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.     

Making the Desert Bloom: Hannah Arendt and Zionist Discourse

This article discusses an aspect of Hannah Arendt’s treatment of the conflict between the Zionists and the Palestinians that has thus far been overlooked in scholarship: her justification of Zionism through the achievements of the Jewish pioneers in cultivating the land, in contrast to the Palestinians’ failure to do so. The inability of natives to cultivate their land was a familiar argument in the history of colonialism, used to legitimize the colonialists’ right to settle a land and often to displace the natives. How should we understand Arendt’s use of this argument? I show that Arendt’s argument should be understood in the context of, first, the recurrence of this argument in Western political thought and practices. Second, the Zionists’—Arendt included—need of legitimizing Jewish settlements in Palestine. And third, the influence of Arendt’s own political philosophy on her understanding of culture in general, and Palestinian culture in particular.     

Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt: criticisms on the development of a German messianic

A discussion of the influence of Martin Buber is not easily limited to the philosophical anthropology he espoused. Nor is the political thinking of Hannah Arendt easily removed from criticism of the philosophies (and -phers) that informed her. Both Buber and Arendt attacked the beastly shoulders of a misapplied messianism as it emerged in modern Germany. Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and to some degree Nietzsche would affect this misplacement, and Arendt and Buber for their part would enter into a shared critique that is often neglected, despite promising attempts in a comparative direction made by Ellis, Engel and Riker. In this essay, I make the case that the contributions of Buber and Arendt – their shared assessments of the viability of the public realm, the need for common responsibility and the recurrent decision to engage with otherness in practical terms – point to an innovative critique of the forcible abstraction of a more traditional messianic made by German views of history. In the midst of the crises identified as correlates of a misapplied messianic, the hope as Buber and Arendt see it lies in the capacity for reflective and courageous identification and education between human individuals as they live towards one another.     

Atavistic Novelty: Questioning Hannah Arendt’s Understanding of Totalitarianism

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critique of Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of totalitarianism as formulated in her magnum opus—The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). It argues that, to comprehend totalitarianism, Arendt forged a heterodox method of historical analysis. Employing that method, she conceived totalitarianism as a form of transcendence of historical context. In doing so, however, she ignored crucial historical contexts that were in fact related to the history of totalitarianism. Subverting her interpretation of totalitarianism as transcendence, these elided contexts erupted inadvertently and repeatedly into her analysis—revealing that totalitarianism was solidly embedded in them. The Origins of Totalitarianism thus exhibits a conceptual contradiction that confuses its attempt to understand totalitarianism.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

"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.     

Deleuze as a Philosopher of Education: Affective Knowledge/Effective Learning

This essay addresses Gilles Deleuze's “pedagogy of the concept” as grounded in the triadic relation between percepts, affects, and concepts. Philosophical thinking based on the “logic of affects” necessarily leads to the creation of novel concepts in/for experience. Still, new concepts are themselves informed by the physicality of affects thus bridging the dualistic gap of the Cartesian subject. Deleuze's neorealist position considers the objects of real experience to be both actual and virtual. Experience exceeds private sense-data; it is a milieu providing an ability to affect and be affected. The essay presents Deleuze's virtual ontology as an unorthodox “foundation” for knowledge under the provision that the affective conditions in real experience for the actualization of the virtual will have been fulfilled. Deleuze's practical philosophy is used here to offer a model for solving the “learning paradox” that has been haunting us since the days of Socrates.     

民族主义与民族国家构建析论

民族主义是现代性的政治共同体意识与行动,民族主义塑造出了民族。民族主义强调他者意识,强调民族的政治权利,也强调民族内部的平等。民族主义推动了民族国家的创建。民族国家被证明优于之前的政权组织模式,因此民族主义又成为现代国家合法性的来源。民族国家创建之后,民族主义依然存在,还会以爱国主义、分离主义等形式表现出来。对那些只具备了民族国家外表而没有实现对民族国家的认同超越其他认同的国家而言,缔造或者深化民族主义在其未来的发展中显得尤为重要。     

Hans Morgenthau and the Tragedy of the Nation-State

The cardinal role of tragedy in Morgenthau's theory of international politics has hardly gone unnoticed. Indeed there is now a considerable corpus of literature that established the importance of tragedy as a central concept around which Morgenthau's theory revolved. This paper builds upon this already developed framework and employs tragedy not as an analytical category but as a metaphor employed by Morgenthau to approach the nation-state. It is claimed that the idea of tragedy underpinned his notion of the nation-state inasmuch as it did his view of individual human beings. As such the notion of tragedy informed consistently Morgenthau's analyses of national tragedies that were like the self-defeating nationalism of Germany. It also informed his efforts to avert potential national tragedies from materialising as his attempts to influence US foreign policy demonstrated. It is finally claimed, that far from a descent into despair, Morgenthau's realism signified a conscious effort to go beyond the tragedy of the nation-state.