The Troubled Legitimation of Hannah Arendt in the German and Italian Intellectual Field: 1962–2015

The aim of the chapter is to compare Arendt’s reception in both the intellectual and academic fields of two European countries, Germany and Italy, which experienced similar transformations in correspondence with three global conjunctures of crises: the defeat of fascist regimes, the student protest in 1968, and the end of the cold war. The main goal is to understand to what extent these social and political moments of crisis had similar impacts on the rebirth and development of the social sciences and humanities in the two countries and, as a consequence, how they conditioned the ways in which Hannah Arendt has been received and eventually consecrated.