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The Portable Hannah Arendt
Although Hannah Arendt is considered one of the major contributors to social and political thought in the twentieth century, this is the first general anthology of her writings. This volume includes selections from her major works, including The Origins of Totalitarianism, Between Past and Future, Men in Dark Times, The Jew as Pariah, and The Human Condition, as well as many shorter writings and letters. Sections include extracts from her work on fascism, Marxism, and totalitarianism; her treatment of work and labour; her writings on politics and ethics; and a section on truth and the role of the intellectual.
575 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2000
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About the author
Hannah Arendt
404 books4,890 followersHannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. She is best known for two works that had a major impact both within and outside the academic community. The first, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon. The second, The Human Condition, published in 1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the fundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work, action). In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a number of influential essays on topics such as the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging).
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August 27, 2022
The Portable Hannah Arendt (Penguin, New York, 2000)
Hannah Arendt ignited controversy for writing what has become the best known addition to this anthology of her work, her coverage of the Eichmann trial, and a recent film seems to have rekindled the whole debate. Her detractors have charged her with giving succour to that most evil of enemies, the Nazis, or at best that she was a good philosopher but a bad historian.
Until I have time to read her critics in detail, I personally thought I had better start by reading Arendt in her own words. It is beyond the scope of a general reader’s review of an anthology to quote the chunks of her writings that would be required to refute her critics point by point, or at least put their critiques in context, but I can now at least say that her conclusions are demanding, and that often leads to misunderstanding or misquoting.
To fully grasp her ideas would in fact require reading shelves full of books, especially when it comes to her academic texts, although Arendt helps the reader by adeptly summarising in order to share her easy familiarity (she read Kant at 14) with centuries of thinking while she develops her arguments, step by step. One other thing that transpires from her works is her consistency and intellectual honesty, and any rebuttal of them needs to be well grounded indeed.
First of all, I think reading her essay on the oft-forgotten Rosa Luxemburg ought to put paid to any notion that Arendt was a poor historian. It was interesting to learn not only about the Polish-born revolutionary’s life here (yes, I used to have a poster of her on my wall), but how her work brought her into conflict (but not enmity) with Lenin – somewhat surprising for a Marxist, one might have been tempted to think -- and anticipated many of the failings of the Soviet Union.
But that’s not all, by any means. Arendt points out that Luxemburg’s murder (and that of Karl Liebknecht) in 1919 was sanctioned by the Weimar authorities and thus marked a tipping point that led to Hitler. She explains this far better than I, so if you want to know more, read the book.
Now for her famous series of reports in The New Yorker on the 1961-2 trial in Jerusalem of Eichmann, who had organised the deportation of millions of Jews from across German-occupied Europe to Nazi death camps during the Second World War.
In her subtitle to the piece Arendt coined the now famous phrase ‘the banality of evil’ because she concluded Eichmann was a not a born monster, but rather an utter non-entity as a person who came to do monstrous deeds in a monstrous society. Indeed, Eichmann comes across as a pettifogging bureaucrat in the archive footage used in Margarethe von Trotta’s much-maligned biopic.
Eichmann was well aware of what he had done, and even used to boast about it, but he was simply thoughtless, incapable of thinking beyond Nazi clichés and even when the hangman slipped the noose around his neck. To have depicted Eichmann as a monster would have been akin to the Devil appearing in a medieval morality plays, which reminds us that Shakespeare’s Iago was far more terrifying precisely because he was human (although Arendt says Eichmann was duller than Iago, but that proves her point).
That went against the grain for many, who effectively said – and still say – that that was tantamount to letting Eichmann off the hook. What raised even more hackles was her contention that there was “cooperation between the Nazi rulers and Jewish authorities” (N.B. by no means Jews as a whole) leading to the destruction of the latter’s own people, because Eichmann negotiated with Jewish leaders over who was to be deported from each community. Only one such leader testified in Jerusalem, and Arendt charged the court with “the gravest omission” in not devoting more time to the issue.
