Seminar Description

Why study Hannah Arendt? Why now?

Called the “most original and profound…political theoretician of our times” for her work on totalitarianism, perhaps more than any other modern thinker, Hannah Arendt helps us understand the politics of terror and confront the awful reality that not only “monsters” but also ordinary people commit atrocities against one another. In the post-9/11 world, Arendt's wisdom seems more germane than ever.

Reading Arendt now against the backdrop of the trial of Saddam Hussein, the war in Iraq, and processes of globalization means confronting profound political and moral issues that emerge in classroom discussions in history, social studies, and literature. Is sovereignty the highest good of the state? Do nations have obligations to one another? Are there universal human rights? Are they enforceable? Is evil a problem of human nature or culture? What explains the rise of totalitarian power and the use of terror and fear as instruments of politics? As the language of good and evil circulates in politics and the media, filters into all our classrooms and affects the social dynamics of “insider/outsider” operating informally on many school campuses today, Arendt invites us to think. Think about the roots of “the problem of evil,” think about the meaning of human plurality and diversity, and think about the use of terror and violence by both state and non-state actors to resolve conflict or redress grievances. What is the human condition? My hope is that studying Arendt together with a diverse group of colleagues will encourage us to encourage our students and peers to think before we act.

Each of the three central texts chosen for this seminar represent distinct, yet interwoven, aspects of Arendt's reflections on what she called the “human condition of plurality.” Each explores the philosophical implications of different crises generated by social conflict in the twentieth century. Together they continue to have remarkable cogency and relevance and repay the patient reader of these difficult works with the rewards of being challenged to reconsider the complex historical roots of totalitarianism and the persistence of tensions between freedom and equality even in democratic societies.

Perhaps the most disconcerting of the three Arendt texts we will examine is Eichmann in Jerusalem . Eichmann is a haunting book. Originally commissioned as a series of articles written for The New Yorker , it became a meditation on morality. Arendt wrote it while she reflected on attending the Israeli trial of Nazi deportation coordinator Adolf Eichmann. In it she reached disturbing conclusions about who bore responsibility for the Final Solution.

Sitting in that courtroom in Jerusalem , Arendt said, she was struck by an odd and disturbing thought--that the evil reflected in Eichmann's crimes, the atrocities against humanity he committed, was the product neither of a madman nor a wicked man nor a monster, but an ordinary, normal human who had acted without thought . To Arendt, Eichmann was terrifying because he was “thoughtless.” The real trouble, she said, was so many were like him, normal people who did awful things, making evil banal.

The controversy surrounding the publication of Eichmann raged for many years and the wisdom of Arendt's tone and conclusions continue to be debated. Yet, the importance of what she wrote about the problem of evil warrants consideration, especially in light of the ease with which different groups target others for vilification today.

Published more than fifty years ago, The Origins of Totalitarianism (OT) is a dense and difficult book in which Arendt sought to “discover the hidden mechanics by which all the traditional elements of our political and spiritual world [had been] dissolved.” In a lecture she gave after the book's appearance she explained that she had not intended to provide an elaboration of historical causes but rather to identify the peculiar “fixed and definite forms” into which various elements of western political theories and practices had crystallized in the “event” of totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism represented what she called the “crystallization” of elements of racism and conquest, which were present in European thought as early as the eighteenth century, but were exacerbated by the disintegration of the nation-state system following World War I. In OT , Arendt painted an enormous canvas of the political and social history of modern Europe in broad, bold strokes to bring into relief patterns of interaction among those elements. What is especially instructive for the contemporary reader of OT is the fact that Arendt located the origins of terror and ideology within Western, democratic societies. She urged reading the record of what she then called the “truly radical nature of Evil” in totalitarianism as a cautionary tale about the “subterranean stream of Western history” (emphasis added). Arendt's story of the hidden underbelly of western history provides a controversial counterpoint for the seminar to engage in critical thinking about the apparently prevalent contemporary identification of terrorism with non-western societies.

Arendt identified the fact of our birth as the source of our freedom and was unique among modern philosophers for contending that “natality,” not mortality, was the origin of politics. Every birth signaled the chance that something new had come into being, and offered all of us already here the opportunity to live with the new and the strange. She called this opportunity the human condition of “plurality”--the fact that every human born is equally human, but in a unique way. In The Human Condition (HC) she explored these human conditions of “natality” and “plurality.” Both OT and HC can provide the basis for stimulating discussion about, for example, how to imagine political solutions to the problem of displaced peoples and the intertwined problems of racial and gender inequalities.

HC is also the text in which Arendt attempted a philosophy of “the political” and distinguished the activities of politics (action), from the activities of both labor (survival, the work of animal laborans ) and work (fabrication, the activity of homo faber ). HC is a commentary on the human condition “from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears.” Arendt reflected on the consequences of asserting life itself “as the ultimate point of reference in the modern age” and issued a warning: “It is quite conceivable that the modern age—which began with an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.”