Hannah Arendt is so modern that one of the academic disputes about her at present is whether she should be classified amongst the moderns or the ‘postmoderns’, an issue which probably puts her at the borderline of our knowledge and understanding, or rather, beyond it.1 She was not a religiously practising Jew: the first letter she wrote to an old Jewish friend, Gertrud Jaspers, after the war, speaks about sending some bacon, with detailed instructions on how to cook it – and somewhat significantly, she adds ‘I’ve forgotten the German word for it, the hell with it’.
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In European Judaism
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2001
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 44–56 (12 total)
Freedom and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt
Civil Disobedience and the Politics of Theatre
Hanako Koyama
Arendt scholars have given exhaustive attention to the importance of actors in Hannah Arendt's political thought. This paper focuses on the role of non-actors, which I argue are also important for a full understanding of her view of politics, freedom and power. It argues that instead of a monistic, action-centred model, Arendt advances a dualistic model of politics, a model which affords a unique position to non-acting beings through the conceptual distinction between actor and audience, or actor and spectator. My paper also argues that she might conceive an interaction between them when she offers a theatrical model of contemporary political action, relaxing the distinction which otherwise remains rigid through most of her work. This paper tries to show that civil disobedience presumes the sympathetic gaze of spectator because its actor requests the distinctively moral perspective of non-active audience in a theatrical setting of the public realm.
Rivka Gordon
In her essay On Violence (1970), Hannah Arendt criticizes what she calls Sartre’s ‘new faith’ of violence. She argues that his call to the oppressed peoples to turn to a violent struggle to achieve freedom from colonialisation is an idea that was not known in the history of revolutions. In addition, Sartre’s glorification of violence is totally opposed to the Hegelian and Marxian tradition, and to any ‘leftist humanism’. Therefore, Sartre should be included, she holds, among ‘the new militants’ or ‘the new preachers of violence’ of the New Left. To support her views, Arendt criticizes passages in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2001
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 69–80 (12 total)
Hannah Arendt
Radical Evil, Radical Hope
Jeffrey Newman
The world is facing a multitude of interconnected issues, leading to avoidable starvation, poverty and death for hundreds of millions. Is Arendt's concept of the 'banality of evil', which she adopted in preference to Kant's 'radical evil', applicable here? Are we bystanders, addicted to 'growth'? The paper considers the central role of thinking and, with the help of Greek myth and Nietzsche, the relationship between evil and hope. Finally, there is an emerging concept of 'radical hope'. What is this, could it be of help and how would it connect with Judaism's teachings of the Messiah?
In European Judaism
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 60–71 (11 total)
Babette Babich
“Had I known what was going to happen, I would probably still have done it.” 1 Margarethe von Trotta’s 2013 film Hannah Arendt , starring Barbara Sukowa as Hannah Arendt raises sociopolitical and specifically philosophical questions in
In German Politics and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2016
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 77–92 (16 total)
Jakob Norberg
Hannah Arendt and Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich produced influential accounts of the postwar West-German population's silence or inarticuleteness. The Mitscherlichs claimed that this silence was symptomatic of a blocked process of mourning; Arendt saw it as a legacy of brutal totalitarian rule. However, both viewed the rapid economic recovery as evidence of the German inability to engage in discursively mediated therapeutic and political processes. Frantic busyness was a form of silence. This paper presents a critical reassessment of these approaches. By drawing on Albert Hirschman's theory of exit and voice, it argues that economic activity possesses a communicative dimension. The alleged retreat from politics is not a symptom of muteness but rather indicates people's preference for an alternative mode of communication. Arendt and the Mitscherlich may be right in assuming a correlation between the postwar economic recovery and ostensible political apathy, but lack the conceptual means to clarify the relationship.
In German Politics and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2011
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–20 (19 total)
Rereading Hannah Arendt's 'What Is Freedom?'
Freedom as a Phenomenon of Political Virtuosity
Ilya Winham
In 'What Is Freedom?', Arendt speaks of freedom as a 'phenomenon of virtuosity', claiming that this phenomenon is the original, hitherto undertheorised experience of freedom in ancient Greece and Rome, and that the idea of freedom began to appear in connection with the will in our philosophical tradition only after freedom as a phenomenon of virtuosity had in practice disappeared in the late Roman Empire - but not from all human activities in which it continued to exist in a hidden form, as the power or 'gift' of humans to begin a new line of action. My interpretation of Arendt's conception of freedom begins from and elaborates on these claims, and shows that she should be taken seriously as a critic of the late antique notion that freedom consists in the decisions we make with our will. I also show that in rejecting accounts of freedom that reduce it to a matter of the will or the intellect, Arendt relies on the notion of an inspiring 'principle' of action that functions in a manner analogous to Hegel's understanding of (moral) action as taking place against a background of unwritten rules (sittlichkeit) and as deriving its 'validity' and 'absolute' character from a spirit, or principle, immanent within it.
Giuseppe Ballacci
In the literature there are two well-established but opposite readings of Arendt: as an agonistic theorist and as a deliberative one. In between these two positions a smaller number of scholars have argued that in Arendt these two dimensions can to a large extent be reconciled. This paper follows this third path but tries to bring it one step further. In particular, it defends the idea that those scholars who have proposed this third reading of Arendt have fallen short of revealing the degree to which deliberation and agonism are, for her, interwoven. Through an original reading of Arendt’s views on judgment, persuasion, distinction and Eichmann’s banality, the paper clarifies why, for her, agonism and deliberation are not only compatible but actually mutually dependent. In other words, it clarifies why she believes that there can be no deliberation without agonism and no agonism without deliberation.
Review
On Reinhart Koselleck's Intellectual Relations to Carl Schmitt
Niklas Olsen
Arendt? Heidelberger Entstehungsspuren und bundesrepublikanische Liberalisierungsschichten von Reinhart Kosellecks “Kritik und Krise” [From Carl Schmitt to Hannah Arendt? On the Heidelbergian genesis and the West German liberalization layers of Reinhart
In Contributions to the History of Concepts
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2021
- Article Type:
- Book Review
- Pages:
- 141–146 (6 total)
The Multiplied Mind
Perspectival Thinking in Arendt, Koestler, Orwell
Milen Jissov
perspectival thinking. 4 It appears in the work of Europe's three most prominent thinkers on totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell. They explore perspectival thinking precisely in their work on totalitarianism. As Nietzsche
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2023
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 79–102 (24 total)