Arendt's View Research Articles

Time Background and Theoretical Pursuit: Comparison of Arendt's and Marx's views of labor

Marx's and Arendt's views of labor are rooted in different contexts. Marx's theory originated in the 19th century during the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism in Europe, and by inheriting Hegel's dialectic, he developed a historical materialist approach, focusing on the elimination of exploitation under capitalism and the struggle for the emancipation of the working class. Arendt's view of labor was formed in the twentieth century during the crisis of modernity in the West, and, drawing from the European tradition of political philosophy, attempted to rebuild the community and reestablish the freedom of the individual through a call to political action. Although the two thinkers had different theoretical aims, together they demonstrated a deep reflection on human labor and social institutions.

학교 교육의 공공성: 교육과 정치의 관련

The aim of this article is to identify the root cause of the current crisis in school education as the 'loss of publicness' and elucidate its significance. The term 'public' carries diverse connotations in our society, with scholars like Dewey and Habermas attempting to define its method and conditions of acquisition. However, there are limitations to such interpretations. Arendt, a scholar dedicated to restoring the meaning and status of politics in human life, serves as the focal point in this article. In this article, based on Arendt's views, I intend to foster insightful discussions on the concept of publicness. In particular, Chapter 3 delves into Arendt's emphasis on ‘politics as judgment’, drawing from her unique interpretation of Kant's Critique of Judgment power. Existing research on Arendt's notion of the 'public' predominantly centers on 'politics as action,' where publicness becomes the purpose of politics. Yet, in the realm of politics as judgment, publicness assumes the a priori of judgment power and is serves as a fundamental condition of politics. This indicates that publicness constitutes the foundation of human life.

Shadows of Being: Encounters with Heidegger in Political Theory and Historical Reflection by Jeffery Andrew Barash

Reviewed by: Shadows of Being: Encounters with Heidegger in Political Theory and Historical Reflection by Jeffery Andrew Barash Rylie Johnson BARASH, Jeffery Andrew. Shadows of Being: Encounters with Heidegger in Political Theory and Historical Reflection. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2022. 260 pp. Paper, $42.00 ELIZABETH C. SHAW AND STAFF* Composed of a series of unique yet thematically connected chapters, Jeffrey Andrew Barash's latest book carefully addresses the relationship between Martin Heidegger's thought and political theory and how these are connected through the thematization of historical narrative. In light of the publication of the controversial Black Notebooks, Barash's book serves as a significant contribution to debates regarding Heidegger's political engagement with National Socialism. However, rather than simply rehash this engagement, Barash takes a critical approach, arguing that Heidegger's historical narrative, that is, the history of Being, buttressed a "political mythology" and "fatalism" that absolved human beings of historical, ethical, and political responsibility. Thus, through a confrontation with Heidegger, Barash demonstrates the danger of denying human agency in the future course of history, since "fatalism only makes more probable the outcome it claims to foresee." While invested in explicating the political and ethical implications of Heidegger's thought, Barash is critically oriented around demonstrating a presupposition within the Seinsfrage, or the question of being that motivated Heidegger's philosophy. Heidegger presupposed that reraising the question of being was the fundamental task of philosophy, one that rendered "subordinate" other forms of historical reflection. Consequently, Barash argues that Heidegger established a "strategy of interpretation" that privileged his own standpoint in the history of Western thought and allowed him to set aside contrary ethical, political, and historical interpretations. Ultimately, this resulted in the formulation of the myth of the history of Being that placed Heidegger himself at the culminating point of Western history. The essays that compose Barash's book address the various implications of Heidegger's presupposition. The book is separated into two parts. The first consists of direct interpretations of Heidegger's thought and is composed of six chapters. The second addresses the critical reception of that thought, reflected in such figures as Hannah Arendt and Emanuel Levinas, and is composed of chapters seven through ten. [End Page 541] Chapter 1 focuses on Heidegger's broad legacy today, which according to Barash is threefold: the prevalence of historical deconstruction, his complicity with "Germanic ideology," and his criticisms of Western scientific rationality, all of which Heidegger rendered into an effect of metaphysics and the forgetting of the Seinsfrage. Chapter 2 discusses Heidegger's metaphysics of memory, showing that his inversion of the traditional eternal view of memory in favor of one grounded in mortality obscured other forms of "collective remembrance." Through a reading of St. Paul and Spinoza, chapter 3 investigates Heidegger's presupposition by revealing that the radical separation of the ontological from the ontic matters of theology, politics, and ethics is in fact an ontic decision of the "ethical order." Chapter 4 extensively discusses Heidegger's understanding of race and its relationship to Nazi orthodoxy. Highlighting that Heidegger was certainly critical of biological racism, Barash nevertheless shows that Heidegger articulated a "metaphysical" racism at the level of the history of Being. Chapter 5 reflects on Heidegger's Being-historical interpretation of World War II. Barash shows Heidegger's fatalism whereby the war was not a matter of human choices but was "attributed to an abandonment of Being." Chapter 7 closes part 1 by discussing the status of mythology in Heidegger's thought. Criticizing mythology as a form of historical production, Heidegger nonetheless creates his own myth: the history of Being. This mythological dimension is perhaps the most problematic aspect of Heidegger's thought. In the second part, Barash changes the trajectory of his arguments, addressing the critical reception of Heidegger's legacy by other philosophers. In chapter 7, Barash discusses the influence of Heidegger on Hannah Arendt's view of the public world, a world that theoretically rests on Heidegger's Dasein. But while Heidegger failed to adequately grapple with the public, Arendt radicalized it, showing that political reflection served as the basis for the philosophical problem of truth. Chapter 8 reflects upon the influence that the...

