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Editors Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark make Hannah Arendt's important early work accessible for the first time. Here is a completely corrected and revised English translation that incorporates Arendt's own substantial revisions and provides additional notes based on letters, contracts, and other documents. "A revelation that may force us to reconsider the traditional interpretation of Arendt's work".--KIRKUS REVIEWS. ... Read more

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Must Read for Lovers of Augustine
I first read this book many years ago, so my recollection is a little hazy, but when I ran across Arendt's dissertation on Amazon, I could not resist making some comment on what was an outstanding addition to my collection of books about Augustine.I strongly encourage anyone interested in Augustine to read this book.The bookdoes have a strong "philosophical bent" to it but is not so weighty a presentation to discourage the educated reader.The book is full of insights and well turned statements on ontology, volition, love, and man's relationship to an all encompassing Creator.Contemporary critics of Catholicism tend to chide and deride the Augustinian project using feminist, trendy Gnostic catagories to abuse a great thinker in the early church, but the reader of Arendt's book will find a sound and reasoned presentation of the Augustinian perspective absent of biases found in current criticism.Anotherfine book to read with Arendt's book would be the slightly more academic work by Emilie Zum Brunn, St. Augustine: Being and Nothingness.

A Young Arendt and Augustine's Philosophy of Love
It seems to me that some people interested in this book will be familiar with either Arendt or Augustine, though certainly there are people familiar with both.But for those only familiar with one or the other: Arendt was a 20th Century German-American philosopher, probably most known for her work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics).The primary text of this book contains her doctoral dissertation on Saint Augustine's philosophical conception of love.Saint Augustine was a Christian bishop in northern Africa in the first third of the 5th Century A.D.Augustine is best known for his works, City of God (Penguin Classics) and St. Augustine Confessions (Oxford World's Classics).

Arendt's dissertation explores Augustine's understanding of the nature of love and the consequences of that understanding for the life of the Christian believer.In particular, Arendt differentiates between "caritas" and "cupiditas" as those terms are used by Augustine."Caritas" is the right love that seeks eternity and the absolute future (i.e., God); "cupiditas" is the wrong love that clings to the world.The difference in the terms is therefore their object, but they both have "appetitus", or craving desire, as their common essence.

At this point I should mention than I'm trained neither in philosophy nor Latin, so you, dear reader, should resist the temptation to jump all over me for the sloppy job I did just above... I'm doing the best I can.

Because "caritas" is ultimately concerned with God and not things of this world, Arendt's dissertation ends with Augustine's understanding of the consequence adopting "caritas" has on our relations in this world with our neighbors.The second half of the book is an essay with four parts that I believe is written by Scott and Stark, the editors.These focus more on various aspects of Arendt's writings and development.This book as a whole is of the philosophic flavor and is a challenging read.I'd especially recommend it to Christians who have read Augustine and Arendt.Arendt's dissertation touches on most of Augustine's writing in some way or another, so this book actually provides some sense of the interplay between Augustine's writings.What this book is not is a theological or religious treatise, although Augustine's theology is inescapably present. ... Read more

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Here is the life story of two exceptional people, two Germans who fled their country for different reasons. It is the story of their life in exile in Paris and in New York, their dependence on each other and deepening love, their continued exchange of ideas, Arendt's teaching and writing, her involvement with Jewish life in Europe and in Israel, and Blucher's years at The New School and at Bard College. It is also an important document of the '30s in Germany and France, of World War II, and the post-war life in ravaged European cities. Meanwhile, there is love of food and drink, and of friendship-both intellectual and affectionate-with Karl Jaspers, Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, and the complex relationship with Martin Heidegger and his wife. Within Four Walls is an extraordinary personal and historical record.
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Intimacy at Its Highest Level
Hannah Arendt has had much of her correspondence published over the last decade or so. We have volumes of her correspodence with Karl Jaspers, Mary McCarthy, Kurt Blumenfeld, and Martin Heidegger, among others. But these letters between Arendt and husband Heinrich Blucher stand out as the finest volume yet published. Whereas in the other volumes we see Arendt as student, friend, confidant, teacher, philosopher, intellectual, in these letters with Blucher we see Arendt as intimate confidant, vulnerable lover, and supportive wife. Heinrich Blucher was the one person to whom she could reveal herself, with whom she dropped her guard. The confidence was mutual as well; in Blucher's letters to Hannah we see his hopes, frustrations, trepidations, and above all, his devoted attachment to her hopes, needs and ambitions. Two people for whom the other was much more than a spouse or lover: someone in whom to take refuge in dark times.

The letters begin in 1936, shortly after Arendt and Blucher met in Paris, to which both escaped from Berlin in 1933: she after a short prison term for illegal Zionist activity, and he as a member of the German Communist Party, fleeing via Prague. At the time they met she was 29 and he 37. Both were married, but not to each other. They would not marry until 1940, shortly after their divorces became final.

