Chamberlain, Lesley. Review of Daniel Maier-Katkin, STRANGER FROM ABROAD. THE INDEPENDENT July 2, 2010.

Maier-Katkin, Daniel. Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness. New York: Norton, 2010.

Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt have many enemies, Heidegger because of his Nazi flirtation and Arendt as a critic of the Jews. We have known for some time, from their letters, that Heidegger, who reinvented philosophy in the 1920s, and Hannah, his star pupil who went on to become a leading political philosopher in the US, were briefly lovers in her teens. The tendency, which Daniel Maier-Katkin, an American human-rights professor magnificently resists, has been to use their early relationship further to indict what came later. In fact, their correspondence tells an exemplary tale of friendship and forgiveness in which the banality of human nature is redeemed. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/stranger-from-abroad-by-daniel-maierkatkin-2015874.html.

Horowitz, Irving Louis. "Assaulting Arendt." FIRST THINGS (February 2010).

The honorable tradition of criticism carries with it a displeasing aspect. This is especially the case in the higher academic circles. Reputations are too frequently made when pygmies stand on the shoulders of giants and when iconic and sometimes heroic figures are symbolically cut down to size. The theory is that, if the critic saws off the legs of those who have managed to stand tall for generations, the midgets can win handily in face-to-face combat with the dead. This is not to deny that even the most talented are sometimes in error; criticism is a useful art. It is, however, a derivative art. Criticism finds acceptance in a culture that measures success by small errors rather than by large-scale successes. The recent critique of Hannah Arendt is a case in point. The most comprehensive assault to date, some thirty-five years after her death, is also the most recent. Bernard Wasserstein, professor of modern European Jewish history at the University of Chicago, comments on Arendt in the Times Literary Supplement in October 2009 under the title “Blame the Victim: Hannah Arendt Among the Nazis.” He offers not just a selective summary of “the historian and her sources” but also an umbrella of charges and allegations from other prominent figures over the past half century. One of the most infamous is that of my good friend Walter Laqueur—a significant figure in his own right. Wasserstein spares us the need to pick through the emotive rubble that has plagued Arendt’s career, stitching together a picture of her as either a gullible reader of neo-Nazi literature or a closet Jewish anti-Semite in need of intellectual detoxification. In summary, but not in any way an exaggeration, Wasserstein claims the following: • The success of Arendt’s earlier work is owed more to the way it locked on to mid-twentieth-century Western guilt over imperialism and the continued strengthening of the Cold War than to The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s conception of the dynamics of historical change is little more than a confused mishmash of the structural, the social-psychological, and the conspiratorial. • Her works display a deep ignorance of political economy, diplomacy, and military strategy. Furthermore, she had little grasp or even interest in the mechanics of the political process in the states about which she wrote. • Rather than examine hard evidence, she deals in trifles and inflates them into richly colored balloons of generalization. At a time when superior historians were rejecting and becoming disenchanted by the idea of totalitarianism, her work in this area did not explain the generalization. • Her comparisons of Nazism and communism were sporadic and uneven, and she hardly dealt with Italian fascism as predecessor of these test cases of totalitarianism. The concept was incorporated into the vernacular of the 1960s and 1970s only because it served the useful ideological purposes of the Cold Warriors at the time. • The burden of her later work is blaming Jewish victims rather than anti-Semitic perpetrators. In her inversion of victims and victimizers, her bile knew no ethnic boundaries or rationalizations. • There was always a special edge to her criticism of her own Jewish people. She swallowed sometimes in whole cloth the poisonous anti-Semitism hatched in the Weimar period, much of which was shrouded in the Nazi literature of the age. The ferocity of his critique blinds Wasserstein to several uncomfortable facts. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/01/assaulting-arendt.

Beran, Michael Knox. "Can the Polis Live Again?" CITY JOURNAL (Autumn 2009).

In 1958, Hannah Arendt published The Human Condition, her book—part panegyric, part lamentation—on what she called “public space.” What she meant by public space wasn’t just the buildings and gathering places that in a good town square or market piazza encourage people to come together. It wasn’t even civic art viewed more broadly, the paintings and poetry Arendt attributed to homo faber, the fabricating soul who translates “intangible” civic ideals into “tangible” civic art. Public space, for Arendt, was also a metaphysical arena in which people realized their individual potential. They escaped necessity’s pinch—the arduous biological round of life-sustaining labor—through a “sharing of words and deeds.” This was the tradition of the Greek polis, from which Arendt drew much of her inspiration, a place designed “to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness.”

But a new Leviathan was gobbling up the old public spaces, Arendt believed. With the advent of the modern nation-state, a social dispensation began to emerge, one whose adepts—sociologists, psychologists, planners—were skilled in techniques derived from the social sciences but whose motives were far from pure. The new social technician, part schoolmarm, part bully, sought not merely to study behavior but also, Arendt argued, to control it. The school of Pericles was giving way to the school of Pavlov.

