What can we still learn from Hannah Arendt’s political categories and
reflections on the public realm in an era that sees the growing spread
of populisms? The large critical literature on Arendt’s work has been
spreading over the years a sort of standardized vision, according to which
Arendt was a nostalgic and anti-modern thinker, whose aim was to rehabilitate
the greek polis model against the modern decline of the public
sphere, so that very few of her conceptual categories are still useful to
understand contemporary phenomena. The purpose of these notes is to
offer a different reading of the complex relationship between Arendt and
the modern age. With the help of most recent literature – characterised
by a more critic approach to her work – it seems possible, quite to the
contrary, to draw from Arendt’s thought a deep “modernist” attitude, not
just regarding her judgement on modernity, but above all in terms of upto-
dateness of some of her suggestions.