Their first letters set the tone. Interspersed with intellectual and political affairs are their feelings for each other and their doubts and a lasting commitment can be achieved. IT grows from there, in all aspects, intellectual and emotional. When Arendt reproaches Blucher for not sticking to their letter-writing schedule, she tells him that she cannot continue to careen like a car wheel that has come off, "without a single connection to home or anything I can rely on."

They also discuss mutual friends such as Karl Jaspers, Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, and Martin Heidegger (whose relationship over the years with Arendt can only be described as ambivilent), holding nothing back and giving the reader a rare glimpse into their intellectual and social world, a glimpse one can only imagine in a formal biography of the two. As no one writes letters anymore, this is a most valuable look into an intellectual time and world as distant from our cyber-present as last century's history.

Worth your time and money? Yes - in every sense of the word. ... Read more

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This book provides a clear and comprehensive introduction to Arendt's key ideas and texts, ideal for students coming to her work for the first time. Hannah Arendt is considered to be one of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century. Although her writing is somewhat clear, the enormous breadth of her work places particular demands on the student coming to her thought for the first time. "Arendt: A Guide for the Perplexed" provides a clear, concise and accessible introduction to this hugely important political thinker. The book examines the most important themes of Hannah Arendt's work, as well as the main controversies surrounding it. Karin Fry explores the systematic nature of Arendt's political thought that arose in response to the political controversies of her time and describes how she sought to envision a coherent framework for thinking about politics in a new way.Thematically structured and covering all Arendt's key writings and ideas, this book is designed specifically to meet the needs of students coming to her work for the first time."Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging - or indeed downright bewildering. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material. ... Read more

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Consisting almost entirely of new essays specially prepared for this volume, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt illuminates the diversity of contemporary feminisms while also generating new and suggestive readings of Hannah Arendt's political thought. The contributing authors' shared interest in Arendt provides a ground upon which to work out their disagreements regarding feminist theory and practice. At the same time, their shared commitment to some brand of feminism leads them to engage Arendt on an unusually wide array of issues, such as gender, sexuality, the body, politics, friendship, solidarity, identity, nationalism, and revolution.Recent developments in feminist theory and practice have prompted a reconsideration of Arendt that includes a critical reevaluation of earlier feminist judgments of her work. From feminist perspectives that interrogate, politicize, and historicize--rather than simply redeploy--categories like "woman," "identity," or "experience," Arendt's well-known hostility to feminism and her critical stance toward identitarian and essentialist definitions of "woman" begin to look more like an advantage than a liability. Arendt's famous reluctance to identify herself as a woman and to address women's issues looks less like a personal problem of male-identification and more like a political stand that resists the reach of a symbolic order that seeks to define, categorize, and stabilize her in terms of one essential, unriven, and always known identity.Thus, the volume's authors move beyond feminism's traditional concern with the "woman question" to ask, further, what contemporary feminisms might learn from Arendt's conceptions of politics, action, and identity. ... Read more

