ABSTRACT
This chapter describes Hannah Arendt's engagement with sociology in stages, which also, to some extent, reflect stages in her development as a thinker. It discusses her critique of Karl Mannheim in her first published article, written while she was living in Berlin in 1930, which contains the germ of her later criticisms of the social viewpoint', but also reveals some surprising affinities between herself and Mannheim. The chapter analyses her criticisms of Karl Marx's supposed conflation of action with fabrication, as this appears primarily in Human Condition (HC). It examines her main criticisms of sociology as a discipline, which appear in her work on totalitarianism and in some of the essays in Between Past and Future (BPF). The chapter explores her insights into a more reflexive sociology that recognizes the importance of making ontological distinctions between different kinds of activity, and incorporating these insights into more nuanced and reflexive forms of explanation.
