Hannah Arendt (1906– 1975) was a determined foe of the social sciences. She lambasted their methods and derided their objectives. Sociology was a particular target of her ire. Yet here she is: the subject of a book that appears in the Anthem Companions to Sociology series. The irony could not be plainer. What accounts for it?

Arendt's presence in the Anthem series is neither a lofty correction of a disciplinary embarrassment – the paucity of “classic” female theorists – nor a cynical marketing ploy. Today, a growing number of sociologists are claiming Arendt for sociology, just as many in the past claimed Marx for it. It is not just that her investigations into the nature of science, work, agency, power, revolution and human society itself afford new perspectives from which sociologists can directly benefit. It is something more basic still. Arendt challenges us to rethink what we are doing. She nudges us to refine, revise or abandon some of our most basic intellectual reflexes.

It is startling to recall that, only 20 years ago, Arendt was still an esoteric author in most of the humanities and almost totally unread in the social sciences. Even within political theory and philosophy, disciplines to which she has an evident affiliation, Arendt was a marginal figure. Yet over the past two decades, her standing has steadily advanced from the fringe of intellectual discussion toward its centre. A host of factors explains this dynamic: the rehabilitation of totalitarianism as a vital political concept following years in the doldrums of Cold War polemics; the advent of genocidal campaigns in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East and, with them, new forms of ideology and terror; the implosion of nations and the tragic reappearance of stateless peoples; the growth of human rights discourses and human rights organizations; renewed disquiet over the reach of the state and its encroachments on privacy; the recovery of classical republicanism as a political alternative to liberalism and socialism. All these developments evoke Arendtian concerns and arguments. Furthermore, the greater porousness between and among the humanities and social sciences in recent years, as a result of the impetus towards transdisciplinary studies, has encouraged academics to move across intellectual borders. Arendt, a wide- ranging thinker with much to say about politics, society, history, aesthetics, philosophy and education, is a natural beneficiary of this process.