ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt’s political thought is baffling even to the most sympathetic reader. The serious inconsistency lies between what may for the sake of brevity be called Arendt’s elitist and her democratic aspects. The relation of Arendt’s political thought to modern political practice is again somewhat reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who oscillated between moralistic utopianism and rejection of all modern politics on the one hand, and practical commitment on the other. Instead of identifying the masses with the lower orders, indeed, Arendt stresses that totalitarian movements received particularly enthusiastic support from that very intellectual elite on whom nineteenth-century prophets of mass society had relied to defend civilised values against the mob. Arendt’s picture of The Human Condition, with its exaltation of Action and its denigration of Labour, is a familiar though disturbing one. Of Hannah Arendt’s long books, On Revolution is the one in which formal organisation is least apparent.
