On being used and abused - Jennifer Szalai in NYT:
‘On the evening of Dec. 4, 1975, Hannah Arendt was sitting in her living room on Riverside Drive in Manhattan when she suddenly slumped over in the presence of her dinner guests. Less than two months before, she had celebrated her 69th birthday; now, she was dead from a heart attack. Arendt certainly had her share of readers and admirers, but as one of her contemporaries later put it, at the time of her death “she was scarcely considered to be a major political thinker.” In the decades since, Arendt has become such a revered figure that it can be hard to recall how controversial she was during her lifetime.’
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‘Arendt’s canonization arguably began in earnest in the 2000s, when the history that was supposed to have ended abruptly roared back. Her work was frequently cited as a warning about where the George W. Bush administration’s “forever wars” might lead. As someone who had been detained by the Gestapo, stripped of her German citizenship and interned in France, she was consistently attuned to the question of “the right to have rights,” and how such legal standing rested precariously on the whims of the state. The legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron, in a 2007 essay, remarked on her abiding concern for those banished to a realm beyond the law: “She would have been appalled by the ‘legal black hole’ at Guantánamo Bay.”’
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‘So much veneration inevitably invited a backlash. The historian Samuel Moyn called Arendt “the most used and abused philosophical source to interpret” the Trump presidency, a “privileged citation” for those grasping at “pseudo-profundity.” In an essay for Harper’s Magazine in 2021, the critic Rebecca Panovka argued that liberal attempts to cast Arendt as a “patron saint of facts” made the mistake of treating Trump’s brazen falsehoods as signs of ominous “totalitarian world-building” instead of “corporate bluster intended to artificially boost his own stock.” Yet even Moyn and Panovka could not resist the urge to enlist Arendt for their purposes; their objection was to the idea that a political figure like Trump was so unprecedented in American politics that one had to look to a European émigré to make sense of him. Now, nearly a year into a second Trump presidency and 50 years after Arendt’s death, she is still routinely invoked as the key to understanding our moment.’
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‘Compared with the incessant mortal danger she experienced in Europe, life in the United States was decidedly different. Arendt learned English, became an editor at Schocken Books and published “The Origins of Totalitarianism” in 1951, the same year she was naturalized as an American citizen. Reviewing the book for The New York Times, the historian E.H. Carr called it “the work of one who has thought as well as suffered.” Yet the anti-Communist Red Scare seizing the country had reintroduced a terrible fear. Blücher had denied his Communist past on his immigration forms; until his citizenship papers arrived, he and Arendt were petrified that some informant could derail their lives with a “simple denunciation.” Still, even at the height of McCarthyism, Arendt published a piece warning that anti-Communist panic risked crystallizing into a “totalitarian form of domination.” This was just three days after the attorney general announced the investigation of 10,000 naturalized citizens and 12,000 aliens suspected of being “subversives.”’
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‘Arendt was completely blindsided by the uproar that greeted “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” In a 1963 letter to the philosopher Karl Jaspers, she described a “smear campaign” that “consistently claims that I had said just the opposite of what I did in fact write.” But she also added that had she known what would happen, she wouldn’t have done anything differently: “It is quite instructive to see what can be achieved by manipulating public opinion and how many people, often on a high intellectual level, can be manipulated.” In a sense, Arendt had been writing about the manipulation of the public for years. But animating her theories about state power and the agents of mass propaganda was a preoccupation with what made people amenable to such manipulation in the first place. A question she kept returning to in her work involved thinking itself: how thought and judgment connected to political action.’
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‘Paradoxically, this is what makes her so ill suited to being the icon an anxious populace keeps wanting her to be. Politics, for her, required collective deliberation by active thinkers, not passive consumers. One cannot go to Arendt’s work for comfort. What she offers instead is company — the company of someone who had direct experience of the horrors of the 20th century yet never relinquished what she called amor mundi, or “love of the world.” This love isn’t a cozy coverlet of sentiment, which only serves to obscure reality. Quite the opposite: Samantha Rose Hill, the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and the author of a book about Arendt, likens amor mundi to “understanding and reconciling oneself with the world as it is.”’
Read the article here.
Most people don’t know about Arendt than a few words, the banality of evil, and the idea that evil can exist because more or less decent people decide to refrain from action.
Reconciling with the world as it is, is an endeavor I highly recommend. Every other Sunday you can always try to change the world. Life completely without idealism becomes also a cemetery.