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This work presents both the range of Arendt's political thought and the patterns of controversy it elicited. The essays are arranged in six parts around important themes in Arendt's work; totalitarianism and evil; narrative and history; the public world and personal identity; action and power; justice, equality, and democracy; and thinking and judging.

Despite such thematic diversity, virtually all the contributors have made an effort to build bridges between interest-driven politics and Arendt's Hellenic/existential politics. Although some are quite critical of the way Arendt develops her theory, most sympathize with her project of rescuing politics from both the foreshortening glance of the philosopher and its assimilation to social and biological processes. This volume treats Arendt's work as an imperfect, somewhat time-bound but still invaluable resource for challenging some of our most tenacious prejudices about what politics is and how to study it.

The following eminent Arendt scholars have contributed chapters to this book: Ronald Beiner, Margaret Canovan, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Seyla Benhabib, Jurgen Habermas, Hanna Pitkin, and Sheldon Wolin. ... Read more

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This outstanding collection of essays explores Hannah Arendt's thought against the background of recent world-political events unfolding since September 11, 2001, and engages in a contentious dialogue with one of the greatest political thinkers of the past century, with the conviction that she remains one of our contemporaries. Themes such as moral and political equality, action and natality, and judgment and freedom are reevaluated with fresh insights by a group of thinkers who are themselves well known for their original contributions to political thought. Other essays focus on novel and little-discussed themes in the literature by highlighting Arendt's views of sovereignty, international law and genocide, nuclear weapons and revolutions, imperialism and Eurocentrism, and her contrasting images of Europe and America. Each essay displays not only superb Arendt scholarship but also stylistic flair and analytical tenacity. ... Read more

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Recognized on publication as the definitive account of its subject and ten years later hailed as a classic by the Times Literary Supplement, this remarkable book has been foremost wherever the characteristics and problems of the twentieth century are discussed. Dr. Arendt's study begins with an account of the rise in the nineteenth century and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. The final section deals with the institutions, organizations, and operations of totalitarian movements and governments, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian dominion in history - Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Dr. Arendt discusses the transformation of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, and the use of terror, the very essence of this form of government. And in a brilliant concluding chapter she analyzes the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination.

The present edition includes all of the material in the 1966 "New Edition," together with the prefaces to the 1968 Harvest editions of Antisemitism and Imperialism.

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This is the first book length study of war in the thought of one of the twentieth-century's most important and original political thinkers. Hannah Arendt's writing was fundamentally rooted in her understanding of war and its political significance. But this element of her work has surprisingly been neglected in international and political theory. This book fills an important gap by assessing the full range of Arendt's historical and conceptual writing on war and introduces to international theory the distinct language she used to talk about war and the political world. It builds on her re-thinking of old concepts such as power, violence, greatness, world, imperialism, evil, hypocrisy and humanity and introduces some that are new to international thought like plurality, action, agonism, natality and political immortality. The issues that Arendt dealt with throughout her life and work continue to shape the political world and her approach to political thinking remains a source of inspiration for those in search of guidance not in what to think but how to think about politics and war. Re-reading Arendt's writing, forged through firsthand experience of occupation and struggles for liberation, political founding and resistance in time of war, reveals a more serious engagement with war than her earlier readers have recognized. Arendt's political theory makes more sense when it is understood in the context of her thinking about war and we can think about the history and theory of warfare, and international politics, in new ways by thinking with Arendt. ... Read more

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The first volume of Arendt’s celebrated three-part study of the philosophical origins of the totalitarian mind. This volume focuses on the rise of antisemitism in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Index.
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The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt rereads Arendt's political philosophy in light of newly gained insights into the historico-cultural background of her work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This book was extremely intelligent!
Seyla Benhabib is an amazing thinker known throught the world.She displays her intelligence and knowledge through this book. ... Read more

Product Description
The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt rereads Arendt's political philosophy in light of newly gained insights into the historico-cultural background of her work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This book was extremely intelligent!
Seyla Benhabib is an amazing thinker known throught the world.She displays her intelligence and knowledge through this book. ... Read more

