Hannah Arendt's Ambiguous Storytelling

Through an original interpretation of Hannah Arendt's historiography, Marcin Moskalewicz reveals an under-acknowledged philosophy of history in her vast and variegated oeuvre. Moskalewicz convincingly expounds Arendt's wrestling with the most important debates for historical theorists in how we represent the past.In this study, the key to understanding the fragmentary thought of Hannah Arendt is through the speculative and critical dimensions of the philosophy of history. Tracing her engagement with the idealistic and materialistic philosophies of history via Kant and Marx situates her own position and speaks to the distinction between theory and philosophy in her historiography. Methodological presuppositions and the consequences of scientific thinking are essential in the history of totalitarian states, which this study connects to Arendt's writings on totalitarianism. Reading her approach as 'fragmentary historiography', the aesthetic project she was committed to reveals itself as the only credible methodological response to the existence of totalitarianism, underlined by an argument that makes a novel contribution to Arendt scholarship.