On the evening of Dec. 4, 1975, Hannah Arendt was sitting in her living room on Riverside Drive in Manhattan when she suddenly slumped over in the presence of her dinner guests. Less than two months before, she had celebrated her 69th birthday; now, she was dead from a heart attack. Arendt certainly had her share of readers and admirers, but as one of her contemporaries later put it, at the time of her death “she was scarcely considered to be a major political thinker.”
In the decades since, Arendt has become such a revered figure that it can be hard to recall how controversial she was during her lifetime. The historian Tony Judt, writing in 1995, noted her “curious and divided legacy.” Arendt specialized in the big political questions that would naturally preoccupy a German Jew who had fled Europe during World War II — totalitarianism, violence, the problem of evil. Some of her Anglo-American critics dismissed her as too, well, European. Arendt preferred “metaphysical musings upon modernity” (Judt’s words) to the empirical data that has long been an obsession of American political scientists.
But for Arendt’s admirers, the United States was in dire need of such “metaphysical musings.” They saw her as a teller of hard truths: someone who could teach a self-identified liberal democracy, flush with confidence in its superiority and resilience, about the modern ills it too often tried to ignore.
Arendt’s canonization arguably began in earnest in the 2000s, when the history that was supposed to have ended abruptly roared back. Her work was frequently cited as a warning about where the George W. Bush administration’s “forever wars” might lead. As someone who had been detained by the Gestapo, stripped of her German citizenship and interned in France, she was consistently attuned to the question of “the right to have rights,” and how such legal standing rested precariously on the whims of the state. The legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron, in a 2007 essay, remarked on her abiding concern for those banished to a realm beyond the law: “She would have been appalled by the ‘legal black hole’ at Guantánamo Bay.”
But it was the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that enshrined her as a prophet. Bewildered Americans looked to her work about European cataclysm for guidance. Sales of Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” soared — no small feat for a dense, 600-page treatise on how racism and imperialism led to the atrocities of Nazism and Stalinism. The Washington Post ran an article explaining how Arendt’s work “illuminates today’s America.” The Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen suggested that Arendt could help us understand “how a demagogic opportunist can exploit a divided country.” A columnist for The Guardian, scrambling to absorb what was happening across the pond, asked, “What would Hannah Arendt do?”
So much veneration inevitably invited a backlash. The historian Samuel Moyn called Arendt “the most used and abused philosophical source to interpret” the Trump presidency, a “privileged citation” for those grasping at “pseudo-profundity.” In an essay for Harper’s Magazine in 2021, the critic Rebecca Panovka argued that liberal attempts to cast Arendt as a “patron saint of facts” made the mistake of treating Trump’s brazen falsehoods as signs of ominous “totalitarian world-building” instead of “corporate bluster intended to artificially boost his own stock.”
Yet even Moyn and Panovka could not resist the urge to enlist Arendt for their purposes; their objection was to the idea that a political figure like Trump was so unprecedented in American politics that one had to look to a European émigré to make sense of him. Now, nearly a year into a second Trump presidency and 50 years after Arendt’s death, she is still routinely invoked as the key to understanding our moment. It’s been a strange afterlife for an idiosyncratic thinker who believed that politics was inherently contingent and unpredictable. What did Arendt actually say, and what is it we keep wanting her to tell us?
‘At Least I Am Not Innocent’
Running through Arendt’s work is a commitment to independent thought — a legacy of seeing firsthand what happens when that commitment is abandoned or destroyed. She was born in 1906 in Hannover, to secular Jewish, middle-class parents. An only child beset by illnesses, whose school attendance was erratic, she taught herself to read Homer in Greek. In 1924, Arendt arrived at the University of Marburg to study philosophy with Martin Heidegger, and they soon became lovers. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933, barely three months after Hitler was appointed Germany’s chancellor. That was also the year when Arendt, who had been asked by a Zionist organization to collect examples of antisemitic statements, was detained by the Gestapo for what the Nazis called “horror propaganda.”
Arendt later recalled how upsetting it was to see so many intellectuals voluntarily fall into line with the Nazis. The research she was doing that led to her arrest was an extension of her urgent sense of responsibility: “At least I am not innocent, no one can accuse me of that.” Released after eight days, she fled Germany with her mother, eventually landing in Paris. Arendt was a stateless person, but after the war began she was nevertheless interned by the French for being a German national. In a matter of weeks, during a moment of chaos, she escaped the internment camp, and with her second husband, Heinrich Blücher — a philosopher and former Communist whom she met at a public lecture in Paris — made her way to the United States, arriving in New York City in May 1941.
Compared with the incessant mortal danger she experienced in Europe, life in the United States was decidedly different. Arendt learned English, became an editor at Schocken Books and published “The Origins of Totalitarianism” in 1951, the same year she was naturalized as an American citizen. Reviewing the book for The New York Times, the historian E.H. Carr called it “the work of one who has thought as well as suffered.” Yet the anti-Communist Red Scare seizing the country had reintroduced a terrible fear. Blücher had denied his Communist past on his immigration forms; until his citizenship papers arrived, he and Arendt were petrified that some informant could derail their lives with a “simple denunciation.”
Still, even at the height of McCarthyism, Arendt published a piece warning that anti-Communist panic risked crystallizing into a “totalitarian form of domination.” This was just three days after the attorney general announced the investigation of 10,000 naturalized citizens and 12,000 aliens suspected of being “subversives.” One biographer called her determination to publish such an article at that fraught time a “measure of her courage.” But part of Arendt’s point was that courage should have been irrelevant. A free country is one in which people can criticize their government without fear of government retaliation. She maintained that dissent was as essential to democracy as consent was.
She didn’t write like a willful provocateur who was hungry for attention, yet she didn’t take pains to avoid controversy either. In “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959), she presented her case against using federal power to integrate public schools, asserting that children were being forced to work out problems that adults should be the ones to solve; it was a strikingly weak essay, thinly and circuitously argued. Arendt was lambasted for it, and in a 1965 letter to Ralph Ellison, who had publicly criticized the piece, she admitted she could see how she “didn’t understand the complexities in the situation.”
But it was what she wrote about the trial of a Nazi official that really got her into trouble. “Eichmann in Jerusalem” ran as a series of articles in The New Yorker and was published in 1963 as a book. Instead of depicting Adolf Eichmann, one of the organizers of the Holocaust, as a monstrous demon, Arendt portrayed him as morally and intellectually shallow — a dutiful bureaucrat who personified “the banality of evil.” That assertion, combined with a few pages about the unwitting complicity of the Jewish councils in sending Jews to the camps, sparked a furious anti-Arendt campaign, which decried her criticism of Zionism, too. The Anti-Defamation League urged rabbis to denounce her from the pulpit. “Self-Hating Jewess Writes Pro-Eichmann Book” read a headline in The Intermountain Jewish News. In France, Le Nouvel Observateur published excerpts from the book and subsequently printed letters from outraged readers in a column asking, “Hannah Arendt: Est-elle nazie?”
In the Company of Others
Arendt was completely blindsided by the uproar that greeted “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” In a 1963 letter to the philosopher Karl Jaspers, she described a “smear campaign” that “consistently claims that I had said just the opposite of what I did in fact write.” But she also added that had she known what would happen, she wouldn’t have done anything differently: “It is quite instructive to see what can be achieved by manipulating public opinion and how many people, often on a high intellectual level, can be manipulated.”
In a sense, Arendt had been writing about the manipulation of the public for years. But animating her theories about state power and the agents of mass propaganda was a preoccupation with what made people amenable to such manipulation in the first place. A question she kept returning to in her work involved thinking itself: how thought and judgment connected to political action.
Eichmann was a case in point. Arendt indicted him not for stupidity but for “sheer thoughtlessness.” It was reflected in the way he clung to “clichés, stock phrases” and the murderous routines provided by the Nazi regime. By refusing to think, Eichmann had sealed himself off against reality — “that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.”
The charge that Arendt was downplaying Eichmann’s responsibility was absurd. If anything, her conclusions were even more chilling. Thinking is hard, and often frightening; Arendt suggested that people who were “just following orders” welcomed a permission structure that discouraged thought. But any relief they felt did absolutely nothing to relieve them of culpability.
Arendt was a prolific writer, and she sometimes would organize her books in a way — with numbered categories and heady themes — that made it seem as if she was a systematic political theorist. Yet it was the attention she paid to the psychological and moral dimensions of political breakdown that made her work so distinctive, as well as resonant.
Right now, amid so much upheaval, there is a widespread sense that our travails aren’t wholly explained by the price of eggs. Material issues are of course crucial. But perhaps many Americans look to Arendt precisely because her “metaphysical free association,” as one adversary scornfully put it, stands apart from the more common, pat, technocratic commentary that depicts politics as a mechanistic realm of competing interests.
Paradoxically, this is what makes her so ill suited to being the icon an anxious populace keeps wanting her to be. Politics, for her, required collective deliberation by active thinkers, not passive consumers. One cannot go to Arendt’s work for comfort. What she offers instead is company — the company of someone who had direct experience of the horrors of the 20th century yet never relinquished what she called amor mundi, or “love of the world.”
This love isn’t a cozy coverlet of sentiment, which only serves to obscure reality. Quite the opposite: Samantha Rose Hill, the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and the author of a book about Arendt, likens amor mundi to “understanding and reconciling oneself with the world as it is.”
Such a commitment to the world requires others. For Arendt, loneliness was dangerous; it was precisely under conditions of isolation that one’s imagination could untether itself from reality and “develop its own lines of ‘thought.’” She offers not a guide but a goad — to partake in an activity that can enact our freedom and also help to sustain it. “What I propose, therefore, is very simple,” she once wrote. “It is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
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