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Thinking, Willing , Judging- The third pillar of Arendt's "Life of the Mind"
Ronald Beiner , as a close student of Hannah Arendt,undertakes in this work, the 'hypothetical completion ' of her last major philosophical enterprise, "The Life of the Mind". Arendt died just as she was about to begin the third and final section of the work, the one on the faculty of 'Judgment'. The previous two sections, one on 'Thinking' and the other on 'Willing' had been completed- this though the second left her at a certain 'impasse'. She had hoped through the work on Judgment to come to clarifications of problems raised in the work on 'Willing'. In this she would follow to a large degree the work of Kant, whose Critiques were in a sense the model of her 'Life of the Mind'. But essentially it is the Kantian theory of Judgment which is most important for her in the final work.
Beiner in this volume provides what he regards as the most relevant texts to the 'Judging 'volume. Her Postscriptum to 'Thinking' her 'Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy' and another essay on 'Imagination'.
The second part of the work which Beiner is an 'Interpretive Essay- Hannah Arendt on Judging.'
Arendt had told her good friend, and fellow political philosopher Glenn Gray that she felt her own personal strongest quality was her capacity for judgment. For her judgment is bound up with the world of the past. To establish valid judgments as Beiner explains it there is, following Kant, a necessity for an intersubjective community which essentially has a world in common and relates to that world. This enables a kind of relation through which each one might seek to see through the eyes of the other, to somehow form a judgment which takes into account the judgments of others- though of course there is no expectation that this will lead to unanimity.
As Beiner sees it Arendt opted for a Kantian perception of the historical process and its judgment as opposed to a Hegelian one. Instead of collectively looking at the process from a perfected end, she focused on the idea that it is the judgments of individuals from their own time looking back at time which constitute significant and meaningful judgment. This means that the 'judgments' themselves which in a sense have the aim of selecting and making memorable certain selected aspects of reality, cannot ( if I understand this rightly) have the quality of the absolute.
I have given a very condensed and no doubt in some way distorted view of Beiner's first- rate presentation- summary both of Kant's theory of judgment, and of Arendt's.
I found this work inspiring and moving , providing the sense that reading works of this kind truly put us in a'higher realm of the mind'. Or perhaps to say it with less pretension, 'in a realm of the mind where thought has its own special meaning'.
Despite my admiration for this work I do not believe that the 'Life of the Mind' will be the work which Hannah Arendt is most remembered for. I believe it is 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' which has had and probably will have greatest impact on political thought.
As for the work of hers which made her most known to a wider public her 'Eichmann in Jerusalem'. I personally believe that she in it showed tremendously poor judgment, violated her solidarity with the community with which she really had in one sense the deepest 'loss of a world' in common with. But that is of course my judgment.
It may well then be that Arendt like so many great writers and thinkers , misunderstood her own abilities, underestimating some capacities and overestimating others.
To my mind the tremendous appeal ofher categorical definitions of concepts like 'autonomy ' and 'freedom' and ' willing' and 'love' and 'judgment' and 'action' and ' contemplation' do provide one, if not the only possible one,'vocabulary of life and thought'.
I greatly appreciate the work done by Ronald Beiner here in helping enrich my own personal understanding of the thought of Arendt.
Every student of hers, and I would almost want to say, all those who take interest in the 'Life of the Mind' will certainly profit by reading this work.
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Lenses for the 21th century
I had Hannah Arendt for classes in grad school in the early 1970s. I had earlier read her "Eichmann in Jerusalem" which exerted a great influence on me. Her classes and her books have sustained and inspired me. This book by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl is a marvelous look at the significance Arendt has for us today. Taking three major works as lenses to throw light on our world, she examines "The Origins of Totalitarianism," The Human Condition" and "The Life of the Mind." I am inspired to go back and read more Arendt.
If you haven't yet read Arendt, this might be a good starting point - though expect to be intellectually challenged. Though Young-Bruehl is very clear, the frameworks Arendt proposes will stretch your mind.
Highly recommended.

Fighting Back on Behalf of a Hero
In some ways Elisabeth Young-Bruehl is a better writer than her icon ever was; at least her sentences are generally shorter and more direct, and she frequently avoids the linguistic traps which sometime Arendt fell into while simultaneously using them as trampolines to give her a moral leverage to jump over her opponents.It is when Young-Bruehl engages in direct combat with previous and current critics of Arendt that her weakness shows, for she is no Mary McCarthy when it comes to attack, and the infuriating Ettinger remains relatively unscathed even by all the intellectual scorn Young-Bruehl pours on her for her expose of the relations between Arendt and Heidegger.

Even if nobody else cares at this late date, Young-Bruehl will not hear a word said again her idol.That's plain as the spots on a leopard, and yet Ettinger did make a case which Young-Bruehl cannot seem to assail.Otherwise the "Why X Matters" format Yale editors have come up with is pretty, yes, banal, but it gets the job done when it comes to Hannah Arendt.Young-Bruehl brilliantly explains Arendt's opposition of power to violence, shading all its implications like a paint wheel, and carefully, calmly, guiding us through the myriad qualifications of her mind.For paradox was her strong suit and, as Young-Bruehl argues, it is only through this prism that it can be said that Arendt matters to us at all (for this is a book designed to be "relevant," sometimes painfully so, like one's mother wearing one's own hip clothes).

"In Arendt's terms," she writes, "the power most likely to be lasting, the one that can best preserve the actors' humanity, is the power that arises from nonviolent action."And yet oddly enough Arendt considered unconditional forgiveness to be not a factor in political conditions, for the unconditional love on which it depends is so rare as to be non-existent in the lives of most people (therefore, in the lives of nations).Is this true?If so, it is one of the hard-boiled traits which sometimes made Arendt seem like the Gloria Grahame of philosophy: her grim, glittering eye and that frozen upper lip, surveying all of the West and East with the same dispassionate glare.

The importance of one of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century
Elisabeth Bruehl- Young wrote what to this point is the best biography of Hannah Arendt. Her book " For Love of the World" is a detailed and majestic study of one of the twentieth- centuries most important political thinkers. Now at the centenary of Arendt's birth she has written a tribute to her great teacher, in which she expounds on the major Arendtian ideas, on Arendt's conception of totalitarianism, on the value she placed on action in the world, on her sense of the value and meaning of 'thinking' even in terms of the prevention of Evil. Her basic grasp of Arendt's thought is made manifest in these pages which can truly give a sense of the significance and meaning of Arendt's work to the world.
Benjamin Balint writing in 'The Jewish Forward claims that " Arendt's most enduring legacy -- and the one most relevant to today's debates -- is her 1951 book "The Origins of Totalitarianism," where her genius in conceptualizing the unfamiliar burns brightest. Wrestling with the most destructive forces of the 20th century, she concludes that despite their outward differences, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union were in profound ways inwardly similar. They belonged to an utterly new, totalitarian type of regime that could not be explained by any of Montesquieu's 200-year-old categories -- republic, monarchy, despotism. As a refugee from Nazi terror who fled to America (by way of Paris and the Gurs internment camp) in 1941, she knew whereof she spoke."

