Ilaria Possenti

Paideia. Hannah Arendt on Socrates and Critical Thought

At the beginning of the ’fifties, in the wake of the political and personal catastrophe that culminated in the events of the Second World War, Hannah Arendt finished writing The Origins of Totalitarianism. More than twenty years after she had written her doctoral thesis and had participated in Martin Heidegger’s courses and lectures in Marburg, she returned to Plato, to the Greeks, to philosophy. In a small group of articles and lectures in 1953–1954, she planned to research into the philosophical tradition that the totalitarian caesura seemed to have rent definitively.2 She was intimately concerned with the relation between philosophy and politics, a central theme in Socrates’ experience and in Plato’s reflection on the education (paideia) of philosophers who, in the Republic, were called to guide a new form of political constitution (politeia).3