Hannah Arendt was one of the twentieth century's most influential political thinkers. Her work delves into the depths of human experience, offering profound insights into the nature of totalitarianism, human action, and the fundamental categories of life. Through her essays and extensive studies, she explored revolution, freedom, and authority, advocating for an understanding of thinking, willing, and judging. Arendt's legacy continues to provoke contemplation on the complexities of the modern world and the essence of human existence.
The book explores the nature of totalitarianism, examining its roots in Stalinism and Nazism through the lens of Hannah Arendt's experiences as a refugee from Nazi Germany. It delves into historical antisemitism, the Dreyfus Affair, and the interplay of imperialism and racism in the rise of totalitarian regimes. This expanded edition includes previously cut chapters and annotations that clarify Arendt's references, reinforcing her argument that totalitarianism remains a persistent threat in modern society.
The book presents two influential essays on civil disobedience from Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt, exploring the responsibilities of citizenship and moral conscience. Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government" details his imprisonment for refusing to pay poll taxes, advocating for individual conscience as a political force. In contrast, Arendt's "Civil Disobedience" critiques Thoreau, emphasizing the importance of collective action and societal promises for enacting meaningful change. An introduction by Roger Berkowitz contextualizes their arguments within the tradition of civil disobedience and contemporary politics.
" 'No one,' Hannah Arendt observed, 'has ever counted truthfulness as a political virtue.' But why do politicians lie? What is the relationship between political lies and self-delusion? And how much organized deceit can a democracy endure before it ceases to function? Fifty years ago, the century's greatest political theorist turned her focus to these essential questions in two seminal essays, brought together here for the first time. Her conclusions, delivered in searching prose that crackles with insight and intelligence, remain powerfully relevant, perhaps more so today than when they were written. In "Truth and Politics," Arendt explores the affinity between lying and politics, and reminds us that the survival of factual truth depends on the testimony of credible witnesses and on an informed citizenry. She shows how our shared sense of reality--the texture of facts in which we wrap our daily lives--can be torn apart by organized lying, replaced with a fantasy world of airbrushed evidence and doctored documents. In "Lying in Politics," written in response to the release of the Pentagon Papers, Arendt applies these insights to an analysis of American policy in Southeast Asia, arguing that the real goal of the Vietnam War--and of the official lies used to justify it by successive administrations--was nothing other than the burnishing of America's image. In his introduction, David Bromwich (American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us) engages with Arendt's essays in the context of her other writings and underscores their clarion call to take seriously the ever-present threat to democracy posed by lying."--From publisher description
A biography of a Jewish woman, a writer who hosted a literary and political salon in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany, written by one of the twentieth century's most prominent intellectuals, Hannah Arendt. Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was Hannah Arendt’s first book, largely completed when she went into exile from Germany in 1933, though not published until the 1950s. It is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, passionate woman, and an important figure in German romanticism. Rahel Varnhagen also bore the burdens of being an unusual woman in a man’s world and an assimilated Jew in Germany. She was, Arendt writes, “neither beautiful nor attractive . . . and possessed no talents with which to employ her extraordinary intelligence and passionate originality.” Arendt sets out to tell the story of Rahel’s life as Rahel might have told it and, in doing so, to reveal the way in which assimilation defined one person’s destiny. On her deathbed Rahel is reported to have said, “The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life—having been born a Jewess—this I should on no account now wish to have missed.” Only because she had remained both a Jew and a pariah, Arendt observes, “did she find a place in the history of European humanity.”
Hannah Arendt war zeit ihres Lebens eine begeisterte Briefschreiberin, die mit ihren Weggefährten in intensivem Austausch stand. Einer dieser Briefwechsel ist erst jetzt entdeckt worden: der mit dem Politologen und Publizisten Dolf Sternberger, dessen Trauzeugin sie – noch als «Hannah Stern, berufslos» – war. Nach dem Krieg begannen die beiden, sich zu schreiben, jetzt zwischen New York, wo die Emigrantin bald zu Weltruhm gelangte, und Heidelberg, wo Dolf Sternberger einen Weg in die bundesrepublikanische Nachkriegsgesellschaft suchte. Ihre Briefe sind voller überraschender Einsichten, sprühen vor Geist und Wortwitz. Kann man die restaurative Bundesrepublik schöner charakterisieren als Arendt: «Mir hat die gute alte Zeit schon nicht gefallen, als sie noch 25 Jahre jünger war»? Udo Bermbach, der beide kannte, beleuchtet in einer ausführlichen Einleitung und zahlreichen Kommentaren die biographischen und zeithistorischen Hintergründe. Die beiden Briefschreiber verband ein tiefer, freier Gedankenaustausch, an dem der Leser nun erstmals teilhaben darf.
Der neue Band innerhalb der Kritischen Gesamtausgabe: das erste Buch, mit dem sich Hannah Arendt 1948 an die deutsche Öffentlichkeit wandte. Drei Jahre nach dem Ende des Krieges, fünfzehn Jahre nach ihrer Flucht aus Deutschland erschienen Hannah Arendts »Sechs Essays«. »Es fällt ja heute einem Juden nicht leicht, in Deutschland zu veröffentlichen«, so heißt es auf der ersten Seite. Auch wenn Arendt die hier gesammelten Texte in ihrer Muttersprache verfasste, sind sie aus der Sicht des Exils geschrieben. Sie entwerfen eine »verborgene Tradition«, in der die Stimmen von Heinrich Heine und Franz Kafka, von Bernard Lazare und Stefan Zweig zu hören sind. Sie konfrontieren Leser im Nachkriegsdeutschland mit »Organisierter Schuld« an Verbrechen, für die nach dem Krieg niemand die Verantwortung übernehmen wollte. Erst 1976, ein halbes Jahr nach Arendts Tod, konnte das bedeutende Buch noch einmal erscheinen. Neben den deutschen Originalfassungen der Essays präsentiert der Band auch die englischen Versionen, die seit 1943 in verschiedenen Zeitschriften erschienen waren. Auf beiden Seiten des Atlantiks begründeten sie Arendts Ruhm als Essayistin.
