The Political Humanism of Hannah Arendt

Michael H. McCarthy

doi:10.5771/9780739177204

Summary

At the end of the Second World War when the horror of the holocaust became known, Hannah Arendt committed herself to a work of remembrance and reflection. Intellectual integrity demanded that we comprehend and articulate the genesis and meaning of totalitarian terror. What earlier spiritual and moral collapse had made totalitarian regimes possible? What was the basis of their evident mass appeal? To what cultural resources and political institutions and traditions could we turn to prevent their recurrence? After years of profound study, Arendt concluded that the deepest crisis of the modern world was political and that the enduring appeal of political mass movements demonstrated how profound that crisis had become.

For Arendt the modern political crisis is also a crisis of humanism. The radical totalitarian experiment was rooted in two distorted images of the human being. The agents of terror believed in the limitless power generated by strategic organization, a power exercised without restraint and justified by appeal to historical necessity. The victims of terror, by contrast, were systematically dehumanized by the ruling ideology, and then brutally deprived of their legal rights and their moral and existential dignity. Arendt’s political humanism directly challenges both of these distorted images, the first because it dangerously inflates human power, the second because it deliberately subverts human freedom and agency.

This book offers a dialectical account of the political crisis that Arendt identified and shows why her interpretation of that crisis is especially relevant today. The author also provides detailed analysis and appraisal of Arendt’s political humanism, the revisionary anthropology she based on the politically engaged republican citizen. Finally, the work distinguishes the merits from the limitations of Arendt’s genealogical critique of “our tradition of political thought”, showing that she tended to be right in what she affirmed and wrong in what she excluded or omitted.

Keywords

Search publication

Bibliographic data

Copyright year: 2012
ISBN-Print: 978-0-7391-7719-8
ISBN-Online: 978-0-7391-7720-4
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 311
Product type: Book Titles

1. Contents No access
2. Preface No access
1. Notes No access
1. Totalitarianism as a Limit Situation No access
2. The Burden of Our Time No access
3. The Sources of Our Political Crisis No access
4. Notes No access
1. The Spirit of Arendtian Politics No access
2. The Cultural Convictions of Modernity No access
3. The Victory of the Animal Laborans No access
4. Notes No access
1. Overcoming Tradition No access
2. Greek Political Philosophy No access
3. The Platonic Inheritance No access
4. Aristotle’s Practical Philosophy No access
5. Poiesis and Praxis No access
6. Ruling and Being Ruled No access
7. The Best Way to Live No access
8. Notes No access
1. Progress and Disillusion No access
2. Dialectical Materialism No access
3. The Critique of Capitalism No access
4. The Arendtian Critique of Marx No access
5. The Glorification of Labor and the Naturalization of Man No access
6. Violence as the Essence of Politics No access
7. The Science of Historical Necessity No access
8. Marxism As Ideology: An Arendtian Critique No access
9. The Merits and Limitations of Marxism No access
10. Notes No access
1. PART I No access
2. The Critical Appropriation of Tradition No access
3. The Old and the New No access
4. The Discontents of Liberal Democracy No access
5. A Crisis of Legitimacy No access
6. The Promise and Perils of Globalization No access
7. American Democracy Revisited No access
8. Toward a New Progressive Agenda No access
9. E Pluribus Unum: The Challenge of Contemporary Pluralism No access
10. PART II No access
11. The Critique of Liberalism No access
12. Public Liberty No access
13. Participation and Representation No access
14. The Primacy of Politics Over Economics No access
15. The Social Question Revisited: Distributive Justice and Political Equality No access
16. The Renewal of Civil Society No access
17. The Common World and the Common Good No access
18. Healing the Rift Between Thought and Action: The Importance of Practical Wisdom No access
19. Is There A Way To Get There From Here? No access
20. Notes No access
Selected Bibliography No access Pages 301 - 304
Index No access Pages 305 - 311