Auf den ersten Blick haben Hannah Arendt und Michel Foucault kaum etwas gemein. Tatsächlich beziehen sie sich jedoch auf die identischen Topoi der Philosophiegeschichte - wenn ihre Auslegungen der Quellen auch denkbar verschieden sind. Als Grund hierfür bestimmt Hannah Holme die komplementären Perspektiven der beiden, die sie als Aneignungen des heideggerschen Sorgebegriffs deutet: die ethische Sorge um sich Foucaults und die politische Sorge um die Welt Arendts. Am Ende steht ein Plädoyer für eine Verbindung des machtkritischen Ethos der (...) Sorge um sich mit der Macht des politischen Handelns, das der Sorge um die Welt unterstellt ist. (shrink)

Judith Butler’s recent work is exemplary of the trend in contemporary theory to consider ethics. Her deliberation over ethical questions, and the place of ethics in intellectual work, has undeniably intensified since September 11. This article will demonstrate, however, that this is a rendering explicit of what has always been implicit in her work. Rather than perceiving the ethical dimension of Butler’s writings in her increasing interest in thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt, I contend that it (...) is in her sustained interest in Hegel, and specifically in Hegelian recognition, that her work can be read as engaged with ethical concerns. This article highlights the growing critical concern with the prevalence of recognition in ethical theory and questions the possibility of theorising ethics outside of the recognition-paradigm. (shrink)

This article examines why and how workers adhere and contribute to the perpetuation of the freedom fantasy induced by neoliberal ideology. We turn to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the human condition, which offers invaluable insights into the mechanisms that foster the erosion of human freedom in the workplace. Embracing an Arendtian lens, we demonstrate that individuals become entrapped in a libertarian fantasy—a condition enacted by the replacement of the freedom to act by the freedom to perform. The latter embodies (...) the survivalist modus operandi of animal laborans who renounces singularity, by focusing on the function of supervised labor, who renounces solidarity, by focusing on individualist and competitive labor, and who is deprived of spontaneity, by focusing on the measured productivity of labor. Therefore, we propose a new corporate governance perspective based on the rehabilitation of political action in organizations as the best way to preserve human capacity for singularity, solidarity, and spontaneity. (shrink)

This highly acclaimed, prize-winning biography of one of the foremost political philosophers of the twentieth century is here reissued in a trade paperback edition for a new generation of readers. In a new preface the author offers an account of writings by and about Arendt that have appeared since the book's 1982 publication, providing a reassessment of her subject's life and achievement. Praise for the earlier edition: “Both a personal and an intellectual biography... It represents biography at its best.”—Peter Berger, (...) front page, The New York Times Book Review “A story of surprising drama.... At last, we can see Arendt whole.”—Jim Miller, Newsweek “Indispensable to anyone interested in the life, the thought, or... the example of Hannah Arendt.”—Mark Feeney, Boston Globe “An adventure story that moves from pre-Nazi Germany to fame in the United States, and... a study of the influences that shaped a sharp political awareness.”—Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch Cover drawing by David Schorr. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt disavowed the title of “philosopher,” and is known above all as a political theorist. But the relationship between philosophy and politics animates her entire oeuvre. We find her addressing the topic in The Human Condition (1958), in Between Past and Future (a collection of essays written in the early 1960s), and in Men in Dark Times (another collection of essays, this one from the late sixties). It is treated in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, composed during (...) the seventies, and also in the posthumous Life of the Mind, two of three projected volumes of which were complete when she died in 1975. Certainly, Arendt’s thought cannot be understood without taking into account her deep suspicion of and equally deep commitment to philosophy in the context of political reflection. For all that, her writings on this abiding preoccupation do not gel into a systematically articulated theory or programmatic statement. Instead, they reflect Arendt’s appreciation of what remained for her a “vital tension” – an enigma. (shrink)

The phrase ‘critique of power’ refers to that analytical program within social philosophy that concerns the discord between the individual and the social orders. From the perspective of many critical theorists, Hannah Arendt’s conception of power, however, is considered unsuitable for such a critical enterprise. In contrast to this assumption, the article argues for reading Hannah Arendt’s concept of power in the light of a critical theory of the political. The critical potential of her thoughts is embedded in (...) her concept of power, which provides an as yet disregarded but highly relevant approach for the analysis of contemporary political orders. Despite the great number of writings concerned with Arendt’s concept of power, this critical potential has not yet been unfolded. This is primarily due to a constricted reading of her concept of power where it is seen as per se normatively positive and non-repressive. In order to overcome this misleading interpretation, the article reconstructs Arendt’s concept of power and argues that her political thinking should be literally read as a critique of power. To illustrate this critical potential, the article unfolds 5 dimensions of Arendt’s analysis of power: the political-parcipitative; the socio-economic; the political-institutional; the ideological-critical; and the ethical. (shrink)

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.

