Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World

I simply want to add a few points to the fine reviews by Freedman and Horner.The original edition of this biography was published in 1983 and undoubtably contributed to the upsurge in Arendt studies that we have seen in the subsequent years. This newest edition includes a preface that situates the biography within that subsequent work.The first point I want to make is one of agreement with the other two reviewers. This is a superb biography written by someone who obviously has great affection and respect for Hannah Arendt. As Horner mentions, Young-Bruehl knew Ms. Arendt. More importantly, she studied with her. The results of that training show in her ability to explain the development of Arendt's thought. Young-Bruehl is very clear, for example, on how Arendt's concept of evil changed from The Origins of Totalitarianism to her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.I also learned much from Young-Bruehl's discussion on Arendt's hope for the council system as a means to effect radical and democratic change that is not controlled from above. Apparently Arendt saw some continuity between what happened in the early stages of the American Revolution and what happened in the 1848, the Sparticist Rebellion and the Hungarian revolt in 1956. If I understand correctly, Arendt had hopes that these were all variations on a new (post-Enlightenment) way to found a government. The idea is that revolutionary situations generate massive small attempts to organize locally that can be then used to create larger governmental entities without losing that mass democratic participation.Finally, Young-Bruehl is good at showing how Arendt's various political concerns kept driving back at certain times to more philosophical work, e.g., how the follow-up work on The Origins of Totalitarianism eventually lead to The Human Condition.Reading Young-Breuhl's excellent discussion of the Arendt's various books made obvious to me many points I should have caught earlier. And she makes me want to read some of Arendt's books all over again. And all this is being done within a well-written and moving narrative of Arendt's life.This really is an impressive achievement. If you have any interest in Hannah Arendt's work, Young-Bruehl biography is an absolutely essential read.

Excellent biography well-written, by an author who is obviously comfortable with the philosophical concepts that Ms. Arendt uses.Less new material than I had expected, but that is because I had read some of Ms. Arendt's letters and essays before reading the biography. I particularly like the parts on her husband, Heinrich Blucher, because he is painted in much deeper emotioal and intellectual colors than anything I had read before. Elisabeth Bruehl-Young adores her subject, but remains appropriately critical of her tone. The biography to my mind still leaves open the mystery of why the clear-thinking Arendt wrote a book like Eichmann in Jerusalem without the clarity she commonly applied to her work. I would recommend it highly to anyone interested in Ms. Arendt's lifetime experiences and perspective and thinking.

Brilliant! I fall in love with Hannah everytime I read her thoughts and words. Students should leave this alone and go to class. Readers will only feel sad when there are no more pages. Perfect for a winter read with lots places to stop and look out the window and watch the snow pile up. Maybe put another log in the woodk stove and think about it.

I have long been a Hannah Arendt fan, but have not -- until now with this book -- foiund a biography that gives the complete picture of this woman and what she means to the philosophical world. I am delighted with the book. It was a library book but is in perfect condition.

Very informative. Although written by an ex-pupil and naturally influenced by its subject, the book presents a many sided person, who was an important witness to her period, nothwithstanding her personal traits - not all of which were admirable.

Hannah Arendt's insights are as relevant today as they were when they were written. I have been augmenting my reading of her works by reading Young-Bruehl's excellent writing about Arendt.

The best book on Arendt I have read, a must for reader of her work.

This is how biography should be written. Not only do we have Arendt's life, but also thoughtful and interesting considerations of all of her work. Well worth reading.

