Existentialism Politicized: Arendt's Debt to Jaspers

Abstract

There has been much debate about how to locate Hannah Arendt within the tradition of political philosophy. This article argues for an “existentialist” reading, claiming that Karl Jaspers's categories reappear, politicized, in Arendt's own thought. Her language and arguments do not, in fact, become completely intelligible until read in the context of Jaspers's Existentz philosophy. The authors contend that the apparent obscurity and ambiguity of Arendt's writings owe to her attempt to stretch the framework of existentialism to fit the milieu of classical antiquity, to which it is fundamentally alien. Conversely, Arendt appropriated only those aspects of Aristotelian theory that suited her existentially defined concerns while ignoring the rest, a procedure that accounts for many of the tensions and contradictions found in her work.