Writings on Hannah Arendt

Reconciling Oneself to the Impossibility of Reconciliation: Judgment and Worldliness in Hannah Arendt's Politics

This essay will appear in: "Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch” ed. by Roger Berkowitz and Ian Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016)

In this essay I argue that reconciliation is a central and guiding idea that deepens our understanding of Arendt’s politics, plurality, and judgment. I also show that the judgment to reconcile with world is inspired by Arendt’s engagement with Heidegger on the questions of thinking, forgiveness, and reconciliation, as well as by her own efforts to think through her personal and intellectual reconciliation with Heidegger. I present nine theses that Arendt advances around the theme of reconciliation found in her Denktagebuch.

Read a Draft of the essay here.

Forthcoming Essays:

"Actions That Deserve to be Remembered: Transcendence and Immortality in a Secular World," forthcoming in "Faith in the World”: Post-Secular Readings of Hannah Arendt, ed. by Rafael Zawisza and Ludger Hagedorn.

"Total Loneliness: Hannah Arendt and the Foundations of Totalitarianism," Published as La désolation total: Hannah Arendt et les fundaments du totalitarisme.

In Hannah Arendt, L’Herne, in the Cahiers Edition of Hannah Arendt.

"Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting the Origins of Totalitarianism"

"Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting the Origins of Totalitarianism,"in Los Angeles Review of Books, March 2017.

"The Singularity and the Human Condition"(Philosophy Today, 2018).

"The Singularity and the Human Condition,"(Philosophy Today, 2018).

Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is frequently read as offering a “theory” of what it means to be human. But the bite of Arendt’s book is to think through the transformation of the human condition in the Modern Age. She argues that the rise of a scientific worldview fundamentally alters the earthly and worldly conditions in which human beings live. Since humans are conditioned beings, the change from our pre-modern subjection to fate to our modern human capacity to create a humanly built world threatens a fundamental shift in human being. The transformation Arendt describes is the loss of our human plurality to a technological singularity. She argues, however, that we can choose to hold on to our humanity if persist in thinking, and thus preserve our human spontaneity and freedom.

Drones and the Question of "The Human"

Carnegie Journal of Ethics & International Affairs, volume 28, issue 02, pp. 159-169.

The increasing reliance on drones is threatening our humanity—but not because of the inhumane ways we use Predator drones in warfare. It is a mistake “to use the term “drone” to refer only to these much publicized military devices. Drones, more precisely understood, are intelligent machines that—possessed of the capacity to perform repetitive tasks with efficiency, reliability, and mechanical rationality—increasingly displace the need for human thinking and doing. The trend Jünger and Turkle worry about is unmistakable: we are at risk of losing the rich and mature relationships that mark us as human.

Read the essay Here.

Instituting freedom: Steve Buckler and Hannah Arendt on an Engaged Political Theory

European Journal of Political Theory 2014, Vol. 13(3) 372–377

Steve Buckler’s Hannah Arendt and Political Theory is most revealing in the final chapter, ‘‘The Role of the Theorist.’’ I did not know Buckler, but this final chapter of his last book must stand as his apologia, his attempt—mediated through Arendt—to offer an account of a lifelong pursuit of an engaged politics. The theorist, Buckler writes, thinks and speaks from ‘‘the standpoint of the reflective citizen rather than [the standpoint] Arendt takes to be the traditionally accented voice of the philosopher’’ (154).

Read the Essay here.

Should We Justify War

Published in "Just War in Religion and Politics," ed. by Jacob Neusner, Bruce Chilton, and R.E. Tully (University Press of America, 2013).

Abstract: In speaking of "just war," we speak not of justice but of justification. As a matter of justification, just war theory can and often does work to exclude and preclude the question of justice in war. What is needed, rather, is a determination to recall that justice, and not merely justification, has a place in war. Instead of the justifications offered by just war theorizing, we must demand that those who fight and we who think about war not blind ourselves to the illumination of justice amidst the fog of war's justifications.

Read here.

Lonely Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Film

The Paris Review Daily.

In 1963, The New Yorker published five articles on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi chief of Bureau IV-B-4, a Gestapo division in charge of “Jewish Affairs.” Written by political thinker and Jewish activist Hannah Arendt, the articles and ensuing book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, unleashed what Irving Howe called a “civil war” among New York intellectuals.

Read the rest of my review of "Hannah Arendt" in The Paris Review. Here.

The Angry Jew: Hannah Arendt on Revenge and Reconciliation

Roger Berkowitz, Philosophical Topics, Fall 2011.

Sholom Schwartzbard killed Simon Petlura in an act of revenge. He admitted his crimeand a French jury acquitted him in 1927. For Hannah Arendt, Schwartzbard’s actions show that revenge can, in certain circumstances, be in the service of justice. This paper explores Hannah Arendt’s distinction between reconciliation and revenge and argues that Hannah Arendt embraces revenge as one way in which politics and justice can happen in the world, but only under certain conditions.

Click here to read the article.

Thinking in Dark Times

in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeff Katz, and Thomas Keenan (2009)

For Arendt, dark times are not limited to the tragedies of the 20th century; they are not even a rarity in the history of the world. Darkness, as she would have us understand it, does not name the genocides, purges, and hunger of a specific era. Instead, darkness refers to the way these horrors appear in public discourse and yet remain hidden.

View the full PDF here.

The Judge as Tragic Hero: An Arendtian Critique of Judging

HannahArendt.net, Articles/Research Notes v.4 (2008)

- Revised version, originally published in The Graduate Review (cont. as Critical Sense) v. 1, #1 (1994)

In his book Justice Accused,1 Robert Cover explores how and why ante-bellum Federal judges who were opposed to slavery consistently upheld the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.2 These judges claimed that despite their strong personal convictions that slavery was immoral and wrong, they were constrained by the U.S. Constitution to declare the Act constitutional.3

Read the full article here.

