GEOFFREY WILDANGER: The Book on Marx That Arendt Never Finished
Hannah Arendt’s unfinished book on Marx offers a timely philosophical dialogue for our era of economic precarity.
The Modern Challenge to Tradition: Hannah Arendt: edited by Barbara Hahn and James McFarland, with Ingo Kieslich and Ingeborg Nordmann. Reviewed by GEOFFREY WILDANGER
In this era of economic precarity and resurgent authoritarianism, it is unsurprising that both Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt occupy a central place in many readers’ minds—and a lingering one on their nightstands. Sales of Capital boomed following the 2008 financial crisis, and Donald Trump offers good reason to read The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is fitting, then, that the new Critical Edition of Arendt’s complete works begins with this, a volume of fragments from an unfinished book originally planned to be called Karl Marx and the Tradition of Political Thought. Sales of Capital boomed following the 2008 financial crisis, and Donald Trump offers good reason to read The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Seyla Benhabib: The Personal Is Not the Political. Arendt maintained that good politics was about the public interest and about the commitment to create a vibrant public life. Good politics should not invade the fragile domain of human attachments and friendships, nor should it force individuals to make public the shadowy and obscure recesses of the human heart
"Exile, Statelessness, and Migration" by Seyla Benhabib - Book Launch and Discussion
Born in Hanover in 1906, Arendt grew up primarily in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in Eastern Prussia. Her parents were assimilated Jews of the upper middle class and dedicated activists in the Social Democratic Party. She studied philosophy at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she had an infamous affair, and went on to receive a doctorate under Karl Jaspers at the University of Heidelberg in 1929. Although intensifying anti-Semitism in Germany and the surging influence of the Nazi party made pursuit of an academic post nearly impossible, Arendt received funding to write a habilitation thesis under Heidegger’s supervision. (German professors are traditionally required to write this second doctoral dissertation in order to receive a permanent post.)
Her experience of anti-Semitism drove her to explicit political commitments, and she began to work with Zionist organizations conducting research on the dire state of Germany's Jews. This work made her an enemy of the Nazis, forcing her into exile in 1933 in France. In 1940, she fled to the United States, where she remained for the rest of her life, maintaining a prominent career as a public intellectual and political philosopher.
The first volume of the Critical Edition presents significant new material, previously available only to those willing to sift through manuscripts and typescripts in the Library of Congress. Presenting texts (in both German and English) written between 1951 and 1954, it is a formidable task of intellectual historical reconstruction. It fills in two lacunae in Arendt’s work: the intellectual labor connecting The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) with later books such as The Human Condition (1958), and the development of Arendt’s thought across the 1950s through a series of fragmented engagements with the writings of Marx and through polemics with American and German peers. It is hard to imagine a timelier dialogue. Some of Arendt’s ideas on Marx are incorporated into volumes published during her lifetime, including The Human Condition, and others have since appeared in posthumous volumes edited by Jerome Kohn. What makes this volume unique and rich is that it not only includes previously unpublished texts, but also, by documenting the process of revision, tracks, in detail, her evolving response to Marx’s thought... read more:
The Modern Challenge to Tradition: Hannah Arendt: edited by Barbara Hahn and James McFarland, with Ingo Kieslich and Ingeborg Nordmann. Reviewed by GEOFFREY WILDANGER
In this era of economic precarity and resurgent authoritarianism, it is unsurprising that both Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt occupy a central place in many readers’ minds—and a lingering one on their nightstands. Sales of Capital boomed following the 2008 financial crisis, and Donald Trump offers good reason to read The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is fitting, then, that the new Critical Edition of Arendt’s complete works begins with this, a volume of fragments from an unfinished book originally planned to be called Karl Marx and the Tradition of Political Thought. Sales of Capital boomed following the 2008 financial crisis, and Donald Trump offers good reason to read The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Seyla Benhabib: The Personal Is Not the Political. Arendt maintained that good politics was about the public interest and about the commitment to create a vibrant public life. Good politics should not invade the fragile domain of human attachments and friendships, nor should it force individuals to make public the shadowy and obscure recesses of the human heart
"Exile, Statelessness, and Migration" by Seyla Benhabib - Book Launch and Discussion
Born in Hanover in 1906, Arendt grew up primarily in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in Eastern Prussia. Her parents were assimilated Jews of the upper middle class and dedicated activists in the Social Democratic Party. She studied philosophy at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she had an infamous affair, and went on to receive a doctorate under Karl Jaspers at the University of Heidelberg in 1929. Although intensifying anti-Semitism in Germany and the surging influence of the Nazi party made pursuit of an academic post nearly impossible, Arendt received funding to write a habilitation thesis under Heidegger’s supervision. (German professors are traditionally required to write this second doctoral dissertation in order to receive a permanent post.)
Her experience of anti-Semitism drove her to explicit political commitments, and she began to work with Zionist organizations conducting research on the dire state of Germany's Jews. This work made her an enemy of the Nazis, forcing her into exile in 1933 in France. In 1940, she fled to the United States, where she remained for the rest of her life, maintaining a prominent career as a public intellectual and political philosopher.
The first volume of the Critical Edition presents significant new material, previously available only to those willing to sift through manuscripts and typescripts in the Library of Congress. Presenting texts (in both German and English) written between 1951 and 1954, it is a formidable task of intellectual historical reconstruction. It fills in two lacunae in Arendt’s work: the intellectual labor connecting The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) with later books such as The Human Condition (1958), and the development of Arendt’s thought across the 1950s through a series of fragmented engagements with the writings of Marx and through polemics with American and German peers. It is hard to imagine a timelier dialogue. Some of Arendt’s ideas on Marx are incorporated into volumes published during her lifetime, including The Human Condition, and others have since appeared in posthumous volumes edited by Jerome Kohn. What makes this volume unique and rich is that it not only includes previously unpublished texts, but also, by documenting the process of revision, tracks, in detail, her evolving response to Marx’s thought... read more:
