Hannah Arendt’s 1959 essay critiquing forced integration, “Reflections on Little Rock,” is widely debated, but less has been said about the positions she takes on education and childhood in this essay. Drawing on archival and historical materials, this article posits an answer to why notoriously obstinate Arendt accepted Ralph Ellison’s critique of her stance on parents of integrators: Ellison’s portayal of these parents aligned with Arendt’s requirement in “The Crisis in Education” that parents introduce children to the old world. It then explicates the problem this acceptance poses for Arendt’s insistence on an apolitical childhood arbitrarily demarcated at age eighteen. It also finds that this position is further undermined by the biographies of the teenage integrators themselves. Finally, it proposes viewing politics as a process of “becoming”—an idea found in Arendt’s work. This would permit political participation for maturing teenagers, while protecting younger children from the harshness of politics.

This article explores the concept of “world alienation” in the work of Hannah Arendt. It seeks to answer two sets of questions. First, what exactly is “world alienation” and how does Arendt’s concept differ from other theories of alienation? Second, what does “world alienation” mean in regard to Arendt’s characterisation of modernity, and what remedies does Arendt equip us with to overcome alienation? The article shows that Arendt’s notion of alienation emerges from her understanding of the “world” as a realm of both human-made things and political action, thus differing from Rousseauian and Marxist notions of alienation. It argues further that Arendt’s analysis of modernity as being defined by world alienation constitutes a critique of capitalism, globalisation, and the destructive potentials unleashed by modern science.

In this article, I point Arendtian scholarship to important elements in the history of psychoanalysis that are relevant to explain Hannah Arendt’s known aversion to the discipline. I show how the political theorist relied on psychoanalytically-relevant concepts from her intellectual heritage—from Aristotle and St. Augustine to Hegel and Nietzsche. Afterward, I argue that Hannah Arendt’s critique of Adolf Eichmann was simultaneously a critique of his narcissism, or lack thereof. I show how her critique was truer to Freud’s original understanding of the concept than that of psychoanalysts writing in postwar America; a time in which the term narcissism itself became misused. I finally marry Freudian and Arendtian concepts together to think about the banality of narcissism.

This article examines how Hannah Arendt’s idea of a “right to have rights” could travel in the Americas. It offers a reading of the right to have rights that foregrounds the right to land as a basic right. This reading emerges through an attention to contemporary Indigenous social movements and political philosophy. Taken together, this examination and reading ask justice-oriented actors to support land back movements as part of a broader practice of defending human rights and situating those rights within a responsibility to land.

This paper challenges the ideas beyond the application of smart technology in the urban environment by investigating the proposal for the waterfront of Toronto by Sidewalk Labs. Although the project has been cancelled in the first months of the COVID pandemic outbreak, it still offers a valuable case study, as it was developed by Sidewalk Labs, part of Alphabet Inc, the company behind, among others, Google. This paper focusses on the spatial, material, and political aspects of the proposal, which are investigated through an architectural reading of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the world. The paper reflects on the public spaces in the plan, and in particular to the ambition to make these spaces “responsive” to popular demand. This ideal is inherent to the most far-fledged convictions beyond smart cities. In contradiction to its promising images and wild ideas, this paper concludes that it silences the participants and diminishes the possibility of active participation in the built environment.

Hannah Arendt’s concept of the mob has long been neglected. This paper aims to shine new light on the concept. It focusses on the mob’s role in Origins of Totalitarianism, as one of the key components in the rise of totalitarianism. First, this paper analyses Arendt’s definition of the mob. Next, it traces the mob’s origins, its growing influence, and two major ideological predispositions: tribal nationalism and rebellious nihilism. After further differentiation from Arendt’s concept of the masses, using the concept of the mob, the paper counters Robert Paxton’s objection to theories of atomized societies leading to fascism.

