From Situating the self: gender, community and postmodernism in contemporary ethics (1992), we know that SeylaBenhabib answers Habermas’ excesses and the limits of the modern universalist tradition with a reinterpretation of the Arendtian conception of “enlarged thought”. In this article, I propose to show that Arendt’s presence in Benhabib’s thought is even more radical than it seems at first, because the author of The human condition is at the root of Benhabib’s theoretical project, guiding her in her philosophical confrontation with tradition at her first major work,Critique, norm, and utopia: a study of the foundations of Crítical theory(1986). My interpretive hypothesis is that the central thesis of this book, according to which Crítical theory is haunted by the philosophy of the subject, bears the marks of Arendt’s criticism to Western political philosophy.
Hannah Arendt; Seyla Benhabib; Philosophy of the Subject; Political Philosophy; Plurality