A Note on Max Weber's Impact on Hannah Arendt's Thought

Revista de ciencia política (Santiago), 2006

American Political Science Review 2016

Notwithstanding its status as a modern classic, Hannah Arendt's study on The Origins of Totalitarianism is generally considered to be lacking a clearly reflected methodological basis. This article challenges this view and argues that in her study Arendt implicitly applies a characterological method of political theorizing that provides a genuine conceptual framework for systematically connecting structural analysis with ideographic historical investigations and with a political theory of action. On this conceptual basis, the study renders an analysis of anti-Semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism not merely in terms of abstract structural concepts, but in terms of dynamic character-context constellations. Arendt's account not only shows interesting parallels to a number of similar conceptual reflections, especially in the 20th century's theory debate; it can also serve to inspire the current debate on methodology in political theory.

The Betrayal of the Humanities: The University during the Third Reich, 2022

Global Intellectual History, 2022

Carl Schmitt read The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), and several essays from Hannah Arendt. By utilizing Schmitt’s extensive comments on Arendt and other novel materials, this essay reconstructs a ‘debate in absence’ between Schmitt and Arendt concerning the nature of totalitarianism, political power, and banality of evil. First, I demonstrate how Schmitt became greatly excited about The Origins, which he (mis)read as an exculpatory document that allowed him to draw an absolute distance between himself and the more racist strains of Nazism. Second, I show how and why Schmitt’s understanding of Arendt became more reserved after he read Eichmann in Jerusalem. Beyond offering a novel empirical starting point for comparing Schmitt and Arendt and providing a comparative account of their understandings of Nazi totalitarianism, power, and political responsibility under totalitarian regimes, the article also contributes to the broader discussions surrounding the nature totalitarianism and on the debates around Arendt’s report on Eichmann.

This paper attempts to find the locus of Hannah Arendt's conception of the political and the anti-political. In doing so, the paper identifies Arendt's essential qualifications of the political and the anti-political and attempt to find concrete spaces where we can more or less locate these events. However, this does not mean, as this paper tries to show that these said loci are uncontroversial, incontestable, and an ideal representative of Arendt's articulation of such activities, most especially the political. Despite this, the paper dares to find the spaces whereby the political and the anti-political could possibly be thought to thrive. The space where anti-political resides can be thought easily, whereas, the political is not. In Arendtian sense, the political is elusive and fragile that it can easily be overwhelmed by anti-political activities. The insights are coming mostly from her two major oeuvres namely: The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism. This paper is divided into two major sections: firstly, an exposition of Arendt's concept of the political explicated in The Human Condition and of anti-political in The Origins of the Totalitarianism and secondly, an attempt to find their loci in our everyday affairs.

In the Nazi concentration camp of Theresienstadt, around 150 people rebelled against the Nazis not through violence of attempts to escape but with music. Musical conductor Rafael Scachter brought all the people together using merely his memory and a single piano in a dark basement of the camp, and in singing Verdi’s Requieum, reached a level of excellence that even the Nazis themselves permitted the music (Bor, et al., 1963) (Manivannan, 2016). The Terezin Requiem is one of the most touching tails of resistance against the Nazis, for the fact that the concentration camps weren’t merely focused upon destroying the physical aspect of the person, but rather the cultural and historical aspect as well. As Peter Baehr puts it, while speaking of Hannah Arendt’s views, “…concentration camps sought to swallow people into “holes of oblivion” and eliminate traces of their ever having existed.” (Baehr, 2010) It was in 1950 that Hannah Arendt finally became a citizen of the United States, and it was also that year that she began meeting and developing a romance with Martin Heidegger once again. Hannah Arendt having been a Jew and in Germany for a long period of her life, not merely wrote of her objective ideas but rather funneled her personal experiences into her writing. It was in the same year 1950 that she wrote her seminal work titled Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps (Arendt, 1950). She stated critiques of the social sciences and removed key assumptions that the discipline held about the utilitarian, functionalist, and self-interest driven elements of human nature with respect to totalitarianism and concentration camps. This paper will provide an account of the arguments that she provided with regards to the limitations of social science techniques, with the context of the extermination of Jews in concentration camps in Nazi Germany. The paper will begin with certain key definitions and proceed to delineate the various arguments of Hannah Arendt.

PMLA, 2012