This paper situates Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality between the rival concerns of Habermasian critical theory and Gadamerian hermeneutical philosophy. I argue that natality is simultaneously emancipatory and hermeneutically grounded. This is to say that Arendt affirms the possibility of reflectively disrupting precedents set by tradition, even as she refrains from overestimating the emancipatory powers of critical reflection. Through comparison with Habermas and Gadamer, it emerges that Arendt conceives of repetition and revolution as jointly constitutive of human natality. At bottom, natality is not simply an innate capacity for newness, but rather refers to the site of an irreducible confrontation between past and future.

The paper suggests that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s arguments against sympathy after the French Revolution, Walter Benjamin’s claims against empathy following the traumatic shock of Modernity and the First World War, and Hannah Arendt’s critical take on compassion. after the Holocaust are similar responses to singular historical crises. Reconsidering Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) and its evocation of Hermann Melville’s novella Billy Budd (1891), I show first that the novella bears the traces of an essay by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Appeal to Law” (1809). Then, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s writings on trauma in Illuminations (1968, edited by Arendt), I discuss the political importance Arendt attaches to the proper way of telling a story, at a time when “the communicability of experience is decreasing” (Benjamin, Illuminations, 86). Through the analysis of Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” and Arendt’s “heartless” report on the Eichmann trial (1963), I equally show that, according to Arendt, testimonies must be narrated, or rather performed, in a dispassionate, dry, and compact manner so that they can be historically and politically relevant.

Transhumanism proposes human enhancement while regarding the human body as unfit for the future. This fulfills age-old aspirations for a perfect and durable body. We use “alienation” as a concept to analyze this mismatch between human aspirations and our current condition. For Hannah Arendt alienation may be accounted for in terms of earth- and world-alienation, as well as alienation from human nature, and especially from the given (“resentment of the given”). In transhumanism, the biological body is an impediment to human accomplishment. At most, this movement accepts “clean” bodies, not bodies with excretions. We argue that real human bodies are valued in the event of giving birth, so a modified concept that Arendt proposed, natality, seems a suitable way to explore the dialectic alienation-reconciliation involving the body (Arendt’s “A child has been born unto us”), when re-read by some feminist scholars.

This essay examines Arendt’s interpretation of Hobbes as it develops from “Expansion and the Philosophy of Power” (1946) and The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to The Human Condition (1958) by focusing on the role of the concept of process, and the reductive concept of life as “the life-process” in order to highlight an important way in which Arendt sees Hobbes as contributing to the valorization of the life-process in modernity. By reconstructing Arendt’s interpretation of Hobbes as it develops in these texts, I aim to expand our understanding of Hobbes’s importance for Arendt’s analysis of modernity by showing that Hobbes is not only the philosopher of an original “expansionist” concept of power and a political-economic imperialist state but also, on account of the centrality of the notion of process within it, key to the elevation of life as the highest value in the modern vita activa.

In this article, I bring together Hannah Arendt’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s respective theories of political judgment to evaluate the problems that arise from their accounts of judgment in praxis. To do so, I compare Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil on Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel and Beauvoir’s “An Eye for an Eye” on Robert Brasillach’s trial in France. In approaching the dilemmas of judgment in theory, both share a commitment to preserving freedom by virtue of our human plurality. In practice, however, both respectively demand the death penalty for Eichmann and Brasillach. I identify three distinct failures of political judgment in praxis: from the accused, the courts, and Arendt and Beauvoir, respectively. I contend that Arendt and Beauvoir fail to appropriately judge Eichmann and Brasillach by arguing for their execution, because it constitutes a form of political violence that undermines their theoretical accounts of judgment.

Hannah Arendt’s conception of violence in On Violence ignores cases in which violence becomes an expression of power. Through my discussion of a government’s use of violence to control criminal violence and the Algerian Revolution, I argue that an Arendtian communicative relationship between power and violence is unrealistic; a decision to use violence can arise within a government bureaucracy or between an anti-colonial group and their supporters, but not between a colonial oppressor and the oppressed. The decision to use violence is a product of power and cannot actually expect a literal public support. Since the decision arises from the power an entity has over others and the need to maintain power, it is unrealistic for power to rule absolutely or for violence to disappear because there is absolute power. Arendt’s central claim is insufficient because it does not consider how using violence is a decision arising from power.