The social signori, Arendt maintained, sought to impose behavioral norms on people through “innumerable and various rules”—bureaucratic harnesses intended to “normalize” men and women, to compel them to “behave,” and to punish their “spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.” Refractory spirits who failed to conform were to be stigmatized as “asocial or abnormal.” In her more perfervid visions, Arendt foresaw a social apocalypse, a “leveling out of fluctuation” that would result in the “most sterile passivity history has ever known.”

Arendt’s jeremiad had a good deal in common with the warnings of other mid-twentieth-century prophets, among them David Riesman and Friedrich Hayek. It resembles, too, the insights of contemporary critics like Camille Paglia, who contends that too many Americans have become “complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them.” But Arendt had her own idiosyncratic understanding of the way public space could help block the road to serfdom. The old forums, in liberating so much potential, foiled those who desired “conformism, behaviorism, and automatism in human affairs.” The question that haunts the reader of Arendt’s work is whether we can get the old places back. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_urb-public-space.html.

Rosenbaum, Ron. "The Evil of Banality." SLATE October 30, 2009.

Will we ever be able to think of Hannah Arendt in the same way again? Two new and damning critiques, one of Arendt and one of her longtime Nazi-sycophant lover, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, were published within 10 days of each other last month. The pieces cast further doubt on the overinflated, underexamined reputations of both figures and shed new light on their intellectually toxic relationship. My hope is that these revelations will encourage a further discrediting of the most overused, misused, abused pseudo-intellectual phrase in our language: the banality of evil. The banality of the banality of evil, the fatuousness of it, has long been fathomless, but perhaps now it will be consigned to the realm of the deceitful and disingenuous as well. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.slate.com/id/2234010/pagenum/all/#p2.

Fourth Independent Conference, Hannah Arendt Circle, Department of Philosophy, DePaul University, April 16-18, 2010.

We invite individual submissions for papers on any aspect of Arendt's work, including critiques and applications of her thinking. Please send an abstract of the paper, by e-mail (750 word limit). Abstracts should be formatted for anonymous review and submitted to the program committee chair, Tama Weisman at tweisman@dom.edu on or before November 30th 2009. Please indicate "Arendt Circle submission" in the subject heading, and include the abstract as a ".doc" attachment to your message. Program decisions will be announced by the beginning of January. Program Committee: Tama Weisman, Dominican University Sarah MacMillen, Duquesne University Peg Birmingham, DePaul University Our first three independent meetings were outstanding, and we are looking forward to the same camaraderie and intense discussion of Arendt’s work at this year’s conference. Each speaker will have approximately 35 minutes for paper presentation and discussion combined —papers should be a maximum of 3000 words (15-20 minutes). Further information is available here: http://www.thearendtcircle.com/our-next-meeting.

Minnich, Elizabeth. Review of Stephan Kampowski, ARENDT, AUGUSTINE AND THE NEW BEGINNING. NDPR (September 2009).

Kampowski, Stephan. Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning: the Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt in the Light of her Dissertation on St. Augustine. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008. Saint Augustine's significance for Hannah Arendt -- a modern, apparently secular Jewish woman who took as given the irreversibility of "modern 'deaths' -- of God, metaphysics, philosophy." (Life of The Mind, p. 11) -- is an obviously tantalizing question. On the face of it, these two thinkers would seem at best incompatible. In this superb book, Stephan Kampowski takes up this challenging inquiry, following a winding trail through Arendt's life as it is intriguingly marked, both early and late in her work, by her citations of Augustine. Kampowski's quest turns out to illuminate the whole of Hannah Arendt's, and strands of Augustine's, thought afresh. It does so in good measure because of his approach, on which I will therefore spend more than the usual time. Kampowski neither forces either of these distinctive thinkers into the other's terms nor stops when he has located divergences. Instead, as Arendt's dissertation supervisor, Karl Jaspers, put it, he seeks "the heartbeat" of their philosophizing below and beyond tangles, by-ways, contradictions as well as similarities. To thus reflect on Augustine and Arendt as they cast light on each other is to remember and take seriously the fact that, however different their paths, both sought meaning to sustain lives in "dark times," as the title of one of Arendt's books has it. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17285.

Kirsch, Adam. "Beware of Pity: Arendt and the Power of the Impersonal." THE NEW YORKER January 12, 2009.

