This is poor work. Are Arendt’s ideas so acclaimed yet so dangerous that her reputation demands dismantling? Only belatedly is it revealed that “Why Arendt Matters,” by longtime advocate Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, stung the author into action. Had he organized his article around analyzing that study’s claims, pitting Arendt’s strengths against her weaknesses in organized fashion, it could have given his critique structure. Instead (to adopt a term used to sideswipe Isaiah Berlin) it “waffles.” All critics are named, but only two “devotees”: why did the editor not require all sources to be specified? By testimony cited here, Arendt never set herself up as a “philosophical hero”; she is known for one thing---the concept of “the banality of evil,” examined in “Eichmann in Jersualem.” Mary McCarthy was so close a friend that Arendt asked her to see two posthumous books through the press, “Thinking” and “Willing,” with notes for a concluding volume, “Judging,” and any just judgment on Arendt’s achievement must address these works. But the author consistently shirks the hard task of comprehending another human being. (Why, for instance, was “loneliness” so integral to her thought?) Surprise is expressed that, after the passage of ten years, Arendt’s view of human nature changed: imagine that. (A good example of “reversible criticism”: had her ideas not changed, she would have been faulted for that too.) Such casual writing and argumentation might do in a blog, but not a journal of record. (“Eichmann” is “cut from another cloth; it is lucid and hard-hitting.” Block those dead metaphors.) This student’s professor should have returned the paper for a thorough rewrite.