Peter Gratton and Yasemin Sari
This book brings together some of the most significant thinkers writing today, all of whom are also specialists on Arendt. This book is not just an introduction to Arendt—though that it accomplishes—but it pushes Arendt’s work in new directions, such as considerations of climate change, science, feminism, and more, all while our writers remain eminently readable and engaging. We take up Arendt’s writings in three sections: first by looking at those who influenced her writings and how she read them, often changing how we read canonical authors; second by introducing each of her major books and how they can be reread today; and lastly by taking on the major topics and themes raised by Arendt’s voluminous writings. But let us break from the tedious pro forma academic introduction—the Table of Contents has told you what to expect before you got here—and get to the point: we put together this book because Arendt remains a vital and relevant thinker with whom we often agree and argue, but all in an era we could undoubtedly call, following the title of one of her books, “dark times.”
The present is always said to be one of crisis—Arendt herself lived through the Holocaust and the calamities of the Cold War—but there is little doubt that we are continuing the loss of the common world to which Arendt bore witness. Such a loss was already diagnosed by her in her considerations of the role of factual truths in relation to how we form opinions. Politics, for her, never had any grounding in an eternal truth, and in fact, the most fearsome political regimes are those that want to take away the ability of each of us to persuade others with our opinions in order that we hold to some truth of history, of some race, or what have you. A so-called “post-truth” era, then, only testifies to her prescient analyses of the ability of politics to make malleable what can in fact ground our common world.
Politics always occurs between two kinds of power: in the first, might is right and to the victors go the spoils, including the writing of history. Politics is performative in this respect: no God handed down borders for territories, and the truth is that power does create its own conditions on the ground. But politics is also about power in Arendt’s sense: words and deeds that persuade others to one’s side. Arendt’s view is that politics cannot be about truth, whether we mean one view of history or a vision of how things should be, since politics is about this trading of opinions or it will fall into violence.
Hence, we don’t live in a post-truth politics. The politics of right-wing nationalists across the globe very much believe in truths to which politics should adhere: market forces being the natural order of the world, while there are just inherent truths about who is of this nation and who is not. The danger is not a politics without truth but one with a clear adherence to a set of them. Facts, yes, are stubborn things, Arendt held, but to engage in politics is to give oneself over to the come-what-may of the promise of the new, of what has not come before, and is as foreign to the idea of politics being about making something great “again” as it is about a shared sameness enforced by the ugliest forms of violence all-too-visible to us in these dark times.
This is why Arendt, some forty years after her death and despite being a writer of her time, has never been so quoted and commented upon in the contemporary media. But the parts of Arendt used are often moralizing hand-waving about totalitarianism and its dangers, not the promise of politics described earlier. Arendt, as you will see, was a thinker of distinctions, and what we face today is not a repeat of the past but something new and, as political, previously unprecedented. We need to reread Arendt and use the tools she gave us to think this new world in which find ourselves, but to simply repeat her, to misapply her key terms (authority, violence, and most of all totalitarianism) is to do an injustice to the horrors of those who faced the holes of oblivion Nazism attempted to create, for example, and to presume history, and therefore politics, is merely a repeat of the past.
The future, when it arrives, is never a priori good, as previous generations of utopians believed, and the task of politics is not merely to catalogue facts and truths, as too many trite movies about journalists winning the day suggest. Every day, facts are reported, but the work of politics comes in activities—words and deeds—that little by little can build another world; without that, we are indeed lost and without hope. Politics is not about nostalgia for a past that never was, or a truth that must be brought into the world, but the very play of differences among and between us as we bicker, cajole, banter, and get infuriated in everyday forms of democratic activism. Those who want a politics of truth want us to be rid of this democratic messiness, which is a dream as old as Plato; and yet as long as human beings in the plural exist, there is no wishing such a politics away. Men, not a man, as Arendt would often say in the gendered language of her day, is what makes a world. Such, in any event, is the promise of politics for Arendt—a promise that some days appears as a dim, if not dim-witted, hope, but is ever possible given the human conditions of what Arendt called natality and our ability always to begin anew. As she puts it in On Revolution, one of her most important writings:
For political thought can only follow the articulations of the political phenomena themselves, it remains bound to what appears in the domain of human affairs; and these appearances, in contradistinction to physical matters, need speech and articulation, that is, something which transcends mere physical visibility as well as sheer audibility, in order to be manifest at all.1
To be sure, the authors in the volume take up the responsibility to articulate and understand better the political phenomena of our times, and in an effort to go beyond the “mere physical visibility” and the “sheer audibility” of such occurrences, this book makes a case for the relevance of Arendt’s thought, and to take up what we may call her invitation for a worldly care in thinking.
