In her 1954 lecture “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought,” Hannah Arendt gave members of the American Political Science Association a tour d’horizon of philosophical developments on the Continent after World War II. After contrasting Plato and Aristotle's contemplative devaluation of the “realm of human affairs” with the partial recovery of its dignity implicit in Hegel's concept of history, Arendt surveys the responses of Catholic thinkers (like Gilson and Maritain), French existentialists (Sartre, Camus, Malraux and Merleau-Ponty), and, finally, her own teachers, Jaspers and Heidegger, to events that have “brought out and made public a deeprooted crisis of Western civilization of which the non-academic philosophers have been aware long before it assumed a political reality” (EU, 431).

In Arendt's estimation, the advantage the French and German existentialists had over Hegel—and, indeed, their Catholic counterparts—is that they have, in Heidegger's words, “left the arrogance of all Absolutes behind us.” Arendt glosses this statement as follows:

It should come as no surprise that Arendt, her respect for thinkers like Gilson and Maritain notwithstanding, has little patience for their call for a “re-subordination of the temporal-political realm to the spiritual, in which the spiritual can be represented by the Catholic Church” (EU, 434). But she is equally skeptical of the French existentialist tendency to “look […] to politics for the solution of philosophic perplexities that in their opinion resist solution or even adequate formulation in purely philosophic terms” (EU, 437). Their “activist or radical humanism” attempts to overcome the “absurdity” of the human condition—its finitude, contingency and lack of place in a meaningful order of Being or History—by “living as though the limitations of [the human] condition did not exist.”