This article examines the theoretical pathways connecting Benhabib’s thoughts on ethical normativity, human rights, legality, democracy, liberalism, pluralism, and the tragedy of the political. It endorses Benhabib’s dialectical treatment of these paradoxical political tropes but notes a possible unresolved tension in her discussion of the ambiguous moral and legal nature of human rights. I propose a pluralist approach to the moral grounding of legal human rights that might be at odds with Benhabib’s approach.

Reflections on Seyla Benhabib’s a. Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

In her chapter on Judith Butler’s Parting Ways, Seyla Benhabib revisits not only Levinas’s statements on Israel but also Butler’s response to them. Several of Levinas’s statements on the State of Israel were made either before the state came into existence or just as it was forming. And several of Levinas’s statements about the hostility that Israel faces were made not about the Palestinian but about the threats to Israel from its neighboring Arab states. In this essay, I revisit those statements and Butler’s response, in order to place them in their proper context. My aim is to ask what we can learn by revisiting these comments when placed in their original context as opposed to thinking of them as comments about Israel in its more contemporary struggles.

The failure of post-war institutions to fully grasp the depth and permanence of the placeless condition in the twentieth-century is at least in part responsible for the re-emergence of camps, barbed wire, sunken boats, and separated children in our own. As Seyla Benhabib demonstrates brilliantly, none of key intellectual exiles at the center of her book believed that political thought could simply accommodate the age of the refugee: the terms under which it operated had to shift with the moving world. I argue that there is an important kind of border poetics at work in these accounts of exile, migration and statelessness and within Benhabib’s analysis of the challenges that the placeless condition presents to the institutions of law and democracy today. This is no-coincidence. The modern history of placelessness required—and requires—a political imagination, and a language, that we are yet to fully appreciate or articulate. The wager of Benhabib’s book is how we might cultivate a poetics of exile which relinquishes claims to sweeping universalism whilst imagining the new forms we so urgently need to keep political life open to the differences and otherness that is its lifeblood.

This is a response to Seyla Benhabib’s Exile, Stateless, and Migration. I focus on Benhabib’s engagement with Arendt and her assessment of stateless persons in addition to what such a discussion suggests for the scope of our historical inquiry.

Judith Shklar wrote about Hannah Arendt throughout her career. However, her nuanced readings are often ignored by scholars who prefer to depict both philosophers as stark counter-images. In this paper, I offer a more complex comparison on the basis of all of Shklar’s writings about Arendt. Shklar’s critique is grounded in what she sees as the Romantic strand in Arendt’s thought, which she identifies with a metaphysical, elitist, and aestheticizing stance towards politics, a distaste for modernity, and a nostalgia for Greek antiquity. For Shklar, this position comes to the fore both in what she believes to be Arendt’s purely therapeutic notion of revolution as well as the rejection of her own Jewish identity. Nevertheless, Shklar also admired Arendt’s insights about exile and her appreciation of Kant. Through her sustained critique of Arendt, Shklar developed her own conception of a realist, rights-affirming, and anti-metaphysical liberalism.

Professor Margaret Canovan wrote two studies of the work of German-Jewish émigré political theorist, Hannah Arendt (1906-75). The first, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, appeared in 1974, while Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought was published in 1992. Both were intended for the Anglophone world, especially the US and Great Britain, although Arendt’s reception was more favorable in America where she settled in 1941 than in the UK. An historian of political thought at Keele University, UK, Canovan was ideal to bring Arendt to a general academic audience not to aim at a highly specialized readership deeply grounded in German thought. Though Canovan emphasized the conservative dimensions of Arendt’s thought, her conclusion was, finally, that Arendt’s political thought was a form of modern “republicanism” not an argument for inherited political traditions or a plea for New Left radicalism. It was a plea for pluralism, as it were.