One riposte to her report included in the anthology is from the American playwright Lionel Abel, who “charged that Arendt had made Eichmann aesthetically palatable and the Jews aesthetically repugnant”.
While nobody is above criticism, I submit the obvious point that Arendt suffered from persecution and nearly found herself on one of Eichmann’s transports. The point is often elided and it is one Arendt never dwells on (incidentally, I think it’s to von Trotta’s credit that she resists the temptation to recreate Arendt’s escape from Camp Gurs). In this light, it is highly unlikely Arendt would have failed to sympathise with anyone who has suffered persecution, let alone her fellow Jews, including countless close friends and relatives.
Besides, Arendt had already given her reasons for focussing on the Judenräte:
“I have dwelt on this chapter of the story, which the Jerusalem court failed to put before the eyes of the world in its true dimensions, because it offers the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society."
Tragically this rings true, because the Nazis were perversely and infamously capable of making others do some of their dirty work for them, including Jews such as the Kapos and the Brenners chillingly portrayed by Russian war correspondent Vasily Grossman in his epic work Life and Fate.
As to the hand-wringing testimony of the former community leader who rhetorically asked the court, “What could we have done?” Arendt answers that while resistance was impossible, it would have been better for the Jewish leaders to simply do nothing. Chaos would have been more helpful and such people as were able to flee before boarding the transports had at least a chance to survive.
In her own words again, she summed up her approach as fiat veritas et pereat mundus, which translates as ‘let the truth be told, though the world may perish’, or to put it another way, issues cannot be ducked just because they are thorny. If that sounds trite to anyone, then I invite them to read Arendt’s thirty-page disquisition on the inevitability of truth winning out.
If I have one criticism to make of the anthology, it is that her academic work is often less readable than the Eichmann report, but as I said earlier, the former is inevitably demanding but always thought-provoking and illuminating.
For instance, it was by no means immediately obvious what the point is of her long exposition on the differences between the public and private domain, until I next read a passing reference to the theme in ‘The Social Question’. As an example of her consistency, it crops up again in her discussion of forced desegregation in the 1950s, which she said was none of a government’s business, and as a non-American I wouldn’t mind reading more about that.
If my reading of other texts is correct, Arendt believes the French Revolution to have paved the road to hell with good intentions, namely to have paid too much attention to the pressing needs of the destitute masses, which she deems to be a private rather than a public matter.
The American Revolution, she adds, was superior to the French one because it was not swayed by such inappropriate and self-defeating aims. She does recognise that the American Revolution was open to charges of hypocrisy because its claims of equality before the law did not apply to the 20% of the population who were slaves, but says slavery was Europe’s fault. I beg to differ with this latter point, because the new Republic was much slower than the mother country in ending it.
Another quibble I have was the short space devoted to her views on Heidegger, but maybe that is more personal and not central to her work. My main beef with the anthology, however, concerns the preface, which is leaden and dispensable.
Above all, I was left wondering what happened to such readable repositories of vast learning like Arendt? Here was someone who could deftly quote from Plato in Greek, from Heine in German or Shakespeare in English, and describe her approach to the truth by paraphrasing medieval Latin axioms. All of this, mind you, from someone whose chosen field was philosophy.
Again, this does not make her infallible, but it certainly makes her arguments most compelling and very readable.
http://booksihavebeen.blogspot.com.es/
© Martin Michael Roberts 2013
Hannah Arendt ignited controversy for writing what has become the best known addition to this anthology of her work, her coverage of the Eichmann trial, and a recent film seems to have rekindled the whole debate. Her detractors have charged her with giving succour to that most evil of enemies, the Nazis, or at best that she was a good philosopher but a bad historian.
Until I have time to read her critics in detail, I personally thought I had better start by reading Arendt in her own words. It is beyond the scope of a general reader’s review of an anthology to quote the chunks of her writings that would be required to refute her critics point by point, or at least put their critiques in context, but I can now at least say that her conclusions are demanding, and that often leads to misunderstanding or misquoting.