Edmund Burke and Hannah Arendt: Decolonization, Resentment, and the Social Question

Abstract Hannah Arendt's work On Revolution brings into contact two temporalities: the decade of its composition (the 1960s), alongside its understanding of revolution in conjunction with “Enlightenment.” A reader of Edmund Burke who turns to this work will be startled at the degree to which he plays a central role. His ideas and even his temperament seem to guide her profound praise for “the men who made the American Revolution” alongside her shock centered around Robespierre but mingled with her discussion of Rousseau and the French Revolution. This connection between Burke and Arendt is worth tracing because it allows readers to understand her response to the post-WWII age, which witnessed the emergence of manifold diverse “revolutions” in the social and political realm brought by decolonization, both in the European and non-European (i.e., Asian, African, postcolonial) contexts. It also allows readers to question Arendt's view of the role that suffering and poverty ought to play in moments of revolution and to scrutinize her thesis that wherever a solution to the “social” question was sought by “political” means it has led to terror and violence, with the notion of resentment playing a crucial role.

Agnes Heller (1929–2019) and Biopolitics

This article is published as a tribute to the late Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller, who died earlier this year. Heller was best known as a prolific writer and political activist whose academic work addressed a wide range of topics, including the status of reformist Marxism, modernism, postmodernism, democracy and aesthetics. The article comprises an introduction, outlining Heller's career as a political dissident and activist, academic philosopher and public intellectual, and an edited transcript of a discussion with Heller, conducted in 2010, focusing on her work on biopolitics. The discussion-interview reflects its historical moment both in the nature of the questions posed and in Heller's responses to them. Heller elaborates her thinking on this topic with particular reference to the following issues: the technical, moral and legal limits of biopolitics in relation to new biological technologies such as genetic engineering; the tension between conceptions of biopolitics as a type of identity politics and as a practice of governmentality and demography; Giorgio Agamben's theorising on biopolitics in Homo Sacer and Hannah Arendt's views on political representation and her distinction between the private and public spheres. Heller also addresses other themes that run through her oeuvre, such as the status and meanings of democracy, totalitarianism, minority rights, and the relationship between ecological science and politics. The conversational tone of the discussion provides a concise and accessible introduction to Heller's later work and conveys her sense of dynamic engagement with what continue to be urgent political and philosophical issues.

Amor Bellitās

Hannah Arendt discovers a theory of politics in Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic treatise, the Critique of Judgment. However, the relationship between Kant and Arendt’s politics remains unfinished. This article seeks to present a syncretic view of Arendt’s work on politics with her work on Kantian judgment. Vital to Arendt’s politics is the concept of amor mundi, the love of the world. Yet, in order for amor mundi to resonate with groups and individuals in the world, one must view the world as beautiful and, in Arendt’s words, ‘a fit place for men to live’. In other words, one must love beauty to love the world and be prepared to execute judgment upon particulars in that world according to Arendt. Such use of this judgment, however, is likely to err in ‘dark times’. Thus, Arendt views the love of the world and beauty as an open-ended process.

