Hannah Arendt at 100
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Centennial celebrations for the political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) are springing up from Lucerne to Lima and Sydney to Seoul. Forthcoming gatherings in Germany, Paris, and New York will successively retrace the geographical arc of this prodigious Jewish émigré scholar’s flight across Europe to America.
Arendt probed the roots of totalitarianism, examined reasons for revolution, and showed how evil could wear an ordinary face. She served as chief editor of Schocken Books, and covered, very controversially, the Eichmann Trial for the New Yorker. Her love and later apologia for the philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger gained her some notoriety.
“She didn’t impose philosophy on the world,” said a professor at SUNY Stony Brook, Dick Howard, “the world made her think.”
Arendt had an “ability to make philosophy come alive and make it matter,” a professor at Yale University, Seyla Benhabib, said. She was the principal organizer of a conference last weekend in New Haven, Conn. where she elicited ideas for a consortium across universities of higher learning to work with the New York-based nonprofit Hannah Arendt Organization in helping to preserve Arendt’s legacy.
Among the programs in New York will be a symposium at the CUNY Graduate Center on October 12 called “Why Arendt Matters?” featuring the biographer and psychoanalyst Elizabeth Young-Bruehl. A professor at the New School, Richard Bernstein, who will also speak in Lima, Peru, and Stockholm, Sweden, will speak at a conference at Bard College October 27–29. That conference will feature a tour of the Hannah Arendt Collection at the library, a keynote address by Christopher Hitchens, a discussion of Arendt’s Jewish identity with the New School’s Hannah Arendt Center director, Jerome Kohn, and others, and a visit to the grave sites of Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, whom she married in 1940.
While a graduate student at Yale in 1972, Ms. Benhabib recalled heading to the New School to hear Arendt. The auditorium of 400 or 500 people included many anti-war activists “hanging from the rafters” to hear “extremely dense lectures on Kant.” The first few questions posed to Arendt were about the Vietnam War: “They had come to talk to her since she was a political thinker.”
“‘The personal is not the political’: that is the message of Arendt’s life and work,” Ms. Benhabib once wrote in the Boston Review, adding the public sphere was “the arena in which we are uniquely able to express our human capacity to jointly address common concerns.” Arendt found much to admire in ancient Greece’s citizen-led democracy and Thomas Jefferson’s idea of small “elementary republics.”
“You can’t place her on the left or the right,” a professor at the University of Toronto, Ronald Beiner, told The New York Sun. Her views “don’t map” onto those coordinates: “She is floating in some other space.” The left has criticized Arendt, a non-Marxist, for elitism and uncoupling politics from economics. And her support of pro-student activism drew fire from the right. But “her sympathies in general ran to the left,” a professor at the University of Nottingham, Richard King, said.
“One of the reasons I admire Hannah Arendt,” Mr. Bernstein said, “is that she was a person who really thought that if we want to understand what is happening in the 20th century, we cannot simply rely on traditional categories. The task of the thinker is to forge new ways of thinking.” He added, “Now, if you really try to do that, that’s threatening.”