Thinking writing doing – Doing Politics

2.1 Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) studied philosophy in Marburg with Martin Heidegger, in Freiburg with Edmund Husserl and in Heidelberg with Karl Jaspers. She wrote her doctorate on the concept of love in St Augustine, and began work on a biography of the early nineteenth-century Jewish intellectual Rahel Varnhagen. She was active in left-wing and Zionist circles […]

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2.2 Erving Goffman

Erving Goffman (1922-1982) grew up in Manitoba, and worked briefly for the National Film Board of Canada before graduating in Sociology from Toronto. He went to graduate school in Chicago, though he did his fieldwork on Unst, in the Shetland islands: the observations he made in the hotel there formed the basis of his PhD […]

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2.3 Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin worked freelance, as an independent scholar. As a young man, he was President of the Free Students’ Union in Berlin; he was involved in the radical political journal Die Aktion. He thought of himself as a literary critic, publishing essays on Goethe and Hölderlin, on the origins of German tragedy […]

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