Nietzsche and Political Thought

Nietzsche and Political Thought

Between Two Betweens: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Education

ABSTRACT This article argues that Hannah Arendt provides an illuminating perspective on the “crisis” of education. The meaning and purpose of education, in Arendt's view, its fundamental role in civilization, is to impart an old world to new beings, preparing children for “renewing a common world” by establishing an active bond to the past that does not just encumber but enables agency. Because her work does not cohere with either contemporary liberal or contemporary conservative criticisms or justifications of higher education, or with either moral or vocational promises about its merit, Arendt's understanding of education appears less as a competing approach than as simply an eclipsed perspective. By focusing on the meanings and values of the public world we ineluctably inherit, Arendt's reflections on education illuminate the temporal precarity intrinsic to the human condition.

A Critique of Violence

A Critique of Violence Robin Truth Goodman (bio) When, in 1968, Hannah Arendt posthumously published her friend Walter Benjamin's essays in Illuminations, she excluded his now-famous, enigmatic work, "A Critique of Violence." "A Critique of Violence" (1921) exhibits Benjamin's philosophical investigations into the role of violence in modern state sovereignty and inherent in its law, and the construction of an alternative understanding of violence—or revolutionary violence—outside of the framework of the modern state. Increasingly relevant today, when violence plays an increasingly central role in spreading markets and controlling populations and when state sovereignty is increasingly undermined by corporate and financial interests, the essay touched on many of the issues that Arendt herself addressed in her opposition to totalitarianism as well as in her theorizing on the politics of the revolutionary tradition and its outbreaks in her time. Arendt never gave any reason for the essay's omission in her collection but spent a considerable part of her career reflecting on the relation of violence to politics in ways that respond to Benjamin's critique, though without any references to it.1 Arendt and Benjamin were both interested in a critique of historical materialism which would divorce thinking from being and open towards an unpredictable contingency not absorbable into a predetermining narrative of progress or causality that denies politics. As Seyla Benhabib puts it, like Benjamin, "Arendt is not concerned to establish some inevitable continuity between the past and present that would compel us to view what happened [End Page 219] as what had to happen. She objects to this trap of historicist understanding and maintains that the future is radically undetermined" (2012, 40; emphasis in original). Arendt is not interested in inevitability or reconciliation. She thought, for instance, that saying that historical events preceding the Holocaust assured that the Holocaust had to have happened meant treating temporality as determined in retrospection, and she understood this interpretation of historicity as a washing out of the human potential for freedom and action. As she notes in A Life of the Mind, A thing may have happened quite at random, but, once it has come into existence and assumed reality, it loses its aspect of contingency and presents itself to us in the guise of necessity. And even if the event is of our own making, or at least we are one of its contributing causes—as in contracting marriage or committing a crime—the simple existential fact that it now is as it has become (for whatever reasons) is likely to withstand all reflections on its original randomness. (1971, 138) In some ways, Arendt's view that nothing in history had to have happened as it did is a statement of divine-like, democratic agency and optimism in the face of overwhelming odds, where history—as it is for Benjamin—is shaped by those who live it rather than to mechanical processes, historical inevitability, fate, or state-sanctioned legal enforcement. In this, both Arendt and Benjamin were engaging in a fundamental post-Hegelian unraveling of a tradition of causality—or instrumental-reasoning—which connected means to ends, onto which Arendt cast the term "violence," and both sought alternative possibilities for thinking about action, politics, and power that would not be governed by a pre-existing and determining concept. For Arendt, violence was instrumentalizing and therefore depoliticizing. Within Arendt's version of some of Benjamin's methods and insights in "A Critique of Violence," she rules out a central character in Benjamin's vision: the legend of Niobe. In this article I argue that Arendt's avoidance of Niobe has philosophical importance for her work: for Arendt, gender cannot be trapped in the means-ends logic of war culture, historical necessity, market calculation, or state sovereignty. Because bodies are political, that is, always coming into the world as no one has before, gender breaks out of historical time and interrupts the meanings imposed by historical necessity, advancing a logic of freedom. In other words, gender for Arendt cannot be thought outside her version of politics; in fact, in some readings it can be said to constitute her version of politics. I show how Arendt's analysis of gender...

