Hannah Arendt, Politics and Philosophy
Term:
Fall 2011
Subject Code:
GPOL
Course Number:
6003
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.
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