Hannah Arendt among the Cold War Liberals.

The article focuses on situating Hannah Arendt within the intellectual milieu of Cold War liberalism, arguing that despite her own rejection of the liberal label, she shared key premises and concerns with prominent Cold War liberals such as Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and Jacob Talmon. Both Arendt and these liberals broke with earlier nineteenth-century liberalism by repudiating its emancipatory and perfectionist ideals, instead emphasizing limits on state power and skepticism toward collective emancipation, especially amid the global context of decolonization. Arendt's political thought, while distinct in its emphasis on creative political action and a neo-Roman republicanism, aligned with Cold War liberals in their racialized skepticism of universal freedom, restricting genuine emancipation largely to Western and Jewish contexts—most notably through Zionism—while dismissing or marginalizing non-white nationalist movements. The article highlights Arendt's and Cold War liberals' shared hierarchical assumptions about freedom's geography, their critique of historicism and progressivism, and their central role in shaping postwar liberalism's intellectual and political boundaries.