The Beginning

Where to begin, when one begins reading, studying, or teaching Hannah Arendt? This question, quite easy to answer in reference to many thinkers we find in the canon of philosophical classics (about which we are not uncritical), proves to be a challenge in the case of Arendt. This is because she is not a systematic thinker, gradually building up her theoretical construction brick by brick. She rather, figuratively speaking, invites her readers to dive right into the deep and rich waters of her thinking. These waters do have a defined geography and once one has recognized how to navigate them, every wave and every sea rock exposes precious elements of her understanding of the world. Since developing, enlarging, and deepening this understanding was Arendt’s life-long passion, her thinking moves cyclically, its streams revisiting places they previously sighted, establishing new connections but also strengthening the ones we already know.

The standard—and quite reasonable—way of beginning with Arendt is to read the first chapters of The Human Condition, where she lays down the most important distinctions of her theory and introduces most of the central notions which provide a key to her distinctive theory of the world we share as human beings: “fundamental human activities: labor, work and action” (HC 7); plurality and natality; the public, the private, and the social.

Rather than laying out these “key concepts” (Hayden 2014) in this building block format, however, what we do in this chapter is to pave Arendt’s conceptual paths in small steps, from one notion to the next, illuminating the fragile framing of her theory. In so doing, we draw from The Human Condition but we also go beyond it, to the numerous books and essays where she returns to these abstract concepts to discuss them more thoroughly, add new meanings to them, or put them into different concrete contexts. What we aim at is an introduction to what Lisa Disch (1994: 24) describes as Arendt’s new lexicon of politics. Our guideposts will be natality, plurality, action, power, freedom, the private and the public, and the social. These notions are interconnected in Arendt’s theory and partly define each other.