Notes toward a performative theory of assembly

Judith Butler elucidates dynamics of public assembly under prevailing economic and political conditions, analyzing what they signify and how. Understanding assemblies as plural forms of performative action, Butler extends her theory of performativity to argue that precarity-the destruction of conditions of livability-has been a galvanizing force and theme in today's highly visible protests. Butler broadens theory of performativity beyond speech acts to include concerted actions of body. Assemblies of physical bodies have an expressive dimension that cannot be reduced to speech, for very fact of gathering says something without always relying on speech. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's view of action, yet revising her claims about role of body in politics, Butler asserts that embodied ways of coming together, including forms of long-distance solidarity, imply a new understanding of public space of appearance essential to politics. Butler links assembly with precarity by pointing out that a body suffering under conditions of precarity still persists and resists, and that mobilization brings out this dual dimension of corporeal life. Just as assemblies make visible and audible bodies that require basic freedoms of movement and association, so do they expose coercive practices in prison, dismantling of social democracy, and continuing demand for establishing subjugated lives as mattering, as equally worthy of life. By enacting a form of radical solidarity in opposition to political and economic forces, a new sense of the people emerges, interdependent, grievable, precarious, and persistent.

Reconciling ourselves to reality: Arendt, education and the challenge of being at home in the world

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I explore the educational significance of the work of Hannah Arendt through reflections on four papers that constitute this special issue. I focus on the challenge of reconciling ourselves to reality, that is, of being at home in the world. Although Arendt's idea of being at home in the world is connected to her explorations of understanding, such understanding should not be approached as a matter of sense making, but in terms of ‘eccentric judgement’. For judgement to be eccentric, we must expose ourselves to otherness, which has to do with friendship if we understand friendship as a public rather than an entirely private matter. While political judgement requires a ‘being in the presence of others’ Arendt's views on thinking and its role in moral judgement indicate the necessity of solitude, of being alone with oneself. Rather than seeing this a process through which one calls oneself into question, I highlight the importance of the experience of being called into question, which I understand as the experience of ‘being taught’. I conclude that the educational significance of Arendt's work particularly lies in this link with teaching, and less so in notions of learning, reflection and sense making.

What Does the Comparative Do for Cosmopolitanism?

A conventional definition of cosmopolitanism stressesrelationships to a plurality of cultures understood as distinctive entities. (And the more the better; cosmopolitans should ideally be foxes rather than hedgehogs.) But furthermore cosmopolitanism in a stricter sense includes a stance toward diversity itself, toward the coexistence of cultures in the individual experience…. It is an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences. (Hannerz 239)In the foundation of comparative literature as a distinctive discipline, cosmopolitanism was valued for its “exoticism”—namely, the feeling of being “a citizen ‘of every nation,’ not to belong to one's ‘native country’” (Texte 79), which in (French) literature translated as the openness toward other (northern European) literatures (xi).Defining cosmopolitanism in relation to national loyalties, multilingualism, and mobility overlooks the fact that the cosmopolitan is much older than the nation and that not all multilingual abilities and mobilities are accepted as cosmopolitan, especially when they lack “sophistication.” Since I have partially discussed these issues elsewhere, I will not pursue them here but will restrict myself to Hannah Arendt's future-oriented concept of cosmopolitanism as global citizenship. My aim is to stress the elitism in many theories of cosmopolitanism and to show how comparative literature can challenge this elitism by looking at “hidden traditions.” To do so, I will draw on two essays by Arendt—“The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition” and “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” As for the first essay, I will introduceGypsynext toJew, the latter being Arendt's exclusive interest despite the implications of her use of the concept of the pariah. In the second essay, Arendt discusses acting qua human, the rights granted by membership in a (cosmo)polis, and what “citizen of the world” (cosmopolitan?) means in relation to the public space, and she stresses the value of communication, with the living and the dead. Furthermore, Arendt differentiates between cosmopolitan and European. I argue that postwar European integration challenges in unexpected ways Arendt's view both on rights as linked to nationality and on citizenship in a cosmopolitan polity.

