Hannah Arendt

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Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt.jpg
Hannah Arendt from a 1988 German stamp
among the Women in German history series
Born (1906-10-14)October 14, 1906
Linden, Hanover, Germany
Died December 4, 1975(1975-12-04) (aged 69)
New York, New York, USA
Era 20th-century philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Continental Philosophy
Main interests Political theory, modernity, philosophy of history
Notable ideas Homo faber, animal laborans, vita activa

Johanna[1] "Hannah" Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German-American political theorist. Though often described as a philosopher, she rejected that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular" and instead described herself as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world."[2] Arendt's work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism.

Contents

Life and career[edit]

Arendt was born into a family of secular German Jews in the city of Linden (now part of Hanover). She was the daughter of Martha (née Cohn) and Paul Arendt.[3] She grew up in Königsberg (renamed Kaliningrad and annexed to the Soviet Union in 1946) and Berlin.

At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. According to Hans Jonas, her only German-Jewish classmate, Arendt embarked on a long and stormy romantic relationship with Heidegger, for which she later was criticized because of Heidegger's support for the Nazi party when he was rector of Freiburg University.[4]

In the wake of one of their breakups, Arendt moved to Heidelberg, where she wrote her dissertation, under the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers, on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine. In 1929, in Berlin, she married Günther Stern, later known as Günther Anders; they divorced in 1937.

The dissertation was published in 1929. Although she was an agnostic,[5] Arendt was prevented from habilitating – a prerequisite for teaching in German universities – because she was Jewish. She researched anti-Semitism for some time before being interrogated by the Gestapo. Thereupon Arendt fled Germany for Paris. There she befriended the Marxist literary critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin, her first husband's cousin. While in France, Arendt worked to support and aid Jewish refugees. In 1937, she was stripped of her German citizenship.

In 1940, she married the German poet and Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blücher, by then a former member of the Communist Party. Later that year, in spite of now being stateless, she was interned in Camp Gurs as an "enemy alien", but was able to escape after a few weeks.

With the German military occupation of northern France during World War II and the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps by the Vichy collaborator regime in the unoccupied south, Arendt was compelled to leave France. In 1941, Arendt escaped with her husband and her mother to the United States. They relied on the life-saving visas, illegally issued by the American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV, who aided in this way approximately 2,500 other Jewish refugees. Another American, Varian Fry, paid for their travels and helped in securing the visas. Upon arrival in New York, Arendt became active in the German-Jewish community. From 1941 to 1945, she wrote a column for the German-language Jewish newspaper, Aufbau. From 1944, she directed research for the Commission of European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction and traveled frequently to Germany in this capacity.[6]

After World War II she returned to Germany and worked for Youth Aliyah, a Zionist organization that had saved thousands of children from the Holocaust and settled them in Palestine.[7] She became a close friend of Karl Jaspers and his wife, developing a deep intellectual friendship with him.[8] She also began corresponding with Mary McCarthy.[9]

In 1950, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States.[10] Arendt served as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, and Northwestern University. In the spring of 1959, she became the first woman lecturer at Princeton. Arendt also taught at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Committee on Social Thought; The New School in Manhattan; Yale University, where she was a fellow; and, the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University (1961–1962, 1962–1963).[11] Arendt was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1962 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964.[12][13]

She died in 1975, at age 69, of a heart attack and was buried at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where her husband taught for many years.[14]

Hannah Arendt's gravestone at the Bard College cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Arendt was instrumental in the creation of Structured Liberal Education (SLE) at Stanford University. She wrote a letter to the then president of Stanford University to convince the university to enact Mark Mancall's vision of a residentially-based humanities program.

Works[edit]

Arendt theorizes freedom as public, performative, and associative, drawing for illustration on the Greek "Polis", American townships, the Paris Commune, the civil rights movements of the 1960s, and the 1956 Hungarian uprising. She posits that freedom does not pre-exist the organised community, but rather, is constructed there, as the common space whereto its equal members bring their own uniqueness and "natality", and create something of lasting value such as a state. This natality signs the contingent, indeterminate, and so political future that we do not know anything about.

