The "Subterranean Stream Of Western History"
Arendt and Levinas after Heidegger

What sort of a book is The Origins of Totalitarianism? One of Arendt's strongest defenders, Seyla Benhabib, writes that it is too "systematically ambitious and overinterpreted" to be strictly history, "too anecdotal, narrative and ideographic" for social science, and is "too philosophical" for political journalism.1 In this chapter I will argue that the work is not only, as others have argued, an act of storytelling, but also an attempt to reframe the stories we tell. I use the word "reframe" precisely because of its Heideggerian echoes. As Arendt's extraordinarily abstruse fable "Heidegger the Fox" suggests and as much scholarship has established, her intellectual relationship with Heidegger is complex. Her work is not simply developing or fi lling in a "Heideggerian politics" nor is she to be understood as a "left Heideggerian."