Roy Tsao

This proposal is for the completion of a book-length study of the political thought of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), one of the leading political philosophers of the 20th century. This study seeks to provide a comprehensive account of the evolution of Arendt's thought from her emigration to the US in 1941 to the end of her life, concentrating on her ongoing philosophical engagements with such thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger. The project combines philosophical analysis with close textual study of Arendt's published and unpublished writings. Along with archival sources, the study makes extensive use of an important collection of Arendt's notebooks(running from 1950 to 1973) that had been largely inaccessible to scholars until very recently.