ABSTRACT
Given that a major ambition of her work was to respond to what she perceived to be a radical break with tradition, Arendt might usefully be defined as a philosophical and political ‘modernist’. This is not to say, however, that Arendt was committed in any way to ‘defending’ the modern world, that she believed fundamentally in ideas of progress, or that she understood modern technology and science to have liberated mankind from labour. In her book The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, Seyla Benhabib writes that, This equivocal attitude towards modernity makes Arendt, in Benhabib’s view,
although Hannah Arendt, the stateless person and persecuted Jew, is the philosophical and political modernist, Arendt, the student of Martin Heidegger, is the antimodernist Grecophile theorist of the polis and of its lost glory.
