GPOL6003

Hannah Arendt has plausibly been characterized as one of the great outsiders of twentieth-century political philosophy: strikingly original and disturbingly unorthodox. This course will involve close readings of the central texts composing Arendt's political philosophy:The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, On Revolution, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, together with some of her most important essays. Without denying the originality and unorthodox character of her thought, we will exam the different currents feeding her mature writings, contending that Arendt might most usefully be understood as our first political modernist, bringing the sensibility of high modernism to philosophy and hence political thought.