Hannah Arendt became famous for her works "The Origins of Totalitarianism", "The Human Condition", and "Eichmann in Jerusalem". Yet her scholarly career began with an exploration of Saint Augustine's concept of caritas, or neighbourly love. Although she commissioned an English translation of her 1929 dissertation, written under the direction of Karl Jaspers and the influence of Martin Heidegger, and annotated and revised it extensively in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the English manuscript was never published. This study is a revised English translation of the work that incorporates Arendt's own substantial revisions of the original text and provides additional notes based on letters, contracts, and other documents as well as the recollections of Arendt's friends and colleagues during her later years. In an interpretive essay, the editors trace Arendt's characteristic mode of discourse to this dissertation, as she introduced concepts that came to resonate throughout her work: caritas, plurality, natality, memory, free will, and love of the world. They argue that the entire revised text is not only a study of neighbourly love and worldliness in relation to the possibility of free will, but also a phenomenological discussion of the social and moral origins of action in the public realm. Scott and Stark demonstrate how Arendt's early work on Augustine provides the key to her later critique of modernity. Her main works are filled with explicit and implicit Augustinian references: the question about the relevance of the neighbour; her conclusion that Augustinian philosophy is both out of, and engaged in, the world; and the path she followed to reach them, combining phenomenology with Christian existentialism, were essentially unchanged even in the context of New York in the early 1960s.

汉娜•阿伦特（Hannah Arendt，1906—1975) ，20世纪最具原创性的思想家、政治理论家之一，著有《极权主义的起源》《人的境况》等。早年于马堡和弗莱堡大学攻读哲学，师从海德格尔，后师从海德堡大学的雅斯贝尔斯，获哲学博士学位。1933年后流亡巴黎。1941年定居美国，先后在普林斯顿大学、哥伦比亚大学等开办讲座，还担任过芝加哥大学和纽约社会研究新学院的教授。

J.V.斯考特，本书编者，东密歇根大学政治学教授；J.C.斯塔克，本书编者，美国西顿•霍尔大学哲学教授。

译者王寅丽，华东师范大学哲学系副教授，译著有《当代法国哲学》《人的境况》《过去与未来之间》《多元现代性：一个斯堪的纳维亚经验的故事》；译者池伟添，华东师范大学哲学硕士。