Balint is however troubled by Bruehl- Young's effort to apply Arendt's ideas to the American political situation today. He thinks her ideas could more readily be related to the Radical Islamic Fundamentalist effort to dominate Mankind through creating one vast Totalitarian Islamic system, in which there is no personal freedom,one in which the authorities enter into and control every aspect of the person's life.

Bruehl- Young takes angry exception to the misuse made of Arendt's term 'the banality of Evil' the key term in her famous analysis of mass- murderer Eichmann. She does not really answer the charge however concerning Arendt's insensitivity to the victims of the 'Holocaust' for whom the use of this term demeaned and diminished ( though Arendt by no means intended this) the horrors of their experience.
Bruehl- Young does try to defend Arendt in another area, in terms of her relationship with and defense of Heidegger. She scornfully though not to my mind, convincingly, attacks Elisabetha Ettinger's portrait of Arendt's somewhat servile character in that relationship.
Arendt , it is important to note placed great weight on her last uncompleted philosophical work , "The Life of the Mind" But this has to this point proven to be a book for scholars only.
Her real significance has been in political thought, and perhaps also in her telling analysis and definition of the human condition.
Bruehl- Young is a loyal and competent student of her great teacher, and anyone wo cares for the work of one of the great political minds of this century will certainly learn much from this work.

, ... Read more

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Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost political thinkers of the twentieth century, and her particular interests have made her one of the most frequently cited thinkers of our time. This volume examines the primary themes of her multi-faceted work, from her theory of totalitarianism and her controversial idea of the "banality of evil" to her classic studies of political action and her final reflections on judgment and the life of the mind. Each essay examines the political, philosophical, and historical concerns that shaped Arendt's thought. ... Read more

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Twenty-five years after her death, we are still coming to terms with the controversial figure of Hannah Arendt. Interlacing the life and work of this seminal twentieth-century philosopher, Julia Kristeva provides us with an elegant, sophisticated biography brimming with historical and philosophical insight.Centering on the theme of female genius,emphasizes three features of the philosopher's work. First, by exploring Arendt's critique of Saint Augustine and her biographical essay on Rahel Varnhagen, Kristeva accentuates Arendt's commitment to recounting lives and narration. Second, Kristeva reflects on Arendt's perspective onJudaism, anti-Semitism, and the "banality of evil." Finally, the biography assesses Arendt's intellectual journey, placing her enthusiasm for observing both social phenomena and political events in the context of her personal life.Drawing on fragments of Arendt's most intimate correspondence with her longtime lover Martin Heidegger and her husband Heinrich Blucher, excerpts from her mother's "Unser Kind" (a diary tracking Hannah's formative years), and passages from Arendt's philosophical writings, Kristeva presents a luminous story. With a thorough thematic index and bibliographical references,is a major breakthrough in the understanding of an essential thinker.Amazon.com Review
Julia Kristeva's Hannah Arendt brings together two of the best minds in 20th-century philosophy; two who are especially noteworthy because they are visionary women in a field long dominated by men. Appropriately, the book is, in part, a tribute to Arendt, one of a series of looks at female genius. Kristeva brings her considerable scholarly arsenal, which includes linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, feminism, aesthetics, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis. In particular, her psychoanalytic bent makes for an incisive look at Arendt because she was "gripped from the start by that unique passion in which life and thought are one.... [She] consistently put life--both life itself and life as a concept to be analyzed--at the center of her work."

Arendt is certainly one of the 20th century's brightest intellectual luminaries. Penning The Human Condition and Eichmann in Jerusalem, she wove her accounts of philosophy with a unique penchant for narrative and personal reflection, vivified by her extraordinary life. Throughout this biography, Kristeva plies Arendt's trade, using Arendt's life to illuminate her thought. By turns she examines Arendt's use of narrative, her ratiocinations on Jewish-ness and anti-Semitism, and her political philosophy. Kristeva's insightfulness in this volume will help ensure her a place in the canon alongside Arendt. --Eric de Place ... Read more

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Living Is Thinking; Or, the Force of Memory
This is a collection of five Alexander lectures that Kristeva delivered at the University of Toronto in 1999.It attempts to delineate certain aspects of Arendt's political philosophy, including her idea of the political, the vita activa/vita contemplative distinction, and the influences of various thinkers, especially Aristotle and Heidegger on Arendt's body of work.Kristeva's main focuses are Arendt's conceptions of language, the self, "political space," and the body, addressing all with a particular focus toward their deployment and usage in political life.

During the first two lectures, Kristeva convincingly makes the case that at the center of Arendt's political thought rests several distinctions which enable us to live political lives (political in the sense of Aristotle's famous "politikon zoon," the observation that we are by nature social animals, not necessarily party politics).She says that we interpret, understand, and react to our world through and by our unique ability to create narratives.The ability to share life, action, and thought in an interactive human matrix arises from what Nietzsche called the "shaping power" of human memory.

The third lecture is a reading of several fiction writers, including Dinesen, Brecht, Sarraute, and Kafka, with emphasis on the implications their work has for political action.While interesting, I didn't find Arendt's reading, or Kristeva's reading of Arendt's reading, especially compelling.

In the last two lectures, she mostly discusses the political relevance of forgiveness, memory, and judgment.Kristeva is makes some peculiar statements about Arendt, i.e., like that Arendt wasn't aware of the large corpus of eighteenth century treatises on aesthetics and taste.I find this highly unlikely, considering Arendt's near-encyclopedic knowledge of Western philosophical traditions.

Overall, this book could have been much better if Kristeva herself was a political philosopher, though she does bring interesting points to the issue at hand considering her background in theory and psychoanalysis.It was enjoyable to get to read a synthesis of Arendt's work from someone whose work epitomizes interdisciplinarity, and does not rest purely within the realm of political science or philosophy.But this is ultimately a double-edged sword for this book.While I always found Kristeva's arguments thoughtful and well-argued, they always lacked a certain historical force that could have been better lassoed with a "tighter" focus on Arendt's purely historic-political métier.

The intellectual overview of a political science genius
It has been a long time since I went to a baseball game, but trying to keep track of the intellectual action in the biography of Hannah Arendt by Julia Kristeva reminded me of the game.Eventually, I even thought of a song, "Catfish" by Bob Dylan (Words by Bob Dylan and Jacques Levy) recorded on July 28, 1975, an outtake from the album "Desire" that was finally released in a three-CD package called "The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 [rare and unreleased] 1961-1991."There was once a pitcher called Catfish Hunter, million dollar man, and Dylan's chorus said, "Nobody can throw the ball Like Catfish can."I have had the words since "The Songs of Bob Dylan" was released in 1976, but I didn't hear the song until 1991.Having an English translation from 2001 of a feminist biography of a political scientist of the mid-twentieth century captures the intellection activity that interests me about as well as "Catfish" captures the action of a baseball game.

Lazy stadium night, Catfish on the mound,
"Strike three" the umpire said,
Batter have to go back and sit down.

There are three chapters in HANNAH ARENDT, and the third has 219 notes.Basic statistics on how much Julia Kristeva is merely educating herself in public by providing a reading from Arendt's books might be obtained by counting the Ibid.s.Counting backwards, I found 133 Ibid.s in the notes for Chapter 3, including my favorite note:

"99."Letter to the Romans 7:21, drafted between 54 and 58 a.d., cited in ibid., p. 64."(p. 268).

A lot of the books I read lately keep trying to tell me when the Bible was written, but I never noticed it in a note before.Usually my favorite notes are about Nietzsche, like:

"123.Ibid., p. 165, citing Nietzsche, THE GAY SCIENCE, no. 310"

"126.Concerning the `forgetting' that Nietzsche revives see p. 237; and Paul Ricoeur, paper presented at the Hannah Arendt Conference at the Grande Bibliotheque de France, December 6, 1997."

"128.Ibid., pp. 169-70, citing Nietzsche, THE WILL TO POWER, no. 585 A, pp. 316-19."

`131.LM, "Willing," p. 172, citing Nietzsche, THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA, pt. 3, "Before Sunrise." '

`187.Ibid., citing Nietzsche, "The Use and Abuse of History," pp. 6, 7.'

"189.Ibid., citing Nietzsche, THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS, p. 61"

`192.Ibid., pp. 63, 72-73 ("even in old Kant:the categorical imperative reeks of cruelty").'

Nietzsche wrote such things about Kant, and it is a bit difficult to imagine that Kristeva and Arendt would associate such ideas with the great weight of the past if Nietzsche hadn't made this connection first.Understanding philosophy is a process that can be compared to intellectually building a rehash of old, familiar plays, as if it is about something like a baseball game, which has an umpire who gets to decide when an easy pop fly is an infield fly rule call that makes the batter out, but the umpire does not have time to say anything until after it is all over when a triple play picks off the runners before they have a chance to tag up if the pitcher ducks under a line drive that gets caught right on second base before anyone has time to react, but a quick shortstop snagged the ball out of the air and flipped it to first in the only instant in which that could happen.Kristeva is capable of interpreting political science as an activity best understood in terms of the philosophy of Nietzsche:

"To the `identical will' that forges the solidarity of a group, Arendt contrasts the way men who are connected to one another through a mutual promise `act in concert.'These men dispose of the future as though it were the present, and they live together in the miraculous enlargement of what Nietzsche called the `memory of the Will,' which is what distinguishes human life from animal life.As Arendt evokes Nietzsche's concept, she hears only the joyful touches of the superman and denotes not a trace of Nietzsche's disdainful tone."(p. 236).

