Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

The past decades have seen a steady canonisation of the “phenomenological Arendt” even if her work does not fit into the Husserlian phenomenological
orthodoxy. While Arendt shares several core assumptions with other phenomenologists, she stands out by applying those to political phenomena such as public space, revolution, freedom, violence, power, authority, law, and human rights. Her key concept of plurality—the idea that human beings are both distinct and equal as they appear to each other in a shared world—politicises not only the subject matter but also the method of phenomenology.
To show how Arendt draws from and expands phenomenology in a political direction, I first delve into her worldcentered ontology. For Arendt, humans are not defined by essences but by contingent “human conditions” that require enactment within and through a shared, public world. This world, in turn, shapes human (co-)existence. Consisting of both material things and shared meanings, it provides for relative stability and meaningfulness. Humans are “worldly,” both building the artificial world and disclosing it through “words and deeds” in their role as citizens. These words and deeds include interactions, interpretations, disagreements, judgments, prejudices, and narratives—what makes up the political and historical fabric of the world.
Secondly, I unpack Arendt’s phenomenological 'method' of political philosophy—what I call “political thinking.” It is characterised by engagement with lived, pre-reflective experience of the plural world of human affairs, consistent with her conception of thinking as a non-theoretical interminable “quest for meaning”. This method involves bracketing theoretical and metaphysical assumptions—a quasi-epoché—to understand political life without preconceived frameworks.
I demonstrate how Arendtian political thinking differs from empirical political science and normative political theory. On the one hand, though it engages with real historical events such as totalitarianism and civil disobedience, it is committed to exploring the ontological structures underlying those. On the other hand, Arendt rejects ideal and normative value theories due to her phenomenological “realism”: an unflinching attention to reality as it appears to all, aligning with the classical phenomenological commitment to “the things themselves.” For her, political thought is not about designing more just political systems, nor establishing moral or political justifications. Normative questions of how to act and judge morally or politically are not theoretical issues to be determined by individuals from a third-person perspective (least of all the philosopher), but, instead, practical issues to be enacted by plural actors and spectators themselves when they start to act together or judge.