The Religion of Politics: Reflections on the Thought of Hannah Arendt

In a period rich with controversy one should perhaps allow fading quarrels to die. It is not my primary intention to rekindle the heated debate that swirled about Miss Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, but rather to see that book within the larger context of her philosophy. The following reflections were actually prompted by a reading of Miss Arendt’s On Revolution which, at least for this reader, suddenly revealed a certain unity of structure that can be discerned in all her writings. A subsequent reading of the Human Condition, the essays entitled Between Past and Future, the book on Rahel Varnhagen, and a rereading of the Origins of Totalitarianism and other essays have suggested that the polemical attacks on Eichmann in Jerusalem, whatever their intrinsic merits, failed to do justice to Miss Arendt as philosopher. It became clear to me that the Eichmann book can be understood only in terms of a certain preestablishe...