This essay considers the prominence of the word "movement," and of ideas of fluidity, displacement and mobility in different forms across Hannah Arendt's writings of the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that Arendt made significant use of uterature in order to make sense of a range of plitical movements, including Nazism, the student protest movement of the 1960s, and Black Power. She did so because she found political theory - and especially Marxist ideas of the state and of class interest — to be singularly incapable of making sense of the phenomenon of a political movement. Nazism was characterized, for Arendt, by an abandonment of any settled political ideology, as well as by a need to be perpetually on the move, and to move and displace those who were subject to its power. I argue that in the 1960s, Arendt drew attention to a different form of pliticcal movement — the motion that is accorded to political subjects by their emotions. I claim that this later argument prefigures more recent work in the field of emotion studies, while providing a model for a different understanding of an inter-disciplinary English studies, which is itself on the move.