Arendt comes by her cloudiness honestly. She was the student - indeed, the lover - of Martin Heidegger, the German existentialist who, as one critic quipped, turned the fact of death itself into a professional secret for philosophers. While her liaison with Heidegger has given rise to much high-level gossip - in today's university, Herr Doktor Heidegger's affair with a stunning 18-year-old student would be even more outrageous than his Nazi sympathies - her intellectual loyalties are more the issue. She never conceptually broke with Heidegger.

In fact a semi-religious Heideggerian idiom of angst, loneliness and rootlessness informs her work. The masses that supported Hitler (and Stalin) did not suffer from unemployment or hunger, but from "loneliness". Totalitarianism "bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man".

¶ 5:58 AM