Hannah Arendt: Thinking, Judging, Freedom

by Gisela Kaplan, Clive Kessler (Editor), Clive S. Kessler (Editor)

Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost thinkers and political commentators of this century. She addressed some of the most difficult and contentious issues of modern times and bestowed upon the modern world her original thought and unrelenting optimism. She insisted that freedom and autonomy, indispensable for human existence itself, are only attainable within an authentic political life. The years since Hannah Arendt's death have seen an intensification of interest in her both as a thinker and as figure of her times. This interdisciplinary collection of superbly crafted essays, by both young and established scholars, offers a series of engagements with Arendt at 'eye-level' in a series of debates, conversations or arguments across the full range of her major intellectual interests. It seeks, in a way that no other account has attempted, to outline and investigate the unity of Arendt's life and work. This is a powerful book that allows the reader to reassemble the various facets of Arendt's writing and personality into one rich mosaic of ideas and issues.

178 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Charlene Mathe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't finished the book--probably will never have time to finish it, because I am not sufficiently familiar with the terms and concepts these scholars use. It makes it difficult for me to follow their points. I picked up the book because I am intrigued by the subject: "Thinking, Judging, Freedom."
I believe intuitively that our Freedoms require citizens who think and judge. In our day, thinking requires wrestling with information overload, misinformation, bias and doublespeak. Who has time for it? What is worse, there is a taboo against "judging." To make a judgment on a matter is to automatically lose credibility in the eyes of the mainstream, as indeed one scholar observes on p.50: "To offer a moral judgment is anathema to most people. The more highly educated people are, the more reluctant they often are to make moral judgments."
In chapter 4, which I read, Michael W. Jackson, Professor of political theory at the University of Sydney, analyzes Hannah Arendt's commentary on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Arendt concluded that Eichmann was Exhibit A of "banal evil" -- evil perpetrated without thinking, and without moral judgment. This is in contrast to her earlier analysis of citizen Nazi's as radically evil; or the view of citizen Nazi's as cogs in a bureaucracy or an authoritarian culture--"just following orders." "For Arendt, evil results less from premeditation than from 'thoughtlessness'('Arendt, 1978, I:5)." (p48) "Her point is that Eichmann could not and did not think at all. In this, he represents a general phenomenon in our century." (p.48)
Other chapters that I will give a try eventually are "To judge in freedom: Hannah Arendt on the relation of thinking and morality," "The chosen people: the historical formation of identity," "Hannah Arendt and the historian: Nazism and the New Order," "The pariah and the citizen: on Arendt's political theory," and "Hannah Arendt and the classical republican tradition."