Thinking in Dark Times—Six Questions for Roger Berkowitz

By Scott Horton
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 [...]

Beware of Pity: Hannah Arendt and the power of the impersonal.

by Adam Kirsch
In 1999, the Croatian novelist Slavenka Drakulić visited The Hague to observe the trials for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. Among the defendants was Goran Jelisić, a thirty-year-old Serb from Bosnia, who struck her as “a man you can trust.” With his “clear, serene face, lively eyes, and big reassuring grin,” [...]

Arendt’s Judgment – by Marc Greif (Dissent Magazine)

Dissent played a part in the controversy over Eichmann in Jerusalem. In 1963, when Hannah Arendt’s articles for the New Yorker on Adolf Eichmann’s trial in an Israeli court provoked consternation in intellectual journals and condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League, Irving Howe decided to hold a public forum, under the auspices of the magazine, to [...]

Pluralizar o universal: guerra e paz na obra de Hannah Arendt

Verena Stolcke
“O que matou os dinossauros? Perguntas enquanto cravas na minha pupila a tua pupila azul. Ou quem? Tu mesma, um meteoro, uma erupção vulcânica? Morreram apunhalados ou foram vítimas de um súbito e calculado extermínio?” (José Ángel Valiente, “Anotaciones para un Fin de Siglo”, em Cabo de Gata)
“É próprio da história dos assuntos [...]

Dignidade da política: por amor ao mundo

Discutir política a partir do legado arendtiano é falar sobre a dignidade e o papel da verdade nas instituiçoes contemporaneas ante ao vazio generalista que a humanidade se encontra, na brecha deixada pela ruptura entre o passado e o futuro, para usar a expressão tão cara a Hannah Arendt.
Alguns, por se pautarem em premissas distintas, podem [...]

Arendt: a challenging figure

Hannah Arendt is a most challenging figure for anyone wishing to understand the body of her work in political philosophy. She never wrote anything that would represent a systematic political philosophy, a philosophy in which a single central argument is expounded and expanded upon in a sequence of works. Rather, her writings cover many and [...]

Eichmann, the Banality of Evil, and Thinking in Arendt’s Thought*

Bethania Assy
ABSTRACT: I analyze the ways in which the faculty of thinking can avoid evil action, taking into account Hannah Arendt’s discussion regarding the banality of evil and thoughtlessness in connection with the Eichmann trial. I focus on the following question posed by Arendt: “Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining [...]

Jane Mayer: Calling Hannah Arendt (The New Yorker)

The mind-numbing bureaucratic details displayed in the documents released last week on the Bush Administration’s abusive detention program sent wise commentators, such as The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin, to Hannah Arendt, the mother of all war-crime writers. Her observations, first published in this magazine, on what she eventually dubbed the “banality of evil,” exhibited by the [...]

Hannah Arendt: a short bio

Political philosopher, an authority on anti-Semitism, and writer of The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). When Arendt’s brief love affair with the famous philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) in the 1920s was revealed, it caused much debate. Heidegger had joined in the 1930s the Nazi party. Arendt, a Jew, gained fame as a [...]

Hannah Arendt: German-American Philosopher and Political Theorist

Descended from wealthy German Jews from Koenigsberg, she was raised by her mother after her father’s death from syphilis when Hannah was only 7. Hannah recalled her life as untouched by the strife of world war one, and similarly she remembered no anti-semitism in her early life. By the time she was sixteen she had [...]