Book review of Sophie Loidolt, Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity
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Book review of Sophie Loidolt, Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
The upsurge of Hannah Arendt scholarship in the last twenty years has led some to speak of an “Arendt-industry”. Sophie Loidolt’s new book, however, shows that careful scholarship can continue to yield new and significant insights into Arendt’s contributions to philosophy. It is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the phenomenological roots of Arendt’s thinking. Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity (2018) is not another introduction to Arendt’s philosophy. Against other readings based in postmodernism (Villa 2014) and critical theory (Benhabib 2003) that interpret Arendt as breaking with the phenomenological tradition and who sees Arendt as a thinker predominantly concerned with the politics of totalitarianism, revolutions, grassroots democracies and civil obedience (Isaac 1992; Canovan 1995; Honig 1995; Bernstein 1996), Loidolt’s goal is to reclaim Arendt as a phenomenologist and to show that her thoughts are best understood as a continuation and expansion of the foundations established by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. With a careful eye for detail and nuance, Loidolt, who holds the chair for practical philosophy at the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany), does an excellent job at introducing the phenomenological tradition to newcomers and provides convincing arguments for why Arendt should be included in its lineage. The book, however, demands a lot from its readers. The dense and comprehensive writing style makes it too demanding for most undergraduates, but suitable for specialized graduate students and scholars interested in Arendt or the phenomenological tradition. Against readings that portray Arendt’s thinking as an eclectic bouquet of ideas (Hull 2011) and a mixture of idiosyncratically interpreted influences from Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger, Marx and others (Canovan 1995; Moran 2000; Buckler 2014), Loidolt’s goal is to reveal that Arendt’s work contains a systematic and coherent but “hidden methodology” and a well-argued “phenomenology of plurality” that can and should * Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic [email protected]
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Postdoc, Philosophy and Science studies, Roskilde University, Universitetsvej 1, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark
D. M. Munch-Jurisic
revolutionize and transform classical phenomenological concepts such as “intentionality, appearance, first-person perspective (in plural, “the we”), subjectivity, intersubjectivity, self, and world” (Loidolt 2018, p. 8). Throughout the book’s chapters, Loidolt carefully and systematically works her way through these concepts to demonstrate the originality of Arendt’s overlooked contribution to the phenomenological tradition. Her primary ambition is to argue that Arendt’s concept of “plurality” and her insistence on the political dimension of intersubjectivity constitute a much needed shot in the arm for contemporary phenomenology which has, with a
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