Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy

Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy PDF Author: Robert Carl Pirro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875802688
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A German Jewish refugee suffering tremendous personal and political upheaval during the years of Nazi conquest, Hannah Arendt turned to classical literature and drama as she struggled to make sense of the terrible events of her time. Studying fiction, plays, and poetry, she found a way to meld theoretical political philosophy and concrete personal commitment to action. Among her literary resources, the epics and plays of ancient Greece provided the ideal balance of politics and culture. In Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy, Pirro focuses especially on the influence of Greek tragedy on Arendt's political writings. Pirro casts Arendt's political thought as tragic storytelling, crafted to inspire her audience both to appreciate political freedoms and to act on those freedoms by participating in public life. Echoing an affinity for Greek drama common in the tradition of German philosophy and letters, Arendt draws on tragic characters, scenes, and dramatic conventions, as well as theories, to assess the maddening and often fatal contradictions of political life in modern times. Classical narratives of heroic achievements and failures shape the structure and content of Arendtian thought, as when she compares Jewish refugees' attempts to confront their stateless condition during the 1930s and 1940s to Ulysses's mythical quest. Turning her attention in the postwar years to the promise and limits of political freedom in American life, Arendt invokes Sophocles's last drama, Oedipus at Colonus, in an attempt to outline an alternative, aesthetic sense of political authority in the American Republic. In providing this new avenue of approach to Arendt, Pirro shows how elements of Greek tragedy helped her grapple with the problems of modern politics in the chaos of a universe without rules. Arendt enthusiasts and readers interested in the classics and politics will find fresh ideas to consider in Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy.

Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy

Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy PDF Author: Robert Carl Pirro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875802688
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
A German Jewish refugee suffering tremendous personal and political upheaval during the years of Nazi conquest, Hannah Arendt turned to classical literature and drama as she struggled to make sense of the terrible events of her time. Studying fiction, plays, and poetry, she found a way to meld theoretical political philosophy and concrete personal commitment to action. Among her literary resources, the epics and plays of ancient Greece provided the ideal balance of politics and culture. In Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy, Pirro focuses especially on the influence of Greek tragedy on Arendt's political writings. Pirro casts Arendt's political thought as tragic storytelling, crafted to inspire her audience both to appreciate political freedoms and to act on those freedoms by participating in public life. Echoing an affinity for Greek drama common in the tradition of German philosophy and letters, Arendt draws on tragic characters, scenes, and dramatic conventions, as well as theories, to assess the maddening and often fatal contradictions of political life in modern times. Classical narratives of heroic achievements and failures shape the structure and content of Arendtian thought, as when she compares Jewish refugees' attempts to confront their stateless condition during the 1930s and 1940s to Ulysses's mythical quest. Turning her attention in the postwar years to the promise and limits of political freedom in American life, Arendt invokes Sophocles's last drama, Oedipus at Colonus, in an attempt to outline an alternative, aesthetic sense of political authority in the American Republic. In providing this new avenue of approach to Arendt, Pirro shows how elements of Greek tragedy helped her grapple with the problems of modern politics in the chaos of a universe without rules. Arendt enthusiasts and readers interested in the classics and politics will find fresh ideas to consider in Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy.

Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin

Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin PDF Author: Kei Hiruta
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691226121
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
For the first time, the full story of the conflict between two of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers—and the lessons their disagreements continue to offer Two of the most iconic thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) fundamentally disagreed on central issues in politics, history and philosophy. In spite of their overlapping lives and experiences as Jewish émigré intellectuals, Berlin disliked Arendt intensely, saying that she represented “everything that I detest most,” while Arendt met Berlin’s hostility with indifference and suspicion. Written in a lively style, and filled with drama, tragedy and passion, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin tells, for the first time, the full story of the fraught relationship between these towering figures, and shows how their profoundly different views continue to offer important lessons for political thought today. Drawing on a wealth of new archival material, Kei Hiruta traces the Arendt–Berlin conflict, from their first meeting in wartime New York through their widening intellectual chasm during the 1950s, the controversy over Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, their final missed opportunity to engage with each other at a 1967 conference and Berlin’s continuing animosity toward Arendt after her death. Hiruta blends political philosophy and intellectual history to examine key issues that simultaneously connected and divided Arendt and Berlin, including the nature of totalitarianism, evil and the Holocaust, human agency and moral responsibility, Zionism, American democracy, British imperialism and the Hungarian Revolution. But, most of all, Arendt and Berlin disagreed over a question that goes to the heart of the human condition: what does it mean to be free?

The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World PDF Author: Barry Gewen
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324004061
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
A new portrait of Henry Kissinger focusing on the fundamental ideas underlying his policies: Realism, balance of power, and national interest. Few public officials have provoked such intense controversy as Henry Kissinger. During his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he came to be admired and hated in equal measure. Notoriously, he believed that foreign affairs ought to be based primarily on the power relationships of a situation, not simply on ethics. He went so far as to argue that under certain circumstances America had to protect its national interests even if that meant repressing other countries’ attempts at democracy. For this reason, many today on both the right and left dismiss him as a latter-day Machiavelli, ignoring the breadth and complexity of his thought. With The Inevitability of Tragedy, Barry Gewen corrects this shallow view, presenting the fascinating story of Kissinger’s development as both a strategist and an intellectual and examining his unique role in government through his ideas. It analyzes his contentious policies in Vietnam and Chile, guided by a fresh understanding of his definition of Realism, the belief that world politics is based on an inevitable, tragic competition for power. Crucially, Gewen places Kissinger’s pessimistic thought in a European context. He considers how Kissinger was deeply impacted by his experience as a refugee from Nazi Germany, and explores the links between his notions of power and those of his mentor, Hans Morgenthau—the father of Realism—as well as those of two other German-Jewish émigrés who shared his concerns about the weaknesses of democracy: Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt. The Inevitability of Tragedy offers a thoughtful perspective on the origins of Kissinger’s sober worldview and argues that a reconsideration of his career is essential at a time when American foreign policy lacks direction.

