Nous avons choisi de faire dialoguer Hannah Arendt et quelques uns de ses contemporains: Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Gunther Stern-Anders, Martin Buber, Paul Celan, Martin Heidegger, Max Horkheimer, Karl Jaspers, Hans Jonas, Victor Klemperer, Emmanuel Levinas, Primo Levi, George Steiner, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin. Unanimes dans leur diagnostic d'une crise de l'occident, ces penseurs recusent la croyance dans le progres et les Lumieres: lorsque la Raison s'est muee en faculte destructrice du monde, lorsque la politique semble avoir perdu de (...) vue sa finalite, prendre soin du monde, comment resister aux forces du nihilisme? Tous illustrent la difficulte d'etre present a un monde hors de ses gonds sur lequel planait la menace d'une troisieme guerre mondiale, guerre atomique, guerre totale. Ils posent une meme question: comment repondre d'un monde habitable, amical, en avoir souci? Comment etre du monde et pas seulement au monde? (shrink)

This article addresses Eric L. Santner’s claim that “there is more political theology in everyday life than we might have ever thought” by analyzing the “theologico-political problem” in the work of three prominent twentieth-century political thinkers—Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt share a preoccupation with the crisis of modern political liberalism and confront the theologico-political problem in a similar spirit: although their responses differ dramatically, their individual accounts dwell on the absence (...) of incontestable principles in modern society that can justify life-in-common and the persistence of the political order. Their writings thus engage with the question of the place of “the absolute” in the political realm. In particular, Arendt’s indirect approach to the theologico-political problem is crucial to understanding the radicality of a political world in which traditional certainties can no longer be re-established. The theoretical trajectory I present suggests that the dispersion of political theology in everyday life has a specific corollary: modern politics operates within the tragic and paradoxical nature of its unstable and common origins that cannot be incorporated in exceptionalist versions of the body politic. (shrink)

Que valent les formes de pensée traditionnelles face à l'apparition des régimes totalitaires? La démocratie a-t-elle présenté des lacunes favorisant l'émergence en son sein de tels régimes? Que devient l'idéal de progrès, de bonheur et de liberté des citoyens? Leo Strauss et Hannah Arendt ont tous deux affronté ce dilemme et posé la question de la portée de la philosophie politique. C'est leur démarche, strictement parallèle mais radicalement opposée, que Carole Widmaier confronte dans une étude stimulante : du (...) constat de la crise à leur parcours dans l'histoire de la pensée et à leur rapport respectif à la tradition et à la modernité. Tandis que Strauss invite à réhabiliter l'idée classique d'une nature humaine, Arendt montre la nécessité d'abandonner cette idée pour approcher l'existence humaine et ses différentes modalités. D'une part la défense d'un mode de vie philosophique retiré, la recherche de la vérité, de l'autre le « souci du monde » et l'attention à l'événement. Une réflexion salutaire pour affronter les maux de la modernité et s'ouvrir au changement politique. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss were contemporary with each other; they shared courses, readings and taught at the same universities. Their lives were also affected by the same historical events, both tried to understand the crisis of Modernity, and the same thinkers and philosophical ideas influenced their works. However, their conclusions differ completely and understanding both their coincidences and their differences can illuminate not only the specificities of two of the most important works of political thought of last (...) century, but also some of the political and theoretical alternatives of our time. Thus, this work aims to show some of the most significant coincidences and differences of Arendt and Strauss, particularly those related to their understandings of the crisis of their time and its consequences. (shrink)

The Crisis of German Historicism Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss - two major political thinkers of the twentieth century, both of German- Jewish background and forced into exile in America - were never friends or intellectual interlocutors. Yet they shared a radical critique of contemporary idioms of politically oriented discourses and a lifelong effort to modify reflective approaches to political experience. Liisi Keedus reveals how Arendt's and Strauss's thinking about political modernity was the product of a (...) common intellectual formation in Weimar Germany, by examining the cross-disciplinary debates guiding their early work. Through a historical reconstruction of their shared interrogative horizons - comprising questions regarding the possibility of an ethically engaged political philosophy after two world wars, the political fate of Jewry, the implications of modern conceptions of freedom, and the relation between theoria and praxis - Keedus unravels striking similarities, as well as genuine antagonisms, between the two thinkers. (shrink)

En ce terrible XXe siècle, celui du nihilisme achevé, du déferlement technique, des totalitarismes, de la Shoah, se soucier du monde, c'est nécessairement se trouver confronté à la question du politique dans toute sa radicalité : comment penser ou refonder dans l'immanence une communauté politique et cosmopolitique, une "société bonne", dont l'unité et la cohérence demeurent respectueuses de la pluralité? C'est en confrontant les regards et les interrogations de trois protagonistes principaux qui appartiennent à la même génération - Hannah (...) class='Hi'>Arendt, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin que Sylvie Courtine-Denamy tire et renoue les fils de leurs dialogues respectifs, souvent tendus ou conflictuels, autour de la question : "Qu'est-ce que la politique?" Pris tous les trois dans "l'étau théologico-politique", ils se sont attachés à dénouer puis à reproblématiser, dans l'horizon de la vie bonne et de la question du bonheur, les liens complexes entre judaïsme et histoire, religions et politiques. Puissent leurs "réponses" croisées, souvent désabusées et toujours contextualisées, ouvrir quelques pistes en ce début d'un nouveau siècle qui connaît la surenchère de tous les fondamentalistes. (shrink)

In understanding the meaning of the West, twentieth‐century political philosophers Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss called for a return to “Athens” (classical political philosophy) in order to address the “crisis of the West,” a loss of a sense of legitimate and stable political authority which, in their view, constitutes a nihilistic threat to Western democracy. The only way for the West to escape this nihilistic crisis is to return to Plato and Aristotle. Implicit in this critique is the (...) belief that the other tradition of the West, “Jerusalem” (the Bible) has contributed to this nihilism, by undermining the authority of the Greeks. Is Jerusalem, then, the fatal “Other” for the West? Which tradition—Athens or Jerusalem—is best prepared to alleviate the crisis of the West, especially the survival of democracy? As I address these questions, I shall contend that it is Jerusalem, not Athens, which is the true source of Western democracy. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's rich and varied political thought is more influential today than ever before, due in part to the collapse of communism and the need for ideas that move beyond the old ideologies of the Cold War. As Dana Villa shows, however, Arendt's thought is often poorly understood, both because of its complexity and because her fame has made it easy for critics to write about what she is reputed to have said rather than what she actually wrote. (...) Villa sets out to change that here, explaining clearly, carefully, and forcefully Arendt's major contributions to our understanding of politics, modernity, and the nature of political evil in our century.Villa begins by focusing on some of the most controversial aspects of Arendt's political thought. He shows that Arendt's famous idea of the banality of evil--inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann--does not, as some have maintained, lessen the guilt of war criminals by suggesting that they are mere cogs in a bureaucratic machine. He examines what she meant when she wrote that terror was the essence of totalitarianism, explaining that she believed Nazi and Soviet terror served above all to reinforce the totalitarian idea that humans are expendable units, subordinate to the all-determining laws of Nature or History. Villa clarifies the personal and philosophical relationship between Arendt and Heidegger, showing how her work drew on his thought while providing a firm repudiation of Heidegger's political idiocy under the Nazis. Less controversially, but as importantly, Villa also engages with Arendt's ideas about the relationship between political thought and political action. He explores her views about the roles of theatricality, philosophical reflection, and public-spiritedness in political life. And he explores what relationship, if any, Arendt saw between totalitarianism and the "great tradition" of Western political thought. Throughout, Villa shows how Arendt's ideas illuminate contemporary debates about the nature of modernity and democracy and how they deepen our understanding of philosophers ranging from Socrates and Plato to Habermas and Leo Strauss.Direct, lucid, and powerfully argued, this is a much-needed analysis of the central ideas of one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century. (shrink)

An examination of the intertwined lives and writings of a group of prominent twentieth-century Jewish thinkers who experienced exile and migration Exile, Statelessness, and Migration explores the intertwined lives, careers, and writings of a group of prominent Jewish intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century—in particular, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Hirschman, and Judith Shklar, as well as Hans Kelsen, Emmanuel Levinas, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss. Informed by their Jewish identity and experiences of being outsiders, (...) these thinkers produced one of the most brilliant and effervescent intellectual movements of modernity. Political philosopher Seyla Benhabib’s starting point is that these thinkers faced migration, statelessness, and exile because of their Jewish origins, even if they did not take positions on specifically Jewish issues personally. The sense of belonging and not belonging, of being “eternally half-other,” led them to confront essential questions: What does it mean for the individual to be an equal citizen and to wish to retain one’s ethnic, cultural, and religious differences, or perhaps even to rid oneself of these differences altogether in modernity? Benhabib isolates four themes in their works: dilemmas of belonging and difference; exile, political voice, and loyalty; legality and legitimacy; and pluralism and the problem of judgment. Surveying the work of influential intellectuals, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration recovers the valuable plurality of their Jewish voices and develops their universal insights in the face of the crises of this new century. (shrink)

"-- M. J. Silverthorne,The Humanities Association Review Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of ...

Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics. Edited by Craig Calhoun and John McGowan, viii + 362 pp. $54.95 cloth $21.95 paper. Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigrés and American Political Thought after World War II. Edited by Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Horst Mewes, and Elisabeth Glaser‐Schmidt, x + 208 pp. $49.95/£35.00 cloth, $16.95 paper. Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later. Edited by Larry May and Jerome Kohn, viii + 384 pp. $40.00 cloth, $17.50 paper.

This paper situates Arendt's ideal of political participation at the cross-roads of two entirely opposite traditions of thought: the one, anti-representationist, the otherpleading for something stronger than mere representation. The first leads Arendt into playing off participation against representation in order to avoid the loss of presence that she fears the latter will entail. Whereas this line of thought seems to derive from what contemporary thought has deconstructed under the heading 'metaphysics of presence', Arendt's work at the (...) same time shows traits that unmistakeably belong to a tradition that is irreconcilable with the presuppositions of such a metaphysics. In fact, her view of freedom as an inner product of the public realm, forbids the latter to merely mirror, express or harmonize the antecedent freedoms of the private sphere. It should rather change these freedoms by transforming them and forcing them into a structure that has an independence of its own. This anti-expressivism seems to share its presuppositions with what we nowadays recognize as 'the symbolic' (in the sense the term has taken with Lévi-Strauss and others, like Claude Lefort). Not having that notion at her disposal, Arendt manages to balance these two contradictory legacies by the weight she puts on the ideal of participation, and she 'succeeds'in doing this so well that she may not have noticed how they are at work in her own texts. In the second part of the paper the author shifts that weight to a number of quasi-concepts that Arendt did not or could not take beyond the level of metaphor, like the daimon in The Human Condition or the short passage on masks in On Revolution. Connectingthese two to an ontological analysis of the difference between the private and the public, he then attempts to delineate a new conception of the public realm that, surprisingly, might salvage the meaning and sense of the separation between the social and the political Arendt was notoriously criticized for, even by those who were otherwise sympathetic to her ideas. In conclusion, the relevance of what the author calls 'the monumental recognition' of appearing in public is indicated by showing its potential as a response to some of the difficulties that have set contemporary multicultural societies ablaze. (shrink)

'At last one of the most famous generalizing works in anthropology by the field's most stimulating and controversial contemporary figure has been translated, beautifully, and with the enlightening preface of the second French edition.

A reissue of the 1975 edition, with four added essays, this collection offers a clear introduction to Strauss' views regarding the nature of political ...

Enth.: Race et histoire / Claude Lévi-Strauss. suivi de: L'oeuvre de Claude Lévi-Strauss / par Jean Pouillon.

Les auteurs présentés attestent que le travail de la pensée a joué un rôle décisif dans l'histoire, entraînant des mutations bien différentes des révolutions bruyantes, des grandes explosions restées sans lendemain. De Heidegger à A. Koestler, de Goethe à G. Sorel, de Nietzsche à Montherlant, de Leo Strauss à Jean Baudrillard, diverses façons de voir et comprendre le monde et d'agir sur lui.

The correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers begins in 1926, when the twenty-year-old Arendt studied philosophy with Jaspers in Heidelberg. It is interrupted by Arendt's emigration and Jasper's 'inner emigration' and resumes in the fall of 1945. From then until Jaspers's death in 1969, the initial teacher-student relationship develops into a close friendship. Three countries figure prominently in the correspondence: Germany, Israel, and the United States. Among the topics are Fascism, the atom bomb and the threat (...) of global destruction, German guilt for the Holocaust, Jewishness, the State of Israel, American politics and American universities, the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Arendt and Jaspers discuss people both famous and obscure. They gossip, joke complain, and argue. They commiserate with each other over the illnesses and infirmities of old age. And they converse about the world's great philosophers: Spinoza, Kant, Marx, Max Weber, Heidegger. Here is a fascinating dialogue between a woman and a man, a Jew and a German, a questioner and a visionary, both uncompromising in their examination of our troubled century. (shrink)

In this book she describes the perplexing crises which modern society faces as a result of the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice ...

Discusses the nature of thought and volition, examines past philosophical theories, and clarifies the relation between will and freedom.

The present volume brings Arendt's notes for these lectures together with other of her texts on the topic of judging and provides important clues to the likely direction of Arendt's thinking in this area.

The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was one of the greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century. His work has had a profound impact not only within anthropology but also linguistics, sociology and philosophy. In this short book he examines the nature and role of myth in human history, distilling a lifetime of writing into a few sharp insights. It is a crystalline overview of many of the basic ideas underlying his work, including the theory of structuralism and the difference between 'primitive' (...) and 'scientific' thought and shows why Levi-Strauss remains a hugely important intellectual figure. With a new foreword by Patrick Wilcken. (shrink)

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 ...

At the age of eighty, one of the most influential yet reclusive intellectuals of the twentieth century consented to his first interviews in nearly thirty years. Hailed by Le Figaro as "an event," the resulting conversations between Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon (a correspondent for Le Nouvel Observateur) reveal the great anthropologist speaking of his life and work with ease and humor. Now available in English, the conversations are rich in Lévi-Strauss's candid appraisals of some of the best-known (...) figures of the Parisian intelligentsia: surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst, with whom Lévi-Strauss shared a bohemian life in 1940s Manhattan; de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus, the stars of existentialism; Leiris, Foucault, Dumézil, Jacob, Lacan, and others. His long friendships with Jakobson and Merleau-Ponty are recalled, as well as his encounters with prominent figures in American anthropology: Lowie, Boas (who suddenly died in his chair beside Lévi-Strauss at a banquet at Columbia University), Benedict, Linton, Mead, and Kroeber. Lévi-Strauss speaks frankly about how circumstances and his own inclinations, after his early fieldwork in Brazil, led him to embrace theoretical work. His straightforward answers to Eribon's penetrating questions—What is a myth? What is structuralism? Are you a philosopher?—clarify his intellectual motives and the development of his research; his influential role as an administrator, including the founding of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology and of the journal L'Homme; the course of his writings, from Elementary Structures of Kinship to The Jealous Potter; and his thoughts on the conduct of anthropology today. Never before has Lévi-Strauss spoken so freely on so many aspects of his life: his initial failure to be elected to the Collège de France; his reaction to the events of May 1968; his regrets at not being a great investigative reporter or playwright; his deep identification with Wagner, Proust, and Rousseau. This is a rare opportunity to become acquainted with a great thinker in all his dimensions. (shrink)

Each of the books that Hannah Arendt published in her lifetime was unique, and to this day each continues to provoke fresh thought and interpretations. This was never more true than for Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she first used the phrase “the banality of evil.” Her consternation over how a man who was neither a monster nor a demon could nevertheless be an agent of the most extreme evil evoked derision, outrage, (...) and misunderstanding. The firestorm of controversy prompted Arendt to readdress fundamental questions and concerns about the nature of evil and the making of moral choices. Responsibility and Judgment gathers together unpublished writings from the last decade of Arendt’s life, as she struggled to explicate the meaning of Eichmann in Jerusalem. At the heart of this book is a profound ethical investigation, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy”; in it Arendt confronts the inadequacy of traditional moral “truths” as standards to judge what we are capable of doing, and she examines anew our ability to distinguish good from evil and right from wrong. We see how Arendt comes to understand that alongside the radical evil she had addressed in earlier analyses of totalitarianism, there exists a more pernicious evil, independent of political ideology, whose execution is limitless when the perpetrator feels no remorse and can forget his acts as soon as they are committed. Responsibility and Judgment is an essential work for understanding Arendt’s conception of morality; it is also an indispensable investigation into some of the most troubling and important issues of our time. (shrink)

A work of striking originality bursting with unexpected insights, _The Human Condition_ is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then—diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox that as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the (...) consequences of our actions—continue to confront us today. This new edition, published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of its original publication, contains an improved and expanded index and a new introduction by noted Arendt scholar Margaret Canovan which incisively analyzes the book's argument and examines its present relevance. A classic in political and social theory, _The Human Condition_ is a work that has proved both timeless and perpetually timely. Hannah Arendt was one of the leading social theorists in the United States. Her _Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy_ and _Love and Saint Augustine_ are also published by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

Leo Strauss argued that the most visible fact about Machiavelli's doctrine is also the most useful one: Machiavelli seems to be a teacher of wickedness. Strauss sought to incorporate this idea in his interpretation without permitting it to overwhelm or exhaust his exegesis of The Prince and the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy . "We are in sympathy," he writes, "with the simple opinion about Machiavelli [namely, the wickedness of his teaching], not only because it (...) is wholesome, but above all because a failure to take that opinion seriously prevents one from doing justice to what is truly admirable in Machiavelli: the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech." This critique of the founder of modern political philosophy by this prominent twentieth-century scholar is an essential text for students of both authors. (shrink)