Why Arendt Matters

I had Hannah Arendt for classes in grad school in the early 1970s. I had earlier read her "Eichmann in Jerusalem" which exerted a great influence on me. Her classes and her books have sustained and inspired me. This book by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl is a marvelous look at the significance Arendt has for us today. Taking three major works as lenses to throw light on our world, she examines "The Origins of Totalitarianism," The Human Condition" and "The Life of the Mind." I am inspired to go back and read more Arendt. If you haven't yet read Arendt, this might be a good starting point - though expect to be intellectually challenged. Though Young-Bruehl is very clear, the frameworks Arendt proposes will stretch your mind. Highly recommended.

In some ways Elisabeth Young-Bruehl is a better writer than her icon ever was; at least her sentences are generally shorter and more direct, and she frequently avoids the linguistic traps which sometime Arendt fell into while simultaneously using them as trampolines to give her a moral leverage to jump over her opponents. It is when Young-Bruehl engages in direct combat with previous and current critics of Arendt that her weakness shows, for she is no Mary McCarthy when it comes to attack, and the infuriating Ettinger remains relatively unscathed even by all the intellectual scorn Young-Bruehl pours on her for her expose of the relations between Arendt and Heidegger. Even if nobody else cares at this late date, Young-Bruehl will not hear a word said again her idol. That's plain as the spots on a leopard, and yet Ettinger did make a case which Young-Bruehl cannot seem to assail. Otherwise the "Why X Matters" format Yale editors have come up with is pretty, yes, banal, but it gets the job done when it comes to Hannah Arendt. Young-Bruehl brilliantly explains Arendt's opposition of power to violence, shading all its implications like a paint wheel, and carefully, calmly, guiding us through the myriad qualifications of her mind. For paradox was her strong suit and, as Young-Bruehl argues, it is only through this prism that it can be said that Arendt matters to us at all (for this is a book designed to be "relevant," sometimes painfully so, like one's mother wearing one's own hip clothes). "In Arendt's terms," she writes, "the power most likely to be lasting, the one that can best preserve the actors' humanity, is the power that arises from nonviolent action." And yet oddly enough Arendt considered unconditional forgiveness to be not a factor in political conditions, for the unconditional love on which it depends is so rare as to be non-existent in the lives of most people (therefore, in the lives of nations). Is this true? If so, it is one of the hard-boiled traits which sometimes made Arendt seem like the Gloria Grahame of philosophy: her grim, glittering eye and that frozen upper lip, surveying all of the West and East with the same dispassionate glare.

Elisabeth Bruehl- Young wrote what to this point is the best biography of Hannah Arendt. Her book " For Love of the World" is a detailed and majestic study of one of the twentieth- centuries most important political thinkers. Now at the centenary of Arendt's birth she has written a tribute to her great teacher, in which she expounds on the major Arendtian ideas, on Arendt's conception of totalitarianism, on the value she placed on action in the world, on her sense of the value and meaning of 'thinking' even in terms of the prevention of Evil. Her basic grasp of Arendt's thought is made manifest in these pages which can truly give a sense of the significance and meaning of Arendt's work to the world. Benjamin Balint writing in 'The Jewish Forward claims that " Arendt's most enduring legacy -- and the one most relevant to today's debates -- is her 1951 book "The Origins of Totalitarianism," where her genius in conceptualizing the unfamiliar burns brightest. Wrestling with the most destructive forces of the 20th century, she concludes that despite their outward differences, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union were in profound ways inwardly similar. They belonged to an utterly new, totalitarian type of regime that could not be explained by any of Montesquieu's 200-year-old categories -- republic, monarchy, despotism. As a refugee from Nazi terror who fled to America (by way of Paris and the Gurs internment camp) in 1941, she knew whereof she spoke." Balint is however troubled by Bruehl- Young's effort to apply Arendt's ideas to the American political situation today. He thinks her ideas could more readily be related to the Radical Islamic Fundamentalist effort to dominate Mankind through creating one vast Totalitarian Islamic system, in which there is no personal freedom, one in which the authorities enter into and control every aspect of the person's life. Bruehl- Young takes angry exception to the misuse made of Arendt's term 'the banality of Evil' the key term in her famous analysis of mass- murderer Eichmann. She does not really answer the charge however concerning Arendt's insensitivity to the victims of the 'Holocaust' for whom the use of this term demeaned and diminished ( though Arendt by no means intended this) the horrors of their experience. Bruehl- Young does try to defend Arendt in another area, in terms of her relationship with and defense of Heidegger. She scornfully though not to my mind, convincingly, attacks Elisabetha Ettinger's portrait of Arendt's somewhat servile character in that relationship. Arendt , it is important to note placed great weight on her last uncompleted philosophical work , "The Life of the Mind" But this has to this point proven to be a book for scholars only. Her real significance has been in political thought, and perhaps also in her telling analysis and definition of the human condition. Bruehl- Young is a loyal and competent student of her great teacher, and anyone wo cares for the work of one