Some Arendtian critiques I'd like to work on.

Arendt's critique of Marx

... can be summed up in these two excerpts, one referring to the problem of labor, the other referring to the problem of history:

To put it another way: while others were concerned with this or that right of the laboring class, Marx already foresaw the time when, not this class, but the consciousness that corresponded to it, and to its importance for society as a whole, would decree that no one would have any rights, not even the right to stay alive, who was not a laborer. The result of this process of course has not been the elimination of all other occupations, but the reinterpretation of all human activities as laboring activities....

For Hegel, thinking historically, the meaning of a story can emerge only when it has come to an end. End and truth have become identical; truth appears when everything is at its end, which is to say when and only when the end is near can we learn the truth. In other words, we pay for truth with the living impulse that imbues an era, although of course not necessarily with our own lives.

-- from here.

It just occurred to me that anyone who quotes Marx but doesn't know Hegel, doesn't really know the full implications of Marx.

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Arendt's view of 20th century totalitarianism

... as an evil that surpasses our traditional moral standards

The thread of our tradition, in the sense of a continuous history, broke only with the emergence of totalitarian institutions and policies that no longer could be comprehended through the categories of traditional thought. These unprecedented institutions and policies issued in crimes that cannot be judged by traditional moral standards, or punished within the existing legal framework of a civilization whose juridical cornerstone had been the command Thou shalt not kill.

I think that this element in Arendt may address what I perceive to be a weakness in Levinas. Levinas appears to place the locus of ethics only in the indvidual subject. However, if we admit to the possiblity of "structural sin," then is it not also possible to speak of a structural ethics? Levinas does not appear to address that.

Leninist Marxism tried to but ended up with a "structural ethics" that goes against the ethics of the individual subject.

We return again to Ricoeur's problem of the socius and the neighbor.