The Origins of Totalitarianism

Arendt's first major book was entitled, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which traced the roots of Stalinist Communism and Nazism in both anti-Semitism and imperialism. The book was opposed by the Left on the grounds that it presented the two movements as equally tyrannical. She further contends that Jewry was not the operative factor in the Holocaust, but merely a convenient proxy. Totalitarianism in Germany was, in the end, about megalomania and consistency, not eradicating Jews.

The Human Condition

Arguably, her most influential work, The Human Condition (1958) distinguishes between the concepts of political and social, labour and work, various forms of action, and explores implications of those distinctions. Her theory of political action, corresponding to the existence of a public realm, is extensively developed in this work. Arendt argues that, while human life always evolves within societies, the social-being part of human nature, political life, was intentionally constructed by only a few of these societies as a space for individuals to achieve freedom through the construction of a common world. These categories, which attempt to bridge the gap between ontological and sociological structures, are sharply delineated. While Arendt relegates labour and work to the realm of the "social", she favors the human condition of action as the "political" that is both existential and aesthetic.

Men in Dark Times

Her collection of essays, Men in Dark Times, presents intellectual biographies of some creative and moral figures of the twentieth century, such as Walter Benjamin, Karl Jaspers, Rosa Luxemburg, Hermann Broch, Pope John XXIII, and Isak Dinesen.

Adolf Eichmann Trial

In her reporting of the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, which evolved into Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness, a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions and inaction.

Arendt was sharply critical of the way the trial was conducted in Israel. She also was critical of the way that some Jewish leaders, notably M. C. Rumkowski, acted during the Holocaust. This caused a considerable controversy and even animosity toward Arendt in the Jewish community. Her friend Gershom Scholem, a major scholar of Jewish mysticism, broke off relations with her. Arendt was criticized by many Jewish public figures, who charged her with coldness and lack of sympathy for the victims of the Shoah/Holocaust. Due to this lingering criticism, her book has only recently been translated into Hebrew. Arendt ended the book with:

Just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to 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.
On Revolution

Arendt presents a comparison of the two main revolutions of the eighteenth century, the American and French Revolutions. She goes against a common view of both Marxist and leftist views when she argues that France, while well studied and often emulated, was a disaster and that the largely ignored American Revolution was a success. The turning point in the French Revolution occurred when the leaders rejected their goals of freedom in order to focus on compassion for the masses. In America, the Founding Fathers never betray the goal of Constitutio Libertatis. However, Arendt believes the revolutionary spirit of those men has been lost, and advocates a “council system” as an appropriate institution to regain that spirit.

Meaning of Revolution

Revolutions are unique in that they are not simply change, but rather a new beginning.ii In looking at the historical use of the word revolution, Arendt notes two inherent ideas: a return to a previously existing condition, and an irresistible nature. Just as the astronomical use denotes a reoccurring pattern, the leaders in both America and France were men attempting what they thought was the restoration of an old order, regardless of whether or not that order ever actually existed. It was only after events had proceeded that they realized in trying to bring back the old they had in fact created something new.iii A historical aspect of the term revolution that has remained associated with it is that of its “irresistibility,” which originally referred to the preordained movement of heavenly bodies. We see in the famous dialogue between Louis XVI and a messenger concerning the fall of the Bastille, and the phrase “Non, Sire, c'est une révolution,” the focus on the inevitable. What the messenger had seen was the multitude of the poor emerging into the public realm, and the violence that would soon result. Arendt argues that all modern theories of revolution see this same violence as historically necessary, and from the French Revolution comes Hegel's view of history as an inevitable march. The Russian Revolution imitated “the course of events, not the men of the Revolution,”iv and ultimately what they learned was “history and not action.”

The Social Question

Arendt then turns her attention to a key difference between the American and French Revolutions: poverty. Specifically, she defines poverty as “more than deprivation, it is a state of constant want and acute misery whose ignominy consists in its dehumanizing force.”v The French Revolution is defined by a social question, how to solve the problem of poverty, which it never finds the answer to. Ultimately, Robespierre abandons the goal of freedom for the needs of the people. The American Revolution and its Founding Fathers remain focused on the political question of freedom, never having to face the “predicament of poverty … present everywhere else in the world.”vi