Childhood in Action: A Study of Natality’s Relationship to Societal Change in Never Let Me Go

Introduction Children are our future. This phrase is used so often that it is generally considered to be a cliche, devoid of any insight. If taken seriously, however, it points to the stakes involved in raising and educating society's youngest members. In her theorizing on the political realm, Hannah Arendt posits that children hold the key to renewing the common human world because of their newness, an idea she explains through her concept of natality. Arendt's understanding of political renewal through the actions of new humans places tremendous importance on children. At the same time, the idea that children will inherit stewardship of the political realm can be threatening to adults, which is another of Arendt's insights. These new humans, strangers to the world, require high levels of care and attention because of their dependency and vulnerability, but as they grow up they will make claims on the common human world and will act to change it. Here is a reminder to adults of both their fallibility and their mortality. Given these dynamics, then, it is unsurprising that so many debates and controversies rage over the best ways to raise and educate children. Hanging in the balance is nothing less than the future of the political world itself. To explore these dynamics, I turn to Arendt's writings on the functioning of the political sphere. I ask how children's initial vulnerability and dependency on adults for survival affects their role in society. I highlight Arendt's view, as formulated in The Human Condition and Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, that natality, the fact that humans are born as radically new creatures, is what gives them the ability to do something new in the common world. However, Arendt also cautions that the child is not yet in a position to put this natality to use in the public sphere; she must be protected from the harsh judgments of that realm and in turn the public realm must be protected from the disruptive newness of the child. (1) I also draw on Deborah Britzman's interpretation of natality in her text The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions. Britzman highlights the relationality of natality: the infant is formed by her first experiences of life through her relationship with her first other (usually her mother) and this sets the stage for her future modes of relating with the world. In order to delve into the implications of natality for society, its unsettling power, and its incredible fragility, I turn to the sketch of human clone children in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. This novel is a particularly interesting literary object for the study of natality because it depicts a world that will likely seem familiar in some basic ways, with one key difference that is both subtle and striking: the existence of human clones. The uncanny world of the novel thus provides an opportunity for the reader to reflect on the significance of natality because it conjures up characters who live in a similar world to ours but who lack the straightforward relationship to natality that comes from being born to human parents and having experienced the intimate first relationship necessitated by the helplessness of the infant. Technology may change the ways humans arrive in our world in the future, but for now all humans have entered the world as infants from the wombs of human mothers. Thus the novel provides a scenario that can be used as a test case, one whose fictionality can nonetheless illuminate the significance of natality in the world outside the novel. After all, these characters are not some radically new type of creature, completely unrelated to human beings as we understand them. Rather, they are exact genetic copies of humans; they appear to be basically the same kind of beings as the people who live in the cities and towns outside of Hailsham and those who exist in the world the reader inhabits. At its most basic and most literal, natality can simply be considered to name the fact that humans are born--to another human and as a helpless infant. …

Hannah Arendt and political theory: challenging the tradition

Hannah Arendt's work has been noted for its unorthodox and eclectic style. This book aims to show that her unusual approach in fact reflects a consistent and distinctive conception of, and way of doing, political theory. This is established through close readings of her most influential works. In light of these readings, the book argues that Arendt's work is of continuing relevance in offering an important and challenging alternative to the more orthodox methods that are characteristic of modern political theory in both its analytical and post-analytical forms. The book discusses Arendt's key works — The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition and On Revolution — alongside her less-well-known and posthumously published writing; shows how Arendt framed problems with respect to specific concerns in the modern polity and democratic culture; and considers Arendt's views on totalitarianism, political theory, the concept of action, revolutions, political ethics and the role of the thinker.

Modernity Gone Awry: Lefort on Totalitarian and Democratic Self-representation

This essay starts by reviewing Claude Lefort's writings on totalitarianism, a theme that runs like a red thread through his oeuvre and plays a key role in the different stages of his intellectual development. The analysis of the USSR is a central interest of Lefort and his colleagues at Socialisme ou Barbarie (and inspires them to adopt an explicitly "political" approach against the "economism" of their fellow Marxists); the problem of totalitarianism features prominently in Lefort's theory of democracy and human rights (where it functions as the "flipside" of democracy); and the theme holds Lefort's attention well after the events of 1989. The emphasis of this essay, however, is not on the chronology of Lefort's trajectory, but on the methodological role of totalitarianism in his theoretical framework. Lefort's account of totalitarianism serves him as a tool to dissect the symbolic fabric of modern society. In Arendt's view, totalitarian rule reveals something of the essence of modernity, as a movement towards ever increasing technical mastery. For Lefort, by contrast, totalitarian tendencies arise as an attempt to close off the experience of indeterminacy that has been opened up by political modernity. He shows that the totalitarian "imaginary" (which he dissects in psychoanalytic terms) presupposes yet deliberately inverts the very ideas that sparked the democratic revolution and that are central to the self-representation of democratic societies. In consequence, democracy is continuously at risk of degenerating into totalitarianism. Importantly, the totalitarian threat, which Lefort believes to be the main threat to modern society, only becomes visible by adopting a specifically "political" perspective. It is therefore of the utmost importance that we continue to under stand and to interpret our society in "political" terms, that is, in reference to the symbolic constellation of collective power.

