The attack of the blob: Hannah Arendt's concept of the social

This study seeks to resolve paradox of Hannah Arendt's ideas; that she intended her work to liberate and empower and to restore our capacity for concerted political action whilst at same time developed a metaphor of the social as an alien, all consuming monster appearing from outer space to gobble up human freedom. Arendt blames it - not us - for our public paralysis and depoliticization. text traces Arendt's notion of the social from her earliest writings to The Human Condition and beyond, interpreting each work in its historical and personal context. answer considers language and rhetoric, psychology and gender, authority and nature of political theory itself. There are repeated challenges on established interpretations of Arendt's project, including role in it of her teacher and lover Martin Heidegger and her supposed neglect of economic concerns.