Hannah Arendt and Politics

232 Pages·2022·0.69 MB·English

by  Maria Robaszkiewicz, Michael Weinman

Half Title
Hannah Arendt and Politics
Series Page
THINKING POLITICS
Series Editors: Geoff M. Boucher and Matthew Sharpe
Published titles
Agamben and Politics: A Critical Introduction
Sergei Prozorov
Foucault and Politics: A Critical Introduction
Mark G. E. Kelly
Taylor and Politics: A Critical Introduction
Craig Browne and Andrew P. Lynch
Habermas and Politics: A Critical Introduction
Matheson Russell
Irigaray and Politics: A Critical Introduction
Laura Roberts
Lyotard and Politics: A Critical Introduction
Stuart Sim
Hannah Arendt and Politics
Maria Robaszkiewicz and Michael Weinman
Forthcoming titles
Nancy Fraser and Politics
Marjan Ivković and Zona Zarić
Nussbaum and Politics
Brandon Robshaw
Judith Butler and Politics
Adriana Zaharijević
Title Page
HANNAH ARENDT AND POLITICS
2
Maria Robaszkiewicz and Michael D. Weinman
Copyright
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Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works by Hannah Arendt viii
Introduction 1
Part I Arendt and Politics: Thinking About the World as a
Public Space
1 Action! 11
2 Between Human Action and the Life of the Mind 31
3 Exercises in Political Thinking 51
Part II Arendt and Political Thinking: Judging the World(s)
We Share
4 The Philosopher and Politics: The Roots of Arendt’s
Critique of Philosophy 75
5 Eichmann, Mass Democracy, and Israel 96
6 The Earth, Education, and Human Action 119
7 Social Justice and Feminist Agency 136
8 Human Rights and Popular Sovereignty 155
9 Thinking With and Against Arendt about Race, Racism,
and Anti- racism 175
Afterword: The Hidden Treasure of Hannah Arendt’s
Philosophy 196
Bibliography 202
Index 220
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
Hannah Arendt and Politics has come to see the light of day thanks
to the collaborative effort of many people over a number of years.
It is our duty, and a privilege, to share our sincere thanks to all of
those whose work and whose encouragement made this project pos-
sible. First, we would like to thank Geoff M. Boucher and Matthew
Sharpe, editors of the Thinking Politics series, for giving us the
opportunity to shape the presentation of this central thinker for this
audience. We also extend our gratitude to everyone at Edinburgh
University Press who has been involved in contracting, completing,
and publishing this book, especially Ersev Ersoy for her excellent
advice and professionalism throughout the late stages of bringing this
project to completion.
Maria Robaszkiewicz would like to thank Marieke Borren,
Antonio Calcagno, Katja Čičigoj, Marta Famula, Ruth Hagengruber,
Wolfgang Heuer, Andrea Karsten, and Ursula Ludz for their helpful
suggestions and their friendship. She very much appreciates the
support of her student assistants, Simge Altunbüken and Aleksandar
Cvetkovic, during the work on this book. She would like especially to
thank her mother, Anna Pikulska- Radomska, who never stops believ-
ing in her. Michael Weinman wishes to thank Sabrina Slipchenko for
research assistance and substantial practical contributions of numer-
ous kinds. He also gratefully acknowledges his debt to his friends and
colleagues in the Hannah Arendt Working Group in Critical Theories
of Modernity at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and in
particular the co-c onvenor of that group, Isaac Ariail Reed, for years
of stimulating interdisciplinary dialogue without which his contribu-
tions to this volume would not have been possible.
Portions of Chapter 8 have appeared previously, in different
form, as: Michael Weinman (2020), “Arendt and the Return of
Ethnonationalism,” Demos vs. Polis: The New Populism, Liberal
Herald 4: 42–8; Michael Weinman (2018), “Arendt and the
Legitimate Expectation for Hospitality and Membership Today,”
Moral Philosophy and Politics 5 (1): 127–50. Both authors gratefully
vi
acknowledgments
acknowledge the editors and publishers of those publications for per-
mission to present reworked versions of these excerpts.
Last but not least, our deepest gratitude to our first readers for
their intellectual inspiration and generous responses to drafts of some
or all of what follows: Marieke Borren, Irit Dekel; David Kretz; Isaac
Ariail Reed. With so many to thank for these various reasons, we
alone take responsibility for whatever errors remain.
vii
Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works by Hannah Arendt
Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works
by Hannah Arendt
BPF Between Past and Future
CC “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political
Significance”
CE “The Crisis in Education”
CH “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern”
EJ Eichmann in Jerusalem
Ex “What is Existential Philosophy?”
GBPF “The Gap Between Past and Future”
H80 “Heidegger at Eighty”
HC The Human Condition
IP “Introduction into Politics”
LKPP Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy
LoM I The Life of the Mind One: Thinking
LoM II The Life of the Mind Two: Willing
MDT Men in Dark Times
OR On Revolution
OT The Origins of Totalitarianism
OV On Violence
PP “Philosophy and Politics”
PRD “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship”
RLR “Reflections on Little Rock”