Hannah Arendt as a Theorist of International Criminal Law

AbstractThe guilt of Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, has long been settled. However, during the trial and for years after, Hannah Arendt questioned the legal theories upon which the Jerusalem court relied. Part 1 of this article discusses how Arendt was uncertain about the use of precedent to judge unprecedented acts. Part 2 concerns the logic of proving Eichmann's culpable mental state when he came from a culture where morality had been turned on its head. Part 3 reveals Arendt's struggle with the rationale for universal jurisdiction as well as her unconventional understanding of 'territory'. Part 4 deals with Arendt's views on group affiliation and how those views informed her definition of 'genocide'. Finally, Part 5 details Arendt's most famous writings on "the banality of evil" and how Eichmann was found guilty, not for succumbing to immoral temptation or being a depraved deviant, but instead for conscientiously observing the flawed mores of the Third Reich. While Arendt ultimately supported Eichmann's conviction, her concerns surrounding the trial raise questions that are still relevant today.

Hope in the Unexpected: How Can Teachers Still Make a Difference in the World?

Background/Context The central role of hope in teaching has long been acknowledged by authors such as Sonia Nieto and Larry Cuban, but hope has received little focused attention from scholars. This article seeks to compare multiple understandings of hope to examine how teachers can find hope in times of global crises that challenge the promise of a better future that is implicit in modern schooling. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study How can teachers find hope in hard times, when the usual promise of schools for a better future seems difficult to sustain? Research Design This article is an analytic essay. Conclusions/Recommendations This article concludes that while the long-dominant understandings of hope are inadequate for many teachers at times like these, Arendt's view of the hope that emerges in the unexpected occurrences of classroom life resonates strongly with the most rewarding and hopeful experiences of many teachers. Yet Arendt explains how the hope that teachers experience from these unpredictable and unexpected occurrences is not just a source of immediate reward, but rather contributes to political and social change. The article concludes with an account of Arendt's critique of historians’ narratives of social change and an affirmation of the impact that teachers can have as agents of change.

Hannah Arendt's Critique of Violence

This article critiques the idea of instrumental justification for violent means seen in Hannah Arendt's writings. A central element in Arendt's argument against theorists like Georges Sorel and Frantz Fanon in On Violence is the distinction between instrumental justifications and approaches emphasizing the `legitimacy' of violence or its intrinsic value. This doesn't really do the work Arendt needs it to in relation to rival theories. The true distinctiveness of Arendt's view is seen when we turn to On Revolution and resituate the later arguments of On Violence in the context of her ideas about the separation between revolution and liberation. Arendt's commitment to the American discovery in revolutionary politics of a means that needs no further ends to justify it permits a rereading of her conception of liberation as an attempt to envisage a violence that, while tactically instrumental, is at the same time politically non-instrumental. But while Arendt's view is distinct, the article also highlights important thematic continuities with the writings of Sorel and Walter Benjamin.

Reflective thinking and medical students: some thoughtful distillations regarding John Dewey and Hannah Arendt

Reflective thought (critical thinking) is essential to the medical student who hopes to become an effective physician. John Dewey, one of America's foremost educators in the early twentieth century, revolutionized critical thinking and its role in education. In the mid twentieth century Hannah Arendt provided profound insights into the problem of diminishing human agency and political freedom. Taken together, Dewey's insight regarding reflective thought, and Arendt's view of action, speech, and power in the public realm, provide mentors and teachers of medical students guidance in the training of thought and the need for its effective projection at the patient's bedside and in the community.

Resisting "Dull and Torpid" Assent: Returning to the Debate Over the Foundations of Human Rights

This article examines a number of the more well-known theories of the foundations of human rights that have been developed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and adds to this discussion the voice of a less well-known theorist of human rights, Hannah Arendt. The traditional theories of the foundations of human rights are divided into two camps, the essentialists and the anti-essentialists, and the benefits and limitations of each camp are analyzed. The author then articulates Arendt's view of human rights and situates her voice within the contemporary debate on human rights.