Richard J. Bernstein - Why Read Hannah Arendt Now?

For Jerry Kohn

Richard J. Bernstein

polity

Copyright Richard J. Bernstein 2018

The right of Richard Bernstein to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2018 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2863-9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bernstein, Richard J., author.
Title: Why read Hannah Arendt now / Richard Bernstein.
Description: Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017050361 (print) | LCCN 2018002934 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509528639 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509528592 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509528608 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Arendt, Hannah, 1906-1975--Criticism and interpretation. | Arendt, Hannah, 1906-1975--Political and social views.
Classification: LCC JC251.A74 (ebook) | LCC JC251.A74 B47 2018 (print) | DDC 320.5--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050361

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I have dedicated this book to Jerry (Jerome) Kohn, a friend for more than twenty-five years. Jerry has done more than anyone else to make Hannah Arendt known to the international public. He has been a judicious editor of her published and unpublished works. His own writings on Arendt are always perceptive and illuminating. He has been an inspiration in my own journey with Arendt. I want to thank Professor Carol Bernstein for reading and editing my manuscript. She is, without doubt, my toughest and most incisive critic. Caecilie Varslev-Petersen helped to prepare this book for publication. Once again, I want to express my gratitude to Jean van Altena, who has skillfully edited my manuscript. John Thompson, who suggested that I write this book, has always been a source of encouragement.

When Hannah Arendt died in December 1975, she was known primarily because of the controversy about her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann and the phrase the banality of evil. There was a circle of admirers and critics in the United States and in Germany who were knowledgeable about her other writings, but she was scarcely considered to be a major political thinker. In the years since her death the scene has changed radically. Her books have been translated into dozens of languages. All over the world, people are passionately interested in her work. There seems to be no end of books, conferences, and articles focusing on Arendt and her ideas. Recently discussions and references to Arendt have overflowed social media. Why this growing interest and why especially the recent spike of interest in her work? Arendt was remarkably perceptive about some of the deepest problems, perplexities, and dangerous tendencies in modern political life. Many of these have not disappeared; they have become more intense and more dangerous. When Arendt spoke about dark times she was not exclusively referring to the horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism. She writes:

If it is the function of the public realm to throw light on the affairs of men by providing a space of appearances in which they can show in deed and word, for better or worse, who they are and what they can do, then darkness has come when this light is extinguished by credibility gaps and invisible government, by speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth in meaningless triviality. (Arendt 1968: p. viii)

It is hard to resist the conclusion that we are now living in dark times that are engulfing the entire world. Arendt claims that even in the darkest of times we can hope to find some illumination illumination that comes not so much from theories and concepts but from the lives and works of individuals. I want to show that Arendt provides such illumination, that she helps us to gain critical perspective on our current political problems and perplexities. She is an astute critic of dangerous tendencies in modern life and she illuminates the potentialities for restoring the dignity of politics. This is why she is worth reading and rereading today.

But who was Hannah Arendt? I will begin with a brief sketch of some of the highlights of her life that shaped her thinking. She was drawn to Machiavellis appeal to the goddess Fortuna (roughly translated as luck, chance, contingency). Luck, as we know, can be good or bad. Unlike her close friend, Walter Benjamin, who always seemed to experience bad luck and finally committed suicide, Arendts Fortuna was favorable at crucial moments in her life. Born in 1906 into a GermanJewish secular family she became an outstanding member of a gifted generation of GermanJewish intellectuals. In the early 1920s she studied with Germanys outstanding philosophers and theologians, including Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Bultmann. With the ominous growth of the Nazis and their rabid antisemitism, Arendt agreed to help her Zionist friends by doing research on Nazi antisemitic propaganda. In 1933 she was apprehended and interrogated for eight days. She refused to reveal what she was doing but was finally released. This was an extraordinary piece of good luck because we know that many others in similar circumstances were murdered in the cellars of the Gestapo.

Arendt then decided to leave Germany illegally. She escaped through Czechoslovakia and made her way to Paris the refuge for many Jews fleeing from the Nazis. Arendt was officially stateless for eighteen years until she became an American citizen. This is a primary reason for her sensitivity to the plight of the stateless and to the troubled status of refugees. Illegal German exiles in Paris faced the problem of not having official papers permitting them to work, so many led extremely precarious lives. Arendt had the good fortune to secure employment with several Jewish and Zionist organizations, including Youth Aliyah the organization that sent endangered European Jewish youths to Palestine. In Paris she met Heinrich Blcher, who came from a German gentile family, had participated in the Spartacist uprising, and had been a member of the German Communist Party. They were married in 1940. In May 1940, shortly before the Germans invaded France, French authorities ordered all enemy aliens between the ages of seventeen and fiftyfive to be sent to internment camps. Arendt was sent to Gurs, a camp in southern France near the Spanish border. In an article written shortly after Arendt arrived in New York, she ironically refers to a new kind of human being created by contemporary history the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends (Arendt 2007: 265). Arendt managed to escape from Gurs during the brief period when the Nazis invaded France. Many of the women who did not escape were eventually sent to Auschwitz on the orders of Adolf Eichmann. Arendt had been separated from Heinrich and her mother when she was interned. She was lucky again because she managed to be reunited with them once again by a series of fortunate accidents.