In this essay, I offer an interpretation of Arendt’s biography of the Jewish-German salonnière, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1957). Treating the book as a work of political theory, I develop two arguments: First, I contend that Arendt’s study lays the grounds for a political epistemology of marginality and exclusion, making her a standpoint theorist avant la lettre. Second, I argue that Arendt’s book gives us an account of the process of ‘becoming political.’ This helps complement, and to a degree counter, her insistence in more widely read books that political freedom is an exclusively plural experience in the public realm. This insistence sidelines the role played by individual political consciousness in the decision to engage in action, as well as the necessary interaction between the private and the public spheres in becoming a political subject. Arendt’s biography suggests that becoming political can be facilitated by a solidary, and private encounter with the excluded other.

In this paper, I identify and distinguish different modes of thinking at work in Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch and letters. In the Denktagebuch, her thinking is dialogical, as she engages with herself in a dialogue of thought, while her writing is a product of poetic thinking. In the letters, her dialogical thinking is not only with herself, but with friends and correspondents, and poetic thinking takes the form of the material letter itself. Arendt engages in a dialogue of thought both with herself, who is a friend, and her correspondents, who are also friends. Arendt’s personal writings, that is, her letters and her Denktagebuch reveal a close relationship between private, solitary thinking, and thinking and writing that appear in public.

By bringing the work of Arendt and Levinas together, this paper hopes to show a possible avenue for addressing the lack of a heteronomous object guiding the public realm in Arendt (which is connected to her rejection of the social). This is first clarified with reference to the lack of a clear criterion for the deployment of violence as found in On Violence and proceeds to show how a criterion can be excavated from her comments elsewhere and clarified through a comparison with the thought of Levinas in which there is a heteronomous factor guiding action—the Other. What is uncovered is a similar framework in which the preservation of the world, as the space of appearances, becomes that which justifies actions. Moreover, it is argued that the social can become an object of concern precisely because of the changed nature of this world owing to modern technology.

This article contributes to debates on complicity in injustice and violence by deepening the recent efforts to map out an ethics of responsiveness to complicity. The ethics of responsiveness aims to increase the affective engagement of people who disproportionately benefit from domination, exploitation, and exclusion, with the impact of their complicity on others. It articulates different strategies for tackling the dispositions that help the privileged disavow complicity. To extend the responsiveness approach, this article builds on Hannah Arendt’s theorisation of the relationship between politics, reality, and responsibility. A turn to Arendt helps us respond to the political problem of an erosion of the frameworks of judgement and action across society that enable critical engagement with complicity. I argue that the problem adds a burden on the privileged to strengthen and protect the institutions and processes that allow us to come to terms with reality together by developing a disposition towards ‘world-in-formation.’

Commentators often note that there are contradictions, or at least inconsistencies, in Arendt’s work. On the one hand, Arendt is accused of theoretical inconsistencies, insofar as she makes claims in her later work that seem incompatible with claims she made earlier. On the other hand, Arendt has been accused of contradicting herself morally, with some commentators claiming that Arendt should not have written Eichmann in Jerusalem the way she wrote it. Both views place the treatment of the 1961 Eichmann trial at the center of Arendt’s thought, and cast it as representing a radical shift from Arendt’s earlier work. This article shows that both views fail to acknowledge the importance of what I call the “archetype of non-contradiction” in Arendt’s work. I argue that, viewed in perspective, her treatment of the Eichmann trial is simply another instance of Arendt attempting to follow the archetype of non-contradiction, practicing tentative and fluid thinking, and maintaining her friendship with herself.

Ciudad Cayalá in Guatemala brands itself as the country’s first private city. I turn to Hannah Arendt to show how and why Cayalá does not and cannot provide the space of appearance she argues is needed to support the possibility of political action. I show how Arendt provides two apparently distinct phenomenological accounts in The Human Condition—one historically-oriented and the other politically-oriented—that articulate how Cayalá fails in its aspiration to privatize the political. Yet the apparent divergence between her accounts raises concern about her relevance for liberatory feminist projects. To demonstrate how and why Arendt’s political phenomenology is aligned with certain feminist aims, I also generate a Cayaláian reading of Arendt to demonstrate the coherence of her two phenomenological accounts through interpreting her thinking by way of Cayalá’s architecture. This article enacts a dialogue between Arendt and Cayalá, mediated by feminist and architectural theory, concerning why efforts toward the privatization of cities will fail.

