The Enduring Radicality of Hannah Arendt

Abstract

The Enduring Radicality of Hannah Arendt Shmuel Lederman (bio) Hannah Arendt. By Samantha Rose Hill. London: Reaktion Books, 2021. Pp. 232. Paper £12.99. ISBN 978-1789143799. An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities. By D. N. Rodowick. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2021. Pp. xi + 182. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0226780214. Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity. By Kei Hiruta. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 288. Hardcover $35.00. ISBN 978-0691182261. Hannah Arendt. By Samantha Rose Hill. London: Reaktion Books, 2021. Pp. 232. Paper £12.99. ISBN 978-1789143799. An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities. By D. N. Rodowick. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2021. Pp. xi + 182. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0226780214. Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity. By Kei Hiruta. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 288. Hardcover $35.00. ISBN 978-0691182261. Interest in the mid-twentieth-century German Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt seems to be anything but waning. For many, it seems, she remains an important companion to come to grips with the contemporary world, how it came to be, and how scared or hopeful we should feel. The three books reviewed here are centered on significantly different themes, but they all reflect thought-provoking attempts to keep Arendt as a companion for thinking about the present, even when they deal with the past or with seemingly abstract philosophical questions. Toward the end of the introduction to her biography on Arendt, Samantha Rose Hill notes that while Arendt did not expect her poems, journals, and love letters to be made public, she might have imagined others "discovering her papers and finding friendship in them as she had done with Rahel [Varnhagen]" (15). Perhaps more than anything, Hill's biography is indeed an intimate portrayal of Arendt, as if she was writing about an old friend. It is an especially common tendency among commentators on Arendt to write either with a sense of palpable hostility or, as here, a strangely deep familiarity and intimacy. One may even speculate that the choice to write a biography of Arendt was driven more by a wish to share this intimacy and familiarity than by a [End Page 145] scholarly need, as much of the story Hill tells about Arendt's life is already known. Hill herself explains that her biography is written more for newcomers to Arendt's thought than for Arendt scholars, although it does add details that have been left out of previous accounts. It does not attempt to be as comprehensive as Elizabeth Young-Bruehl's classic biography of Arendt, and its relatively short length makes it more accessible to readers (15). Certain figures also appear in a more intimate light in Hill's biography. Hill emphasizes, for example, Karl Jaspers's lasting influence on Arendt, which in Arendt scholarship has remained in the shadow of Heidegger, but arguably had no less substantial impact on the core motivations behind Arendt's political thought. For Jaspers, Hill notes, "answers had to be found in reality looking towards the world, not in the mode of pure philosophical contemplation," and thinking about these answers had to take place in conversation with others (45). It is hard to imagine a better formulation of the guiding thread that runs through Arendt's political thought: whether in action and speech in the public sphere, in "going visiting" at the standpoints of others in our imagination, or in the silent dialogue of the "two-in-one" that is thinking, Arendt never tired of emphasizing that we need to find answers by looking towards the world, not away from it, and that the primary way of doing that is through communication with others. One of the challenges of writing a biography on a figure about whom so much has been written is how to offer interventions in long-standing scholarly questions and debates without getting into lengthy arguments that would burden the readers. Hill seems to implicitly respond in this spirit to critics of Arendt on various important points. Consider, for example, Arendt's sharp distinction between the private and the public...