Margaret Canovan
With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came
into the world. . . . It is in the nature of beginning that some-
thing new is started which cannot be expected. (Below, p. 177)
I
Hannah Arendt is preeminently the theorist of beginnings. All
her books are tales of the unexpected (whether concerned with
the novel horrors of totalitarianism or the new dawn of revolu-
tion), and reflections on the human capacity to start something
new pervade her thinking. When she published The Human Con-
dition in 1958, she herself sent something unexpected out into
the world, and forty years later the book's originality is as striking
as ever. Belonging to no genre, it has had no successful imitators,
and its style and manner remain highly idiosyncratic. Although
Arendt never tried to gather disciples and found a school of
thought, she has been a great educator, opening her readers' eyes
to new ways of looking at the world and at human affairs. Often
the way she sheds light into neglected corners of experience is
by making new distinctions, many of them threefold, as if con-
ventional dichotomies were too constricting for her intellectual
imagination. The Human Condition is crammed with distinctions:
between labor, work, and action; between power, violence, and
strength; between the earth and the world; between property and
wealth; and many more, often established through etymological
explorations. But these distinctions are linked to a more contro-
versial way of challenging contemporary truisms. For (in what is
surely the most unexpected feature of the book) she finds in an-
cient Greece an Archimedean point from which to cast a critical