Hannah Arendt and Postcolonial Thought

Literaturwissenschaft in Berlin, 2020

This piece is an extended review essay on the exhibition "Hannah Arendt and the Twentieth Century," which opened on May 11, 2020 at Berlin’s Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM). The irony was not lost on me that opening the exhibition in the midst of a pandemic entailed something of an Arendtian social experiment. The review explores Arendt's role as a public intellectual, in five parts: Her clash with feminism, her writings on colonialism and imperialism, her engagements with postwar Germany, the famous Eichmann affair, and her many close friendships. Arendt once said a defining feature of every “venture into the public realm” is that we throw ourselves into a network of social relations and can never know for certain what will come of it. Arendt’s life can be seen as a succession of such ventures. Hannah Arendt and the Twentieth Century succeeds by debunking the myth of the solitary philosophical talking head and setting Arendt back in the world and in conversation. It helps us see that Arendt remains so endlessly relevant—and disputed—not simply because of her brilliance, or the way she resisted orthodoxies and labels, but also because she sometimes had the courage to change her mind.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2002

This book officially announces Arendt's canonisation within the tradition of Western political philosophy with which she maintained an ambivalent relationship throughout her intellectual life.

2008

This article examines the multiple ways in which Hannah Arendt's thought arose historically and in international context, but also how we might think about history and theory in new ways with Arendt. It is commonplace to situate Arendt's political and historical thought as a response to totalitarianism. However, far less attention has been paid to the significance of other specifically and irreducibly international experiences and events. Virtually, all of her singular contributions to political and international thought were influenced by her lived experiences of, and historical reflections on, statelessness and exile, imperialism, trans-national totalitarianism, world wars, the nuclear revolution, the founding of Israel, war crimes trials, and the war in Vietnam. Yet, we currently lack a comprehensive reconstruction of the extent to which Arendt's thought was shaped by the fact of political multiplicity, that there are not one but many polities existing on earth and inhabiting the world. This neglect is surprising in light of the significant " international turn " in the history of thought and intellectual history, the growing interest in Arendt's thought within international theory and, above all, Arendt's own unwavering commitment to plurality not simply as a characteristic of individuals but as an essential and intrinsically valuable effect of distinct territorial entities. The article examines the historical and international context of Arendt's historical method, including her critique of process-and development-oriented histories that remain current in different social science fields, setting out and evaluating her alternative approach to historical writing.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2004

Hannah Arendt was the great theorist of mid-20th-century catastrophe. Writing in the aftermath of the Nazi holocaust, she taught us to conceptualize what was at stake in this darkest of historical moments. Seen through her eyes, the extermination camps represented the most radical negation of the quintessentially human capacity for spontaneity and the distinctively human condition of plurality. Thus, for Arendt they had a revelatory quality. By taking to the limit the project of rendering superfluous the human being as such, the Nazi regime crystallized in the sharpest and most extreme way humanity-threatening currents that characterized the epoch more broadly. Arendt explored these currents elsewhere as well. In Stalinism, for example, she discerned a not wholly dissimilar effort to re-engineer human life on a mass scale. Seeking to totalize a single vision, it too obliterated public space and endangered individuality and plurality. But that was not all. Unlike the cold warriors who later appropriated her concept of totalitarianism to stifle criticism of what they called the 'free world', Arendt also excavated what we might call some proto-or quasi-totalitarian crystals in the democratic 'mass societies' of the 1950s: the eclipse of politics by 'social housekeeping' and the colonization of public space by scientistic techniques for manipulating opinion and managing populations. Without in any way glossing over the enormous differences between Nazism, Stalinism, and democratic mass society, she entertained the heretical thought that the latter too harbored structural threats to the fundamental conditions of human being. The result was a far-reaching vision of the distinctive evils of the 20th century and a diagnosis of humanity's vulnerability. Many of the specifics of these analyses are certainly debatable. But this is not the level at which I want to engage Arendt's thought. What interests me, rather, is the larger diagnosis that underlies them. From Arendt's perspective, the 20th century's distinctive and characteristic catastrophes arose from the fateful convergence of two major historical streams. One was the crisis of the nation-state, which had become unmoored from the limits of place by the expansive logic of imperialism; this crisis produced intense national and pannational chauvinisms, stigmatized and vulnerable minorities, and defenseless stateless persons, deprived of political membership and thus of 'the right to

German Studies Review, John Hopkins University Press, 2023

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.

2014

Her main research interest is in the field of normative ideas of political life. She has published articles on the concept of politics, political education and, with Kimberly Hutchings, works on the relationship between violence and politics.

Hannah Arendt (1906-75) is one of the most important political thinkers of the twentieth-century. She is well-known for her monumental study The Origins of Totalitarianism (1966 [1951]), her diagnosis of modern politics and society in The Human Condition, and for coining the term 'the banality of evil' to describe a Nazi war criminal in her most controversial book, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1968a [1963]). Arendt did not shy away from controversy in her life-time and some of her most controversial and important ideas continue to shape political discourse. The latest surge of engagement with Arendt's writing - coinciding with the centenary of her birth in 2006 - has occurred at a time that has produced moral and political disasters very similar and in many ways related to those she addressed in the various stages of her life. As international theory has returned to the canon of political thought it is not surprising that Arendt's unique and often idiosyncratic contribution is coming to the fore. Like many others discussed in this volume, serious engagement with Arendt in international political theory is belated and welcome.

European Journal of Political Theory, 2019

Hannah Arendt’s account of imperialism has become an unlikely source of inspiration for scholars invested in anti-colonial and postcolonial critique. However, the role of settler colonialism in her thought has come under far less scrutiny. This essay reconstructs Arendt’s account of settler-colonization. It argues that Arendt’s republican analysis of imperialism hinges on her notion of the boomerang effect, which is absent in settler-colonial contexts. Arendt recognized some of the distinctive features of settler expansionism but reproduced many of the ideologies that sustain practices of settler-colonial conquest. This interpretation sheds light on the promises and limits of contemporary retrievals of Arendt’s analysis and critique of imperialism by foregrounding the specificity of settler colonialism as an axis of ongoing colonial violence.