If not for the humanitarian devastation occasioning the citation, Hannah Arendt might have been entertained to learn that, on October 9, 2025, nearly 50 years after her death, she was invoked by no less an ecclesiastical authority than Pope Leo XIV. Commending the bravery of journalists covering “Gaza, Ukraine, and every other land bloodied by bombs,” the new Pontiff quoted a famous passage from the end of The Origins of Totalitarianism: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”Footnote ¹ Pope Leo went on to preach, “We are not destined to live in a world where truth is no longer distinguishable from fiction,” exhorting his audience to “be vigilant in order to ensure that technology does not replace human beings, and that information and algorithms that govern it today are not in the hands of the few.”Footnote ² Nine months on, the mission is not looking particularly auspicious.

Though possibly the holiest, the Pope is hardly the sole public figure perceiving the salience of Arendt’s ideas to the cascade of global political crises constituting our times. Over the last decade her profile has broadened far beyond academia, largely in response to fears about the political future of the United States.Footnote ³ Per Rebecca Panovka, following Donald Trump’s first election Arendt “was rebranded as something of a patron saint of facts.”Footnote ⁴ Writing for the New York Times, Jennifer Szalai observed “it was the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that enshrined her as a prophet.”Footnote ⁵ At least for now, perceived relevance is overcoming perennial criticism that Arendt’s political theory is too abstruse to be useful. If all theorists have their season, Arendt’s is dark and uncertain times.

Three recent books portray Arendt’s thinking as anything but hermetically sealed off from the world around it. Notwithstanding diverging goals, Samantha Rose Hill, Mark Aloysius, and David D. Kim converge on a view of Arendt as unbound by disciplinary narrowness, especially that of political science. In doing so, they join Arendt in refusing to abide by conventions that too often make the results of political thinking cliché. Of these three authors, only Hill, who published a biography of Arendt in 2021, holds a PhD in political theory.Footnote ⁶ Reading Hill, Aloysius, and Kim’s books together suggests that Arendt’s uncanny relevance to today’s political realities may be traced not just to the crises proliferating around us, but to Arendt’s relentless search for understanding, whether in poetry and literature, theology, or everyday experience.

These books invite readers to approach Arendt as a human being as much as a theorist of politics, while shifting focus away from the best-known moments in her biography and theory. With Hill we meet Arendt as amateur poet, a writer’s writer whose love of language rivaled her often-cited love of the world and thinking. With Aloysius, readers encounter a generative if unorthodox contributor to Augustinian theology, grappling with spiritual as well as political implications of displacement. And with Kim, we assess a significant but conflicted thinker of solidarity, a mind that disappointed as well as inspired readers, past and present.

Of the three books, Hill’s is the most reverent toward its source, whom she describes as “a very feeling woman” (xxviii). What Remains is the first complete collection of Arendt’s poetry in English, though many of the poems appear elsewhere, such as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography.Footnote ⁷ What Remains has 71 poems, arranged chronologically in two parts. They are readable and mostly quite short; many are one or two stanzas. Arendt’s original German appears alongside Hill’s English translations. Brief commentary enriches readers’ appreciation of Arendt’s creative erudition without becoming overbearing.Footnote ⁸ Drawing its title from Arendt’s often-cited 1964 interview with Günter Gaus, What Remains pairs well with Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb’s Reflections on Literature and Culture, a collection of Arendt’s cultural and literary criticism.Footnote ⁹

Hill’s concise introduction “The Mother Tongue” makes valuable observations about the priority of language, and thus the importance of poetry, in the development of Arendt’s theoretical imagination. Scholars engaged in more traditional interpretive and critical projects would do well to attend to Hill’s description of Arendt as an intentional writer for whom word choice and structure were not arbitrary. Scholars often reiterate that events inspired Arendt’s thinking —but etymology was an equal muse. Hill might have mentioned that Arendt draws frequently on Greek, Latin, and French terms to develop concepts. More discussion of the significance of viewing Arendt as “a thinker who remained deeply rooted in the German language” (xvii) is warranted, given that her major works of political theory were written in English.

Uncertainty about whether Arendt would have welcomed its publication hangs over each poem in What Remains. Hill seems to anticipate skepticism about the need for a volume by an amateur poet when she classifies these private texts as “among [Arendt’s] most prized possessions” (xv), packed alongside the future political theorist’s important documents and minimal belongings when she fled Europe (xvi). We learn, intriguingly, that Arendt organized her poems, revising material that had been written decades before, as she had with her dissertation on Augustine—though she never sought to publish them. Given her coterie of literary friends and career in publishing, this would not have been difficult; Arendt’s life was not Emily Dickinson’s. We also learn that Hill’s volume reversed some of Arendt’s editorial decisions: “When Arendt collected her poems, she did not include all of them. The omitted poems have been included here. As best as I can judge from her correspondence, the omitted poems were sent directly to Martin Heidegger.” (xxxii).

