Dilip Simeon's blog

Arendt shows us “how to think the world anew […] how to hold ourselves accountable for our actions, how to think critically without succumbing to ideology,” Hill writes. “Only when we do this, she says, will we be able to love the world.”    The peak of her pariahdom came when she covered Adolf Eichmann’s trial for  The New Yorker , which culminated in her 1963 book,  Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . Hill scarcely breaks a sweat defending Arendt on the Eichmann matter, which is still alive and kicking in parts of academe. Hannah Arendt : by Samantha Rose Hill Reviewed by Shaan Sachdev Hill has obviously heard it all, knows where most strictures fail to hold water, and gives Arendt the last word: 'To Arendt the most upsetting part of the literary show trial was that she was pronounced guilty for a book she had never written. Most of her critics had, she wrote, not even bothered to read it. They objected to her ironic tone, not its content...

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience … The Origins of Totalitarianism  (1951) by Hannah Arendt ‘Please write regularly, or otherwise I am going to die out here.’ Hannah Arendt didn’t usually begin letters to her husband this way, but in the spring of 1955 she found herself alone in a ‘wilderness’. After the publication of  The Origins of Totalitarianism , she was invited to be a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. She didn’t like the intellectual atmosphere. Her colleagues lacked a sense of humour, and the cloud of McCarthyism hung over social life. She was told there would be 30 students in her undergraduate classes: there were 120, in each. She hated being on stage lecturing every day: ‘I simply can’t be exposed to the public five times a week – in oth...

Arendt gained widespread recognition for revealing the common tactics of repressive governments of varying ideologies, as well as the fertile soil in which they grow. “You can fight over many things with her,” political theorist Hans Morgenthau said, “but she was the first to understand fascism.” Covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann from Jerusalem in 1961, she also recognized that evil did not require committed ideologues to further its agenda  - a well-oiled bureaucracy of ambitious functionaries would suffice to perpetrate genocide....  Within months of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, a political investigator with the Berlin police detained twenty-six-year-old scholar Hannah Arendt and politely interrogated her for more than a week. Upon her release, she devised a plan to leave Germany and headed east with her mother. Taking refuge in the Erzgebirge Mountains, the two women approached the Czech border without travel papers. More posts on Hannah Arendt Aren...

“The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.” A message that projects a long arm into the present and can be read in the current global context that sees indifference and outright hostility to refugees, a political and social attitude that can only come at the price of exacerbating tensions and rupturing the moral fabric of the perpetrators of such indifference and hostility.  “We Refugees” In the first place, we don’t like to be called “refugees.” We ourselves call each other “newcomers” or “immigrants.” Our newspapers are papers for “Americans of German language”; and, as far as I know, there is not and never was any club founded by Hitler-persecuted people whose name indicated that its members were refugees. A refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held. Well, it is true we have had to seek refuge; but we committed no act...

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. ...

Maria Popova - Lying in Politics:Deception, Self-Deception, and the Psychology of Defactualization “The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people,”  Adrienne Rich wrote in her beautiful 1975  speech on lying and what truth really means ,  “are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.”   Nowhere is this liar’s loss of perspective more damaging to public life, human possibility, and our collective progress than in politics, where complex social, cultural, economic, and psychological forces conspire to make the assault on truth traumatic on a towering scale. Those forces are what  Hannah Arendt (1906 -1975), one of the most incisive thinkers of the past century, explores in a superb 1971 essay titled “Lying in Politics,” written shortly after the release of the Pentagon Papers and later included in  Crises of the Republic  (...

Thinking in Public - by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft  Reviewed by Jon Baskin IN AN  article  published earlier this summer in  The Revealer , the intellectual historian Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft identifies a recent hunger in the United States for “public intellectuals.” As he amply documents, different people mean different things by the term. Predominantly, though, it is used to signify a desire for a more thoughtful and informed public conversation, bolstered by the input of those educated in the humanities. Most of us assume, in other words, that having more “intellectuals” engage in public life would be a good thing, probably for intellectuals themselves and certainly for the rest of society. (Having spent nearly a decade in graduate school, during which I helped start a magazine based on the idea of public philosophy, I’d count myself among those who have staked this claim.) Wurgaft’s article gently lays out some of the contradictions inherent in our demand for ...

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” “Loneliness is personal, and it is also political,”  Olivia Laing wrote in  The Lonely City , one of the  finest books of the year . Half a century earlier, Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) examined those peculiar parallel dimensions of loneliness as a profoundly personal anguish and an indispensable currency of our political life in her intellectual debut, the incisive and astonishingly timely 1951 classic  The Origins of Totalitarianism  ( public library ). Arendt paints loneliness as “the common ground for terror” and explores its function as both the chief weapon and the chief damage of oppressive political regimes. Exactly twenty years before h...

For the new year, here are some prophetic excerpts from two essays of Hannah Arendt’s, collected in  The Jewish Writings  (2007). Please note her predictions of the Nakba, of unending conflict, of Zionist dependence on the American Jewish community, of ultimate conflict with that American Jewish community, and the contribution of political Zionism to world anti-semitism. Just what Howard Gutman  said recently. For  which he was denounced by– Zionists. Zionism Reconsidered, 1944: Nationalism is bad enough when it trusts in nothing but the rude force of the nation. A nationalism that necessarily and admittedly depends upon the force of a foreign nation is certainly worse. This is the threatened state of Jewish nationalism and of the proposed Jewish state, surrounded inevitably by Arab states and Arab people. Even a Jewish majority in Palestine–nay even a transfer of all Palestine’s Arabs, which is openly demanded by the revisionists–would not substantially ...

Camps and pariahs are still with us. They have never been more numerous To be unwanted is never just about being rejected by those who throw you out. Hannah Arendt  was on her way to lunch with her mother Martha when a Berlin policeman arrested her and took her to the presidium at Alexanderplatz. It was 1933. Hitler had been in power for several months; Hermann Göring’s agents were rounding up suspicious activists. The young researcher for the German Zionist Organization spent eight days in jail while gendarmes scoured her apartment, examined her philosophical notes, and pored over her mysterious codes — a selection of Greek quotes. Upon her release, she packed her bags. Since the torching of the Reichstag in February, life had become hell for socialists, communists, and Jews. Like others before her, and more after, Arendt fled to Paris. She would spend the next 18 years as a refugee, a stateless person, a pariah. There are 60 million refugees in the world, the hig...

"I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.." Courtesy Aeon magazine Philosophy: Kwame Anthony Appiah - how to swing honour away from killing & towards peace Hannah Arendt died 40 years ago. Her legacy remains uncertain. Born in 1906 to a secular, assimilated German-Jewish family in what is today Hanover, she rejected the designation ‘political philosopher’, preferring instead to be called a ‘political theorist’. Theory, as she saw it, allowed her to expand from philosophy’s singular man to the experiences of plural men, and to say something enduring about the collective struggle of humanity as it confronted the unprecedented violence of the 20th century. Of course, what that something was remains elusive, perhaps even muddled. Mirror...