That is what these chapters consider, all in their different ways. Cogent and up to the moment we face (the weaponization of political lies, the rise of white nationalism, and so on), these chapters make clear Arendt’s relevance for not falling for the easy view that politics comes with a pre- given truth or, failing that, we are simply done for. Indeed, she was often clear of the courage and virtues needed to enter politics. This was not some nostalgia for Hellenic values, as some have claimed, but is what is needed politically today and every day.
Given the rise of social media, politics can often appear as mere social posturing, but to enter into the realm of the political is to face down damning criticism on all sides, and this is not new; it was ever thus. The stakes are high: our whole humanity is put in question whenever we enter politics, or just think, which Arendt deemed a most treacherous activity on its own since we are often forced to give up even our most precious preconceived notions. Anything else invites what Arendt feared most—political quietism—a retreat into our homes or private spaces as other people take command. And history, if it has shown anything, demonstrates that this is always a real possibility. Hence Arendt argues that we must act in words and deeds against the barbarity of a dark time in which populism is equaled with nationalistic jingoism hearkening back to a time that never was. If we are to have anything but a technocratic order or defer to a small set of rulers, we must practice our freedom and recover shared spaces where our words and deeds can matter—in short, where we can share a love of the world with one another.
Hannah Arendt’s lifetime (1906–75) was marked by some of the most consequential moments in the twentieth century. Hers was an engaged life, and she wrote in response not just to horrors of the world wars but also of promising events such as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the civil rights movement in the United States. Born Johanna (Hannah) Arendt in Hannover, East Prussia, into an old Jewish family from Königsberg, Arendt was raised as a largely secular Jew, though this did not always protect her from the virulent anti-Semitism of her classmates, just as it wouldn’t protect her and her family with the rise of the Third Reich in the 1930s. In 1922–3, Arendt began studying classics and Christian theology at the University of Berlin, moving to Marburg University in 1924, where she took up philosophy with Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). She would soon begin a romantic relationship with him, one that would reach its high mark during the period when Heidegger wrote his famous work, Being and Time, but which has become a focus of endless, even lurid, fascination for many of her biographers and commentators. She continued contact with Heidegger even after beginning her studies at the University of Heidelberg for a doctorate with Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), under whom she wrote a dissertation on love in the writings of St. Augustine, obtaining her doctorate in 1928. Her friendship with Heidegger—before moving to Berlin in 1929, she would drop anything to go see him upon his invitation—broke off in 1933, just as she left Germany for Paris due to the rise of the Nazis to power, but also as Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. His last letter to her in 1933 protested that rumors of his anti-Semitism were untrue (they weren’t), but this apparently reached deaf ears, since she would not have contact with him again until after the Second World War. Her friendship with Jaspers, however, was continuous, when not disrupted by mail stoppages during the war, and she engaged in their correspondence about matters both personal and deeply philosophical: the nature of philosophical dialogue, the kind of evil represented by the Third Reich, the kind of consequences that should face those who took part in the regime and what counts as political action.
Having completed her doctorate, in 1929, she moved from Heidelberg to Berlin, published her doctoral thesis, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, and then met and married the philosopher Günther Stern, with whom she fell in love. In Berlin, she began work on a biography of Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833), a Jewish writer and well-known Berlin salon host. She completed most of this biography by 1933, when the German political situation intervened. (The biography would be completed in 1957.) In the months after the Reichstag fire and Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Arendt first became politically active. Her apartment would become something of a stop on an underground railroad for Jews and Communists under threat of ending up in the hands of the Gestapo and looking for a way out of the country. Stern was one of those who faced getting caught up in the mass illegal arrests after the Reichstag fire, and he escaped for Paris, leaving Arendt, for the moment, behind. This would be a turning point for Arendt. As she later told Günther Gauss in a 1964 television interview, so many “ended up in the cellars of the Gestapo or in concentration camps. That was such a shock to me. Ever after I felt responsible,” she said, “I no longer felt I could be an observer.”
