ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt saw herself as a thinker, and the natures of thinking, and the importance of a certain kind of thinking, were among her most important concerns. Thinking enables us to identify the pensee unique that threatens to suffocate us and allows us, in Bourdieu's phrase, to 'speak' rather than just be 'spoken for' by the Zeitgeist. When Arendt urged us to 'stop and think' and talked about the need to 'think what we are doing' she was not referring to the kind of thinking that for much of the history of western civilisation had been the preserve of philosophers. For Arendt assuming political responsibility for one's community was human-kind's most important task. Arendt's views on the place of compassion, pity and solidarity in politics have profound implications for political life and for how we prepare young people for this life.