Still counting backward, I find 102 Ibid.s in the notes for Chapter 2 and only 52 Ibid.s in the notes for Chapter 1.The Introduction only had two notes, on a wide variety of topics, but both related to the nature of "genius."When political opinion surveys offer a few sample views to encompass the political orientation of the great mass of the population, only a genius could be expected to have a ready answer to questions like "Will mothers become our only safeguard against the wholesale automation of human beings?"(p. xiii).The Introduction actually seems more suited for a triple biography, as "The three women who are the subject of this work" on page xv includes two women who are hardly mentioned in the three main chapters of HANNAH ARENDT.It does not add much to understanding this book to also learn "that Melanie Klein devoted herself to studying decompensation."(p. xvii).But in considering who else has been brilliant, it pays to have some comic relief.Among the French, who must understand comedy as well as any people anywhere, it might even be popular to declare:

"Colette's only real rival would prove to be Proust, whose narrative search has a social and metaphysical complexity that goes well beyond the adventures of Claudine and her counterparts.And yet Colette far surpasses Proust in the art of capturing pleasures that have never been lost."(pp. xviii-xix). ... Read more

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recommendation
The purchase was very simple, and they had the available book, the times and delivery of the product was made under the engaged conditions. I recommend this company for their quality and responsibility. I recommend this company for their quality and responsibility.

Dark Times and Heidegger
In the Arendt-Heidegger correspondence letter 89 credits Heidegger with being the whole inspiration of her "The Human Condition".

The really troubling question is how she justified excluding "Martin" from this book, "Men in Dark Times", when there are two chapters on Jaspers.

My opinion - my interpretation - is that in this book, the opening of the prize speech is in fact veiled justification of Heidegger.

Read in conjunction with the Arendt account of Heidegger's supposed 10-month Nazi error, I think that this is the inescapable reading of what she says in the opening passages of 4th Chapter of this book.That speech was delivered in the very year that "The Human Condition" was published and 10 years before this little volume.

Not long after this book appeared, the UNESCO tract "Trends in Philosophy" would have no sign of Jaspers - credited in these essays by Arendt as the philosopher to be read by all mankind - but many references to Heidegger.

Two or three essays should have been in this book: an essay on Husserl after expulsion from the university; an essay on Gerhardt Husserl after his expulsion from the University; an essay on Ernst Cassirer and his response to the NS-Zeit (a strong parallel to Gerhardt Husserl.)

My gut feeling is never to recommend these essays to general readers ( I would not recommend them to a suburban public library acquisitions department - if missing, I would not recommend their replacement) - but they should be read for anyone conversant with Jaspers.

Somewhere I recall jaspers reporting how Heidegger mocked his interest in Lessing, but this book opens with an essay on Lessing - and I would like to think that Lessing would also have felt sickened by Letter 89.

Intellectual portaits that augment human dignity
These portraits of Karl Jaspers, Waldemar Gurian, Randall Jarrell, Walter Benjamin,Isak Dinesen,Bertolhdt Brecht, Pope John XXIII are remarkable for their human insight, their narrative power and their philosophical understanding. Arendt makes of each portrait a life- story, often a most moving story, and a presentation and critical assessment of the figure 's life- work. In some cases she had a central part in introducing to an English reading audience seminal figures ( Walter Benjamin and Hermann Broch are the outstanding examples) who were far less well known , than they would come to be. She chooses figures whose power of creation is great and unique, and she assesses them in terms of her own set of categories and understandings. One outstanding instance is her evaulation it is really a laudatio a work of praise for the great Pope John XXIII .She speaks of his remarkable simplicity, humanity and courage. His simple great faith "Every day is a good day to be born, and every day is a good day to die"
Some of the portraits are of personal acquaintances and friends. And one feels that in writing about them she is somehow doing for them what she in her " The Human Condition" spoke about as the role of the poet the immortalization of the hero and their deeds. She has a wonderful eye, and her description for instance of the awkwardness with material things of Waldemar Gurian catches the essence of the person in a striking way.
All in all the portraits of Men in Dark Times shed light on the human character and soul, and are a testimony not only to the greatness of the subjects but to the greatness of the writer herself.

