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Arendt's work appears to have focused primarily on the ways individuals and collectives could think and act in ways that escape the constraints and assumptions of the past which inhibit free ethical and imaginative possibilities, broadly speaking. Her experiences arose out of the tragedy and chaos of World War II and the holocaust, as an escaped Jewish woman to the United States.
From my reading at this point, she draws upon Kant, Heidegger, Socrates, and even Nietzsche's diagnoses, within various continental traditions, to develop novel perspectives grounded in Kant's Critique of Judgment, Socrates views on the polis and enlarged mentality through free men conversing with each other beyond the myopia of private lives (in contrast to what we think now of limiting politics so we can be free individuals), and Heideggerian critiques of rationality and technology.
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