SOURCE: "The Contradictions of Hannah Arendt's Political Thought," in Political Theory, Vol. 6, No. 1, February, 1978, pp. 5-26.

Below, Canovan investigates Arendt's major works, discerning "a contradiction between democratic and elitist attitudes on the one hand, and an uncertainty about the relation of her political thought to practice on the other."

Hannah Arendt's political thought is baffling even to the most sympathetic reader. It is baffling not only because of her fondness for questioning our established certainties, and not only because her political values are strange and shocking to us, but most importantly because her thought is riven by a deep and serious inconsistency and confused by a persistent uncertainty of stance.

The serious inconsistency lies between what may for the sake of brevity be called Arendt's elitist and her democratic aspects. She can be read as one of the most radical of democrats. Her political ideal is a vision...