The Common Life: <em>Lebenswelt </em>and Individual in the Political Thought of Arendt and Heidegger

<p>This dissertation argues that the political thought of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt is best understood in terms of two fundamental components: namely, a social ontology of the <i>Lebenswelt </i>(or life-world) as well as a normative conception of the individual person. The argument is primarily oriented around the texts of Heidegger and Arendt yet engages significantly with their intellectual <i>milieu </i>in order to resolve interpretive dilemmas.I therefore argue that the work of these two authors can be best understood when seen in the light of philosophical movements such as <i>Lebensphilosophie</i>, phenomenology, and German <i>Existenzphilosophie</i> as well as alongside authors such as Wilhelm Dilthey, George Simmel, Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Karl Jaspers. Through this historical-contextual approach, one can see the systematicity of both Arendt and Heidegger’s political thought with greater clarity: both see politics as the practice of properly integrating an authentic individual into a common world of shared social meanings (defined similarly by both).Moreover, once the internal logic of their argument is clarified, I propose that the difference in Heideggerian and Arendtian political thought is primarily due to their different understandings of what constitutes an individual’s ‘selfhood’ or ‘personhood’.</p>