SQMP “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy”
TMA “Tradition and the Modern Age”
TP “Truth and Politics”
UP Understanding and Politics
VA Vita activa
WA “What is Authority?”
WF “What is Freedom?”
WRLR “What Remains? The Language Remains”
Please note that all citations refer to the editions included in the
Bibliography.
viii
Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works by Hannah Arendt Introduction
Introduction
“An experience in thinking [. . .] can be won, like all experience in
doing something, only through practice, through exercises,” notes
Hannah Arendt in the introduction to her essay collection Between
Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (2006). This
inconspicuous remark escapes the attention of most readers and
has only been taken up by a few interpreters (such as Bar On 2002;
Koivusalo 2010; Robaszkiewicz 2017). Although it appears in the
title of the book, Arendt herself refers to the notion of exercises only
briefly in the introduction. But although its significance can easily
be missed, on a closer look the concept turns out to be one of the
foundations of her specific conception of the political and has great
potential for the interpretation of her work.
Arendt already had exercises in thinking in mind when working
on The Origins of Totalitarianism, her first large project after the
Second World War. In her pointed reply to Eric Voegelin (1953) in
his critical review of this book, she rejected the charge that her study
lacked objectivity, emphasizing that her goal was not to present an
objective theory of totalitarian regimes but to understand what had
happened. She connected this pursuit of understanding to the power
of imagination and linked it to the practice of what she on this
occasion described as spiritual exercises:
I do not wish to go into this matter here, but I may add that I am con-
vinced that understanding is closely related to that faculty of imagination
which Kant called Einbildungskraft and which has nothing in common
with fictional ability. The Spiritual Exercises are exercises of imagination
and they may be more relevant to method in the historical sciences than
academic training realizes. (Arendt 1953: 79)
And indeed, Arendt’s writings, regardless of their scope, specific
subject matter, or the time they were written, can function as exam-
ples of such exercises. Throughout her body of work, she never loses
sight of her primary goal: to understand and judge the phenomena of
our political life.
1
hannah arendt and politics
There would be much to write about Hannah Arendt’s own life
story. This has been done in a wonderful way by Elisabeth Young-
Bruehl (1982) in her classic For Love of the World, and recently taken
up from a different angle in Samantha Rose Hill’s Critical Lives biog-
raphy (2021), to name just two sources shedding light on her rich
life, full of unexpected twists and turns.1 Arendt herself reveals some
autobiographical details in her famous 1964 interview, published
as “What Remains? The Language Remains” (1994), and widely
available as an online video source. This is why here, we restrict
ourselves to a couple of words, marking some points in her life, to
which we refer later in this book. Born in a Jewish family in Hanover
on October 14, 1906, she lost her father soon after and moved with
her mother to Königsberg, where she grew up. Her mother was a
communist and a supporter of Rosa Luxemburg. The question of
being Jewish was treated in the family as a plain fact, not a politi-
cal matter. Already as a teenager, Hannah Arendt was fascinated by
philosophy; she read Kant and Jaspers, and soon decided to study
philosophy. She began her studies in Berlin, then moved to Marburg
upon hearing rumors of Martin Heidegger’s genius. Heidegger and
Arendt engaged in a brief romantic relationship, after which she left
Marburg to complete her dissertation about Saint Augustine with
Karl Jaspers. In the early 1930s, upon the rise of National Socialist
party and antisemitic sentiments in Germany, Arendt discovered
her political side and got involved with Zionists, even though she
never became a member of any party or organization. After being
briefly imprisoned, she fled to Paris, and later, with her husband
Heinrich Blücher, to New York, where they arrived in 1940. As a
Jewish migrant, Arendt joined the already established Jewish intel-
lectual community. In 1949, she published her voluminous study The
Origins of Totalitarianism, which made her famous overnight. From
there, her career as a political t heorist— not a philosopher, as she
stressed— developed very dynamically. In 1951, after over a decade
of statelessness, she received US citizenship. She published many
books (The Human Condition is probably the most popular one) and
essays, and taught highly regarded courses as a guest lecturer at many
leading American universities, including Princeton and the University
of Chicago, before taking a permanent position at the New School
for Social Research. In 1961, Arendt reported for the New Yorker
about the trial of Adolf Eichmann. The report, published as a book
in 1963, and in particular its subtitle introducing the phrase “banal-
ity of evil,” sparked a heated debate, which had serious consequences
2