Hannah Arendt's Approach to the Social Sciences

German Historicism, Functionalism, and Behaviorism

Abstract

This article intends to carry out an analysis of Hannah Arendt's approach to Social Sciences, aiming to understand the continuities and disjunctions in her thinking from the 1930s until the 1969 seminar. For that, the argument is divided into three parts, namely: I. The problem of the conditions of political theory in Hannah Arendt's formative period: Karl Mannheim's historicism and sociology of knowledge; II. Political Theory and Social Sciences: the phenomenon of the socialization of the political and the functionalism of the social sciences in Arendt's thought from the 1940s to the seminar of 1969.