This article is about nationalism from unlikely perspective: Hannah Arendt. Though Arendt is famously no supporter of nationalism, I argue that her writing on narrative provides an illuminative way of examining the phenomenon. In the first section, I build upon Arendt’s narrative theory—and Leah Bradshaw’s analysis of it—to develop a distinction between narratively true stories and false ones, or reveries. I argue that while Arendt’s work on the matter often pertain to the tales of individuals, the thought is transferable to the stories of nations. In the latter half of the paper, I turn these two questions on to instances of contemporary nationalism. Section two is on England, and section three is on Israel. I do not suggest that my conclusion about these case studies are definitive, but I do hope that their inclusion in this paper helps to demonstrate how Arendt’s philosophic analysis could be turned on the world.

We explore how a refugee’s experience of rootlessness may persist after they resettle in a new country. Drawing primarily on “We Refugees,” we focus on assimilation as an uprooting phenomenon that compels a person to forget their roots, thereby perpetuating threats to identity and the loss of community that is a condition for political agency. Arendt presents assimilation in a binary way: a person either conforms to or resists pressures to conform. We seek to move beyond this binary, arguing that the performative quality of the “right to have rights” (Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State?; Gündoğdu, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights; Sari, “An Arendtian Recognitive Politics”) and the notion of dwelling in-between worlds (Ortega, In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self) reveal possibilities for a refugee to assimilate in some ways while reinforcing their rootedness. What emerges from our argument is an Arendtian account of assimilation that offers an alternative picture of navigating assimilation than that captured by the binary between parvenu/conscious pariah.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the issues of war and violence in the thought of Hannah Arendt, drawing on articles published in the newspaper Aufbau between 1941 and 1945. In these texts Arendt argues for the organisation of a Jewish army to engage in the struggle against Nazism. Here I attempt to show that this call for a Jewish army is not in contradiction with the separation between power and violence that Arendt posited. With this objective, I will compare Aufbau’s writings not only with On Violence, but above all with Was ist Politik? and I will try to interpret this comparison by means of the concept of impolitical, elaborated by the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito. This way I will suggest a new reading of the relationship between politics and violence. It is not a matter of considering the Jewish question only as a starting point to analyze Arendt’s thought, or to interpret her claim in favor of a Jewish army as the result of a specific historical context, but also to see how these positions spring from a will of transformation of this same context and are coherent with the development of her thought.

The article elaborates on Arendt’s take on the religious and the political and on how they interact and merge in modernity, especially in totalitarianism. We start with framing the three different understandings of religion in Arendt: first, a classic understanding of religion, which is foreign to the logic of the political; second, a secularized political religion; and third, a weak messianism. Both the classic understanding of religion and the political religion deny human freedom in Arendt’s sense. Her transcendent alternative to them both is the notion of the democratic political community: the Republic. Then we turn to Arendt’s political theology, illuminating why interrogating Nazism is central to examine the relationship between politics and religion in modernity. This is followed by a discussion of Nazism as a type of political religion. We focus here on totalitarianism, both as an idea and actual institution. We conclude with an assessment of the role of profanation in Arendt’s work and its significance vis-à-vis the contemporary ‘return of religion’ as well as totalitarian tendencies which call for new forms of voluntary servitude.

Hannah Arendt is one of the few philosophers who has given an important role to the concept of forgiveness within the context of his or her broader philosophical thinking. This paper aims at giving an account of Arendt’s understanding of forgiveness, critically discussing it, and showing that the concept of forgiveness can be put to greater use than Arendt realizes, by relating it to the important Arendtian concept of plurality.

According to a standard interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s remarks about evil, she had a psychologically thin conception of evil action. This paper has two aims. First, I argue that the distinction between psychological thinness and thickness is poorly conceived, at least as it commonly applies to theories of evil action. And second, I argue that, according to a better conception of the thin-thick distinction, Arendt is being misinterpreted.