Arendt finds an inherent link between necessity and violence, as the revolutionaries in France are motivated by compassion. There existed a great divide between the people and their new representatives, requiring what Robespierre referred to as “virtue.” Arendt makes two key connections regarding compassion, and the violence found in the Reign of Terror. The first is that compassion is inherently opposed to political matters, with the former relying on nonverbal communication and the latter relying on the exchange of ideas. Compassion in this realm originates with Rousseau, as Arendt states that “if Rousseau had introduced compassion into political theory, it was Robespierre who brought it onto the market-place.”vii While compassion can be a noble form of human passion, in this instance it is deformed into pity, which instead of promoting unity leads to a selfish glorification of others suffering. The second connection regards the human heart, which Arendt describes as “a place of darkness” that protects “inner-most motives which are not meant for public display.”viii In fact, those intentions are often remain unknown even to ourselves, and the resulting suspicion, seen in Robespierre's distrust of friends and rivals, leads to the questioning of the actions of all. The masses would seize upon this hypocrisy, sparing only those who obeyed the force of necessity.

Foundation

For Arendt, freedom is found in the constitution, as she rejects the idea of a “permanent revolution.” She also rejects the definition of constitutional government as limited by law. The clear difference between the rights given by the American Revolution, which proclaims “no more than the necessity of civilized government for all mankind,” and the French, which proclaims “the existence of rights independent of and outside the body politic” lies in the ultimate role of each constitution. Any shortcomings in the theory of constitutional government are matched, Arendt suggests, by the seventeenth-century theories of social contract. These failed to distinguish between the “mutual contract” or promise making, and the consent to be governed. Comparing the revolutions, Arendt notes how the American revolutionaries were wary of the abuse of power, viewing human nature with much greater suspicion than did the men of the French Enlightenment. But this also meant that the Americans were equally conscious of the dangers posed to the polity by the unchecked rights and liberties of the citizen. Hence “the true objective of the American Constitution was not to limit power but to create more power” in separate sources – executive, legislative, judicial, as well as federal and state.ix The second problem faced by the Americans was the establishment of the authority of the constitutional foundation. Without authority, a new legal constitution is at permanent risk of being undone, as was the French constitution, which was replaced fourteen times between 1789 and 1875. In Arendt's theory of the unifying role of “principles,” what was most important for the avoidance of violence and the survival of the US Constitution was the fact that more than any other principle the one which seemed to inspire the Founding Fathers was the principle of mutual promise. According to Arendt, this meant that the authority, the “constituent power,” of those who formulated both the state and federal constitutions was never seriously questioned by the people.

The Revolutionary Tradition

Regardless of all her praise for the successes of the American Revolution, Arendt feels that America has misunderstood the important aspects of what the Founders accomplished, and has offered no resistance to the people's removal from the political process. The people still retain a respect for the Constitution, but have forgotten the meaning behind its origins, with the government presenting itself as perfection achieved. America has failed to face the danger of the public sphere transforming itself into a realm where private interests are held above public interests. The disappearance of a space to form opinions through public discussion has taken away conviction that is able to sustain political dialogue, leaving in place subjective moods. The result is a government that is “democratic in that popular welfare and private happiness are its chief goals; but it can be called oligarchic in the sense that public happiness and public freedom have again become the privilege of the few.”x What then, is Arendt's answer to the lost spirit of the American Revolution, and to the dwindling space for action she saw in both capitalist democracies and socialist regimes? Arendt's admiration for popular councils and their equivalents seems to offer the clearest indication of how she believed political action could establish a permanent home in the modern world. Arendt insists that councils appeared and spread throughout history without any prompting or planning by trained revolutionaries or party cadres, and would permit the people to become participators in government.

Criticism

The main criticism against Arendt's work is the seeming paradox between the belief in the success of the American revolution and the rejection of its system of representation.xi Others question her idea of a “council system,” saying that it is “at most a metaphor suited for turning the theoretical imagination in a new direction” and not a practical goal.xii A final criticism can be found in the narrative Arendt puts forward surrounding modern politics, and the replacement of happiness with freedom. The idea of “a broad hermeneutic structure that privileges freedom to the exclusion of happiness, placing emphasis on the forms of politics without regard for its ends and purposes,” plagues much of Arendt's writing. xiii"Hannah Arendt, Council Democracy And (Far) Beyond. A Radical View", 19 May 2003.

