Hannah Arendt is one of the great outsiders of twentieth-century political thought, at once strikingly original and disturbingly unorthodox. Ever since the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 her writings have attracted great interest and intense controversy, and during her lifetime her reputation was affected by sharp swings in intellectual fashion. Totalitarianism itself was first acclaimed as a profound analysis of Nazism and Stalinism and then dismissed as a piece of Cold War propaganda; The Human Condition and On Revolution were received in some circles as classic defences of the ‘participatory’ politics that became fashionable in the sixties, but deplored in others as baseless attacks on the social concerns of modern politics. Most hotly debated of all was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published in 1963, which was regarded by many as an act of disloyalty to the Jewish community. After her death in 1975 these particular controversies died down, but her standing as a political theorist remained debatable. Her defenders regarded her as the theorist who had done most to reassert the value of politics in an age when it had largely become subordinate to social and economic concerns. Her critics pointed to her rejection of ordinary democratic politics in favour of models drawn from ancient city-states or modern revolutions, and felt that she had little to say about politics here and now.

In recent years, however, Arendt's reputation has been growing again, as some of her ideas seem not only to have survived the passage of time but to have taken on a new relevance.