Welcoming Niklas Plaetzer

Announcing the newest member of the Hannah Arendt Consortium

HAC Is pleased to welcome Niklas Plaetzer, a Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge, as the newest member of our consortium.

Niklas received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago and also holds a French doctorate in Political Theory from Sciences Po Paris. His research focuses on the history of political thought and democratic theory, with particular interests in nineteenth-century French and Brazilian republicanism. His book project, The Plebeian International: Traditions of the Vanquished in Radical Republican Thought, reconstructs an Atlantic tradition of plebeian republicanism (ca. 1830s–1880s) and its approaches to oligarchy, counter-power, and international order.

Niklas also has a long-standing interest in the writings of Hannah Arendt, in particular her institutional thought beyond the tradition of nation-state sovereignty. His work on Arendt has appeared in Political Theory, Modern Intellectual History, and the volume Creolizing Hannah Arendt (eds. Neil Roberts and Marilyn Nissim-Sabat), among other venues. His review of Über Palästina (ed. Thomas Meyer) is forthcoming in Arendt Studies.

As a member of the Hannah Arendt Consortium, Niklas hopes to continue recovering Arendt as a thinker of international order, and in particular to explore ways of thinking “with and against Arendt” about the revival of imperialist warfare and what she called, in a 1945 essay, “a fascist International.” This work examines Arendt’s own relationship to anti-imperialist politics, including her little-known engagement with the Cuban Revolution—the subject of a lecture Niklas will give in Cambridge this term—as well as her interest in projects for multinational institutional orders after the breakdown of the Habsburg Empire, especially in the work of the Austromarxist theorist Otto Bauer. He also hopes to build new dialogues between the Hannah Arendt Consortium at Cambridge and communities of political theorists in the Global South, particularly through collaborations with partners in Brazil and the Caribbean Philosophical Association.