Why Hannah Arendt is the philosopher for now

Arendt’s political philosophy, formed under Nazi persecution, is having a resurgence in our troubled age.

by Lyndsey Stonebridge for The New Statesman

(Portrait of German-born American political theorist and author Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975), a cigarette in hand, as she leans across a table, 1944. (Photo by Fred Stein Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

‘When Hannah Arendt was herded into Gurs, a detention camp in south-west France in May 1940, she did one of the most sensible things you can do when you are trapped in a real-life nightmare: she read – Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Clausewitz’s On War and, compulsively, the detective stories of Georges Simenon. Today people are reading Arendt to understand our own grimly bewildering predicament…’

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