{"id":102657,"date":"2022-12-06T16:43:45","date_gmt":"2022-12-06T16:43:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.flad.pt\/meet-the-author-ive-never-opened-a-book-of-political-philosophy-like-that\/"},"modified":"2025-12-22T12:14:39","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T12:14:39","slug":"meet-the-author-ive-never-opened-a-book-of-political-philosophy-like-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.flad.pt\/en\/meet-the-author-ive-never-opened-a-book-of-political-philosophy-like-that\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Author: “I’ve never opened a book of political philosophy like that”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The discovery of The Human Condition as<\/em> if it opened up a new world. “I’ve never opened a book of political philosophy like that.” Since then, Samantha Rose Hill has devoted two decades to the study and teaching of Hannah Arendt, culminating in the authorship of a new biography of the German political thinker. A personal journey and an extensive work that the author presented on Meet the Author, at FLAD.<\/h3>\n

The starting point was the work Hannah Arendt \u2013 A Biography<\/em>, edited this year in Portugal by Rel\u00f3gio D’\u00c1gua. But the conversation has led those present to the path of its author, Samantha Rose Hill, since she began reading political philosophy at the age of 12, and the way she got involved in the fascinating world of Hannah Arendt, a disconcerting, controversial thinker who remains deeply present.<\/p>\n

As a political scientist, she was always told to focus on the authors’ work and not on their lives. But Hannah Arendt changed the way she saw political philosophy. “In someone like Hannah Arendt, we can’t write about the work without writing about her life,” the author said.<\/p>\n

So when she accepted the challenge of writing a biography about the political thinker of the 20th century, she devoted herself to trying to understand her life as best as she could. In between, some gaps remain unfilled, including the three months Hannah Arendt lived in Lisbon, while fleeing a France invaded by Nazi Germany, bound for the United States, where she lived the rest of her life.<\/p>\n

Her work remains present, and controversial, as it was in the last century. From her concept of love of the world, to the Banality of Evil she coined with the reporting of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel, and how the social has become a tradable commodity in modernity, resulting in a loss of freedom.<\/p>\n

If you haven’t had a chance to watch it live, you can see the full conversation here:<\/p>\n