In 1952, Waldemar Gurian, founding editor of The Review of Politics, commissioned Eric Voegelin, then a professor of political science at Louisiana State University, to review Hannah Arendt’s recently published The Origins of Totalitarianism . She was given the right to reply; Voegelin would furnish a concluding note. Preceding this dialogue, Voegelin wrote a letter to Arendt anticipating aspects of his review; she responded in kind. Arendt’s letter to Voegelin on totalitarianism, written in German, has never appeared in print (...) before. She wrote two drafts of it, the first and longest being the more interesting. It contained an early reference to her thinking about the relationship among plurality, politics, and philosophy. It also invoked her notion of the compelling “logic” of totalitarian ideology. But this was not the letter Voegelin received. Because of this, he misunderstood significant parts of her argument. Below, the two versions of Arendt’s letter are translated. They are prefaced by a translation of Voegelin’s initial message to Arendt. An introduction compares Arendt’s letters, offers context, and provides a snapshot of Arendt’s and Voegelin’s perceptions of each other. Their views of political religion and human nature are also highlighted. Keyed to Arendt and Voegelin’s letters are pertinent aspects of the debate in The Review of Politics that followed their epistolary exchange. (shrink)

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt develops several arguments regarding why truthfulness cannot be counted among the political virtues. This article shows that similar arguments apply to lying in business. Based on Hannah Arendt's theory, we distinguish five reasons why lying is a structural temptation to businessmen: business is about action to change the world and therefore businessmen need the capacity to deny current reality; commerce requires successful image-making and liars have the advantage to come up with plausible stories; (...) business communication is more often about opinions than about facts, giving leeway to ignore uncomfortable signals; business increasingly makes use of plans and models, but these techniques foster inflexibility in acknowledging the real facts; and businessmen easily fall prey to self-deception, because one needs to act as if the vision already materializes. The theory is illustrated by a case study of Landis, which grew from a relatively insignificant organization into a large one within a short period of time, but ended with outright lies and bankruptcy. (shrink)

Resumo: O presente artigo reflete sobre o tema da “responsabilidade” no pensamento filosófico de Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975) e Emmanuel Lévinas (1906 - 1995) com a intenção de demonstrar as nuances e particularidades de cada autor e ao mesmo tempo realizando uma atualização da reflexão filosófica destes dois grandes pensadores do século XX. Para Arendt, o conceito de responsabilidade perpassa tanto o aspecto pessoal quanto coletivo acentuando a dimensão da política e aparece de forma sistemática em escritos a (...) partir do seu livro Eichmann em Jerusalém (1963). Já para Lévinas, o conceito de responsabilidade está intrinsecamente ligado à sua concepção de ética como filosofia primeira. Encontramos uma maior exposição deste conceito nas obras Totalidade e Infinito (1961), Ética e Infinito (1982), Deus, a Morte e o Tempo (1993), dentre outras. Ele tem por objetivo tirar a primazia da ontologia e assim propor um novo paradigma para o agir humano. Segundo Lévinas, a exterioridade do rosto manifesta-se quando o outro olha para mim, torno-me responsável por ele, de tal maneira que, mesmo tendo que assumir responsabilidade a seu respeito, a sua responsabilidade incumbe-me, ou seja, o rosto do outro me interpela, me prende em sua ética da responsabilidade. Podemos afirmar que há uma aproximação entre o pensamento de Hannah Arendt e Emmanuel Lévinas, na concordância de ambos, no fato de que não deve haver uma supervalorização do ‘eu’, mas a centralidade deve estar acentuada na alteridade, quer no cuidado com o mundo (Arendt), quer no cuidado com o Outro (Lévinas). (shrink)

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo analisar o fenômeno do Totalitarismo no pensamento da filósofa alemã Hannah Arendt tendo como fio condutor a obra Origem do Totalitarismo. Verificaremos como a filósofa compreende o movimento totalitário e atuação do mesmo para capturar os seres humanos e destituí-los de todos os direitos usando para este fim os mais baixos artifícios, tais como os campos de concentração e o sistema propagandista ficcional. Focalizaremos especificamente no terceiro capítulo da obra supracitada, no qual a (...) pensadora apresenta os horrores das ditaduras e do Totalitarismo, revelando a face tenebrosa e cruel do homem. (shrink)

