Hannah Arendt. Routledge Critical Thinkers.

Routledge Critical Thinkers

by Simon Swift

Hannah Arendt's work offers a powerful critical engagement with the cultural and philosophical crises of mid-twentieth-century Europe. Her idea of the banality of evil, made famous after her report on the trial of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, remains controversial to this day. In the face of 9/11 and the 'war on terror', Arendt's work on the politics of freedom and the rights of man in a democratic state are especially relevant. Her impassioned plea for the creation of a public sphere through free, critical thinking and dialogue provides a significant resource for contemporary thought. Covering her key ideas from "The Origins of Totalitarianism" and "The Human Condition" as well as some of her less well-known texts, and focusing in detail on Arendt's idea of storytelling, this guide brings Arendt's work into the twenty-first century while helping students to understand its urgent relevance for the contemporary world.

Kindle Edition

First published October 6, 2008

Reviews

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hesitate to this book a bad review because it's not as though I didn't learn something from it. One of the positive effects of the book was that it inspired me to read more of Hannah Arendt's own work, and at least initially the book provided something like a framework in which to begin to think about some of her Big Ideas. That said, what was most disconcerting about the work was the way in which her ideas were consistently pitted up against contemporary Continental Philosophers' ideas. It would have been great if I thought these contemporary thinkers had something to say, but I never found it to be an interesting artificial conversation between what she thought and what they thought. Also, sometimes the book followed Hannah Arendt's line of thinking rather uncritically and did not seek to check if such is true. For instance, Arendt wrote a lot about Athens and there's no attempt in the book to engage that history, to see if what she's saying is true.