It is an ambiguous tribute to Arendt, then, that her scholarly and popular profile is higher today than at any time since she died, in 1975, at the age of sixty-nine. In the past few years, a number of Arendt’s works have been published by Schocken Books, where she worked as an editor in the nineteen-forties. The Origins of Totalitarianism has been accompanied by several collections of essays—most notably The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman, which includes Arendt’s wartime journalism. Scholars around the world have kept pace with a torrent of studies—on Arendt and international relations, Arendt and human rights, Arendt and the Jewish question. It is hard to name another thinker of the twentieth century more sought after as a guide to the dilemmas of the twenty-first. Yet it is not just political theorists who find Arendt a source of fascination. The most intense curiosity about Arendt in the past few years has had less to do with her work than with her life. Above all, the publication in English, in 2004, of Arendt’s correspondence with Martin Heidegger, after decades of speculation about their relationship, brought renewed scrutiny to her intimate life. To a thinker who believed that the personal was emphatically not political, this kind of attention would have been very unwelcome. She derided the “pseudoscientific apparatuses of depth-psychology, psychoanalysis, graphology, etc.” as nothing more than “curiosity-seeking.” Yet Arendt’s deeply ambivalent relationship with Heidegger—her lover, teacher, and friend—has a more than personal significance, since it casts light on the most vexed issue in her work: her tangled relationship with Jewishness and Germanness. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/01/12/090112crat_atlarge_kirsch?printable=true.

Markell, Patchen. "Review of Birmingham's HANNAH ARENDT AND HUMAN RIGHTS & Parekh's HANNAH ARENDT AND THE CHALLENGE OF MODERNITY." NDPR (Dec. 2008).

Birmingham, Peg. Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: the Predicament of Common Responsibility. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006. Parekh, Serena. Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: a Phenomenology of Human Rights. London: Routledge, 2008. In the years following the Second World War, Hannah Arendt identified a deadly irony in the history of the idea of human rights. Appeals to human rights had long been understood as a means of protecting individuals against the nation-states to which (it was assumed) they belonged. Yet precisely because human rights discourse took national membership and the coextensivity of nations and states for granted, the idea of human rights proved disastrously impotent just when it was needed most: when the crisis of the nation-state and the rise of totalitarianism produced and then destroyed stateless persons on a mass scale. Half a century later, political philosophers concerned with the vulnerable status of refugees, migrants, and national minorities in the wake of the Cold War rediscovered Arendt's critique of human rights, as well as her effort to reorient human rights discourse around the idea of a fundamental right to belong, or a "right to have rights" -- even as some of them, most influentially Seyla Benhabib, worried that Arendt's reconstructed conception of human rights lacked sufficiently strong "normative foundations." One response to this concern might be to insist that it is misplaced: that Arendt herself would have rejected the demand for foundations as a manifestation of the relentless subordination of political freedom to philosophical certitude in what she called "the tradition" of Western political philosophy. These two recently published books on Arendt and human rights, by Peg Birmingham and Serena Parekh, adopt a different strategy. Responding directly to objections like Benhabib's, Birmingham and Parekh argue in different ways that Arendt did indeed try to provide a new foundation for human rights, but that the foundation she offered was of a distinctive, unfamiliar kind. Generally speaking, both authors suggest that Arendt anchors human rights not in an account of human "nature" (that is, in a characterization of human beings in terms of a set of properties shared by each member of the species), but in a picture of the human "condition" (that is, in a phenomenological characterization of the basic features of human beings' worldly existence). Such phenomenological foundations don't possess the compulsory force of logical deductions, but they may nevertheless help to strengthen the commitment to human rights by showing us how such a commitment harmonizes with (and can thus draw sustenance from) a potentially persuasive broader portrait of human being. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14788.

3rd Annual Conference, Hannah Arendt Circle, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, March 27-29, 2009.

The conference is jointly hosted by the departments of Philosophy, Communications, & Foreign Languages. Individual submissions for papers are welcome on any aspect of Arendt's work, including critiques and applications of her thinking. Please send an abstract of the paper, by e-mail (750 word limit). Abstracts should be formatted for anonymous review and submitted to the program committee chair, Karin Fry at kfry@uwsp.edu on or before November 14th, 2008. Please indicate "Arendt Circle submission" in the subject heading, and include the abstract as a ".doc" attachment to your message. Program decisions will be announced by the end of December. Program Committee: Karin Fry, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point Tama Weisman, Quincy University Irene McMullin, University of Arkansas Further information is available here: http://www.arendtcircle.com/ournextmeeting2.

Judt, Tony. "The 'Problem of Evil' in Postwar Europe [on Hannah Arendt]." NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS February 14, 2008.

The first work by Hannah Arendt that I read, at the age of sixteen, was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It remains, for me, the emblematic Arendt text. It is not her most philosophical book. It is not always right; and it is decidedly not her most popular piece of writing. I did not even like the book myself when I first read it—I was an ardent young Socialist-Zionist and Arendt's conclusions profoundly disturbed me. But in the years since then I have come to understand that Eichmann in Jerusalem represents Hannah Arendt at her best: attacking head-on a painful topic; dissenting from official wisdom; provoking argument not just among her critics but also and especially among her friends; and above all, disturbing the easy peace of received opinion. It is in memory of Arendt the "disturber of the peace" that I want to offer a few thoughts on a subject which, more than any other, preoccupied her political writings. . . . Read the whole article here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21031.