ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt is not usually numbered among the existentialist writers and is often classed as a radical political theorist drawing on phenomenology so as to address such questions as What is politics? Who are we as political beings? And what is freedom? The following contribution makes a case for interpreting her work in more existential terms, demonstrating how such existential motifs form the backdrop of such political thinking and her attempts to reflect on themes such as plurality, natality, singularity, and love of the world. The further point will be made that Arendt finds in Socrates a proto-existentialist to whom she can turn so as to bring together existential and political concerns and she does so to offset what she sees as an overly subjectivity-focused existentialism.
