Since her rediscovery in recent years, it is hard to imagine public debates on freedom, oppression and flight without Hannah Arendt. But it is not only what she thought that is of striking relevance, just as important is how she thought. Maike Weißpflug presents us with an undiscovered Hannah Arendt and, in her stirringly narrated study, traces the sources of her highly unusual style of thinking. She finds these not in philosophy, but above all in her readings of poets such as Homer, Conrad and Brecht. With them, the political theorist turns against all grand and comprehensive explanations and theories and makes the small-scale and sensual world of experience her point of departure: "The art of thinking politically consists above all in the courage to sit between all chairs. Being argumentative requires being able to look at the world from the perspective of others and still think for oneself.
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Maike Weißpflug is a political scientist specialising in political theory. She was a research assistant at RWTH Aachen University and now works in the research department "Museum and Society" at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. She is one of the co-initiators of the blog theorieblog.de.
"It is one of the many merits of Weißpflug’s book that it presents us a Hannah Arendt who can teach us a way of thinking about political problems that has the potential to open up new avenues of thought and counter prevailing wisdom. Weißpflug has provided convincing evidence for Arendt’s particular importance for our attempts to come to terms with the – at times rather frightening – political phenomena of the day." The Berlin Review of Books