Eclipse of Action

Eclipse of Action PDF Author: Richard Halpern
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022643379X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
According to traditional accounts, the history of tragedy is itself tragic: following a miraculous birth in fifth-century Athens and a brilliant resurgence in the early modern period, tragic drama then falls into a marked decline. While disputing the notion that tragedy has died, this wide-ranging study argues that it faces an unprecedented challenge in modern times from an unexpected quarter: political economy. Since Aristotle, tragedy has been seen as uniquely exhibiting the importance of action for human happiness. Beginning with Adam Smith, however, political economy has claimed that the source of happiness is primarily production. Eclipse of Action examines the tense relations between action and production, doing and making, in playwrights from Aeschylus, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton to Beckett, Arthur Miller, and Sarah Kane. Richard Halpern places these figures in conversation with works by Aristotle, Smith, Hegel, Marx, Hannah Arendt, Georges Bataille, and others in order to trace the long history of the ways in which economic thought and tragic drama interact.

The Politics of Tragedy and Democratic Citizenship

The Politics of Tragedy and Democratic Citizenship PDF Author: Robert C. Pirro
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441189467
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This study of the political significance of theories of tragedy and ordinary language uses of "tragedy" offers a fresh perspective on democracy in contemporary times.

The Promise of Politics

The Promise of Politics PDF Author: Hannah Arendt
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0307542874
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
After the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, Hannah Arendt undertook an investigation of Marxism, a subject that she had deliberately left out of her earlier work. Her inquiry into Marx’s philosophy led her to a critical examination of the entire tradition of Western political thought, from its origins in Plato and Aristotle to its culmination and conclusion in Marx. The Promise of Politics tells how Arendt came to understand the failure of that tradition to account for human action. From the time that Socrates was condemned to death by his fellow citizens, Arendt finds that philosophers have followed Plato in constructing political theories at the expense of political experiences, including the pre-philosophic Greek experience of beginning, the Roman experience of founding, and the Christian experience of forgiving. It is a fascinating, subtle, and original story, which bridges Arendt’s work from The Origins of Totalitarianism to The Human Condition, published in 1958. These writings, which deal with the conflict between philosophy and politics, have never before been gathered and published. The final and longer section of The Promise of Politics, titled “Introduction into Politics,” was written in German and is published here for the first time in English. This remarkable meditation on the modern prejudice against politics asks whether politics has any meaning at all anymore. Although written in the latter half of the 1950s, what Arendt says about the relation of politics to human freedom could hardly have greater relevance for our own time. When politics is considered as a means to an end that lies outside of itself, when force is used to “create” freedom, political principles vanish from the face of the earth. For Arendt, politics has no “end”; instead, it has at times been–and perhaps can be again–the never-ending endeavor of the great plurality of human beings to live together and share the earth in mutually guaranteed freedom. That is the promise of politics.

Eichmann in Jerusalem

Eichmann in Jerusalem PDF Author: Hannah Arendt
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101007168
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The controversial journalistic analysis of the mentality that fostered the Holocaust, from the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt’s postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative—an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling (and unsettled) issues of the twentieth century.

Greek Tragedy and Political Philosophy

Greek Tragedy and Political Philosophy PDF Author: Peter J. Ahrensdorf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139475584
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
In this book, Peter Ahrensdorf examines Sophocles' powerful analysis of a central question of political philosophy and a perennial question of political life: should citizens and leaders govern political society by the light of unaided human reason or religious faith? Through an examination of Sophocles' timeless masterpieces - Oedipus the Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone - Ahrensdorf offers a sustained challenge to the prevailing view, championed by Nietzsche in his attack on Socratic rationalism, that Sophocles is an opponent of rationalism. Ahrensdorf argues that Sophocles is a genuinely philosophical thinker and a rationalist, albeit one who advocates a cautious political rationalism. Ahrensdorf concludes with an incisive analysis of Nietzsche, Socrates and Aristotle on tragedy and philosophy. He argues, against Nietzsche, that the rationalism of Socrates and Aristotle incorporates a profound awareness of the tragic dimension of human existence and therefore resembles in fundamental ways the somber and humane rationalism of Sophocles.

Between Past and Future

Between Past and Future PDF Author: Hannah Arendt
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101662654
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
From the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Origins of Totalitarianism, “a book to think with through the political impasses and cultural confusions of our day” (Harper’s Magazine) Hannah Arendt’s insightful observations of the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, constitute an impassioned contribution to political philosophy. In Between Past and Future Arendt describes the perplexing crises modern society faces as a result of the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice, reason, responsibility, virtue, and glory. Through a series of eight exercises, she shows how we can redistill the vital essence of these concepts and use them to regain a frame of reference for the future. To participate in these exercises is to associate, in action, with one of the most original and fruitful minds of the twentieth century.

The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt

The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt PDF Author: Dana Villa
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521645713
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
A distinguished team of contributors examines the primary themes of Arendt's multi-faceted thought.