In the months after Donald Trump's election, Hannah Arendt's seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism crashed onto the Amazon bestseller lists. "Never has our future been more unpredictable," she had written in the preface to the first edition in 1951, "never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest - forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries." With an uncannily (...) accurate prescience, Arendt's dark history of her times seemed to be describing the insanity of our own. Arendt would've recognized the extremes of the twenty-first century from her own: the disenchantment with politics; the rise of conspiracy theories; self-censorship; powerlessness; tyranny and occupation, the climate catastrophe, the banality of evil. She had lived through it already. Born in the first decade of the last century, just before it lurched into war, she escaped Fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one its most influential-and controversial-public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and above all about freedom. Hannah Arendt wrote, and thought, in order to engage directly with the political chaos of her time. Questioning - thinking - was her first defence against tyranny. Her approach was to change the world by examining it unflinchingly, and not simply to criticise and protest. It is this defiance that attracts so many to her work today. (shrink)

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, _Hannah Arendt_ 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 on Judaism, 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, _Hannah Arendt_ is a major breakthrough in the understanding of an essential thinker. (shrink)

This article starts from the observation that Socratic dialogues in the Nelson–Heckmann tradition can create a sense of belonging or community among participants. This observation has led me to the current argument that Socratic dialogue offers an alternative to more prominent forms of conversation, which I have called ‘discussion’ and ‘discourse of uncritical acceptance.’ I explain the difference between these forms of conversation by considering the role of experience in Socratic dialogue and the requirement that participants put themselves in each (...) other’s shoes. My argument is structured according to the different phases in a Socratic dialogue and placed within the literature on this method, as well as Hannah Arendt’s writing on imagination. (shrink)

!is paper aims to focus on the main common points of the lecture of the totalitarian phenomenon supported by!eodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, despite the divergence of their analysis.!e balance of this contrast conveys that both thinkers display an aesthetics of resistance facing the totalitarian ideology, which is based principally on two tenets.!e "rst is the claim of the concept of culture, which Arendt thinks belongs to the making of a traditio and Adorno sees as a re#exion linked to (...) the critical potential of the fragment and the ruin.!e second refers to the educational task, which Arendt considers as an unavoidable pre-political condition and Adorno de"nes as a fundamental piece of the only possible Bildung after the totalitarian catastrophe, that is, the formation of a non-rei"cated consciousness.El texto propone identi"car los principales puntos de acuerdo del diagnóstico que!eodor Adorno y Hannah Arendt realizan sobre el fenómeno totalitario, a pesar de que recurren a distintos análisis. El saldo arrojado por esta lectura conjunta pone de mani"esto que ambos pensadores preconizan una suerte de estética de la resistencia a la ideología totalitaria, que se basa fundamentalmente en dos pilares. El primero sería la reivindicación del concepto de cultura, que Arendt enlaza con los mecanismos generadores de una traditioy Adorno entiende como re#exión ligada al potencial crítico del fragmento y la ruina. El segundo remite a la tarea educativa, que Arendt considera como una condición pre-política ineludible y Adorno de"ne como pieza fundamental para la única Bildung posible tras la catástrofe totalitaria, a saber, la de una conciencia no cosi"cada. (shrink)

Throughout her work, Hannah Arendt continually insists on the importance of the division between public and private. However, while the value of the public is a clear theme in Arendt scholarship, the unique value of the private often goes overlooked. In this essay, I draw on Arendt’s work in The Life of the Mind, particularly her discussion of the thinking activity, in order to draw out the richness that the hiddenness of the private has to offer as well as (...) to explore what it might look like to care for the private in a modern world.Dans son travail, Hannah Arendt insiste continuellement sur l’importance de la division entre le public et le privé. Cependant, bien que la valeur du public soit un thème évident aux oeuvres intellectuelle d’Arendt, la valeur unique du privé vient souvent négligée. Dans cette dissertation, je m’appuie sur les travaux d’Arendt dans The Life of the Mind, en particulier son débat sur l’activité mentale, afin de faire ressortir la richesse dissimulée que le privé a à offrir ainsi que d’explorer ce à quoi cela pourrait ressembler si on s’occupait du privé dans un monde moderne. (shrink)

Aborda a questão social no interior do surgimento da esfera social na modernidade e suas implicações na constituição e derrocada da esfera pública no mundo contemporâneo. Approaches the social question inside the rise of social realm in the modernity and the implications of that in the constitution and decadence of the public realm in contemporary world.

This article starts from the observation that Socratic dialogues in the Nelson–Heckmann tradition can create a sense of belonging or community among participants. This observation has led me to the current argument that Socratic dialogue offers an alternative to more prominent forms of conversation, which I have called ‘discussion’ and ‘discourse of uncritical acceptance.’ I explain the difference between these forms of conversation by considering the role of experience in Socratic dialogue and the requirement that participants put themselves in each (...) other’s shoes. My argument is structured according to the different phases in a Socratic dialogue and placed within the literature on this method, as well as Hannah Arendt’s writing on imagination. (shrink)