Hannah Arendt once said, when she was asked what her position was on the politics of left and right:

If there was one political thinker who radically rejected the terms of the cold war, according to Jeffrey Isaac, it was this author of The human condition, who believed in the power of human creativity to go beyond “a monologic politics that is incapable of projecting beyond the subject … a polarizing politics in which the Other becomes simply a projection of one's own obsessions and fears … epitomized by the mutual balance of terror and conformity.” For Arendt, politics is above all about difference and dissonance, the presence in the political arena of actors with alternative understandings and competing projects, the existence of “others from whom one cannot escape and with whom one must share the world,” and she believed that recognizing and respecting this otherness is central to genuine politics and free political life.