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Hannah Arendt enjoyed her solitude, but she believed that loneliness could make people susceptible to totalitarianism.
We can shout truth to power and it will never be heard, because truth and politics don’t stand on common ground.
WHEN HANNAH ARENDT escaped the Gurs internment camp in the middle of June 1940, she did not go to Marseilles to find her husband Heinrich Blücher — she went to Lourdes to find Walter Benjamin. For nearly two weeks they played chess from morning to night, talked, and read whatever papers they could find.
THE 1967 CORRESPONDENCE between Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno followed Walter Benjamin’s death by nearly 30 years. The acrimony that grew between Arendt and Adorno during the intervening decades is present in these letters. Who had the right, ethically and intellectually, to edit and publish Benjamin’s work?
When Hannah Arendt arrived at the German Literature Archive in Marbach Germany in June 1975 to organize Karl Jasper’s papers, she stood up in the cafeteria and began reciting Friedrich Schiller by heart. She was fond of “Das Mädchen aus der Fremde”, but this is pure speculation. As Arendt said to Günter Gaus in her last interview, she carried German poems around in her hinterkopf. I’d wager she knew more than one.
People often ask me, “Why Arendt?” The honest answer is that I fell in love with her writing my freshman year of college, reading The Human Conditionon a brown leather sofa in the library, between the stacks. I found her by accident while looking for Erich Fromm, and there was no turning back when I read: “In 1957, an earth-born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies — the sun, the moon, and the stars.”
In November 2016, a few days after Donald Trump’s election, some political scientists, critical theorists and other academics gathered for a conference in New York. Some of their papers and discussions on the timely theme of ‘The Authoritarian Personality Revisited’ have now been developed into contributions to a special issue of the American journal South Atlantic Quarterly / SAQ…
What is the relationship between thinking and politics?
Donald Trump’s political rhetoric relies upon brevity and repetition. Slogans like “Make America Great Again,” “Lock her up,” “Drain the swamp,” “Build the wall,” “America first,” and “fake news” fill his speech. His canned language paints an unflattering portrait of a person unable to think past himself. Even his knack for dominating media cycles with manufactured crisis and boorish morning tweets is beginning to seem routine in its predictability. Like a script he is unable to sway from, he moves between self-flattery and disparaging anyone he finds outside his favor…
The epigraph above comes from a panel discussion titled “Values in Contemporary Society” in Thinking Without a Banister. The discussion took place on July 13, 1972 between Hannah Arendt, Paul Freund, Irving Kristol, and Hans Morgenthau; it was organized by Kenneth W. Thompson, the vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation…
I think that there is a lot of good that can come from the #metoo campaign, but at the same time I am wary of the way this conversation about sexual politics is unfolding in the United States. On the one hand, it is good that we are addressing the ubiquity of sexual assault and harassment women face. On the other hand, I’m not sure the #metoo campaign can ultimately shift the status quo for reasons I want to discuss here…
Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which was published in 1951, reversed the then conventional wisdom about the emergence of fascist and totalitarian regimes. While many saw fascism and totalitarianism as the historical apotheosis of the nation, Arendt argued that fascism and totalitarianism emerged in the middle of the 20th century as the nation-state system began to collapse. Put simply, totalitarianism is not the triumph of the nation-state, totalitarianism is what emerges when the nation-state system falls apart…
In 1956, toward the end of McCarthyism, a concerned father wrote the FBI about his daughter’s professor. He was worried that she was being corrupted by a teacher, and that the teacher posed a threat to national security…
The level of public discourse in America continues to sink as journalistic integrity is continuously sacrificed for likes, hearts, and viral fame. Factual truth is under assault from the right and left, negating the common ground of dialogue and understanding. Instead of lifting up the public realm in this dark moment, finding higher ground to report on the facts and events of life, columnists are swallowed up by the media tide foregoing truth, integrity, and a sense of ethical obligation. Whether it is Rachel Maddow whipping up media frenzy over finding two pages of Trump’s tax returns, or the BBC reporting that Trump was snubbed by Poland’s first lady (she did shake his hand), I find it difficult to muster hope for the future of American democracy. There are far too many examples of bad reporting to list. So, I want to focus on a recent one that has some direct relevance to Hannah Arendt…
"Baby It's Cold Outside" begins to play as the camera sweeps over a snow-dusted town. The opening scene alternates between two women, identical twin sisters, moving through their morning routines in different settings worlds apart. As an alarm sounds, the first twin climbs out from under Christmas-themed flannel sheets, flanked by her dog, while the second twin is already awake in her city apartment, sitting up in a gray silk robe with an iPad on her lap, working away. The iPad-beholden twin makes her way through an immaculate high-rise condo, blending a green smoothie while wearing a dress and heels, reading emails on her phone. Meanwhile, the first sister happily throws on jeans and a flannel sweater, does the laundry, wakes up her kids, and cooks eggs and bacon for breakfast.
