This book explores the influence of Hannah Arendt's and Leo Strauss' background in pre-World War II Germany on their perception of American democracy. The contributors analyze how their emigre experience both influenced their American work and also impacted on the formation of the discipline of political science in postwar Germany. Arendt's and Strauss' experiences thus aptly illustrate the transfer and transformation of political ideas in the World War II era.

This introduction to Hannah Arendt s political thinking, based on a very close reading of the most relevant texts, suggests that her core teaching culminates in a unique kind of political humanism. It consists of the disclosure of unique individual personalities in free public actions inspired by public principles. The full meaning of such principled actions and its actors emerges from an uneasy symbiosis between actors and their casts of judgmental spectators. But it is the free spectators of action who determine its possible meanings. Importantly, only such public meanings save humans from...