Dante in the margins of Hannah Arendt

The Action chapter of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition opens with a quotation from Dante’s Monarchia. Why does Arendt choose this exergue? Why does she open the discussion of the “political activity par excellence” and fulcrum of her reactivation of active life with a reference to an author who asserts the primacy of the speculative over the practical? Through a complex exegetical and critical-hermeneutical work, this article delves into Arendt’s reflection and articulates its discourse in three parts: 1. Margins and the Robber Quotation, which talks about the marginal position of Dante in Arendt’s work and the enigma of Dante’s quotation; 2. Dante as Philosopher of Active Life, where, with the help of Étienne Gilson, Arendt presents Dante as the philosopher who, while reaffirming the primacy of contemplative life over the active one, gave it an unusual dignity in medieval thought; 3. The Joy of Acting, which shows that, by referring to the passage from the Monarchia, Arendt derives some fundamental characteristics of action, namely, the intensification of the agent’s being and its revelatory function.