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This essay surveys the theme of solidarity in the respective works of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hannah Arendt. Recent discourses in continental political philosophy have arrived at an impasse regarding solidarity. On the one hand, solidarities are important for galvanizing historically oppressed peoples against dominant discourses. On the other hand, solidarities that impose similarities in advance run the risk of absorbing difference and becoming exclusionary.Gadamer and Arendt, each in different manners, promise a distinctive approach to discourses on solidarity through their emphasis on the existential concern for human finitude. Both suggest that insofar as we are finite, we are bound together not by familiarity and sameness but rather by shared vulnerability, finding help with this vulnerability by remaining open to the difference and otherness that is always at stake in communal life. In this, Gadamer and Arendt open new paths to theorizing collectives in ways that embrace and defend difference rather than rejecting it. Moreover, both remind us of the urgency of such a notion of solidarity for responding to what, in allusion to Arendt, we may be inclined to call the dark times in which we live.

This article examines Hannah Arendt’s concern for remembrance in political life in light of contemporary discourses regarding the memory of slavery and colonization in the African diaspora. Arendt’s blindness to questions of exclusion within this context has given way to a set of critical debates in Arendt studies concerning the viability of her political project. In this paper, I give further contour to these debates by considering Arendt’s discourse on revolution in light of an analysis of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). In so doing, my aim is to deepen and challenge Arendt’s understanding of the revolutionary tradition that she believes we are responsible for remembering and appropriating anew in political life today.

Few topics in Arendt's corpus have garnered more attention than her analysis of the dangers inherent in Adolf Eichmann's inability to think. Eichmann revealed what Arendt describes as the banality of evil, a new kind of evil born not of monstrous or demonic motives but of thoughtlessness (Arendt, 2006, p. 54). 1 Yet, while Eichmann made clear the urgent need we have to think, scholars remain at odds as to whether Arendt succeeds in demonstrating that thinking itself has a role to play in preventing evildoing (Bernstein, 2000;Biser, 2014;Formosa, 2016). My aim is to give new orientation to these debates by reconsidering Arendt's critical reception of Martin Heidegger in The Life of the Mind in relation to her claim that thinking must be understood terms of the quest for meaning rather than truth (Arendt, 1978, Vol. 1, p. 15). 2 By developing Arendt's emphasis on meaning this way, I argue that she introduces to thinking a distinctive capacity for critique, one that she takes to be absent in Heidegger and that helps to distinguish her conception of thinking in its ability to intervene in the dangers of thoughtlessness.