To fully grasp her ideas would in fact require reading shelves full of books, especially when it comes to her academic texts, although Arendt helps the reader by adeptly summarising in order to share her easy familiarity (she read Kant at 14) with centuries of thinking while she develops her arguments, step by step. One other thing that transpires from her works is her consistency and intellectual honesty, and any rebuttal of them needs to be well grounded indeed.
First of all, I think reading her essay on the oft-forgotten Rosa Luxemburg ought to put paid to any notion that Arendt was a poor historian. It was interesting to learn not only about the Polish-born revolutionary’s life here (yes, I used to have a poster of her on my wall), but how her work brought her into conflict (but not enmity) with Lenin – somewhat surprising for a Marxist, one might have been tempted to think -- and anticipated many of the failings of the Soviet Union.
But that’s not all, by any means. Arendt points out that Luxemburg’s murder (and that of Karl Liebknecht) in 1919 was sanctioned by the Weimar authorities and thus marked a tipping point that led to Hitler. She explains this far better than I, so if you want to know more, read the book.
Now for her famous series of reports in The New Yorker on the 1961-2 trial in Jerusalem of Eichmann, who had organised the deportation of millions of Jews from across German-occupied Europe to Nazi death camps during the Second World War.
In her subtitle to the piece Arendt coined the now famous phrase ‘the banality of evil’ because she concluded Eichmann was a not a born monster, but rather an utter non-entity as a person who came to do monstrous deeds in a monstrous society. Indeed, Eichmann comes across as a pettifogging bureaucrat in the archive footage used in Margarethe von Trotta’s much-maligned biopic.
Eichmann was well aware of what he had done, and even used to boast about it, but he was simply thoughtless, incapable of thinking beyond Nazi clichés and even when the hangman slipped the noose around his neck. To have depicted Eichmann as a monster would have been akin to the Devil appearing in a medieval morality plays, which reminds us that Shakespeare’s Iago was far more terrifying precisely because he was human (although Arendt says Eichmann was duller than Iago, but that proves her point).
That went against the grain for many, who effectively said – and still say – that that was tantamount to letting Eichmann off the hook. What raised even more hackles was her contention that there was “cooperation between the Nazi rulers and Jewish authorities” (N.B. by no means Jews as a whole) leading to the destruction of the latter’s own people, because Eichmann negotiated with Jewish leaders over who was to be deported from each community. Only one such leader testified in Jerusalem, and Arendt charged the court with “the gravest omission” in not devoting more time to the issue.
One riposte to her report included in the anthology is from the American playwright Lionel Abel, who “charged that Arendt had made Eichmann aesthetically palatable and the Jews aesthetically repugnant”.
While nobody is above criticism, I submit the obvious point that Arendt suffered from persecution and nearly found herself on one of Eichmann’s transports. The point is often elided and it is one Arendt never dwells on (incidentally, I think it’s to von Trotta’s credit that she resists the temptation to recreate Arendt’s escape from Camp Gurs). In this light, it is highly unlikely Arendt would have failed to sympathise with anyone who has suffered persecution, let alone her fellow Jews, including countless close friends and relatives.
Besides, Arendt had already given her reasons for focussing on the Judenräte:
“I have dwelt on this chapter of the story, which the Jerusalem court failed to put before the eyes of the world in its true dimensions, because it offers the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society."
Tragically this rings true, because the Nazis were perversely and infamously capable of making others do some of their dirty work for them, including Jews such as the Kapos and the Brenners chillingly portrayed by Russian war correspondent Vasily Grossman in his epic work Life and Fate.
As to the hand-wringing testimony of the former community leader who rhetorically asked the court, “What could we have done?” Arendt answers that while resistance was impossible, it would have been better for the Jewish leaders to simply do nothing. Chaos would have been more helpful and such people as were able to flee before boarding the transports had at least a chance to survive.