"On Violence"

Arendt's essay, "On Violence", distinguishes between violence and power. She maintains that, although theorists of both the Left and Right regard violence as an extreme manifestation of power, the two concepts are, in fact, antithetical. Power comes from the collective will and does not need violence to achieve any of its goals, since voluntary compliance takes its place. As governments start losing their legitimacy, violence becomes an artificial means toward the same end and is therefore, found only in the absence of power. Bureaucracies then become the ideal birthplaces of violence since they are defined as the "rule by no one" against whom to argue and therefore, recreate the missing links with the people they rule over.

The Life of the Mind

Her posthumous book, The Life of the Mind (1978, edited by Mary McCarthy), remained incomplete. Stemming from her Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, it focuses on the mental faculties of thinking and willing, in a sense moving beyond her previous work concerning the vita activa. In her discussion of thinking, she focuses mainly on Socrates and his notion of thinking as a solitary dialogue between Me and Myself. This appropriation of Socrates leads her to introduce novel concepts of conscience (which gives no positive prescriptions, but instead, tells me what I cannot do if I would remain friends with myself when I re-enter the two-in-one of thought where I must render an account of my actions to myself) and morality (an entirely negative enterprise concerned with non-participation in certain actions for the sake of remaining friends with one's self). In her volume on Willing, Arendt, relying heavily on Augustine's notion of the will, discusses the will as an absolutely free mental faculty that makes new beginnings possible.

Legacy[edit]

In the third volume, Arendt was planning to engage the faculty of judgment by appropriating Kant's Critique of Judgment; however, she did not live to write it. Nevertheless, although her notion of judging remains unknown, Arendt did leave manuscripts ("Thinking and Moral Considerations," "Some Questions on Moral Philosophy,") and lectures (Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy) concerning her thoughts on this mental faculty. The first two articles were edited and published by Jerome Kohn, an assistant of Arendt and a director of Hannah Arendt Center at The New School, and the last was edited and published by Ronald Beiner, professor of political science at the University of Toronto.

Her personal library was deposited at Bard College at the Stevenson Library in 1976, and includes approximately 4,000 books, ephemera, and pamphlets from Arendt's last apartment. The college has begun archiving some of the collection digitally, which is available at The Hannah Arendt Collection.[15]

Commemoration[edit]

Film[edit]

In 2012 a German film entitled Hannah Arendt was released, directed by Margarethe von Trotta, and with Barbara Sukowa in the role of Arendt. The film concentrates on the Eichmann trial, and the controversy caused by Arendt's book, which at the time was widely misunderstood as defending Eichmann and blaming Jewish leaders for the Holocaust. In a key scene, Arendt responds before a lecture theatre full of her students, insisting that anyone who wishes to write about that period in history has a duty to try to understand what makes ordinary people into tools of totalitarianism.

Selected works[edit]

  • Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation (1929).
  • The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Revised ed.; New York: Schocken, 2004. (Includes all the prefaces and additions from the 1958, 1968, and 1972 editions.)
  • The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
  • Rahel Varnhagen: the life of a Jewess. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston (1958). Complete ed.; Ed. Liliane Weissberg (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), also in March 2000. 400 pages. ISBN 978-0-8018-6335-6.
  • Die ungarische Revolution und der totalitäre Imperialismus (1958).
  • Between Past and Future: Six exercises in political thought (New York: Viking, 1961). (Two more essays were added in 1968.)
  • On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963).
  • Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). (Rev. ed. New York: Viking, 1968.)
  • Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968).
  • On Violence. Harvest Books (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970). (Also included in Crises of the Republic.)
  • Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972). "Civil Disobedience" originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in The New Yorker. Versions of the other essays originally appeared in The New York Review of Books.
  • The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, edited with an introduction by Ron H. Feldman (1978).
  • Life of the Mind, unfinished at her death, Ed. Mary McCarthy, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). ISBN 0-15-107887-4.
  • Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969. Edited by Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, translated by Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992).
  • Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, Ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994). Paperback reprint edition, September 10, 1983, ISBN 0-300-03099-1. Paperback ed. (New York: Schocken, 2005).
  • Love and Saint Augustine. Edited with an Interpretive Essay by Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Scott (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996/1998).
  • Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy. Edited and with an Interpretive Essay by Ronald Beiner (The University of Chicago Press, 1992).
  • Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, 1936-1968. Edited by Lotte Kohler, translated by Peter Constantine (New York: Harcourt, 1996).
  • Responsibility and Judgment. Edited with an introduction by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003).
  • Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Letters, 1925–1975, Ed. Ursula Ludz, translated Andrew Shields (New York: Harcourt, 2004).
  • The Promise of Politics. Edited with an Introduction by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005).
  • Arendt und Benjamin: Texte, Briefe, Dokumente. Edited by Detlev Schöttker and Erdmut Wizisla (2006).
  • The Jewish Writings. Edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. Schocken Books. (2007).

