Hannah arendt biography intelectual mundial pagina

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Arendt’s insistence on the importance of direct participation in politics is thus based on the idea that, since politics is something that needs a worldly location and can only happen in a public space, then if one is not present in such a space one is simply not engaged in politics.

This public or world-centered conception of politics lies also at the basis of the third feature stressed by Arendt, the distinction between public and private interests.

Her other examples are the revolutionary clubs of the French Revolution, the Paris Commune of 1871, the creation of Soviets during the Russian Revolution, the French Resistance to Hitler in the Second World War, and the Hungarian revolt of 1956. We focus here on her assessment of the social: Arendt identifies the social with all those activities formerly restricted to the private sphere of the household and having to do with the necessities of life.

She was born into secular family of German Jews. Radical evil consists in the destruction of human plurality and spontaneity, and in rendering human beings superfluous (OT, 445). Listening to such an inner representation of other people can help to withstand the pressure of public opinion.

6.4 Judgment and Politics: Two Models

The foregoing account has underlined the moral significance of thinking and judgment.

The consequences of each act are thus not only unpredictable but also irreversible; the processes started by action can neither be controlled nor be reversed.

The remedy which the tradition of Western thought has proposed for the unpredictability and irreversibility of action has consisted in abstaining from action altogether, in the withdrawal from the sphere of interaction with others, in the hope that one’s freedom and integrity could thereby be preserved.

Others, such as Norman Podhoretz, Irving Howe, Lionel Abel, and Walter Laqueur regarded the book as historically flawed and tendentious. Since in political discourse there is always disagreement about the possible courses of action, the identity of the “we” that is going to be created through a specific form of action becomes a central question.

Politics, for Arendt, is a matter of people sharing a common world and a common space of appearance so that public concerns can emerge and be articulated from different perspectives. (RJ, 67) Following Kant, Arendt understands this explicit self-relation as an awareness of one’s own autonomy, i.e. She believed that Senator Joseph McCarthy had a good chance of rising to the presidency and, at one point, considered moving to Switzerland.

These are, first, its artificial or constructed quality; second, its spatial quality; and, third, the distinction between public and private interests.

As regards the first feature, Arendt always stressed the artificiality of public life and of political activities in general, the fact that they are man-made and constructed rather than natural or given.

It is at this point that actor and spectator become united; the maxim of the actor and the maxim, the ‘standard,’ according to which the spectator judges the spectacle of the world, become one” (LKPP, 75).

6.5 Opinion and Truth in Politics

Against Plato and Hobbes, who denigrated the role of opinion in political matters, Arendt reasserts the value and importance of political discourse, of deliberation and persuasion, and thus of a politics that acknowledges difference and the plurality of opinions.

In 1924, after having completed her high school studies, she went to Marburg University to study with Martin Heidegger. EJ contains four main narratives: the trial and the course of the proceedings, the motives of the Israeli government, the status of the Jewish Councils (Judenräte) and, last but not least, the question of personal responsibility under dictatorship in general and the accused’s deeds and his state of mind in particular.

It was not only the tone of book, its use of irony and sarcasm, that alienated many readers, but also her claim that some members of the Jewish Councils were collaborators in that they provided the Nazis with lists of their Jewish fellow citizens who were then deported to the extermination camps in the East (EJ, 11, 91, 117–126).

Thus, “the banality of evil” was meant to describe not the nature of the deeds, but the character and the motives of the doer Eichmann (Bernstein 2000; Benhabib 2000).

According to her own statements, Arendt proposed herself to report on the trial because she absolutely wanted to know how someone looked like who had done radical evil (cf.

(See Benhabib 2003, Ch. 6; Bernstein 1986, Ch. 9; Hansen 1993, Ch. 3; Parekh 1981, Ch. 8.)

Secondly, Arendt’s identification of the social with the activities of the household is responsible for a major shortcoming in her analysis of the economy. Her name has been invoked by a number of critics of the liberal tradition, on the grounds that she presented a vision of politics that stood in opposition some key liberal principles.

In 1936 she separated from her first husband, Günther Stern, and started to live with Heinrich Blücher, whom she married in 1940. In 1936, shortly before her divorce from Stern, Arendt met Heinrich Blücher, who would become her second husband. Thus, action entails speech: by means of language we are able to articulate the meaning of our actions and to coordinate the actions of a plurality of agents.