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Abstract
Hannah Arendt's political theory is both provocative and deeply unsettling—reckoning with the decline of tradition that framed her life. While Arendt bemoans a loss of meaning in the modern world, the path out of our predicament remains ambiguous. This senior thesis aims to reconstruct an Arendtian politics based on action with others in the public sphere. Chapter One traces the motif of the mob that haunts Arendt's corpus, and argues that the mob is antipolitical because it eschews plurality and thinking, and hence, politics itself. Chapter Two utilizes The Human Condition to pinpoint Arendt's conception of the political and considers the implication of this conception for theorizing about politics. Chapter Three, based primarily on a review of J. Glenn Gray's correspondence with Hannah Arendt, offers a history of Hannah Arendt at Colorado College. My goal throughout is to grapple with the ambiguity between Arendt as a diagnostician and as a proponent. Put simply, my argument is that for Hannah Arendt, politics is action.