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Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost thinkers and political commentators of this century. She addressed some of the most difficult and contentious issues of modern times and bestowed upon the modern world her original thought and unrelenting optimism. She insisted that freedom and autonomy, indispensable for human existence itself, are only attainable within an authentic political life. The years since Hannah Arendt's death have seen an intensification of interest in her both as a thinker and as figure of her times. This interdisciplinary collection of superbly crafted essays, by both young and established scholars, offers a series of engagements with Arendt at 'eye-level' in a series of debates, conversations or arguments across the full range of her major intellectual interests. It seeks, in a way that no other account has attempted, to outline and investigate the unity of Arendt's life and work. This is a powerful book that allows the reader to reassemble the various facets of Arendt's writing and personality into one rich mosaic of ideas and issues. ... Read more

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This study is an interpretive survey of Hannah Arendt's lifework taken from the perspective of her understanding of freedom. The author demonstrates that throughout her life, Arendt was preoccupied with establishing the primacy of political freedom over the inwardly philosophical, and that she continually posited freedom in its true sense to be a political phenomenon. Despite the complexity of Arendt's work, the author asserts that her thought is quite coherent and a unique contribution to political thought. ... Read more

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Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity explores the theme of human rights in the work of Hannah Arendt. Parekh argues that Arendt's contribution to this debate has been largely ignored because she does not speak in the same terms as contemporary theoreticians of human rights. Beginning by examining Arendt’s critique of human rights, and the concept of a right to have rights with which she contrasts the traditional understanding of human rights, Parekh goes on to analyze some of the tensions and paradoxes within the modern conception of human rights that Arendt brings to light, arguing that Arendt’s perspective must be understood as phenomenological and grounded in a notion of intersubjectivity that she develops in her readings of Kant and Socrates.

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Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was one of the most original andinteresting political thinkers of the twentieth century. In this newinterpretation of her career, philosopher Richard Bernstein situatesArendt historically as an engaged Jewish intellectual and explores therange of her thinking from the perspective of her continuingconfrontation with "the Jewish question." Bernstein argues that manythemes that emerged in the course of Arendt's attempts to understandspecifically Jewish issues shaped her thinking about politics in generaland the life of the mind. By exploring pivotal events of her life story– her arrest and subsequent emigration from Germany in 1933, herprecarious existence in Paris as a stateless Jew working for Zionistorganizations, her internment at Gurs and her subsequent escape, andfinally her flight from Europe in 1941 – he shows how personalexperiences and her responses to them oriented her thinking. Arendt'sanalysis of the Jews' lack of preparation for the vicious politicalantiSemitism that arose in the last decade of the nineteenth century,Bernstein argues, led her on a quest for the ultimate meaning ofpolitics and political responsibility. Moreover, he points out thatArendt's deepest insights about politics emerged from her reflections onstatelessness and totalitarian domination. Bernstein also examinesArendt's attraction to and break with Zionism, and the reasons for hercritical stance toward a Jewish sovereign state. He then turns to theissue that, in Arendt's opinion, needed most to be confronted in theaftermath of World War II: the fundamental nature of evil. He traces thenuances of her thinking from "radical evil" to "the banality of evil"and, finally, reexamines Eichmann in Jerusalem, her meditation on evilthat caused a storm of protest and led some to question her loyalty tothe Jewish people. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A deep study despite the apologetics
Richard A. Bernstein traces Hannah Arendt's relationship to her own Jewishness, from her earliest experiences of Anti- Semitism in childhood to and through the 'banality of evil' controversy. He shows that certain fundamental concepts of her thought were strongly influenced by her experience as a stateless Jew.He details the story of her special connection with Kurt Blumenfeld and the thought of Charles Lazare which helped form her Zionism.
Her latter- day critique of Israel is considered as her passionate admission that the one public tragedy she could not think to bear would be the destruction of Israel.
As to her controversy with the Jewish community on the 'banality of evil'. My own sense is that Bernstein is a bit too sympathetic to her position, and that Scholem was essentially right in speaking of Arendt's distance from the ordinary Jewish people. Her insensitivity, even moral cruelty to the victims of the Shoah, is a black mark on her record, a record which includes a heroic chapter in her years in France helping foster Youth Aliyah, and saving Jewish children.
The story is complicated and always interesting. This is a deep study but a political thinker who understands Arendt well. ... Read more

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Philosophia brings together, for the first time, the work of three major women thinkers of this century, producing a developing commentary on the human condition as an alternative to the mainstream, masculine, philosophical tradition. ... Read more