Balderdash or Hyperbole? Canovan's Arendt.

Cambridge U. Press Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought by Margaret Canovan opens with this gem:

Hannah Arendt is one of the great outsiders of twentieth-century political thought, at once strikingly original and disturbingly unorthodox.

In fairness to Arendt I would like to say that much of her thesis on technique in The Human Condition, Chapter VI, need not be traced to her master and lover, Heidegger - it can be taken from Husserl's Krisis.  But some insist that this Husserl material itself came from Heidegger.  Some of the Husserl passages seem closer to the Arendt text, so I will get them up in Curl markup over at http://phil.aule-browser.com/ along with links to browse the Canovan quote in Google Books (she wrote the preface to the posthumous second edition of The Human Condition.)

While I'm trying to be fair: the buffoonery of a Blücher lecture can be traced almost word-for-word to a paragraph in Max Scheler's Man's Place in the Cosmos.  Only Blücher did not see fit to tell his Bard undergrads that he was quoting Scheler - if his bombast can be termed 'quoting'. Call it 'playing the part' of the professor. So I will try to get around to posting that, as well.

Arendt and Blücher considered the Americans to be less than their intellectual equals - caveat emptor as ever. So few pronouncements are new under the sun - or any critical light.