E. P. Ashton had done an English translation, and Arendt was under contract to produce a final version-despite which, after some tinkering, she gave up on it. The plan of the dissertation was to present three parallel concepts of love in Augustine. Christian love, caritas, is a craving for God, unlike secular love, cupiditas , which craves for worldly fulfillment. The price paid for Caritas II , however, is a kind of isolation from the rest of humanity. This becomes clear in exploring the social dimension of this concept of love.
Human estrangement gives rise to a new togetherness in struggle against the world.
The reason one should love one's neighbor is that the neighbor is fundamentally one's equal and both share the same sinful past. This was the basic outline of the 1929 dissertation. It was a very different Hannah Arendt who returned to the dissertation after nearly forty eventful years. The main change she had undergone was political. The Arendt of 1929 had no interest in politics, while the Arendt of the 1960s was nothing if not political.