In her own words again, she summed up her approach as fiat veritas et pereat mundus, which translates as ‘let the truth be told, though the world may perish’, or to put it another way, issues cannot be ducked just because they are thorny. If that sounds trite to anyone, then I invite them to read Arendt’s thirty-page disquisition on the inevitability of truth winning out.
If I have one criticism to make of the anthology, it is that her academic work is often less readable than the Eichmann report, but as I said earlier, the former is inevitably demanding but always thought-provoking and illuminating.
For instance, it was by no means immediately obvious what the point is of her long exposition on the differences between the public and private domain, until I next read a passing reference to the theme in ‘The Social Question’. As an example of her consistency, it crops up again in her discussion of forced desegregation in the 1950s, which she said was none of a government’s business, and as a non-American I wouldn’t mind reading more about that.
If my reading of other texts is correct, Arendt believes the French Revolution to have paved the road to hell with good intentions, namely to have paid too much attention to the pressing needs of the destitute masses, which she deems to be a private rather than a public matter.
The American Revolution, she adds, was superior to the French one because it was not swayed by such inappropriate and self-defeating aims. She does recognise that the American Revolution was open to charges of hypocrisy because its claims of equality before the law did not apply to the 20% of the population who were slaves, but says slavery was Europe’s fault. I beg to differ with this latter point, because the new Republic was much slower than the mother country in ending it.
Another quibble I have was the short space devoted to her views on Heidegger, but maybe that is more personal and not central to her work. My main beef with the anthology, however, concerns the preface, which is leaden and dispensable.
Above all, I was left wondering what happened to such readable repositories of vast learning like Arendt? Here was someone who could deftly quote from Plato in Greek, from Heine in German or Shakespeare in English, and describe her approach to the truth by paraphrasing medieval Latin axioms. All of this, mind you, from someone whose chosen field was philosophy.
Again, this does not make her infallible, but it certainly makes her arguments most compelling and very readable.
http://booksihavebeen.blogspot.com.es/
© Martin Michael Roberts 2013
October 14, 2016
This volume is a very helpful introduction to the thought and writings of a remarkable and original political philosopher. Her firsthand knowledge of Germany in the 1920's and 1930's, as well as European and US culture in the 30's, 40's, 50's and later, her roots as an assimilated Jew in German and broader European culture, her knowledge, independence, originality, intelligence, and candor give her writing a freshness and relevance 50 years after these pieces were written. What went on in Germany leading to the Third Reich? After the first World War, what did socialists in Germany, eastern Europe and Russia care about, what did they try to do, and how did it turn out? Names like Rosa Luxemburg and Adolf Eichmann rise from the pages as real people; she lived in their world, knew the air they breathed. And especially, what are we to make of it now, after the gigantic human catastrophes brought about by the Nazis and the Communists? Her thought eludes simple answers, offers perspectives and reflections and convincing insights that could not fit in a sound bite or on a bumper sticker. She makes you think.
Read
November 17, 2019No matter how hard I tried, I only got half way through the book and thought to myself that there is so much more reading out there to be doing that I'll actually enjoy.
I found myself lost and unsure as to what she was trying to argue or even say. (Talk about having an unclear thesis...) Perhaps I feel this way because the book is a fragmented collection of her writing across many years and subjects. It often felt like she was in the thick of her argument or the current selection was on a tangent from her original argument. The way she writes isn't accessible to everyone nor is it easy. I found it convoluted. (although I'm sure I'm finding it convoluted because I just don't understand what she's saying)
There are some really good parts of the books however. Although I disagree with her stance on desegregation, Little Rock's Social Question, her reflection on desegregation in the US, was really interesting. Her stance on human rights and how it can be enforced is interesting as well. Her interviews and some letters were easier to read and I found some quite interesting.
There is a lot of good stuff in this book, but honestly, I just couldn't be bothered sitting through it. Anyhow, perhaps I'll give myself a few years and I'll return to it then. I definitely want to understand why so many people love her.
