Arendt and America

by Richard H. King

German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75) fled from the Nazis to New York in 1941, and during the next thirty years in America she wrote her best-known and most influential works, such as The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and On Revolution . Yet, despite the fact that a substantial portion of her oeuvre was written in America, not Europe, no one has directly considered the influence of America on her thought—until now. In Arendt and America , historian Richard H. King argues that while all of Arendt’s work was haunted by her experience of totalitarianism, it was only in her adopted homeland that she was able to formulate the idea of the modern republic as an alternative to totalitarian rule.
 
Situating Arendt within the context of U.S. intellectual, political, and social history, King reveals how Arendt developed a fascination with the political thought of the Founding Fathers. King also re-creates her intellectual exchanges with American friends and colleagues, such as Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, and shows how her lively correspondence with sociologist David Riesman helped her understand modern American culture and society. In the last section of Arendt and America , King sets out the context in which the Eichmann controversy took place and follows the debate about “the banality of evil” that has continued ever since.  As King shows, Arendt’s work, regardless of focus, was shaped by postwar American thought, culture, and politics, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War.

For Arendt, the United States was much more than a refuge from Nazi Germany; it was a stimulus to rethink the political, ethical, and historical traditions of human culture. This authoritative combination of intellectual history and biography offers a unique approach for thinking about the influence of America on Arendt’s ideas and also the effect of her ideas on American thought.

416 pages, Hardcover

First published October 22, 2015

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hannah Arendt is not the easiest writer to decipher. Anyone who likes to read her work or about her knows that there will be many re- and slow-readings ahead, but the effort is usually worth it. For that that group of potential readers who want to learn but are intimidated by her language, this would be a book to move up on the potential reading list. King sums up her major writings from the perspective – guiding thesis – of her time in the United States, which she and her husband adopted as their home after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1941, later becoming a citizen. She lived slightly less than half her life in the United States, but is still largely considered a European thinker. King sets out to better understand how her American experiences shaped her views, most times convincingly, others less so. He ends up creating a stunningly readable discussion of why Arendt’s ideas are important, especially today. Even those which may be considered controversial are made understandable by King.

Arendt’s final essay, published shortly before her death, Home to Roost , is a meditation on the meaning of Watergate that, in a sense, was a valedictory statement about her life experience, grounds the American experiment in honesty:

When the facts come home to roost, let us try at least to make them welcome. Let us try not to escape into some utopias—images, theories, or sheer follies. It was the greatness of this Republic to give due account for the sake of freedom to the best in men and to the worst.

Hers is a sentiment that a slight majority of Americans summarily rejected in 2024.

They also rejected two of Arendt’s fundamental lessons, essential to understand all she wrote: the right (of yet to be determined groups) to have rights and the notion that no one has the right to obey. How far they have been denied and how long it will last will make these principles relevant again in this nation, if ever, is still to be determined. (I’ll try to remember to come back to this a few times in the coming years to see how it ages.) King’s simple, straightforward explanation of the Eichmann “banality of evil” controversy should put any critical comments about her to rest.

King also makes the point over and over again that Arendt was “a splitter, not a lumper.” Although her ideas are about big societal issues, she rejected all-encompassing, organic explanations. Each event had its own circumstances, only parts or aspects of it could be applied to others. This led her to reject the overriding importance of the history of ideas; they had a place, but were not a cause. Reading this as the American election cycle was ending was a sobering experience. It’s unfortunate that we don’t have an Arendt around today and a King to make her ideas accessible.

[Matthew Linton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Arendt and America is a venerable history of both Arendt's relationship to American ideas and the reception of her ideas in the United States. King's research is thorough and the book reads well. I would not recommend this as an introduction to Arendt or her thought, since King is most interested in the American dimensions of her thought and does not provide much of an overview of her major ideas.

I didn't love this book for two reasons. First, it seemed pretty clear that Arendt was, ultimately, a European thinker and that she was more of the last of the interwar German philosophers than a postwar American author. King seems to be fighting uphill the entire book against the Eurocentrism of Arendt's thought and the relatively minor place the US occupied in her worldview. Centering Arendt and America seems to be more a story of missed connections than substantive engagement. Second, Arendt was totally unmoored when talking about race in the United States. Her views on school desegregation and the Black Power Movement were uninformed. Still, King devotes two full chapters to her thoughts on race in the United States. Making matters worse, while he is willing to criticize Arendt's ideas about race, he still makes a lot of excuses for why Arendt believed, for instance, that Black parents were harming their children by trying to integrate them into white schools in the South. I get that he wants to provide context that many other philosophers and social scientists were similarly ignorant about the racism in the United States, but too often King comes off as defending Arendt's worst ideas.

Arendt lived a fascinating life and many of her ideas (about Europe!) remain important. This book is worth reading for academic historians or Arendt completists, but there are better reception histories (American Nietzsche by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen for one) and 20th century intellectual histories.