This article expands Patchen Markell’s (2011) seminal problematization of The Human Condition by examining the impact that the modern developments in science and technology had on Arendt’s signature categories. Whereas Markell is interested in the systematic “architecture” of the book, I attempt to historicize Arendt’s distinctions in light of the story she tells about science and technology. From the invention of the telescope to the splitting of the atom, technoscience has provoked shifts in the hierarchies within the vita activa; spawned new varieties of “labor,” “work,” and “action”; and blurred the traditional boundaries between “nature” and the “human world.” These reconfigurations draw the contours of a new, “modern world” that is different from the world whose story and conceptual tradition Arendt set out to articulate. Largely as a result of the activities of science and technology, the experiences that informed the categories of the “Western tradition” correspond to a world that is no longer our own.

Unlike “Imperialism” and “Totalitarianism,” the last two chapters in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), written in the United States in the 1940s, the completion of the first chapter, “Antisemitism”, was preceded by more than two decades of writing in Europe and in the United States, during which Arendt found it increasingly necessary to address issues related to the Jews’ political and social situation. The chapter may be only one part of the book, but it is in fact the “origin of The Origins” and its cornerstone. In order to trace several themes of this seminal chapter, we must analyze the contribution of the French Jewish thinker, Bernard Lazare, to Arendt’s thinking. Without him, “Antisemitism” would never have coalesced and seen the light of day as a political analysis of the phenomenon. Without the “Antisemitism” chapter, The Origins of Totalitarianism would not have become a canonical work of twentieth-century political thought.

In this paper, I focus on Arendt’s concept of revolution in order to tackle the intricate relationship among past, present and future in the fields of action and politics. For this purpose, I propose to rethink the concept of authority and to show its possible connection with action and revolution. On the basis of her reflections on the American Revolution, I claim that authority and Arendt’s concept of power are not incompatible and can appear together. On the other hand, I hold that if power seeks to found, establish and consolidate a new republic, it requires to be endorsed by authority. Authority can provide a horizon of longevity that is not present within power and can enable the task of foundation to succeed.

Zionism needs a fundamental overhaul given both the collapse of the Oslo-initiated peace process and the erosion of liberal values in Israeli society. There is no better guide than Hannah Arendt for such an undertaking. On the one hand, she provided a searing diagnosis of mainstream Zionism’s foundational shortcomings, which persist to the present. One is a creed that assumes an eternal anti-Semitism. Two is a corresponding insular nationalism, which rejects affirmative engagement with the outside. On the other hand, Arendt articulated an affirmative humanist Zionism based on three elements. First, is a Jewish self-determination aimed at cultural enrichment and emancipation. Second, is an outward-oriented Zionism that embraces internationalism. Third, is substantive coexistence with Palestinians based on an innovative alternative to the homogenous nation-state model. This article retrieves and updates Arendt’s humanist Zionism. I emphasize her plea to confront Zionism’s pathologies, break from an insular nationalist mindset, and foster new political channels for attaining genuine reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.

Both love and politics name relations, according to Arendt, in which a subject is constituted as a unique person. Following up on this suggestion, I explore how love gives rise to a conception of personhood that temporarily suspends the public judgments and social prejudices that reduce the other to their actions or to their social identity. I do so by tracing a similar movement in the various tropes of Arendt’s phenomenology of love: the retreat away from the collective world into the intimacy of love, followed by the necessary return to the world and the end of love. This exploration casts a new—and surprisingly positive—light on some key notions in Arendt’s thought, such as the body, the will, and life. However, Arendt disregards that love, as De Beauvoir argued, requires a constant effort in restraining our tendency to reduce the lover to their social identity.

In the following, I will trace the presence of Montesquieu in Arendt’s work, giving an account of both Arendt’s praise for the French writer’s particular way of thinking the political and his approach to problems that will become central to the development of Arendt’s own thought. Firstly, I will follow Arendt down the path that led her to discover fundamental tools in Montesquieu for understanding totalitarianism “with eyes unclouded by philosophy.” Secondly, I will track the way in which the Arendtian reconceptualization of some key political words—power, law and freedom—is threaded through with her reading of the French author. Thirdly, I will look into the way in which Montesquieu’s formulation of a particular link between what Arendt calls the basic experience and the political regime, allows her to go on to discover a criteria that makes it possible to distinguish between political and anti-political ways of living together; and allows us to see that there is a phenomenally essential element within tyranny and totalitarianism that ensures that it “develops the germs of its own destruction the moment it comes into existence.”