While still in Berlin, Arendt quietly carried out research for Kurt Blumenfeld, secretary general of the Zionist Federation of Germany, detailing the anti-Semitic documents of various German business and civic groups rushing to parrot the new regime’s propaganda about World Jewry. Her work was not clandestine enough: she was held under interrogation for eight days (she told the police only a parade of lies about her work and the various Jewish groups with which she was in contact), and not long after, along with her mother, she fled without travel documents to Prague (whose Jewish population ballooned as it was a stopping point for those escaping persecution), then Geneva, and then to Paris, where she would live as a stateless refugee for the remainder of the decade.
Arendt, whose relationship to Zionism would always be complicated, especially after the Eichmann affair of the 1960s, nevertheless heeded her mother’s advice: “If attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew,” not as a German citizen, not as “world-citizen, and not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.” Hence while in Paris she worked with Jewish legal aid groups and Zionist organizations helping to settle refugees safely in Palestine. While working with one these groups, Youth Aliyah, which rescued Jewish youth, she met Heinrich Blücher, who was to become her second husband four years after divorcing Stern in 1936. Her marriage to the former Communist Party member was to be a lifelong romance, friendship, and intellectual partnership until his death in 1970, though his several affairs over the years would wound her deeply. He came from a poor background and lacked Arendt’s elite education, but he would later become a memorable lecturer at the New School and later Bard College, and he held a formidable intellect he would need as co-host to many of Arendt’s salons in the 1950s and the 1960s. The two were very different: Arendt was the only daughter of a traditional bourgeois Jewish family and the former student of two of Germany’s most renowned philosophers, while Blücher grew up poor in Berlin and lacked her Jewish background. Largely self-taught—he had attended some night school but never gained a degree—he had made his living working in cabarets in the period before fleeing Germany. But he was politically active, and Arendt had only begun to think deeply about politics. Blücher, she would later tell Jaspers, taught her “to think politically and see historically.” In Paris, she also met fellow intellectuals in exile, including Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as well as the who’s who of French philosophical life: Albert Camus, Alexandre Kojève, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Wahl.
Arendt’s life would be upended again in May 1940, when she, along with other stateless persons, mostly Jews, was declared “enemy aliens” by the collaborationist Vichy government. She was taken to the Gurs concentration camp and separated from Blücher, who was placed in a camp outside of Paris. Her life in jeopardy, Arendt fled the camp in July, making her way to a safe house where Blücher had also found his way as a fugitive from his camp. After four months on the run, the couple was able to obtain emergency visas to the United States, though they still faced the constant risk of being caught by Vichy authorities. They first made their way to Lisbon, staying there several months, before gaining passage to the United States, arriving in May 1941. (Benjamin would take the same route not long after, but facing arrest at the French-Spanish border, he took his life.)
Despite being luckier than others in getting out of Europe, the family’s adjustment to New York City, which Arendt and Blücher would make their home for the rest of their lives, was difficult. They each had to learn English quickly, and in a small, often hot Bronx apartment, Blücher and his mother-in-law found it impossible to get along. His first employment was in a chemical factory. Arendt soon found employment writing a column for Aufbau, a leading German-language newspaper, where she wrote article after article highlighting the plight of European Jews and the frightful growing evidence of the Nazi’s Final Solution. She was uncomfortable, she wrote to Jaspers, writing for a German-language publication, but they needed the money and it gave her a forum to remind readers about the plight of the Jews who remained in Europe. As the German hold on the continent came to an end, Arendt worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission, which undertook efforts at reclaiming Jewish cultural artifacts stolen by the Nazis during their brief hold on much of Europe. In 1946, she became an editor at Schocken Books, where she would eventually champion and edit major publications of Walter Benjamin’s work into English, an effort that continues to bring some of his greatest works to readers in the English-speaking world. In 1950, she and Blücher became naturalized US citizens.
As if all of this were not enough, Arendt also began work on what is still one of the most important works on the rise of Nazism, her first in English, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which would come out in 1951. The book gained her wide renown: Cold Warriors found her inclusion of the Soviet Union in the last part of the book as further evidence of the need to fight Stalinism at home and abroad, while historians picked apart her historical claims about the rise of anti-Semitism and questioned the equation of the Nazi regime with the Soviet’s. Nevertheless, no one doubted that she was an incisive new voice on the American scene. It was also during these years that she would rekindle her correspondence with Heidegger and helped to rehabilitate his intellectual reputation by supporting the publication of his books in English, even finding translators for his magnum opus, Being and Time, published in English in 1962. Their continued relationship scandalized a number of Jews, who could never forgive Heidegger for his activities in the Nazi Party nor his silence about the Holocaust after it. Yet she made visits to him in Freiburg—at first made uncomfortable by Heidegger’s wife’s knowledge of their affair—and sent him her works, though she doubted he read them with any care, if at all.
