Suchergebnisse

Hannah Arendt's conception of modernity is reconstructed & critiqued to assess the soundness of her interpretive categories, arguing that her negative assessment of modernity was shaped by her experience of totalitarianism. It is shown how Arendt employed two hermeneutic strategies -- one derived from Walter Benjamin, the other from Martin Heidegger -- to reappropriate past experiences that might illuminate the present. Examined are key features of Arendt's conception of modernity -- notions of world alienation, earth alienation, the rise of the social, & the triumph of animal laborans (the working being) -- & three categories that Arendt used in her critique of modernity -- nature, process, & the social. By insulating the political sphere from the concerns of the social, Arendt was ultimately unable to account for two of modernity's most important achievements: the struggles for the extension of citizenship, & the redrawing of the boundaries between the public & the private. W. Howard