Hannah Arendt

[Revy]

what are your thoughts on her?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Wasn't she one of the first liberal screamers at "totalitarianism" a la Rand?

On the other hand, her fascination with councils avoids the question of genuine class struggle, party-movement building, etc.

[khaetlyn]

I recently applied to a magnet school in my state (South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities) to focus on creative writing. If accepted, I will spend my junior and senior years of high school living on campus and focusing most of my studies on writing.

The essay topic for the application was:

Hannah Arendt said, "For true greatness, the presence of others is required." Write about how a sense of other people is required for greatness. Feel free to include real or imagined "others" in your response.

I only looked up a bit on her to get some background knowledge. She wrote Banality of Evil and was married to three Marxists, apparently.

That is the extent of my knowledge on her!

[Belisarius]

i'm not a specialist, but as far as my understanding of Arendt reaches, i think her views on the banality of evil are true in some sense, but for some cases a bit unnuanced. i understand the point that most evil done by man is actually an evil of the "establishement" and that the individuals themselves are just the medium of that evil. but i think she makes of humanity some kind of group of willless creatures who just live their lives in society without ever questioning what they're doing. but i think the existence of communism actually proves her wrong: the capitalist society wants us all to function in capitalist society without questioning it, but communism wouldn't exist if Arendt was right. what she was actually doing was defending a structuralist notion of society which eradicates all human agency.

my alternative is that human agency and structural society (with "banal" individuals) are in some kind of reciprocal relation where we live our lives banally most of the time, but can also be critical of society. this is essentially Marcuse's point in "One-dimensional man".

[narcomprom]

The only articles by Hannah Arendt I had the pleasure to read were an Essay on Brecht, some autobiographic notes and Eichmann in Jerusalem.

In the first she lauds a personal attack on Bertolt Brecht. She attacks him for 1. supporting the trials of moscow with a play 2. writing crappy anti-nazi poetry during the war (and, generally, not doing enough), and 3. selling off to Stalinists after the war.

In her autobiography she provides psychological and moral analysis of the Koenigsberg of her youth, inhabited by touching little communists, conservatives and zionists.

In Eichmann she defends Kantian moralism pointing out how Eichmann appealed to a wrong interpretation, one by the nazi Hanns Frank, during the trial.

Along with Adorno and Reich-Ranicki she was most welcome in Western German post-war academia. Their domestic conservatives, the moralists and cultural pessimists have all discredited themselves in fascism and had to be replaced with Jewish expat talking heads. Personally she reclaimed Heidegger, Jaspers and Kant for future generations to write papers about.

German intellectuals speak quite favourably of her political thought, while Russian ones associate her name with the notion of totalitarianism.

[Apeiron]

i'm not a specialist, but as far as my understanding of Arendt reaches, i think her views on the banality of evil are true in some sense, but for some cases a bit unnuanced. i understand the point that most evil done by man is actually an evil of the "establishement" and that the individuals themselves are just the medium of that evil. but i think she makes of humanity some kind of group of willless creatures who just live their lives in society without ever questioning what they're doing. but i think the existence of communism actually proves her wrong: the capitalist society wants us all to function in capitalist society without questioning it, but communism wouldn't exist if Arendt was right. what she was actually doing was defending a structuralist notion of society which eradicates all human agency.

my alternative is that human agency and structural society (with "banal" individuals) are in some kind of reciprocal relation where we live our lives banally most of the time, but can also be critical of society. this is essentially Marcuse's point in "One-dimensional man". this is a deeply impoverished understanding of what Arendt is trying to convey with the phrase the 'banality of evil.' it is precisely the 'cog-in-a-machine,' 'institutionalized man' that you describe which she aims to criticize in the Eichmann book, and in her later work in general. The historical conditions of modernity have eroded our sense of responsibility and produced a generalized condition of 'thoughtlessness.' This is her diagnosis, but there is always hope for Arendt - namely, in the human capacity to act, to begin anew (see: On Revolution). To gain a better perspective on what she's trying to do in her later work I recommend reading some of the essays in the collection titled "Responsibility and Judgment."

in my view, Arendt is one of the only modern political thinkers to take seriously the central political question: that of freedom. her critique of Marx is also quite prescient, and one that has gone seemingly ignored among Marxists.... I'm sure that bit of her work is bound to be received unfavorably around these parts but I encourage you all to take it up none-the-less.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Once described as a 'metaphysical journalist' -- I cannot disagree with that.

[vyborg]

not very interesting. her analysis of the 1956 revolution is pure crap

[Pjotr]

i'm not a specialist, but as far as my understanding of Arendt reaches, i think her views on the banality of evil are true in some sense, but for some cases a bit unnuanced. i understand the point that most evil done by man is actually an evil of the "establishement" and that the individuals themselves are just the medium of that evil. but i think she makes of humanity some kind of group of willless creatures who just live their lives in society without ever questioning what they're doing. but i think the existence of communism actually proves her wrong: the capitalist society wants us all to function in capitalist society without questioning it, but communism wouldn't exist if Arendt was right. what she was actually doing was defending a structuralist notion of society which eradicates all human agency.

my alternative is that human agency and structural society (with "banal" individuals) are in some kind of reciprocal relation where we live our lives banally most of the time, but can also be critical of society. this is essentially Marcuse's point in "One-dimensional man".
I think Hannah Arendt is more complex. She doesn't defend a structuralist notion of society at all. On the contrary, as for as I know Arendt tries to defend human agency in the most radical way possible. I'm not saying I agree with her on every occasion, but that's what she was trying to do. In her point of view the most problematic feature of modern society was exactly the LACK of human agency, the LACK of responsibility people like Eichmann took for their actions. As far as I know that's also the main reason why she was in favour of the death penalty for Eichmann (and I tend to agree with her). She didn't perceive Eichmann as a monsters, but as a very banal conformist (which is even worse).

I've done some research on her philosophy and the best way to understand what she's trying to do is understanding her distinction between different kinds of human activity (labour, work, agency) and the way the relationships between these activities were experienced and perceived troughout history. Her theories on totalitarianism (although not accurate as a historical research nowadays) is actually a perfect example of what she's saying about the relationship between these kind of activities in modern times. Very interesting in 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' is the part about 'Imparialism'. She seems in these kind of writings very negative about capitalism, even coming close to some marxist analyses. But in later writings she is capable of criticizing marxism on the basis of her own ideas about human activities.

On the basis of what I'm saying you might think that Arendt is just very confused, but the truth is that she was always asking radical questions and that her writings were to a large extent a way to evaluate and question her own positions. This is the reason why I think Arendt is very interesting, especially for marxists. I don't agree with her thesis on totalitarianism at all, but it was certainly an eye-opener.