Hannah Arendt's Political Biographies
Men in Dark Times is a collection of biographical essays Arendt wrote over a period of 15 years (1955-1968), all of which were published elsewhere, and collected here under this title. She has choosen to collct her portraits of cultural and political figures who worked and were caught upin world affairs in the first half of the twentieth-century, figures suchas Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Jaspers, Isak Dinesen, Walter Benjamin, and BertoltBrecht. The oppening essay, "On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts aboutLessing," focuses on the thought of the eighteenth-century Germanphilosopher, and she uses his thoughts on friendship, on the political andcivic aspects of friendship, the ways in which philosophical and politicalworks are formed through civic friendship, to tie all of the personaediscussed in the book together. She sees them all as struggling to producein an era racked by political upheavel. As always, she writes with a highlyastute critical eye and a sharp tongue. It is one of her more polemicalworks, and is sure to make one re-evaulate how we look not only at thelives and works of those she tells us about, but also about ourselves. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (4)

recommendation
The purchase was very simple, and they had the available book, the times and delivery of the product was made under the engaged conditions. I recommend this company for their quality and responsibility. I recommend this company for their quality and responsibility.

Dark Times and Heidegger
In the Arendt-Heidegger correspondence letter 89 credits Heidegger with being the whole inspiration of her "The Human Condition".

The really troubling question is how she justified excluding "Martin" from this book, "Men in Dark Times", when there are two chapters on Jaspers.

My opinion - my interpretation - is that in this book, the opening of the prize speech is in fact veiled justification of Heidegger.

Read in conjunction with the Arendt account of Heidegger's supposed 10-month Nazi error, I think that this is the inescapable reading of what she says in the opening passages of 4th Chapter of this book.That speech was delivered in the very year that "The Human Condition" was published and 10 years before this little volume.

Not long after this book appeared, the UNESCO tract "Trends in Philosophy" would have no sign of Jaspers - credited in these essays by Arendt as the philosopher to be read by all mankind - but many references to Heidegger.

Two or three essays should have been in this book: an essay on Husserl after expulsion from the university; an essay on Gerhardt Husserl after his expulsion from the University; an essay on Ernst Cassirer and his response to the NS-Zeit (a strong parallel to Gerhardt Husserl.)

My gut feeling is never to recommend these essays to general readers ( I would not recommend them to a suburban public library acquisitions department - if missing, I would not recommend their replacement) - but they should be read for anyone conversant with Jaspers.

Somewhere I recall jaspers reporting how Heidegger mocked his interest in Lessing, but this book opens with an essay on Lessing - and I would like to think that Lessing would also have felt sickened by Letter 89.

Intellectual portaits that augment human dignity
These portraits of Karl Jaspers, Waldemar Gurian, Randall Jarrell, Walter Benjamin,Isak Dinesen,Bertolhdt Brecht, Pope John XXIII are remarkable for their human insight, their narrative power and their philosophical understanding. Arendt makes of each portrait a life- story, often a most moving story, and a presentation and critical assessment of the figure 's life- work. In some cases she had a central part in introducing to an English reading audience seminal figures ( Walter Benjamin and Hermann Broch are the outstanding examples) who were far less well known , than they would come to be. She chooses figures whose power of creation is great and unique, and she assesses them in terms of her own set of categories and understandings. One outstanding instance is her evaulation it is really a laudatio a work of praise for the great Pope John XXIII .She speaks of his remarkable simplicity, humanity and courage. His simple great faith "Every day is a good day to be born, and every day is a good day to die"
Some of the portraits are of personal acquaintances and friends. And one feels that in writing about them she is somehow doing for them what she in her " The Human Condition" spoke about as the role of the poet the immortalization of the hero and their deeds. She has a wonderful eye, and her description for instance of the awkwardness with material things of Waldemar Gurian catches the essence of the person in a striking way.
All in all the portraits of Men in Dark Times shed light on the human character and soul, and are a testimony not only to the greatness of the subjects but to the greatness of the writer herself.

Hannah Arendt's Political Biographies
Men in Dark Times is a collection of biographical essays Arendt wrote over a period of 15 years (1955-1968), all of which were published elsewhere, and collected here under this title. She has choosen to collct her portraits of cultural and political figures who worked and were caught upin world affairs in the first half of the twentieth-century, figures suchas Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Jaspers, Isak Dinesen, Walter Benjamin, and BertoltBrecht. The oppening essay, "On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts aboutLessing," focuses on the thought of the eighteenth-century Germanphilosopher, and she uses his thoughts on friendship, on the political andcivic aspects of friendship, the ways in which philosophical and politicalworks are formed through civic friendship, to tie all of the personaediscussed in the book together. She sees them all as struggling to producein an era racked by political upheavel. As always, she writes with a highlyastute critical eye and a sharp tongue. It is one of her more polemicalworks, and is sure to make one re-evaulate how we look not only at thelives and works of those she tells us about, but also about ourselves. ... Read more

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"The late German-Jewish political theorist Arendt returned repeatedly in her work to the effects and proper uses of power and authority. This career-spanning collection of essays will reinforce for any reader that these preoccupations followed her even into literary criticism..."
--Publisher's Weekly