Unfortunately, Hill’s introduction misleads at times, such as when she alleges that Arendt’s political theory “eschews emotions as being irrational” (xxviii). Arendt was not a rationalist. She argued politics was the realm of opinion and could not be measured against the yardstick of philosophical truth without pathologizing distortion. Ancient oration, i.e. the art of emotional appeal, is the paradigm of action as persuasive public speech. Although she did question the role of specific emotions in politics, such as love and pity, Arendt never “banishes feelings from the public realm” (xxviii). In “The Gap Between Past and Future” Arendt describes the “ épaisseur triste ” of consignment to private life following the affective highs of acting in concert.Footnote ¹⁰ The point of On Revolution is to recover the “public happiness” that freedom entails.Footnote ¹¹ The memory of the “strange pathos of novelty” inheres in revolutionary transience.Footnote ¹² Loneliness, which Hill has written about compellingly elsewhere, is both a feeling and a political condition, as is its opposite: belonging.Footnote ¹³

While some amount of prurience is perhaps unavoidable in biographical work, sentimentality approaching schmaltz creeps into Hill’s descriptions of Arendt’s New York residences as “refuges overflowing with wine and liquor” and her prose becomes purple when she imagines that “cigarette smoke and laughter conferred an opulence to an otherwise unfashionable green sofa worn threadbare from hours of conversation over Campari and Chesterfields.” (xviii). For Arendt, romanticism is politically dangerous because it nurtures immature attraction to fantasy rather than sober willingness to face reality. More off-putting is Hill’s matter-of-fact catalogue of the locations where Arendt’s probable sexual encounters with Heidegger occurred: “They met in his office, in the woods, in the meadows, in her tiny attic apartment where she kept a pet mouse.” (xxiv). Meant to convey old-world charm, this gloss reads as titillating cringe. What Remains does not mention that Arendt was 18 years old when she met Heidegger, while he was twice her age, famous, anti-Semitic, and married. By contrast, Young-Bruehl’s definitive biography reports that keeping the affair a secret “isolated and estranged” Arendt from her peer group in Marburg.Footnote ¹⁴ By summer 1925, her ruminations were “full of anguish” and her “despairing mood” made her long for death.Footnote ¹⁵ Hill provides minimal context for the poems she dates to this era, despite announcing her choice to override Arendt’s efforts to keep them private. Readers should be cautious about putting great stock in the dating schema of the table of contents, which has discrepancies with Young-Bruehl’s definitive biography.Footnote ¹⁶

While this curious volume does not achieve the status of “a landmark literary event” that its marketing materials proclaim,Footnote ¹⁷ it effectively reminds us that poetic sensibility can be an asset for comprehending the works Arendt considered fit to appear in public.

Mark Aloysius takes a more traditional exegetical approach to Arendt. Based on the author’s dissertation, Arendt and Augustine considers the “movement” between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa , focusing on Arendt’s evolving critique of Augustinian worldlessness (5). Addressed primarily to theologians, Arendt and Augustine will be a bit arcane for general readers. Still, this carefully argued book situates Arendt as a thinker with global appeal, deepening scholars’ appreciation of the degree to which her intellect was shaped by interdisciplinary humanism (10). Aloysius reminds us that Arendt was not exceptional in this regard; theology in general and Augustine in particular were widely studied by German philosophers and intellectual historians in the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, Aloysius insists that Arendt makes a unique contribution to contemporary theology by theorizing concern for the secular world as love.

Much as Jean Elshtain did, Aloysius seeks to read Arendt and Augustine not as foils but as philosophical soulmates who “have much more in common than the glaring differences pointed out by contemporary scholars.” (xiii). Aloysius reads Arendt’s lifelong engagement with Augustine as a meditation on displacement that emphasizes the creation of new experiences of home after permanent loss. He describes Arendt as “the most significant thinker concerning the effects of the loss of a homeland on refugees and stateless persons” and interprets her as drawing her “most treasured insights into politics … from the stories of the wandering of refugees.” (xi). Aloysius sees Arendt as not only a cosmopolitan thinker but a person attuned to human suffering around the world. Like Augustine, she is preoccupied by liminal space, what she variously refers to as the in-between, abyss, or the no-longer-and-not-yet. In theological terms, this is the desert, an image Arendt begins drawing on in her dissertation as she thinks through worldlessness and worldliness. At the core of Arendt and Augustine’s ideas is a shared “acknowledgement of the fragility of the human condition and of mutual dependence on each other as fellow refugees” (xiii).