In this paper, I examine Hannah Arendt’s notion of “enlarged mentality.” I use a close textual exposition of enlarged mentality in Arendt’s writings in order to offer an interpretation of Denktagebuch Notebook XXII, in which Arendt initially sketched her political interpretation of the Critique of Judgment. I maintain that a close examination of enlarged mentality—particularly as it appears in Arendt’s notebooks—answers basic questions about Arendt’s appropriation of Kant’s third Critique that have eluded scholarly commentators. In this paper, I seek to answer one such question: why did Arendt turn to Kant’s Critique of Judgment? I argue that in turning to Kant for a model of political judgment Arendt took herself to be correcting methodological inconsistencies that she believed she located in the Critique of Judgment.

In this article, I offer a politico-philosophical perspective to reassess the much-contested role of truth in politics to put forth a principle of political action that will make sense of a “right to unmanipulated factual information,” which Hannah Arendt understands as crucial for establishing freedom of opinion. In developing a principle of epistemic responsibility, I will show that “factual truth” plays a key role in Arendt’s account of political action and provides a normative order that can extricate her account from charges of immoralism. The article will be divided into three sections: section 1 deals with the distinction between rational truths and factual truths, and the question of their validity, section 2 deals with what a principle of political action is, and lastly, section 3 proposes a principle of “epistemic responsibility” that becomes action-guiding in the political sphere, in order to shed new light on the 2013 Gezi Park protest, one of the recent democratic uprisings of our century.

Arendt’s concept of experience can contribute in important ways to the contemporary debates in political and feminist theory. However, while the notion is ubiquitous in Arendt’s thinking we lack an understanding of experience as a concept, as opposed to the impact of Arendt’s personal experiences on her thought. Drawing from her notes for “Political Experiences in the Twentieth Century,” the article seeks to enrich our understanding of the Janus-faced character of political experience. It emphasizes the importance of vicariousness, and argues that experience should be understood as a process of suffering, enduring, and re-experiencing events beyond our conscious control. The article further posits that experience appear only when events, through metaphors, are allowed to leave their mark on our way of using language. It is argued that this concept poses an important challenge to the different ways experience is approached in contemporary political and feminist theory.

The article examines Hannah Arendt’s contribution to the development of a philosophical anthropology that takes relationality as its point of departure. The relations in question are to ‘others’ and to ‘place.’ The first part of the article argues that while relationality has to be understood as a descriptive of human being, the possibility of coming into relation—in Arendt’s terms ‘appearing’—needs to be understood as the actualization of a potentiality. While the potentiality has a necessary existence, its actualization is inherently contingent. It is the problem of potentiality as that which demands actualization that, while fundamental to Arendt’s project, she fails to take up. The second part of the article traces the presence of this limit in Arendt’s thought through her engagement with Heidegger in her text What is Existential Philosophy?

Arendt’s “natality,” a promising foundation for humanness that might be expanded to include those with profound cognitive disabilities, emerges in part out of Arendt’s creative interpretation of Augustine. Returning to Augustine provides natality with resources to escape the weaknesses of Arendt’s thought when viewed from the perspective of disability theory: The traps of grounding human dignity in rationality, of downplaying expressions of creativity in non-political spheres, and of denigrating the role of the body.

