Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt

Seyla Benhabib is Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University, and director of the Program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics.

• Chapter 1 Introduction: Why Hannah Arendt?Chapter 2 The Pariah and Her Shadow: Hannah Arendt's Biography of Rahel VarnhagenChapter 3 Jewish Politics and German "Existenz Philosophy": The Sources of Hannah Arendt's ThoughtChapter 4 The Destruction of the Public Sphere and the Emergence of TotalitarianismChapter 5 The Dialogue With Martin Heidegger: Arendt's Ontology of The Human ConditionChapter 6 The Art of Making and Subverting Distinctions: With Arendt, Contra ArendtChapter 7 From the Problem of Judgment to the Public Sphere: Rethinking Hannah Arendt's Political Theory

It is difficult to do justice to the rich texture of Benhabib's argument and interpretation, which is a magisterial dialectic between modernity and existentialism, reformism and utopianism, and fundamentalism and perspectivalism. Benhabib's book remains one of the most stimulating of the recent spate of books on Arendt.