Russell Jacoby: Hannah Arendt's Fame Rests on the Wrong Foundation
[Russell Jacoby is a professor in residence in the history department at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the author, most recently, of Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (Columbia University Press, 2005).]
A street is named after her. Back-to-back conferences celebrate her. New books champion her. Hannah Arendt, who was born 100 years ago this past October, has joined the small world of philosophical heroes. Nor has this attention come to her only since her death in 1975. During her life, she received honorary degrees from Princeton, Smith, and other colleges and universities. Denmark awarded her its Sonning Prize for "commendable work that benefits European culture," also bestowed on Albert Schweitzer and Winston Churchill. When she gave public lectures, students jammed the aisles and doorways.
Arendt fits the bill for a philosophical hero. She was a German Jewish refugee drenched in classical education and worldly experience. With its frequent references to Greek or Latin terms, her writing radiated thoughtfulness. She was not afraid to broach big subjects — justice, evil, totalitarianism — or to intervene in the political issues of the day — the war in Vietnam, civil rights, the trial of Adolf Eichmann. She was both metaphysical and down-to-earth, at once profound and sexy. Alfred Kazin, the New York critic, recalled her as a woman of great charm and vivaciousness — a femme fatale, even.
Yet if her star shines so brightly, it is because the American intellectual firmament is so dim. After all, who or where are the other political philosophers? The last great political American philosopher, John Dewey, died in 1952. Since then American philosophy — with the partial exception of Richard Rorty — has vanished into technical issues; within the subfield of political philosophy, the largest of its figures, John Rawls, remains abstract and insular. His work may quicken the attenuated pulse of academic philosophers, but it does not move the rest of us.
Those thinkers who belong to Arendt's European generation lack her appeal. Take two obvious contenders: Jean-Paul Sartre, who, because of his lifelong extremism and mercurial politics, nowadays evokes decreasing enthusiasm; and Isaiah Berlin, who, because of his extreme caution and unwavering moderation, offers little inspiration. Unlike Arendt, Berlin avoided both political commitment and books on big subjects. (In fact, he never really wrote a book.) While Arendt wrote volumes like The Human Condition, with the subtitle A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man, Berlin wrote essays such as "Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought" and "Two Concepts of Liberty." While Arendt took stands, Berlin waffled.
It is not only the general bleakness that brightens Arendt's star. Her work can sparkle, especially her essays. Yet with the great exception of Eichmann in Jerusalem, her major books suffer from major cloudiness. Ironically, the more philosophical Arendt sought to be, the more opaque she became. Even after the most careful readings, it is difficult to know what Arendt is trying to say. This is as true of The Human Condition as of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the book that first brought her attention. But she is the beneficiary of the widespread belief that philosophical murkiness signals philosophical profundity.
Her devotees sometimes admit that Origins is disorganized and unsuccessful. She sought to present Nazism and Stalinism as twin representatives of totalitarianism, but left out Stalinism until the conclusion. Sections on imperialism and racism, which are coherent and insightful, lack a relationship to Stalinist totalitarianism, which derived from neither. To make her argument, she yoked Nazism and Stalinism together with philosophical babble about ideology and loneliness. Somehow the "loneliness" of the masses fuels totalitarianism. "While it is true that the masses are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects, it is also true that their longing for fiction has some connection with those capacities of the human mind whose structural consistency is superior to mere occurrence." Huh?...
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Education
A street is named after her. Back-to-back conferences celebrate her. New books champion her. Hannah Arendt, who was born 100 years ago this past October, has joined the small world of philosophical heroes. Nor has this attention come to her only since her death in 1975. During her life, she received honorary degrees from Princeton, Smith, and other colleges and universities. Denmark awarded her its Sonning Prize for "commendable work that benefits European culture," also bestowed on Albert Schweitzer and Winston Churchill. When she gave public lectures, students jammed the aisles and doorways.
Arendt fits the bill for a philosophical hero. She was a German Jewish refugee drenched in classical education and worldly experience. With its frequent references to Greek or Latin terms, her writing radiated thoughtfulness. She was not afraid to broach big subjects — justice, evil, totalitarianism — or to intervene in the political issues of the day — the war in Vietnam, civil rights, the trial of Adolf Eichmann. She was both metaphysical and down-to-earth, at once profound and sexy. Alfred Kazin, the New York critic, recalled her as a woman of great charm and vivaciousness — a femme fatale, even.
Yet if her star shines so brightly, it is because the American intellectual firmament is so dim. After all, who or where are the other political philosophers? The last great political American philosopher, John Dewey, died in 1952. Since then American philosophy — with the partial exception of Richard Rorty — has vanished into technical issues; within the subfield of political philosophy, the largest of its figures, John Rawls, remains abstract and insular. His work may quicken the attenuated pulse of academic philosophers, but it does not move the rest of us.
Those thinkers who belong to Arendt's European generation lack her appeal. Take two obvious contenders: Jean-Paul Sartre, who, because of his lifelong extremism and mercurial politics, nowadays evokes decreasing enthusiasm; and Isaiah Berlin, who, because of his extreme caution and unwavering moderation, offers little inspiration. Unlike Arendt, Berlin avoided both political commitment and books on big subjects. (In fact, he never really wrote a book.) While Arendt wrote volumes like The Human Condition, with the subtitle A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man, Berlin wrote essays such as "Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought" and "Two Concepts of Liberty." While Arendt took stands, Berlin waffled.
It is not only the general bleakness that brightens Arendt's star. Her work can sparkle, especially her essays. Yet with the great exception of Eichmann in Jerusalem, her major books suffer from major cloudiness. Ironically, the more philosophical Arendt sought to be, the more opaque she became. Even after the most careful readings, it is difficult to know what Arendt is trying to say. This is as true of The Human Condition as of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the book that first brought her attention. But she is the beneficiary of the widespread belief that philosophical murkiness signals philosophical profundity.
Her devotees sometimes admit that Origins is disorganized and unsuccessful. She sought to present Nazism and Stalinism as twin representatives of totalitarianism, but left out Stalinism until the conclusion. Sections on imperialism and racism, which are coherent and insightful, lack a relationship to Stalinist totalitarianism, which derived from neither. To make her argument, she yoked Nazism and Stalinism together with philosophical babble about ideology and loneliness. Somehow the "loneliness" of the masses fuels totalitarianism. "While it is true that the masses are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects, it is also true that their longing for fiction has some connection with those capacities of the human mind whose structural consistency is superior to mere occurrence." Huh?...