"Reflections on Literature and Culture contains fascinating essays on Kafka, Proust, and Brecht."
--New York Review of Books

"Arendt was one of the most important American political thinkers of the 20th century. The 34 selections in this volume, which span 1930-75, offer great insight into her less notable works of cultural and literary criticism...Gottlieb arranges the selections chronologically, letting readers see both the consistency and the change in ideas."
--Library Journal

As one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt is well known for her writings on political philosophy.Less familiar are her significant contributions to cultural and literary criticism.This edition brings together for the first time Arendt's reflections on literature and culture.The essays include previously unpublished and untranslated material drawn from half a century of engagement with the works of European and American authors, poets, journalists, and literary critics, including such diverse figures as Proust, Melville, Auden, and Brecht.

Intended for a wide readership, this volume has the potential to change our view of Arendt by introducing her not only as one of the leading political theorists of her generation, but also as a serious, committed, and highly original literary and cultural critic. Gottlieb's introduction ties the work together, showing how Arendt developed a form of literary and cultural analysis that is entirely her own. ... Read more

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wonderful book
I have to say that's a quite good book, offering you a totally different perspective on Arendt. ... Read more

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"not only an achievement in historiography, but also in political science... (including) the rights of man, in philosophy and ethics... itself a social force not to be underestimated." David Riesman ... Read more

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Hannah Arendt And Education is the first book to bring together a collection of essays on Hannah Arendt and education. The contributors contend that Arendt offers a unique perspective, one which enhances the liberal and critical traditions' call for transforming education so that it can foster the values of democratic citizenship and social justice. They focus on a wide array of Arendtian concepts- such as natality, action, freedom, public space, authority and judgment- which are particularly relevant for education in a democratic society. Teachers, educators, and citizens in general who are interested in democratic or civic education would benefit from reading this book. ... Read more

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She was, Hannah Arendt wrote, "my closest friend, though she has been dead for some hundred years." Born in Berlin in 1771 as the daughter of a Jewish merchant, Rahel Varnhagen would come to host one of the most prominent salons of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Arendt discovered her writings some time in the mid-1920s, and soon began to reimagine Rahel's inner life and write her biography. Long unavailable and never before published as Arendt intended, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess returns to print in an extraordinary new edition.

Arendt draws a lively and complex portrait of a woman during the period of the Napoleonic wars and the early emancipation of the Jews, a figure who met and corresponded with some of the most celebrated authors, artists, and politicians of her time. She documents Rahel's attempts to earn legitimacy as a writer and gain access to the highest aristocratic circles, to assert for herself a position in German culture in spite of her gender and religion.

Arendt had almost completed a first draft of her book on Rahel by 1933 when she was forced into exile by the National Socialists. She continued her work on the manuscript in Paris and New York, but would not publish the book until 1958. Rahel Varnhagen became not just a study of a historical Jewish figure, but a poignant reflection on Arendt's own life and times, her first exploration of German-Jewish identity and the possibility of Jewish life in the face of unimaginable adversity.

For this first complete critical edition of the book in any language, Liliane Weissberg reconstructs the notes Arendt planned for Rahel Varnhagen but never fully executed. She reveals the extent to which Arendt wove the biography largely from the words of Rahel and her contemporaries. In her extended introduction, Weissberg reflects on Rahel's writings and on the importance of this text in the development of Arendt's political theory. Weissberg also reveals the hidden story of how Arendt manipulated documents relating to Rahel Varnhagen to claim for herself a university position and reparation payments from the postwar German state.

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Arendt and Jaspers on Rahel
This book should be read in conjunction with the Arendt-Jaspers correspondence and her correspondence with he second husband, Heinrich Bluecher. ... Read more

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Margaret Canovan argues in this book that much of the published work on Arendt has been flawed by serious misunderstandings, arising from a failure to see her work in its proper context. The author shows how such misunderstanding was possible, and offers a fundamental reinterpretation, drawing on Arendt's unpublished as well as her published work, which sheds new light on most areas of her thought. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Arendt neither a 'feminist' nor a 'zionist'
Those looking to Hannah Arendt for a Zionist or Feminist philosophy will be disappointed. She is one of the great philosophic minds of the twentieth century, and to assign labels to her and use the lens concordant to such labels in reading her is to miss much of what she has to say. She is certainly not trying to provide clever arguments to win debates with. Her relevance to the world today is up to the reader to determine, but I would encourage you to make the attempt.

Arendt is overrated
This is a collection of essays from Arendt, a feminist and Zionist fromthe middle of the century.I am sure most political theorists love thiskind of book, but for normal people the text is far too"scholarly".I could find nothing of a feminist nature in thisbook and little convicing of a Zionist nature.There are far moreconvincing books on both sets of thought than this. ... Read more