Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Thinking and Acting
- 3 Theory and Method
- 4 Theorising Dark Times: The Origins of Totalitarianism
- 5 Theorising Political Action: The Human Condition
- 6 Theorising New Beginnings: On Revolution
- 7 Political Theory and Political Ethics
- 8 The Role of the Theorist
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Thinking and Acting
- 3 Theory and Method
- 4 Theorising Dark Times: The Origins of Totalitarianism
- 5 Theorising Political Action: The Human Condition
- 6 Theorising New Beginnings: On Revolution
- 7 Political Theory and Political Ethics
- 8 The Role of the Theorist
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
My assumption is that thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings.
I've taken an epigraph from … [Karl Jaspers]: ‘Give yourself up neither to the past nor to the future. The important thing is to remain wholly in the present’. That sentence struck me right in the heart, so I'm entitled to it.
Hannah Arendt 1964In an interview broadcast on West German television in 1964, Hannah Arendt, by then a famous political thinker, insisted that she did not regard herself as a ‘philosopher’ and had no desire to be seen as such: her concern was with politics. She was not even happy with the suggestion that what she did was ‘political philosophy’, regarding this as a term overloaded with tradition. She preferred what she took to be the less freighted epithet of ‘political theorist’. There is, Arendt argued, a fundamental tension between the philosophical and the political; and the historical tendency to think about the contingent and circumstantial business of politics from a philosophical point of view, seeking to speak about it in terms of the universal and the eternal, has had unfortunate consequences. In the light of this conviction, Arendt said she wished to look at politics ‘with eyes unclouded by philosophy’ (Arendt 1994: 2). The aim of this book is to explore the implications of this statement as they make themselves felt in Arendt's work and to suggest that they underwrite a distinctive, potent and consistently challenging way of theorising politics.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Hannah Arendt and Political TheoryChallenging the Tradition, pp. 1 - 13Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011