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Hannah Arendt, 1906–1975

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2009

Dana Villa
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Abstract

This essay provides an overview of the life and theoretical concerns of Hannah Arendt. It traces the way her experience as a German Jew in the 1930s informed her analysis of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism and her idea of the “banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem. The essay takes issue with those of Arendt's critics who detect a lack of “love of the Jewish people” in her writing. It also traces the way Arendt's encounter with totalitarian evil led to a deeper questioning of the anti-democratic impulses in the Western tradition of political thought—a questioning that finds its fullest articulation in The Human Condition and On Revolution. Throughout, my concern is to highlight Arendt's contribution to thinking “the political” in a way friendly to the basic phenomenon of human plurality. I also highlight her recovery and extension of the main themes of the civic republican tradition.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 71 , Issue 1 , Winter 2009 , pp. 20 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2009

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References

1 See Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

2 See Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 33–34Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 42.

4 See, for example, Wolin's, RichardHeidegger's Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

5 See Arendt, Hannah, “What Remains? The Language Remains: A Conversation with Gunter Gaus,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Kohn, Jerome (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994), 9Google Scholar.

6 Hannah Arendt, “What is Existenz Philosophy?” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, 163–87.

7 The personal relationship between Arendt and Heidegger is well covered in Young-Bruehl's biography. As to the philosophical relationship, see my study, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

8 Arendt, Hannah and Blumenfeld, Kurt, In keinem Besitz verwurzelt (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1995)Google Scholar.

9 See, for example, Arendt's, comments in the previously unpublished ms. “Anti-Semitism” (most likely composed in the late thirties) in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Kohn, Jerome and Feldman, Ronald H. (New York: Schocken Books, 2007)Google Scholar, 50ff. Of course, once the war began, Arendt was quite clear that the Zionist Organization was the only true Jewish political organization and—as such—a key vehicle for active resistance to the Hitler regime. See her piece “Centrum Censeo . . . ” from Aufbau (December 26, 1941), in The Jewish Writings, 142–44.

10 This is the animating theme of the majority of the columns she wrote for Aufbau, with their insistent call for the creation of a Jewish army to take part in the fight against Hitler. See Hannah Arendt, “The Jewish Army—The Beginning of a Jewish Politics,” in Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 136–39.

11 See Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 134–243.

12 Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 153–55.

13 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1973), 296–97Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as OT.

14 Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1994)Google Scholar.

15 Arendt, Jewish Writings, 466–67.

16 See Villa, Dana, “Genealogies of Total Domination: Arendt, Adorno, and Auschwitz,” New German Critique 100 (Winter, 2007): 1–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Arendt, “Ideology and Terror,” in OT, 466.

18 Ibid., 455, 458–59.

19 See, for example, the exchange between Arendt, and Voegelin, on “The Origins of Totalitarianism” in The Review of Politics 15, no. 1 (January 1953), 68–85Google Scholar.

20 Ibid., 441. See my essay “Terror and Radical Evil” in Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1–32.

21 See Berlin, Isaiah and Jahanbegloo, Ramin, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (New York: Scribner's, 1991)Google Scholar. Berlin's lack of regard for Arendt might, at first glance, appear to be a function of an analytic philosopher's disdain for a more “continental,” dense, and occasionally aphoristic form of writing. In fact, as Jeremy Waldron has recently pointed out, Berlin's own prose is hardly the most disciplined or “rigorous,” at least from an analytic point of view. The real source of Berlin's dismissal was, unsurprisingly, political. Berlin was an intimate of many establishment figures in Israeli politics and the Zionist movement, and had little regard for those—like Arendt—who were critical of either. Academic vanity also played a role.

22 See Schell, Jonathan, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Picador, 1982)Google Scholar.

23 See Wellmer's, Albrecht important essay “Hannah Arendt on Revolution” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Villa, Dana (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

24 See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's detailed account in Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 347–62.

25 See my essay “Conscience, the Banality of Evil, and the Idea of a Representative Perpetrator” in Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror, 33–61.

26 See Trunk, Isaiah, Judenrat (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

27 See Kateb, George, “On Political Evil,” in Kateb, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 199–221Google Scholar.

28 Arendt, Hannah and Heidegger, Martin, Letters: 1925–1975, ed. Ludz, Ursula, translated by Andrew Shields (New York: Harcourt, 2003)Google Scholar.

29 For a record of Heidegger's political activities during the Nazi period, see Otto, Hugo, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. Blunden, Allan (New York: Basic Books, 1993)Google Scholar. For a balanced view of the nature and background of his political thought (such as it was), see Pöggeler's, Otto essay “Heidegger's Political Self-Understanding” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Wolin, Richard (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 198–244Google Scholar.

30 See Arendt, Hannah, “Martin Heidegger at 80,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Murray, Michael (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

31 For an extended comparison of Gadamer and Arendt, as well as a nuanced appreciation of Arendt's debt to Kant's third Critique, see Beiner, Ronald, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

32 Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind, vol. I, Thinking (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 3–4Google Scholar.

33 Arendt, Hannah, “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Kohn, Jerome (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 108Google Scholar.