I found myself lost and unsure as to what she was trying to argue or even say. (Talk about having an unclear thesis...) Perhaps I feel this way because the book is a fragmented collection of her writing across many years and subjects. It often felt like she was in the thick of her argument or the current selection was on a tangent from her original argument. The way she writes isn't accessible to everyone nor is it easy. I found it convoluted. (although I'm sure I'm finding it convoluted because I just don't understand what she's saying)
There are some really good parts of the books however. Although I disagree with her stance on desegregation, Little Rock's Social Question, her reflection on desegregation in the US, was really interesting. Her stance on human rights and how it can be enforced is interesting as well. Her interviews and some letters were easier to read and I found some quite interesting.
There is a lot of good stuff in this book, but honestly, I just couldn't be bothered sitting through it. Anyhow, perhaps I'll give myself a few years and I'll return to it then. I definitely want to understand why so many people love her.
August 9, 2007
i can't say enough good things about the way arendt writes about our modern times and conditions. i think she's razor sharp. this is the kind of book i get in trouble with the library over. i should probably buy it. in the meantime, special shoutout to the "labor, work, action" essay. here's a quote to give you an idea: 'Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men...corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition - not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam - of all political life' .
August 15, 2017
As such collections encourage, I skimmed and skipped from selection to selection, spending the most time here with introductory material, letters and excerpts, and the material from Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. That material was and remains shocking, and unlike the reactionary caricatures of Arendt's vision of Eichmann's role and significance, I find Arendt always lucid and utterly precise. Her "crime," if that is the word, is her cool and razor-sharp style. At the same time, she is no calloused rag and bone picker through historical dustbins and archives: Arendt's brows feel arched even as she writes of laughter, tense and knotted when she writes of pain, yet never stooped with misery or vacuous with the false fires of sentimentalism. Still keen to see the human amid the symbols and understand the role –– and aspiration –– of law in a transforming international context.
Arendt has much still to teach us.
Arendt has much still to teach us.
January 22, 2014
I purchased this online thinking that it was an anthology of Arendt's works. I discovered to my surprise that it is an extensively expurgated version of her major pieces. Arendt is challenging though that it is hard to work from fragmentary texts. I will ultimately have to go to the originals. My rating should apply to the editorial work that was done in this piece, rather than to Arendt's works in general. On the positive side, I found the editor's introduction to be cleverly written and magisterial in its command of the totality of Arendt's body of work.
April 23, 2007
I don't know that I can ever agree with her, esp. regarding forced desegregation, but hey.
September 3, 2010
brilliant
Read
September 23, 2010The Portable Hannah Arendt (Penguin Classics) by Hannah Arendt (2003)
March 29, 2019
I bought this book after Trump wad elected and it's taken all this time to get through it. It isn't a light read and some background in philosophy is indicated. That said, some of the essays are so salient to contemporary politics that it's worth the effort. Arendt's thoughts on the banality of evil, on truth, and on public life are enduringly important. I can't say I always agree or that I'm always fully oriented while reading (the text demands, for instance, knowledge of Ancient Greek philosophy vocab as well as the odd bit of untranslated German - ouch), but I'm glad I took up the challenge of slowly making my way through it.
