Arendt and the Functions of Political Thought

On a trip last year to the Hannah Arendt Collection housed in Bard College's Stevenson Library, we came across a copy of Philosophy, Politics, and Society (second Series): A Collection.

Edited and assembled by Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman, two fellows of Trinity College in Cambridge at the time of its 1962 publication, the collection features 10 essays on social and political philosophy.

Overall, the anthology champions the promise of the "analytical" approach to philosophy.

Arendt made several annotations to her copy of this collection. For example, in an essay written by John Greville Agard Pocock, a historian of political thought, she underlined several passages over a two-page span. These sections read as follows:

"the human mind does pursue implications from the theoretical to the practical and from the practical to the theoretical"

"A philosophy reappears as an ideology"

"and that we possess means of distinguishing between the different functions which political thought may be performing, and of following the history of concepts and abstractions as they move from one employment to another."

"To this process, once embarked upon, there is no known end, and our effort to understand the philosopher's thought must be an effort not only to follow it, but to actually assist it, in its indefinite progress towards higher states of organization."

"and he desires to make a single coherent story out of it all."

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The Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College is maintained by staff members at the Bard College Stevenson Library. To peruse the collection's digital entries, please click here.

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