Greater and greater attention is being paid to Hannah Arendt’s iconic The Origins of Totalitarianism as a way to understand contemporary politics and particularly the global rise of the Far Right. With this promising resurgence, though, comes a distinct danger that was a central concern of Arendt herself in her post-war writings and the development of the book. Arendt was sharply critical of her contemporaries, particularly the social sciences, for their loose historical methods. An unthinking historical sensibility led, in her view, to the too-easy drawing of analogies between past dominations and totalitarianism. In her pre-Origins talks and writings, Arendt slowly built an entire historiographic methodology around her concern with political judgment, a radical historicism that argued for the preeminence of progenesis and novelty in the politics of history. This paper looks to excavate that historicism and draw out its full implications not only for Arendt’s theoretical orientation, but for the broader praxis she demanded of all those who would be politically minded. Arendt’s radical historicism, which can rightly be called the groundwork for writing Origins and her turn to judgment, represents the beginning of what became her thorough-going practice: an ethics of responsibility, to the past and present.

The text is an analysis by a former student of Hannah Arendt, with the living experience of her thought in public life. As Brazil’s Foreign Minister on two occasions and as Ambassador to Genève, the Author discusses how her thought shaped many facets of his outlook in dealing with the challenges of international life. Diplomatic judgement as a reflective judgement is the unifying thread of the issues discussed. Among them, environment and sustainable development, human rights, nuclear disarmament, authority, power, violence, factual truth and lies.

In this paper I ask how Arendt, a relatively obscure Zionist activist, became a public intellectual in postwar US and Europe. I argue that Arendt’s idealization of Europe—that is her presentation of a federal Europe as the political and cultural ideal for other peoples to imitate—accounts for her postwar success in both Euro-American and German and Jewish-American public spheres. An analysis of Arendt’s writings during the period shows that she idealized Europe despite also condemning European fascism, imperialism, and totalitarianism (to which she considered Jews to have contributed). I also show that Arendt’s idealization of Europe determined her self-presentation. While much has been made of Arendt’s insistence on identifying as a Jew, in fact in the postwar period she identified alternatively, as a Jewish, European, and non-national public intellectual. She held these varying identifications precisely because her idealized view of Europe led her to conflate Jewish and European identities despite also considering these to be separate.

The importance of Hannah Arendt’s intellectual dialogue with her husband, Heinrich Blücher is widely acknowledged, yet it has rarely been systematically studied. In this paper, I use Blücher’s lectures to highlight the way some of his reflections and insights shed new light on Arendt’s political thought. Blücher, I seek to show, offers through the figure of Socrates an alternative under­standing of the meaning of philosophy and its relation to politics. His reflections help us see that Arendt worked with two conceptions of philosophy: not only the dominant one in the Western philosophical tradition, of which she was famously critical, but also an alternative one in which philosophy and politics become mutually supportive, rather than mutually exclusive activities. What emerges from the comparison between Arendt’s and Blücher’s reflections on the relationship between philosophy and politics, I argue, is a joint and life-long commitment on the part of both to question the philosophical tradition in order to offer new theoretical foundations for participatory democratic citizenship.

In this essay, I examine both the neoliberalization of higher education, as well as a powerful alternative which is implicitly sketched out in the work of Hannah Arendt. This paper is divided into three parts. In part one, I briefly discuss important neoliberal features of contemporary American higher education, with a specific focus on the ways in which neoliberal ideology is transforming contemporary higher education along vocational and utilitarian lines. In the second part of the essay I argue that there are ways in which thinking (as Arendt describes it) is an especially powerful ideal for proponents of the liberal arts to seize upon in order to establish a contrast with the demand that we reconfigure higher education along vocational and corporatist lines in order to fulfill neoliberal imperatives. In the third and final part of the paper, I will attempt to address objections to this proposal.

Arendt’s explorations of the dynamics of politics, facts, and truth in the public sphere contain important insights into the authority of science and science denial. This article reviews and contextualizes Arendt’s views on modern science and technology, discusses her views on authority, and identifies some insights that her writings provide on the dynamics of science denial. Arendt’s writings point to another possible source of authority besides Weber’s three categories (traditional, legal-rational, charismatic), based on a relationship between ruler and ruled that precedes the issuance of commands. Her writings help clarify what makes scientific findings vulnerable to denial, expose some of the specific tactics of science denial, and include some clues for what it would take to keep the public space open, and to nourish the compelling element that would have to underlie scientific authority.