Hannah Arendt and the Specter of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt and the Specter of Totalitarianism PDF Author: Marilyn LaFay
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137382244
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
This work positions Arendt as a political writer attempting to find a way in which humanity, poised between the Holocaust and the atom bomb, might reclaim its position as the creators of a world fit for human habitation.

Hannah Arendt and the Specter of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt and the Specter of Totalitarianism PDF Author: Marilyn LaFay
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137382244
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
This work positions Arendt as a political writer attempting to find a way in which humanity, poised between the Holocaust and the atom bomb, might reclaim its position as the creators of a world fit for human habitation.

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt PDF Author: Marilyn LaFay
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Totalitarianism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book Here

Book Description
The argument that I present is that Arendt falls short of providing a mitigation of the political crisis of modernity. She commits what I see as a fundamental error, that of confusing an existential self for a political self. Her primary goal, I believe, is to establish a means by which we may exercise the existential self safely, from within a virtuous community. The concern I have with Arendt's political work is that it does not provide a political solution to political problems, but rather relies on an existential self-exposure that lacks the values of political commitment. Despite all of her good intentions, the result is a politics without direction. Arendt is unwilling to allow human civilization to be thrown onto the rubbish heap, and she attempts to indicate the ways in which humanity can actively create and maintain the world: we need not succumb to fate. Arendt wants to strip the individual of both narcissism and hubris, of the compulsion toward authenticity, and wants Self and community to recognize that both are man-made. Because of the artifice of both, each requires a constant vigilance and care. Her political thought relies upon an insistence on the human ability to create and respond, to actively generate the world in which we live. Public space is to be valued as that which allows individuals to overcome their sense of superfluousness, and thus, public space is valued not as a political starting point, but for its own being-ness. She attempts to substitute the yearning of existentialism into an expressly political domain. Ultimately, it is Arendt's narrow reading of "ideology" on which her theory flounders. She fails to recognize that ideologies can be viewed as either "progressive" or "reactionary, " viewing all instead as part of a single Tradition. However, as I argue, without ideology, we cannot translate political goods into political goals. Arendt refuses to view ideology as a freely-chosen position that represents my choices about the "best society, " of what I wish to attach myself to in order to see my principles and interests met.

Hannah Arendt and the Specter of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt and the Specter of Totalitarianism PDF Author: Marilyn LaFay
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137382244
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
This work positions Arendt as a political writer attempting to find a way in which humanity, poised between the Holocaust and the atom bomb, might reclaim its position as the creators of a world fit for human habitation.

The Origins of Totalitarianism

The Origins of Totalitarianism PDF Author: Hannah Arendt
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156701532
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 580

Get Book Here

Book Description
"How could such a book speak so powerfully to our present moment? The short answer is that we, too, live in dark times, even if they are different and perhaps less dark, and "Origins" raises a set of fundamental questions about how tyranny can arise and the dangerous forms of inhumanity to which it can lead." Jeffrey C. Isaac, The Washington Post Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianism and an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Arendt explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in our time--Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia--which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination.

Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences

Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences PDF Author: Peter Baehr
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804774218
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the nature of totalitarianism as interpreted by some of the finest minds of the twentieth century. It focuses on Hannah Arendt's claim that totalitarianism was an entirely unprecedented regime and that the social sciences had integrally misconstrued it. A sociologist who is a critical admirer of Arendt, Baehr looks sympathetically at Arendt's objections to social science and shows that her complaints were in many respects justified. Avoiding broad disciplinary endorsements or dismissals, Baehr reconstructs the theoretical and political stakes of Arendt's encounters with prominent social scientists such as David Riesman, Raymond Aron, and Jules Monnerot. In presenting the first systematic appraisal of Arendt's critique of the social sciences, Baehr examines what it means to see an event as unprecedented. Furthermore, he adapts Arendt and Aron's philosophies to shed light on modern Islamist terrorism and to ask whether it should be categorized alongside Stalinism and National Socialism as totalitarian.

Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History

Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History PDF Author: Richard H. King
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1845455894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hannah Arendt first argued the continuities between the age of European imperialism and the age of fascism in Europe in 'The Origins of Totalitarianism'. This text uses Arendt's insights as a starting point for further investigations into the ways in which race, imperialism, slavery and genocide are linked.

The Portable Hannah Arendt

The Portable Hannah Arendt PDF Author: Hannah Arendt
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780142437568
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 644

Get Book Here

Book Description
A collection of writings by a groundbreaking political thinker, including excerpts from The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem She was a Jew born in Germany in the early twentieth century, and she studied with the greatest German minds of her day—Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers among them. After the rise of the Nazis, she emigrated to America where she proceeded to write some of the most searching, hard-hitting reflections on the agonizing issues of the time: totalitarianism in both Nazi and Stalinist garb; Zionism and the legacy of the Holocaust; federally mandated school desegregation and civil rights in the United States; and the nature of evil. The Portable Hannah Arendt offers substantial excerpts from the three works that ensured her international and enduring stature: The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem. Additionally, this volume includes several other provocative essays, as well as her correspondence with other influential figures.

Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism PDF Author: Hannah Arendt
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN: 9780544312654
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the final volume, Arendt focuses on the two genuine forms of the totalitarian state in history-the dictatorships of Bolshevism after 1930 and of National Socialism after 1938. Index.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 PDF Author: Hannah Arendt
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0307787036
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 497

Get Book Here

Book Description
Few thinkers have addressed the political horrors and ethical complexities of the twentieth century with the insight and passionate intellectual integrity of Hannah Arendt. She was irresistible drawn to the activity of understanding, in an effort to endow historic, political, and cultural events with meaning. Essays in Understanding assembles many of Arendt’s writings from the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s. Included here are illuminating discussions of St. Augustine, existentialism, Kafka, and Kierkegaard: relatively early examinations of Nazism, responsibility and guilt, and the place of religion in the modern world: and her later investigations into the nature of totalitarianism that Arendt set down after The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951. The body of work gathered in this volume gives us a remarkable portrait of Arendt’s developments as a thinker—and confirms why her ideas and judgments remain as provocative and seminal today as they were when she first set them down.

The Need for Roots

The Need for Roots PDF Author: Simone Weil
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000082792
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hailed by Andre Gide as the patron saint of all outsiders, Simone Weil's short life was ample testimony to her beliefs. In 1942 she fled France along with her family, going firstly to America. She then moved back to London in order to work with de Gaulle. Published posthumously The Need for Roots was a direct result of this collaboration. Its purpose was to help rebuild France after the war. In this, her most famous book, Weil reflects on the importance of religious and political social structures in the life of the individual. She wrote that one of the basic obligations we have as human beings is to not let another suffer from hunger. Equally as important, however, is our duty towards our community: we may have declared various human rights, but we have overlooked the obligations and this has left us self-righteous and rootless. She could easily have been issuing a direct warning to us today, the citizens of Century 21.