ABSTRACT
In the wake of her experience of totalitarian politics, Hannah Arendt developed an understanding of the political based on plurality, natality, and action, which is still highly relevant and influential today. One task of this chapter will be to show how this understanding is anchored in the phenomenological tradition. Arendt’s turning away from philosophy, her rejection of an ontology of Being, and her attention to the practices of the political can be interpreted as the development of a political methodology that draws on phenomenology but also transforms it. The main claim of this political phenomenology is that it is the human condition of plurality—in its phenomenologically conceived, contingent actualization—that fundamentally politicizes our Being. The second task of this chapter will be to explore Arendt’s relation to other developments in phenomenology that responded to the experience of totalitarianism, such as the existentialist authors explored in Part Two of this handbook and the so-called left Heideggerians covered in Part Four on post-foundationalism, especially in the person of Claude Lefort.
