Toward the end of her life, Arendt's attention was focused very much on the study of the mind and mental faculties, culminating in her final, unfinished trilogy The Life of the Mind (1981). This has given some the impression that, following her early move away from philosophy toward politics, she later moved away once again from political questions toward a concern with the mental life. If this were so, then it might seem perverse to pursue the issue of Arendt's approach to political theory through a consideration of what she had to say about thinking, about matters that she took up once she had left political questions behind. However, the idea that Arendt made a second ‘turn’ of this sort is misplaced. Any survey of Arendt's work as a whole reveals the fact that a concern with the experience of thinking is a consistent theme throughout: from early pieces such as ‘Understanding and Politics’, first published in 1953, right through to ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’ (1971), a piece which contained many of the ideas that were to inform The Life of the Mind itself, this thematic consistency is evident (see Arendt 1994: 307-27, 1971). This is not to say that Arendt's reflections on thinking did not develop. Her concern with the relation between thinking and acting was augmented, following her observation of the trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1961, with a commensurate concern as to the possible relation between thoughtlessness and evil, a question that she came to regard as being of central political importance (cf. Young-Bruehl 1994: 336; Bernstein 2000: 277).