A year after publishing The Origins of Totalitarianism, she received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship to study “The Totalitarian Elements of Marxism,” and she began lecturing at prestigious institutions across the United States on Marx and began her critique of the Western philosophical tradition, both of which would come to fruition in The Human Condition (1958). She was also a sought-after voice on contemporary events, with her writings often hard to categorize on the easy left-right split of the era, such as her notorious, if not tone-deaf, essay in 1959 for Dissent magazine critiquing the 1957 decision of the then US president Dwight Eisenhower to use the National Guard to integrate Central High School in Little Rock. Though worried that the weight of the political world was being put on the shoulders of children surrounded by armed soldiers, Arendt’s essay seemed oblivious to the larger racial context of segregation in America, given her own writings on anti-Semitism, and she chose not to republish it during her lifetime, as she did with numerous other contemporary essays. Indeed, in a letter dated July 29, 1965, she wrote to Ralph Ellison, the great novelist and essayist, that while she wasn’t bothered by what her “‘liberal’ friends or non-friends” had critiqued in her essay, an interview by him showed her just how misguided she had been: “I knew I was somehow wrong,” she wrote, “and thought that I hadn’t grasped the element of stark violence, of elementary, bodily fear in the situation.” Then she adds, “But your remarks seem to me so entirely right that I now see that I simply didn’t understand the complexities in the situation.”
The controversy over Little Rock, though, was nothing compared to one she would face as she turned in full to the question of evil in the wake of the capture by the Israeli Mossad of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in May 1960. A year later, she covered the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker magazine, publishing her report in five successive issues from February 16 —to March 16, 1963, and her account was subsequently published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Viking Press later that year. The controversy that her work sparked was not merely academic but deeply personal, and it still has not ceded near six decades after its publication. She lost many friendships, though the novelist Mary McCarthy stood by her and defended her in Partisan Review. The accusations against Arendt’s account were numerous and, as happens too often in supposed intellectual debates, were often made by people who refused to read the book itself: she naively accepted Eichmann’s self-presentation as a mere functionary who held no special hatred for the Jews; his bureaucratic cunning and monstrous deeds were in no way “banal”; she blamed the Jews, especially in her depiction of the Jewish Councils who managed the ghettos, for their own annihilation; she ignored those instances in which Jews did attempt revolts against their Nazi captures; she looked down upon the Israeli crowds and depicted them in anti-Semitic stereotypes; and she used a biting tone that reflected an unseemly lack of empathy for the victims of the Holocaust.
In response, partially to her excommunication by her friends, colleagues, and old-time comrades, and partially to the manner in which she was criticized—often with a vitriol not often seen in intellectual debates—she appended a “Note to the Reader,” dated June 1964, to the second edition of the book published in 1965. She wrote, “The factual record of the period in question has not yet been established in all its details, and there are certain matters on which an informed guess will probably never be superseded by completely reliable information.” In the “Postscript,” she describes the “campaign” against her:
Even before its publication, this book became both the center of a controversy and the object of an organized campaign. It is only natural that the campaign, conducted with all the well-known means of image-making and opinion-manipulation, got much more attention than the controversy, so that the latter was somehow swallowed up by and drowned in the artificial noise of the former. This became especially clear when a strange mixture of the two, in almost identical phraseology—as though the pieces written against the book (and more frequently against its author) came “out of a mimeographing machine” (Mary McCarthy)—was carried from America to England and then to Europe, where the book was not yet even available. And this was possible because the clamor centered on the “image” of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had never occurred to me before.2
Her work on the Eichmann trial centered both on the trial itself and on a discussion of two activities Arendt deemed crucial to it: the human ability to think and judge. As a spectator to the trial, she reported on one famous set of events—the trial itself—arising from another historical event—the Nazi crimes against humanity—that was of an unprecedented nature. The judgment she accorded to the trial could not be found under clichéd categories. Staying true to her Kantian convictions while acknowledging that the faculty of understanding is always at work in judgment, especially in creating new concepts in judging the particular, she set out to demonstrate that at the heart of a trial was a man who was symbolic of the modern “banality of evil.”
