Judging appearances: The continuing legacy of Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics. Edited by Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), viii + 362 pp. $54.95 cloth $21.95 paper.

Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigrés and American Political Thought after World War II. Edited by Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Horst Mewes, and Elisabeth Glaser‐Schmidt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), x + 208 pp. $49.95/£35.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.

Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later. Edited by Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), viii + 384 pp. $40.00 cloth, $17.50 paper.     

From Rosa Luxemburg to Hannah Arendt: Socialism,Barbarism and the Extermination Camps

The relationship between Rosa Luxemburg and Hannah Arendt has occasionally been noted but rarely systematically discussed. In fact, there is a profound sense in which Arendt's continuing preoccupation with the significance of the extermination camps owes much to Luxemburg's earlier expressed concern that barbarism was a real possibility. Luxemburg first raised this in the context of the First World War, which she saw as a catastrophe marking a fundamental break with the past and opening the way to terrible new possibilities. The terms that Luxemburg used to describe this catastrophe apply better to subsequent events that Arendt was to analyse, particularly the extermination camps (“hell” on earth). In explaining how barbarism could occur, Arendt drew extensively on Luxemburg, emphasising the impact of world wars, imperialism and nationalism, though she was of course then to go further in analysing what barbarism meant when it took place.     

Hannah Arendt on the Power of Creative Making in a World of Plural Cultures

Since culture is a form of poēsis and thus carries the danger of monologism and domination, and since today political “conflicts are increasingly defined from a cultural standpoint,” the question this paper addresses is whether culture can affect politics other than as a form of conflict and political aestheticism. Put differently: can culture become a source of communication and dialogue in politics? The answer this paper proposes is that culture can do so not by uncompromisingly divorcing praxis from any association with poēsis, but by making a distinction between two forms of poēsis. I argue that there are good grounds in Hannah Arendt's conception of the human condition and of the life of the mind to think that a distinction is possible between, on the one hand, technical, and thus non-creative, making and, on the other hand, metaphorical, imaginative, and creative making. It is the work of art that, through the joint employment of taste and polyphonic authorship, brings culture into politics in a manner that creatively and dialogically serves the purpose of augmenting the world. Through taste one is receptive to particulars and thus capable of judging their worldly suitability, while keeping one's mind open. Through polyphonic authorship one anticipates the unfinalized and open character of ideas and thus, the ongoing need to speak with other ideas, with the ideas of others.     

Between Athens and Jerusalem: Western otherness in the thought of Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt

In understanding the meaning of the West, twentieth‐century political philosophers Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss called for a return to “Athens” (classical political philosophy) in order to address the “crisis of the West,” a loss of a sense of legitimate and stable political authority which, in their view, constitutes a nihilistic threat to Western democracy. The only way for the West to escape this nihilistic crisis is to return to Plato and Aristotle. Implicit in this critique is the belief that the other tradition of the West, “Jerusalem” (the Bible) has contributed to this nihilism, by undermining the authority of the Greeks. Is Jerusalem, then, the fatal “Other” for the West? Which tradition—Athens or Jerusalem—is best prepared to alleviate the crisis of the West, especially the survival of democracy? As I address these questions, I shall contend that it is Jerusalem, not Athens, which is the true source of Western democracy.     

Hannah Arendt's Political Theology of Democratic Life

Abstract

In this essay, I explore Hannah Arendt's suggestion that we conceptualize human power and freedom polytheistically if our aim is to understand the challenges and requirements of democratic self-governance. Although it is not clear that politics must always be understood through theological grammars, if it is to be, polytheism affirms that there may be multiple sources of value and of right, offering both a metaphysical counterpart to value pluralism and a vision of how to create political practices and institutions that mirror and honor both the equality and distinction of human beings.     

"The Human Condition" as social ontology: Hannah Arendt on society, action and knowledge

Hannah Arendt is widely regarded as a political theorist who sought to rescue politics from "society," and political theory from the social sciences. This conventional view has had the effect of distracting attention from many of Arendt's most important insights concerning the constitution of "society" and the significance of the social sciences. In this article, I argue that Hannah Arendt's distinctions between labor, work, and action, as these are discussed in "The Human Condition" and elsewhere, are best understood as a set of claims about the fundamental structures of human societies. Understanding Arendt in this way introduces interesting parallels between Arendt's work and both classical and contemporary sociology. From this I draw a number of conclusions concerning Arendt's conception of "society," and extend these insights into two contemporary debates within contemporary theoretical sociology: the need for a differentiated ontology of the social world, and the changing role that novel forms of knowledge play in contemporary society as major sources of social change and order.     

Hannah Arendt's Mythology: The Political Nature of History and Its Tales of Antiheroes

Current scholarship has focused on analyzing how Arendt's storytelling corresponds to her political arguments. In following up this discussion, I offer a closer examination of the unusual myth Arendt uses to explain the condition of the modern age, a myth she refers to as the “political nature of history.” I employ literary terms along with the standard vocabulary of political theory in shaping this reading of Arendt. Following Robert C. Pirro, I also consider Arendt's story as a tragedy, but in the broadest sense, that of a collision of two goods, freedom and security. By describing Arendt's thought in this manner, I hope to reveal another way in which Arendt represents the call to action that she believes so crucial to humanity, as a summons to we flawed antiheroes through the device of a heroic myth.     

Existential Failure and Success: Augustinianism in Oakeshott and Arendt

That Oakeshott and Arendt's political works contain Augustinian references is well known. What historians of political thought have had difficulty in is assessing the consistency and importance of the Augustinian themes within their work. It transpires that the traces of existentialism and personalism in Augustine are amplified and clarified by their use in Oakeshott and Arendt, to the extent that they form an important subtext to their work. One stumbling block for scholars attempting to link the ‘mature’ works of Oakeshott and Arendt to Augustine has been a sense of disparity between the eschatological character of Augustine's writings and the civic worldliness of Oakeshott's associations and Arendt's public realm. Returning to several strands of twentieth-century Augustinianism, from the personalist to the existentialist to the liberal, reveals an Augustinianism that is much more credibly linked to the whole of Oakeshott and Arendt's writings.     

The Gendered Genealogy of Political Religions Theory

This article explores the origins of certain theories of fascism, notably political religions theory, in the gendered intellectual milieu of the late nineteenth century. It suggests that political religions theory owes much to Gustave Le Bon's collective psychology (or crowd theory), a discipline that depended on a distinction between the feminised, racialised mass and the active male elite, and which saw women as trapped in the traditional phase of history. The article shows the influence of collective psychology in Durkheimian sociology and Freudian social psychology, and details its transmission to political theory via Talcott Parsons's account of the origins and nature of Nazism. The unacknowledged influence of collective psychology means that advocates of political religions theory either ignore women, or depict them as passive creatures defined by their need for the domination of a male elite.