Political theorists will be especially interested in Aloysius’s claim that Arendt’s engagement with Augustine offers a path toward the renewal of the world after “the degradation of the political” (1). Many interpreters focus on Arendt’s admonitions about the loss of the common world but fewer dwell on her resources for transforming that loss. Aloysius describes movement between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa as paramount for transformative renewal, defining Arendt’s approach as “diastolic”—“akin to the rhythm of the heart.” (xii). A central claim in Arendt’s Augustine is that Arendt’s concept of the political requires “a pedagogy of desiring/loving and thinking which parallels Augustine’s treatment of the pedagogy of the citizen” (1)—though Aloysius never makes the meaning of this parallel entirely clear. In contrast to Hill and Kim, Aloysius says little about Arendt’s biography, confining his sketch to a paragraph in the first chapter in which he finds room to note that “For a time, Arendt was also Heidegger’s lover.” (10). Aloysius omits details relevant to his topic, such as Arendt’s time studying theology with Catholic priest Romano Guardini, a future critic of Nazi ideology who was forced out of his position as Chair of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Berlin in 1939.Footnote ¹⁸

Aloysius’s discussion of Augustinian mystagogy is less intelligible than it should be for readers outside theology. Rooting Arendt’s notion of politics in “pedagogy” will be a tough sell for interpreters who consider her “the political thinker who demurs from instructing anybody.”Footnote ¹⁹ One gets the sense that pedagogy is not synonymous with education, but Aloysius leaves the term underspecified. This is unsatisfying given Arendt’s view that “education can play no part in politics … Whoever wants to educate adults really wants to act as their guardian and prevent them from political activity.”Footnote ²⁰ It is likewise surprising that Aloysius presents Arendt as trying “to form citizens who can look beyond their own limited self-interest, think from a broader standpoint, engage in discourse with other political actors, overcome conflict, and act for the common good” (1). Aspects of this description cut against Arendt’s agonist reputation, earned through critiquing the common good tradition’s tendency to turn the political community into an organic entity that effaces plurality.

Following Arendt in resisting the false choice between acting and thinking, Aloysius applies plurality and love of the world to his vision for the future of the Catholic Church. “Far too little attention is given to the violence that is inherent in a certain vision of ecclesiology and in practices which preclude difference,” he writes in the book’s conclusion (192).

David D. Kim’s Arendt’s Solidarity is an ambitious undertaking. Kim previously authored Cosmopolitan Parables: Trauma and Responsibility in Contemporary Germany which contends that “postcolonial guilt and postwar legacy after unification” reveal “repeatedly failed liberal obligations to freedom, equality, and justice” in the context of Holocaust remembrance.Footnote ²¹ His second book shifts from memory to anticipation: “Instead of waiting for the next tide of hatred, how do we forge a coalition that does not treat political negotiations as zero-sum calculations, but acknowledges equity, inclusivity, and diversity as necessary conditions for community?” (xix). Because Arendt is so often invoked by coalition builders, investigation of her ideas is paramount, Kim argues.

In short order, Kim contests Arendt’s anti-authoritarian bona fides, arguing that her work contributes to pernicious narratives of American righteousness encoded with white supremacist biases. Arendt’s Solidarity depicts its subject wrestling with the implications of solidarity from her dissertation to her final writings, particularly as she theorizes plurality. Building on work on race in Arendt’s thought by Richard King,Footnote ²² Anne Norton,Footnote ²³ Patricia Owens,Footnote ²⁴ and Kathryn Sophia Belle,Footnote ²⁵ Kim asks why Arendt’s “solidarity with the American Republic” outweighed her solidarity with people who were persecuted and oppressed by that same republic, both during her lifetime and in the nation’s past (141).

Arendt’s Solidarity is especially worthwhile for its contribution to debates surrounding humanistic methodology. In the introduction, Kim clarifies that his book “works within an interdisciplinary, multilingual, transcultural framework,” which prompts him to unearth Arendt’s “responses to complex problems” as they arise in “journal articles, notes for public lectures, diary entries, and conversations with friends” in addition to her well-known works (31). Daringly, on more than one occasion Kim builds his argument around what Arendt does not say. For instance, chapter 3 constructs an interpretation about the impossibility of solidarity between Jewish and non-Jewish German émigrés on the basis of Arendt’s lack of reply to Thomas Mann’s letter about “The Jew as Pariah.” Expecting that this could appear far-fetched based on the evidence at hand, Kim avers: “We need different sensibilities for archival gaps, unsaid discords, and implicit biases.” (95). A strength of this approach is the view it affords of the web of relationships that surrounded Arendt; she was not an isolated thinker. Still, Kim’s method will dissatisfy readers who prefer definitive textual evidence.

