September 9, 2005
I am noting this article on Hannah Arendt entitled 'Between Modern and Postmodern: A Reading of Arendt's Political Theory in the 1990's' by Jiang Yi-huah. Jiang says:
In the 1990's, Arendt continues to be interpreted as a modernist, or a theorist sympathetic with the basic tenets of modernism although critical of certain phenomena of modernity. Following Habermas' reading of Arendt, Seyla Benhabib tells us that Arendt is a "reluctant modernist." Arendt's presentation of the modern age, in terms of the decline of the public sphere and the rising of a social sphere of economic activity and bureaucratic domination, is one of the most severe criticisms that modernity have received from an antimodernist. But Benhabib thinks the story of modernity presented in The Human Condition should be balanced by Arendt's early works, such as Rahel Varnhagen and The Origins of Totalitarianism.
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