June 4, 2024
The essays about political theory in this volume of Hannah Arendt’s writings are thought provoking. As a European Jew who survived World War II, Arendt has a lot to say about Nazi Germany and about totalitarianism, but also more generally about political interaction. Her subdivision of the experiences of our lives into the private, in which we gather the basic necessities to live, social, in which we experience discrimination, and political, where equality dominates, and how these categories have changed since the time of the Greeks and Romans is a unique perspective from which to view civilization. Her ideas about the meaning of freedom are refreshingly relevant, for example, consider freedom to act vs freedom from want. For me, the most fascinating and readable group of essays was on the trial of the low level Nazi official, Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961. From her first-hand experience covering the trial, Arendt uses Eichmann’s character as a starting point to illuminate her thoughts about many political aspects of Nazi Germany, including the support of the German public for Hitler, the self-interested motivations of the group of assassins who attempted to kill Hitler, even the contributions of Jewish leaders to the demise of their own people in the Holocaust. Two other highly relevant essays are “What is Authority?” and especially, in our time of fake news and the internet, the last essay, “Truth and Politics.” Her comments on how facts can be unwelcome, and rational and factual truth vs. opinion are exceptional. Two quotes from this essay that I had to write down are
“…the very quality of an opinion, as of a judgment, depends upon the degree of its impartiality. “
“Truth carries within itself an element of coercion…”
“…the very quality of an opinion, as of a judgment, depends upon the degree of its impartiality. “
“Truth carries within itself an element of coercion…”
November 29, 2023
This book is worth if for the excerpts from Eichmann in Jerusalem alone. She reminds me of Sontag in her ability to talk about the unspeakable in a way that does not rob the victims of their agency and humanity. In contrast, her depiction of the SS elite as these ambivalent, BORING shmucks who never really stood for anything is as biting as it is accurate. In her own words, "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil"
Favorite short excerpt is "What Remains, the Language Remains".
Favorite short excerpt is "What Remains, the Language Remains".
June 28, 2021
I gave up.
It's possible that I'd appreciate the original works more, but honestly the reason I stopped reading was because of the racist attitudes she slides in about other cultures. I'd rather read someone whose work broadens and unlocks freedoms for all people.
I will say that there were some great insights in between the stuff that rubbed me the wrong way. So, I still took away good things, but I want to give my time to someone who is more intersectional.
It's possible that I'd appreciate the original works more, but honestly the reason I stopped reading was because of the racist attitudes she slides in about other cultures. I'd rather read someone whose work broadens and unlocks freedoms for all people.
I will say that there were some great insights in between the stuff that rubbed me the wrong way. So, I still took away good things, but I want to give my time to someone who is more intersectional.
June 16, 2019
Let us return to Arendt in this age of Trump! Arendt’s account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann gave us the indelible phrase and much-misunderstood notion of “the banality of evil.” A journalist-philosopher, Arendt suggests that the very worst deeds are not perpetrated by monsters but by ordinary people motivated by conformity and self-interest.
August 5, 2025
ONLY PARTLY READ:
I have completed sections:
1 (Overview: What Remains)
2 (Stateless Persons)
5 (Banality and Conscience) - so engaging I might do the full Eichmann book.
And am about midway through section 6.
Recording this for future reference so I don't repeat stuff.
I have completed sections:
1 (Overview: What Remains)
2 (Stateless Persons)
5 (Banality and Conscience) - so engaging I might do the full Eichmann book.
And am about midway through section 6.
Recording this for future reference so I don't repeat stuff.
October 26, 2025
Hard work to read, but necessary. Keep a pen on hand for underlining all the prescient observations that apply to our own time. Makes you feel, once youre done, like you had a Spock-style mind-meld with one of the greatest intellects of all time.
May 17, 2020
Writings on totalitarianism are very though provoking as well as the writings on the rights of man and public and private realms.
November 18, 2020
Had tot read this for class, didn't love it, whateva
August 25, 2019
The best compendium of Arendt's essential writings, skillfully edited and arranged.
January 5, 2025
Damn.... failed to save my review. Not going to do it all again....
September 14, 2021
Contains the jewel of her reporting on the Eichmann trial. Did the Nazi regime work some magic on him? Was he pre-disposed to toe the line, regardless of what was being done? Was he aware of what was to become of the Jews who he arranged to ship to the camps? Wasn’t the fact that the names for shipping were chosen by the Jewish community enough? (This creepy, thought-provoking fact alone was worth the entire book.) For the answers to these and other pressing questions, read the book. Also contains other insightful essays on history and authority by Arendt, who clearly knew a whole hell of a lot more intellectual history than pretty much any talking head in today’s tottering Republic.
to-come-back-to
April 3, 2017I just bought this for - well - obvious reasons, really...
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews