A month after Donald Trump was elected president, the Washington Post published an essay by political scientist Jeffrey C. Isaac describing how people with “growing fears about … authoritarianism” were turning to Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Isaac’s was the first of many such pieces that would come out of the Trump years, cherry-picking a handful of tantalizing quotes from Arendt’s 500-page tome to suggest that Trump was a dictator on the order of Stalin or Hitler. Sales of the book skyrocketed, and Arendt quickly became the resistance’s favorite political thinker.
In fact, one could say that Arendt is now more popular, and less understood, than ever before. In a new biography, Samantha Rose Hill aims to capitalize on this popularity while recovering the true scope of her subject’s thought.
Hill is well suited for the task. Until recently the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, she’s familiar with her subject’s life, work, and recent resurgence. Hill had ample access to Arendt’s papers, and her archival research is evident on every page of Hannah Arendt.
Part of the Critical Lives series, this slim, accessible book walks the reader through Arendt’s life while introducing her major works and ideas. Hill does not claim Arendt for a particular side in contemporary political debates, a studied silence that sets the groundwork for a proper appreciation of Arendt’s ideas. But her attempt to keep Arendt “unclassifiable” also masks some of the thinker’s greatest insights.
The book hits all the standard biographical notes: Arendt’s education in Germany, including studies with her lover, the philosopher and future Nazi Martin Heidegger, her internment in France and escape to America, and the publication of her major works, from Origins to her masterwork of political theory, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem, her controversial report on the trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust.
But the book also sheds new life on Arendt’s life, particularly her youth. Some of these insights are merely amusing, as when Arendt was arrested in 1933 for collecting antisemitic articles to send to Jewish organizations abroad. After searching her apartment, the Gestapo interrogated her about the “secret code” in her notebooks. The “code” was Greek.
Some insights, however, can shed new light on Arendt’s thought. For instance, we learn that she attended Christian Sunday school in addition to her synagogue education, and as a child, she told her rabbi that “all prayers should be offered to Christ.” It’s hard not to think of this early education when considering Arendt’s lifelong study of St. Augustine and her argument that politics depends on forgiveness.
Most intellectual biographies emphasize ideas over personal details, which is generally the correct approach. But Arendt is different. Her work, as Hill repeatedly shows, was influenced by the events of her life. She turned to politics after the Reichstag fire vaulted the Nazis to power in Germany, and she studied the American founding once she took refuge in the United States. Her complicated relationship with Heidegger and his flirtation with Nazism inspired some of her most insightful work on forgiveness in politics and the dangers of thinking.
This is not to say that we can only understand Arendt in her historical context. But because she wrote so widely and was so influenced by her friendships and experience, a biographical study illuminates Arendt’s thought in a way it wouldn’t some of her contemporaries. Arendt, who long rejected the label “philosopher,” worked more like a journalist, observing and reporting as she went through life.
To her credit, Hill understands that Arendt cannot be easily classified as a specific type of thinker or said to have a particular ideological bent. But she is too enamored with the idea that Arendt is “unclassifiable,” causing her to ignore important aspects of Arendt’s thought and personality, particularly her conservatism.
Hill notes Arendt’s many conservative tendencies, including her objection to what we now call “identity politics,” her condemnation of student protests and feminism, and the reverence for human life that is central to so much of her thought. But Hill refuses to connect the dots, seemingly out of a fear that doing so will allow critics to put the famously “heterodox” thinker in a particular ideological box.
Other observers have been more willing to label Arendt. In his memoir, New York Jew, Alfred Kazin fondly remembers his time with “the genuinely conservative Hannah Arendt.” He says it was Arendt’s “deep German conservatism, theological and classicist,” that drove her to denounce German idealism and directed her inquiries into the failure of modernity.
As Kazin makes clear, Arendt was not necessarily conservative in any American sense. But he notes that Arendt was “enchanted with the wisdom of the Federalist Papers, the political theory of John Adams, [and] came to believe more deeply in the Founding Fathers than any July Fourth orator.” Then and now, such a position clearly indicates a conservative sensibility.
Arendt’s fascination with the founders also points to Hill’s biggest blind spot. As has been shown elsewhere, Arendt embraced her adopted homeland and was committed in her later years to defending it, particularly by articulating the virtues of republican government. A consideration of Arendt’s turn to American political thought would add an important dimension to Hill’s study and show those new to the subject that Arendt’s thought had dimensions beyond her early work in Origins.
Hill ends her biography on an ambiguous, forward-looking note. She asserts that “our century is not Hannah Arendt’s” and to “continuously think the world anew [and] define new limits … is the inheritance she has left us.”
This is half right. One of the great things about Arendt is that she’s hard to pin down. She crossed disciplines throughout her career and did not leave behind a school or a doctrine. The breadth of her writings, and the absence of “Arendtians,” means that each generation — indeed, each reader — can dive into her work without the baggage and preconceptions that accompany a thinker such as Leo Strauss. And so there can be liberal and conservative readings of Arendt, just as her work can be of equal interest to students of politics, philosophy, and poetry.
But none of this means her thought lacks a core. Arendt was concerned with the rupture in the Western philosophical tradition and worried about challenges to republican government. Contrary to what Hill says, those problems are still very much with us. And while the best thing we learn from Arendt may be how to think, that certainly doesn’t mean we can’t learn what to think from her, as well.
Tim Rice is the associate editor of the Washington Free Beacon.
