The first indications of the reception of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition

Abstract

The object of this work is to present some of the many critical reviews that The Human Condition —written by Hannah Arendt and published in New York in 1958— received during that year, in 1959 and in 1960, both in the academic environment and in specialized journalism. Later on, it seems that this work, that falls between the significant controversies of its predecessor The origins of Totalitarianism and its successor Eichman in Jerusalem, was received with less animosity, generating instead bewilderment and some perplexity. We found a total of eighteen reviews, most of them published in 1958 and 1959, and in a lesser amount in 1960. The publications that contained them were mostly academic in nature and generally well-known, and written mainly by well-known professors and intellectuals. We have selected some of them, providing interpretation pointers in order to finalize the hypothesis that the almost generalized misunderstanding of the Arendtian work was due to the state of science and the prevailing political theory in the United States with a predominance of positivist and behavioral mindsets.