Endings and Beginnings

Abstract

Li LANNAH ARENDT'S work seems to divide sharply into two parts. Her early political and historical writing, up to and including Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), stands as an eloquent, somber, and relentlessly serious meditation on this century's dubious contribution to western political experience-totalitarianism. By the late 1950s, however, Arendt's concerns shifted to politics and its importance in human selfunderstanding. Her work took on, if not an optimistic tone, at least a more hopeful one. Once the chronicler of dark times, she became a celebrator of the public life.' An explanation for the intellectual Kehre is difficult to come by. It scarcely is acknowledged in Arendt's own writing as though the left hand hardly knew or remembered what the right one had done. Nor does Arendt's biographer, in an otherwise engrossing account of her life, describe or explain what another student of Arendt's work has called a genuine disjunction in her thought.2 This is not to say that Arendt's oeuvre is so fragmented as to frustrate any attempt to make sense of the whole. Indeed some have argued that Arendt's apotheosization of politics was her way of offering a theoretical antidote to the historical horrors she had analyzed, while Bernard Crick considers Origins to be the source of the themes Arendt developed more fully in her later work.3 There is indeed considerable evidence that Arendt was concerned with the political quite early. Writing to Karl Jaspers in March 1951 (just as Origins was appearing), Arendt referred to a possible thread linking the problems of radical evil, politics, and the philosophical tradition of the West. In contrast with thinkers such as Karl Popper, Jacob Talmon, Eric Voegelin, and Isaiah Berlin, figures who treated