This phrase was not meant to become yet another cliché, though it has. In judging the nature of the deed, she was mistaken to be condoning—or even defending—Eichmann’s personal motives, given that he was just a thoughtless “nobody.” His personality, his drive to repeat every cliché he ever heard and the fact that he went about his bloody work as if it were but another bureaucratic step up the chain of command—all this marked him as banal, but no less evil for all that. That’s what Arendt’s book attempts to come to terms with. To be sure, the ultimate driving force in her thinking was her unfaltering attempt at understanding and reconciling with the world. In this one instance, however, reconciliation was not a possibility made clear by her final conviction. Arendt wrote:
Just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.3 4
Arendt responded to the world from out of modernity, from out of her own experiences as a thinker, a writer, a refugee, and, yes, as a Jew who herself was almost caught up in the Holocaust. She clarifies her thoughts on the activity of thinking and its relation to personal experience to Günter Gaus in a 1964 interview:
I do not believe that there is any thought process possible without personal experience. Every thought is an afterthought, that is, a reflection on some matter or event. Isn’t that so? I live in the modern world, and obviously my experience is in and of the modern world. This, after all, is not controversial. But the matter of merely laboring and consuming is of crucial importance for the reason that a kind of wordlessness defines itself there too. Nobody cares any longer what the world looks like.
This lack of care, however, comes at a cost. In an interview with Joachim Fest from the same year, she alludes to the importance of reflection in assuming responsibility for one’s actions:
Apart from the fact that bureaucracy is essentially anonymous, any relentless activity allows responsibility to evaporate. There’s an English idiom, “Stop and think.” Nobody can think unless they stop. If you force someone into remorseless activity, or they allow themselves to be forced into it, it’ll always be the same story, right? You’ll always find that an awareness of responsibility can’t develop. It can only develop in the moment when a person reflects—not on himself but on what he’s doing.5
Notwithstanding the controversy surrounding the Eichmann book, Arendt continued thinking and writing about the events of her time, attesting to her own conviction that thinking needs to become manifest—in order to be what it is: “Thinking, however, in contrast to cognitive activities that may use thinking as one of their instruments, needs speech not only to sound out and become manifest; it needs it to be activated at all.”
Her reflections on the concept of revolution, and the constitution of freedom were published in On Revolution (1963), followed by essays on Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Jaspers, Isak Dinesen, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Randall Jarrell, and others in Men in Dark Times (1968). Her critical and timely analyses of culture, education, freedom, politics, and science became Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (1968). Her reflections on the crises of the 1960s and the 1970s resulted in On Violence (1970), which was later included in Crises of the Republic (1972), a book that dealt not only with the questions of violence and revolution but also with lying in politics, a work that has gained a new readership given the events of the past few years.
In the 1970s, Arendt continued lecturing and writing, finishing two of three volumes of her last, unfinished work, The Life of the Mind, which was published posthumously in 1978. The volumes brought together her lifelong concern to reconcile between wha t she understood as the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. This work can be said to bring to a quasi-close her ceaseless thinking on how to be in the world as a human being—a being who thinks and acts. The bridge she found between these two activities, namely, the activity of judging—accompanied by willing—was meant to be the topic of the last section of the book, which was never finished. Her Kant’s Lectures on Political Philosophy, published posthumously as well in 1982, brings together her lectures on Kant’s political philosophy, with the novelty resting on its reference to Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). What Arendt would say in the third volume is often conjecture based on these lectures and archival sources. On December 4, 1975, Arendt went to her desk at her home, rolled in the first sheet of paper of her Judging manuscript into her typewriter—she had skipped a doctor’s visit just days before to collect her notes for it—and then stopped to greet two dinner guests. Over dessert and coffee, they would discuss a Jewish intellectual historian important to Arendt’s work in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Phillip Friedman. But at some point, she coughed and then sunk slowly back into her chair. Her guests called her doctor to come over, but to no avail. At the age of sixty-nine, Arendt died of a heart attack, leaving behind the work of a life of the mind with which we are still attempting to come to grips.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1964), 19.
2 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1963), 282–3.
3 Ibid., 279.
4 Hannah Arendt, “What Remains? Language Remains: A Conversation with Günther Gaus,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 1–23, 20.
5 Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann was Outrageously Stupid: Interview with Joachim Fest,” in Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, trans. Andrew Brown (New York: Melville House, 2013), 73–120, 122.