See also[edit]

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References[edit]

  1. ^ Kelsey Wood (Pulaski Technical College). "Literary Encyclopedia | Hannah Arendt". Litencyc.com. Retrieved 2012-09-24. 
  2. ^ Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Second ed. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998. Print.
  3. ^ Hannah Arendt: An Introduction - John Mcgowan - Google Books. Books.google.ca. 1997-12-15. Retrieved 2012-09-24. 
  4. ^ "Ron Rosenbaum, the author of Explaining Hitler, even extended the argument [of Heidegger's critic Emmanuel Faye that Heidegger's thought is thoroughly tainted by Nazism] to the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, a former student and lover of Heidegger's. Citing a recent essay by the historian Bernard Wasserstein, Mr. Rosenbaum wrote on Slate.com that Arendt's thinking about the Holocaust and her famous formulation, "the banality of evil," were contaminated by Heidegger and other anti-Semitic writings." Cohen, Patricia. "An Ethical Question: Does a Nazi Deserve a Place Among Philosophers?", The New York Times, November 8, 2009.
  5. ^ Peter Baehr (2010). Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences. Stanford University Press. p. 66. ISBN 9780804756501. "Both Hannah Arendt and Aron were assimilated, agnostic Jews (so were Mannheim and Riesman) who became politically radicalized only with the rise of the Nazi movement;..." 
  6. ^ Sznaider, Natan (20 October 2006). "Human, citizen, Jew". Haaretz. Retrieved 28 August 2012. 
  7. ^ Cullen-DuPont, Kathryn (1 August 2000). Encyclopedia of women's history in America. Infobase Publishing. pp. 16–17. ISBN 978-0-8160-4100-8. Retrieved 28 November 2011. 
  8. ^ Arendt, Hannah; Jaspers, Karl (1992), Correspondence 1926-1969 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), ISBN 0-15-107887-4 
  9. ^ Arendt, Hannah; McCarthy, Mary (1995), Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975 (Secker & Warburg), ISBN 0-436-20251-4 
  10. ^ Pfeffer, Anshel (9 May 2008). "Dear Hannah". Haaretz. Retrieved 28 August 2012. 
  11. ^ Guide to the Center for Advanced Studies Records, 1958–1969 at Wesleyan University
  12. ^ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter A". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 22 April 2011. 
  13. ^ "Deceased Members". American Academy of Arts and Letters. Retrieved 22 April 2011. 
  14. ^ Bird, David (December 6, 1975). "Hannah Arendt, Political Scientist, Dead". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-11-19. "Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher who escaped Hitler's Germany and later scrutinized its morality in "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and other books, died Thursday night in her apartment at 370 Riverside Drive." 
  15. ^ "Hannah Arendt Collection - Stevenson Library, Bard College". Bard.edu. Retrieved 2012-09-24. 
  16. ^ Shenhav, Yehouda (3 May 2007). "All aboard the Arendt express". Haaretz. Retrieved 28 August 2012. 
  17. ^ "Hannah Arendt Gymnasium, Haßloch". Hagh.bildung-rp.de. Retrieved 2012-09-24. 
  18. ^ "Hannah Arendt Gymnasium, Barsinghausen". Han-nah.de. 2012-09-17. Retrieved 2012-09-24. 
  19. ^ "Hannah Arendt Gymnasium, Lengerich". Hag-lengerich.de. Retrieved 2012-09-24. 
  20. ^ "Hannah Arendt Gymnasium, Berlin". Hag-berlin.net. Retrieved 2012-09-24. 

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