Mériam Korichi invited me to prepare a ten-minute speech for a Symposium of Love that she was hosting at the annual Night of Philosophy. Realizing I didn’t have anything to say about love, I thought about how I might begin to answer the question: What is love? What unfolded was a conversation with the various thinkers I love most dearly.
The day after the 2016 US presidential election I wrote a small piece for the Hannah Arendt Center newsletter Amor Mundi. Caught in the throes of grief, shocked, and uncertain of the future, I said that now we had to learn to love the world. Arendt’s provocation in that moment gave me a sense of calm and purpose, something to hold on to.
From calling President Obama’s nationality into question to the announcement of his candidacy which targeted Hispanic immigrants, Donald Trump has put citizenship at the center of his political agenda. His announcement this week to end Birthright Citizenship should not come as a surprise…
Hannah Arendt was not a fan of Karl Marx, but she took his writing very seriously. There are no less than three volumes of Das Kapital in her personal library at Bard College. She famously opens her chapter on “Labor” in The Human Condition declaring: “In the following chapter, Karl Marx will be criticized.” In her lectures on Marx, which were recently published for the first time in Jerome Kohn’s edited volume Thinking Without a Banister, Arendt begins by noting: “It has never been easy to think and write about Karl Marx.”…
Earlier this month, as part of the Courage to Be Program hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center, Penny Gill gave an inspired talk on what it means to act courageously. Drawing from her timely work, What in the World Is Going On?, Gill asked us to think about the narratives we weave about the world and how those narratives prevent us from acting in the world…
The unthinkable has happened. So we must ask, among other things, why was it unthinkable? How could we not see what was happening? In asking these difficult questions my thoughts keep wandering to Hannah Arendt…
America is not a totalitarian society, but there are elements of totalitarianism in America.
When Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1949, she was attempting to understand the phenomenal appearance of totalitarianism in the world. Instead of offering an historical account of the emergence of fascism, Arendt undertook a historical, material analysis of anti-Semitism, imperialism, and Nazi practices. Drawing from Walter Benjamin’s claim in OnThe Concept of History that “the exception is always the rule,” Arendt turned against historicist modes of thinking. Instead of offering a timeline, she sought to highlight the “crystalized elements” of totalitarianism that forged together to make fascism possible…
2016 feels like a disastrous year. Each morning and evening brings fresh news of violence: Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, police shooting black men, police being shot at, BREXIT, Trump, Congress staging a sit-in, attempted military coups. With each media push we cringe: What’s happened now? And once we’ve answered that question, we move into a meta-narrative where the conversation has shifted to: “President Obama hangs his head, again.” “We know what everyone is going to say.” “We feel numb.” It seems in this age of technology that the stream of violence and turmoil is never ending. It is what we have come to expect from the daily news. So, how do we understand this violence? …
There is an exchange about doubt, fear, and thinking toward the beginning of Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt’s correspondence. Mary is working on her novel, A Charmed Life, and asks Hannah for her thoughts on the phenomenon of doubt within the tradition of western political thought…