Hannah Arendt is one of the most interesting political thinkers of the twentieth century. Her analysis of totalitarianism is of permanent value, her insights into the thoughtless evil of Eichmann memorably controversial, and her critique of political action and constitutionalism probing and profound. Born in 1906, she died in 1975, still striving to understand issues of freedom and identity, revolution and political authenticity. Her views are complex, often abstract and provocative, emphasising action as the purpose of thinking, engaging with thinkers from Socrates and Augustine to Heidegger and Habermas, with a polemical side‐swipe at Marx’s dialectical materialism on the way. As a Jew, she directly experienced the rise of Nazism and saw Zionism at work, and as a German born in Hanover saw her country and its political systems and discourses distorted by fascism. She provides a unique commentary on political action and personal choice, dealing with events and issues of dramatic importance in the real world while working most of her life as a university professor in the USA (Universities of Chicago and California, Princeton and Columbia).
Works like The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and The Life of the Mind (posthumously edited by her friend Mary McCarthy, 1978) will remain as standard reading for anyone seriously studying links between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, the dynamic and problematic lying between political action and human judgement and choice. Concepts like agonism and agonial spirit are often used of her view that people in the political realm struggle to distinguish themselves, and it is only in the political realm that truth can be sought, facing the choice between political opportunism and that virtù or excellence which Machiavelli speaks about. It is an appropriate adjective for Arendt herself, as a Jew, a thinker, as a woman preoccupied with how totalitarianism and bureaucracy creates pariahs, as someone who provoked violent controversy in what she said of Eichmann and the Jewish leaders themselves, and as author of Rahel Varnhagen (1938), a biography of a parvenu and outsider.
So it is timely and appropriate for Arendt to be included as focus and subject of a Cambridge Companion, edited by Dana Villa, whose own work on Arendt is distinctive (for example, Arendt and Heidegger, 1996, and Politics Philosophy Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt, 1999). He has assembled some dozen international (mainly US) scholars who discuss Arendt’s work on totalitarianism and nationalism, political evil and the Holocaust, freedom and political action, the influence of classical ideas on her work and thought (Socrates and Plato, Aristotle and Augustine, the Greek polis and the Roman res publica), her views on revolution and constitution, and her final work on judgement and thinking itself. All contributors are established Arendt scholars, Margaret Canovan (an excellent review of Arendt on totalitarianism) the author of Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought, 1992 ; George Kateb (a probing and conceptual essay on this most conceptual of writers) the author of Hannah Arendt: Politics Conscience Evil, 1963; and Maurizio d’Entrèves (on judgement) the author of The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt, 1994. Arranged in six logical sections, the companion provides background and discussion of her work on totalitarianism and the Jews, the way she drew on ideas about authentic political action from examples like Socrates (whose suspicion of constitutional structures she shared), and what she meant by new beginnings, why she trusted autonomous councils, and why she emphasised rights as a precondition of political freedom. Villa himself provides a helpful and coherent introductory essay.
It is not a book for beginners, because it provides the background beginners would want and need only incidentally to its major task of interpretation and discussion. The essays look at Arendt rather like a camera panning around a statue, coming at it from various viewpoints. Outstanding is the essay on revolution by Albrecht Wellmer, differentiating Arendt from the Marxist and liberal‐democratic paradigms but then analysing her arguments to conclude, with Habermas, that rationally her case for the autonomy of the political ignores how inherent in the political process rights actually are, and yet conceding, despite that, Arendt’s insights into democratic legitimacy are profound and lasting. The essays identify key ideas from what is often a perplexing corpus of work, ideas for which she deserves to be remembered, highlighting that unique amalgam of philosophy and politics she made her own.
For direct biographical events like her feud with Heidegger over political action, readers will go elsewhere. For a full interpretation of Augustine (on whom she did her doctorate, under Jaspers, in 1926), readers will again have to go elsewhere. Some of the conceptual analysis will irritate the pragmatic beginner looking for simple explanations and signposts. Yet in this companion we get a clear exegesis of her intellectual and personal involvement with that “banality of evil” that was Eichmann, Nazism and Stalinism, the value of representative political thinking, and the central value to human development of an active public sphere. Arendt is a key figure and one that bears thorough investigation. This companion will help readers do this, particularly if they turn also to the rich vein of critical and hermeneutic work on Arendt, and to references sources like other companions (like Habermas, Hegel, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Plato, and Foucault) to help them on their journey. The issues she discussed still resonate today in contemporary politics. This is very much a book for any academic collection serving such studies.
