Hannah Arendts Ambiguous Storytelling

Through an original interpretation of Hannah Arendt''s historiography, Marcin Moskalewicz reveals an under-acknowledged philosophy of history in her vast and variegated oeuvre. Moskalewicz convincingly expounds Arendt''s wrestling with the most important debates for historical theorists in how we represent the past.In this study, the key to understanding the fragmentary thought of Hannah Arendt is through the speculative and critical dimensions of the philosophy of history. Tracing her engagement with the idealistic and materialistic philosophies of history via Kant and Marx situates her own position and speaks to the distinction between theory and philosophy in her historiography. Methodological presuppositions and the consequences of scientific thinking are essential in the history of totalitarian states, which this study connects to Arendt''s writings on totalitarianism. Reading her approach as ''fragmentary historiography'', the aesthetic project she was committed to reveals itself as the only credible methodological response to the existence of totalitarianism, underlined by an argument that makes a novel contribution to Arendt scholarship.>

Préface
Original account of Hannah Arendt's aesthetic engagement with the theory and philosophy of history.

Auteur
Marcin Moskalewicz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin and Poznan University of Medical Sciences in Poland. Moskalewicz was Marie Curie Fellow at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, the Netherlands, and University of Oxford, UK, EURIAS Fellow at Collegium Helveticum in Zurich, Switzerland, Fulbright Scholar at Texas A&M, USA, and Humboldt Fellow at Heidelberg University, Germany.

Texte du rabat

Through an original interpretation of Hannah Arendt's historiography, Marcin Moskalewicz reveals an under-acknowledged philosophy of history in her vast and variegated oeuvre. Moskalewicz convincingly expounds Arendt's wrestling with the most important debates for historical theorists in how we represent the past.

In this study, the key to understanding the fragmentary thought of Hannah Arendt is through the speculative and critical dimensions of the philosophy of history. Tracing her engagement with the idealistic and materialistic philosophies of history via Kant and Marx situates her own position and speaks to the distinction between theory and philosophy in her historiography. Methodological presuppositions and the consequences of scientific thinking are essential in the history of totalitarian states, which this study connects to Arendt's writings on totalitarianism. Reading her approach as 'fragmentary historiography', the aesthetic project she was committed to reveals itself as the only credible methodological response to the existence of totalitarianism, underlined by an argument that makes a novel contribution to Arendt scholarship.

Contenu
Introduction 1. The Origins of Totalitarianism 2. Bare Life and the End of History 3. Thinking History through Time 4. The Science of History as Ideology 5. Performative Self 6. Temporal Conflicts of the Mind 7. The Contingency and Decline of History 8. The Beauty of the Past 9. Redemption of Contingency 10. Pieces of the Past Conclusion Acknowledgements Notes Bibliography Index