#philosophy

In times of political instability, readers have repeatedly turned to Hannah Arendt, more often for clarity than for comfort. Her work resurfaces whenever democratic norms begin to erode, insisting on the importance of learning how to think when familiar categories collapse. That task feels newly urgent today.

In the fall of 1970, Hannah Arendt delivered a series of lectures on Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy. She was scheduled to teach Kant again in the spring of 1976, though her death in December 1975 prevented her from doing so. Indeed, the fact of her untimely death is central to the story of Arendt’s Kant lectures – both their origin and the scholarly attention given to them.