it bluntly: in a time in which the (Marxist-coloured) social paradigm of the social sciences has collapsed for heteronomous ideological reasons, there was a need for a “replacement”, a “comparable” matrix of thought, which, after the collapse of Soviet communism, had to correspond with the ideology of victorious capitalism. Arendt’s philosophy is not a simple sign-off ideology on the prevailing globalized Western mode of production, but as its quintessence clearly pertains to the realm seen in Marxist thought as the epiphenomenal superstructure, this intellectual edifice plays a major role in the current elimination of the “social as intellectual” category (and of social criticism).1 Arendt’s political philosophy as an alternative to Marxist criticism of society cannot be just dismissed as unequal in substance and importance, but must be seen in the context of its growing status in the contemporary zeitgeist.