Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha, eds., Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations

Abstract

Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha, eds., Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations. Stanford University Press, 2012, 352 pp., $25.18 paperback, (978-0-8047-7539-7) Arendt and Adorno offers its readers a timely and sophisticated collection of essays evaluating the historical, political, and theoretical proximity of these two important 20th century thinkers. The premise of the collection is that even if the personal relationship between Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno was a strained one, bordering on open hostility (at least on Arendt's part), this by no means should be allowed to become a judgment on the interconnections between their respective bodies of work. On the contrary, as Gandesha points out in his introduction to the collection, there are significant commonalities between these thinkers' personal circumstances that also no doubt draw the content of their respective work into proximity and dialogue. Adorno and Arendt each lived through the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, both were of German-Jewish heritage, both were involuntarily exiled to the United States throughout this period--although unlike Adorno, Arendt opted to remain in the United States after the war--and both maintained common friendships with other prominent intellectuals of the time. As one might expect, such historico-biographical affinities left deep and lasting traces on their respective bodies of work, the similarities and differences of which this collection does an admirable of job of putting into relief and dialogue. The book is divided into three main sections. The first broadly canvasses the views of Adorno and Arendt on modernity's relationship to philosophy and political philosophy, while the second examines their often parallel understandings of Nazi totalitarianism, its relationship to the fate of Europe's Jews, and--although this theme is more implied than discussed outright--the implications of this fate for the viability of cosmopolitanism and the paradigm of human rights. The final section takes up the experience of exile common to both thinkers in order to consider its ramifications for the exiled intellectuals' attempted theorization of an unfamiliar social and cultural environment. The pieces in this collection are strong without exception, and several are written by established scholars who will be familiar to readers working in contemporary social theory, such as Seyla Benhabib, J.M. Bernstein, and Dieter Thoma, among others. The book's first section features essays broadly focused on the relation between modernity and modern philosophy in Adorno and Arendt's writing. Taking up the influence of Walter Benjamin on both Arendt and Adorno, Seyla Benhabib argues that this influence accounts for the centrality of Kant's concept of reflective judgment in both thinkers' respective works, representing a form of aesthetically derived resistance to the categories of the reified modern world. While for Benhabib, Adorno, here unlike Arendt, neglects the communicative potentials of the aesthetic, J.M. Bernstein's contribution offers something of a counter-weight to Benhabib's view with its argument that Arendt's account of civil disobedience should be read as a philosophical transcription of Adorno's aesthetic theory into the domain of politics. Such transcription contests the Habermasian line that Adorno's aesthetics retreat into a subjective utopia, since on Bernstein's reading Arendt's notion of civil disobedience requires the reactivation of the normative promise of founding deeds, and so constitutes a form of political communication across time and between generations. In contrast to these pieces that assay the commonality between Arendt and Adorno, Dana Villa's essay lays out the differences between Adorno and Arendt's theories of society and politics. By following closely Weber's theory of bureaucratic domination Adorno is led to retreat into the increasingly compromised sphere of private individuality; such a retreat is contrasted to Arendt's attitude toward politics: while sharing to some extent Adorno's critique of the liberal individual, she ultimately believes that political action in the public sphere is still possible. …