The aim of this text is to examine how Seyla Benhabib recovers the arendtian concept of broad-based mentality to disrupt the radicalisation of the debate between communarists and liberals, to counter the antagonism between contextualism and universalism, and at the same time to correct the rationalistic excesses it detects in Habermas. In doing so, I would like to clarify how Hannah Arendt inspire Benhabib in the formulation of his theory of interactive universalism, more specifically when rethinking universalism in the face of neo-aristolic objections of decontextualisation.