Of the three books reviewed here, Kim’s is the most invested in forming conclusions about Arendt’s character in order to assess her philosophical legacy. Her ambivalence about solidarity makes Arendt not merely mistaken but also blameworthy in Kim’s eyes, stunted by “ingrained racism” (13). Arendt’s shortcomings arise not so much from flaws in her major concepts, such as natality, plurality, and action, but from personal failings: “after her arrival in the United States, [Arendt] never marched in the street, joined a picket line, or gave a rousing speech before a revolutionary crowd” (12–13). Kim attributes Arendt’s “color blindness and settler colonial mentality” to the privilege she enjoyed in the United States as a highly educated “white passing” woman, despite her “thick German accent” (240).

One of Kim’s most serious allegations is that Arendt’s “racist beliefs find their way into a hierarchical formulation of citizenship” (151). He points to Arendt’s notorious “Reflections on Little Rock” to argue that, against her reputation as an egalitarian, Arendt advocated for a two-tiered society of white privilege that disenfranchised people of color. That essay, which Arendt admitted was “a failure to understand” in a 1965 letter to Ralph Ellison,Footnote ²⁶ has received extensive well-deserved criticism since its publication. However, positioning it as a synecdoche for Arendt’s worldview is a tall order that Arendt’s Solidarity does not fulfill.Footnote ²⁷ Similarly, Kim’s argument calls for a more sustained reading of Arendt’s “Civil Disobedience” (1970) where she appears to share his views about the exclusionary nature of “the original consensus universalis of the American Republic.”Footnote ²⁸

Exaggerated conclusions, factual errors, and ad hominem argumentation detract from the portions of Arendt’s Solidarity that are informative and rigorously argued. Kim faults Arendt for accepting “a glorified historical narrative of the Founding Fathers, such that their main motivation for declaring independence from British monarchy—the preservation of chattel slavery—disappeared from view” (205), echoing the most controversial claim of The 1619 Project as incontrovertible fact.Footnote ²⁹ Careful readers will spot the erroneous inclusion of John Adams in a list of slave owners (234). Moments like these interfere with more serious critique that a “sanitized, bloodless” (206) narrative of immigration shaped Arendt’s perceptions of US racial politics in general, and her judgments about Black Power and school integration specifically.

Bizarre personal insults pepper the book, giving the impression that Kim simply does not like Arendt as a person. “Owing to the rise of National Socialism on the heels of the Great Depression, [Arendt] quickly lost her self-absorbed, philosophical aloofness”, he writes (25). The endnote for this claim references Arendt’s discussion of ancient philosophy in private pre-war correspondence with a friend; no rationale is provided to explain why discussing intellectual interests would merit being labeled “self-absorbed” and “aloof.” Despite calling Arendt “a trailblazer” for pursuing philosophical study (59), Kim insists that “Arendt followed in the footsteps of her professors—all of them men…” (59), all but suggesting that she was responsible for the lack of gender diversity in the pre-war German academy. Complementing Kim’s putdowns is frequent use of the outdated, gendered, and arguably derisive term “Jewess” to refer to Arendt (39, 61, 129, inter alia ). For a book that equates cultural competency with antiracism this is ironic. Surely no offense is meant—though Kim rejects as “facile” scholarly perspectives that extend Arendt the same charity (207).

The most valuable contribution of Arendt’s Solidarity is Kim’s distillation of Arendt’s intellectual biography. Chapter 2 is exemplary, tracing how Arendt’s views about solidarity, pariahdom, and assimilation grew out of her study of Rahel Varnhagen, laying the groundwork for future theory. Kim challenges narratives, even Arendt’s own, that 1933 initiated a radical break in her theoretical orientation. Also fascinating is Kim’s partial reconstruction of a 1967-Theatre for Ideas panel in which Arendt deliberated with Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, and others about violence and political action. It is unfortunate that Kim does not closely analyze Arendt’s comments (only Cruise O’Brien’s are rendered verbatim) since she appeared to share his disdain for US interventionism, commenting: “American attitudes are known as ‘moralistic’ all over the world; in this country we seem not to be aware of the seriousness of this reproach.”Footnote ³⁰ Relatedly, it is a pity that Kim does not develop his provocative observation that “Rahel Varnhagen could be read as a precursor of [the book] Black Marxism,” a 1983 critique of racial capitalism by Cedric Robinson (85). Indeed, Arendt’s Solidarity would be improved by a much deeper engagement with Arendt’s critiques of Marx and Marxism, as well as the extensive secondary literature on identity, alterity, and difference.Footnote ³¹

Despite interpretive overreach, Arendt’s Solidarity is a worthwhile read. Yet, given all that political theory, intellectual history, and cultural studies can still learn from one another, Kim’s analysis misses an opportunity for deeper and more productive exchange.

Hill, Aloysius, and Kim provoke us to consider how extensive our pictures of Arendt’s inner life ought to be as we evaluate her theoretical relevance. Their books remind us that Arendt was a person in search of understanding—not a secular saint or political prophet whose writing holds all of the answers we might desire to endure uncertainty.