Hannah Arendt and Human Rights

Philosophy in Review (December, 2007). Review of Peg Birmingham's Hannah Arendt and Human Rights

Apologies. This article is not currently available online.

Revolutionary Constitutionalism: Some Thoughts on Laurie Ackermann's Dignity Jurisprudence

Acta Juridica (2008)

- Reprinted in Dignity, Freedom and the Post-Apartheid Legal Order, ed. by Alfred Barnard (Jutta, 2009).

Justice Laurie Ackermann’s decision in Ferreira is a study in tonal dissonance. Ackermann’s 232 paragraph legal opinion begins slowly. It plots out the judicial history of the case; it wades through questions of jurisdiction and standing; and it frames the question of the case all without offering a narrative version of the facts.

View the full PDF here.

"The Human Condition Today: The Challenge of Science"

"The Human Condition Today: The Challenge of Science," in Arendt Studies (v. 2, 2018).

To consider the meaning of The Human Condition today means to understand how Arendt explores the fate of humanity in the aftermath of the scientific age. She argues that the modern age of science began "in the seventeenth century [and] came to an end at the beginning of the twentieth century." In the aftermath of the scientific revolution, we now live in what Arendt calls the modern world, a world defined above all by earth and world alienation.

"Protest and Democracy: Hannah Arendt and the Foundation of Freedom"

"Protest and Democracy: Hannah Arendt and the Foundation of Freedom," in Stasis (v. 6, 2018).

The great political achievement of the modern era, stable representative democracies that legitimate power, are everywhere under attack. No thinker can better help understand our present democratic disillusionment than Hannah Arendt. Arendt argues that as bureaucracies and governments grow, individual action is evermore attenuated in its ability to make a difference in the world.

"Zur Kritik an Hannah Arendts »Reflections on Little Rock«",

Published in “Hannah Arendt und das 20. Jahrhundert," Catalogue for a Museum Show at German Historical Museum Berlin, ed. by Monika Böll. (2020)

Republished in HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center v. 8 2020 pgs. 73-80. Read an English Version here.

What Are We Fighting For?

Published in The Philosopher, vol 108 no. 2 (2020) 55-58.

Amidst the death of God, the loss of tradition, and the end of political ideals, we are left, Hannah Arendt argues in Between Past and Future, with "the ominous silence that still answers us whenever we dare to ask, not, 'What are we fighting against' but 'What are we fighting for?'" We all know what we oppose and fight against: totalitarianism, fascism, racism, sexism, loneliness, and meaninglessness. But we are silent in the face of the challenge: What are we fighting for?

The Failing Technocratic Prejudice and the Challenge to Liberal Democracy

Published in The Emergence of Illiberalism edited by Michael Weinman and Boris Vormann. (Routledge, 2020).

Justice

Justice is the virtue of acting rightly and properly with regard to others (political justice) and with regard to oneself (moral justice). Justice is also understood as the good, the appropriate, or what is right in a given situation. Rhadamanthus, the Greek judge of the dead, meted out justice according to the maxim: “Suffer what you have done.” The Roman jurist Ulpian writes: “Justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to each man his due.” The Golden Rule holds: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Read the Essay here.

Misreading 'Eichmann in Jerusalem'

The Stone in the New York Times. July 7, 2013. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/misreading-hannah-arendt...

In The Stone in The New York Times, I argue that a new critical consensus is emerging around Hannah Arendt's thesis about the "fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil." This new consensus holds that Arendt was right in her general claim that many evildoers are normal people but was wrong about Eichmann in particular. As Christopher R. Browning summed it up recently in The New York Review of Books, “Arendt grasped an important concept but not the right example.”

Read Here.

Hannah Arendts erste Briefe an Karl Jaspers und Martin Heidegger: Freundschaft, Versöhnung und Wiederaufbau einer gemeinsamen Welt

Nach dem Krieg! - Nach dem Exil? Erste Briefe/First Letters 1945-1950, II, ed. Detlef Garz and David Kettler (Text und Kritik, 2012).

Apologies. This article is not currently available online.

The Power of Non-Reconciliation – Arendt’s Judgment of Adolf Eichmann

hannaharendt.net (2011).

View the full article here.

Hannah Arendt and Human Rights

The Handbook of Human Rights (Routledge, 2011)

Hannah Arendt approaches human rights as someone who lived through their failure in the first half of the 20th century. A German Jew, Arendt understood antisemitism, experienced the denationalization of the Jews in Germany, and witnessed how the world and even the diaspora Jewish community largely ignored the plight of European Jewry. Arendt also saw how other minority peoples in Europe - Germans in Russia, Slovaks in Czechloslavakia, muslims in Yugoslavia, Gypsies, and many others - were systematically denaturalized, persecuted, and killed - all, as she emphasized, within the strictures of national and international law. For Arendt, the failure of human rights is a fundamental fact of modern times.

Read the full article here.

Thinking in Dark Times - Six Questions for Roger Berkowitz

Harpers Magazine, (2009)

Fordham University Press has just put out Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, a collection of papers from a conference convened at Bard College to mark Arendt’s hundredth birthday. I put six questions to Roger Berkowitz, a professor at Bard and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking, about issues addressed in the book.

Read the full interview here.

Solitude and the Activity of Thinking

in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeff Katz, and Thomas Keenan (2009)

“The true predicaments of our time.” Hannah Arendt wrote, “will assume their authentic form only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past.” The totalitarianisms in Germany and the Soviet Union were only symptoms of these true predicaments, of what Arendt early on calls the mass society characterized by “organized loneliness.” Later, covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she would come to see that the bond between totalitarianism and loneliness is the phenomena of thoughtlessness.

View the full PDF here.

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