The extraordinary biography of the German Jewish philosopher and self styled "political thinker" Hannah Arendt, "Hannah Arendt: For Love of The World"by the late Elisabeth Young- Bruehl,cannot be surpassed by other biographers.Margarette von Trotta's recent movie biopic, "Hannah Arendt" is loosely based on a section of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography.Elisabeth Young -Bruehl's biography succeeds in charting not only the ups and downs of Hannah Arendt's life, first as a young Jewish university student of philosophy in Weimar Germany where her non-Jewish mentors were Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers ,with whom she continued a friendship as long as it was possible, but also the trajectory of her thinking,"the life of her mind", both as a refugee in America in the 1940s and later as a public intellectual in Europe and America. There are many facets to Hannah Arendt's writing, editing, and lecturing career, and she was the recipient towards the end of her life of numerous awards and honors both in the United States and Europe, but what she seems to be most remembered for her is her work on the crisis created by the complete breakdown of morals,ethics, traditions and laws with the advent of ideologically driven regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.She believed that morality, ethics and law had to be reconceptualised in the wake of the failure of western European norms to address mass murder and barbarism.She became convinced that apolitical thinking for its own sake and the retreat into solipsistic thinking, (unworldliness),as a a gesture of contempt for the majority of non-intellectual people,(Heidegger's and other existentialists'contempt for the those who unlike himself were not professional thinkers), was in times of crisis an act of irresponsibility.She positioned her self as a member of a plurality of individual human beings with a diversity of interests in the public domain , drawing on the Greek notion of the polis as a template for a democratic society and her reading of American republicanism.Hannah Arendt's "excommunication" by the North American Jewish religious and cultural world following her attempts to address the aetiology of evil while refusing to ground iniquity in human nature, led to rifts in her friendships and fellowship with significant Jewish colleagues and thinkers although some remained loyal.Margarette von Trotta's film seeks to, dramatise this impact of this rejection on the vulnerable Hannah Arendt who was scornful of the Judenrate's, ( Jewish councils')alleged collaboration with the Nazis.The distinction she made in "Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil"written for The New Yorker Magazine between "radical evil", and the banality of evil" she thought could be explained by what was omitted in the genocidal outlook of the Nazi war criminal Eichmann and others, ( the absence of thought and the ability to think for oneself, (thoughtlessness) and the inability to put yourself in another's shoes to see things from the Other's point of view.She noted a reversal of traditional values , which had its roots in philosophical nihilism, celebrating the abnormal as normal and the normal as abnormal.Perpetrators'passive compliance with nihilistic prescriptions showed an absence of will and a divorce between thinking and willing.Professional thinkers like Heidegger, (who became complicit with the Nazis), had abdicated from the imperative to exercise judgement in dire circumstances.Misunderstood by her detractors , and accused of sympathy for the Nazi criminal Eichmann,she felt she had been abandoned and accused of treachery, although she was by no means a Nazi sympathizer.When she saw Eichmann in the dock she realized that he was not the very incarnation of evil, but a human being who had lost his humanity and therefore a right to a call on our sympathy for his plight.Although at one time a displaced person and Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany herself,she felt that she had been abandoned by the Jewish intellectual community she drew on for sustenance.The vehemence with which she was attacked was exceptional for criticism of a Jewish intellectual by her intellectual and cultural peers. Essentially a political humanist under the influence of her philosophic mentor Karl Jaspers, she eschewed the idea of tribalism, ethnocentrism and nationalism,but never disidentified with or denied her Jewish auspices.Following her "excommunication" she continued with her project of reconciling thinking, willing and judging neglected by modern German philosophers and the western philosophic tradition.Elisabeth Young-Bruehl who was convinced that the unjustified attack on Hannah Arendt by many who had not even bothered to read her book, ( for example Isaiah Berlin), but who thought exclusively in terms of both the historical and contemporary Jewish-gentile relations requiring a defensive absence of dissent within the Jewish community,plus the deaths of humans dear to her, hastened her demise.The pathos of Hannah Arendt's rejection, ( although she did not regard herself as a victim and did not wish to be considered so),is lightened by disclosing the futile attempts of W.H. Auden( her friend the celebrated poet), and Hans Morgenthau,( the political realist ),to court her with proposals of marriage after the death of her Sparticist husband Heinrich Blucher.Hannah Arendt felt guilty at the untimely death of her friend Auden following his marriage proposal and plea for help.Hans Morgenthau although critical remained a friend.At best Margarette von Trotta's film biopic based on Elisabeth Young -Bruehl's biography can only provide superficial portrayals of very complex characters such as Kurt Blumenthal, Hans Jonas, Gershon Scholem and Walter Benjamin some of whom are described in depth in the biography .Elisabeth Young-Bruehl convincingly reconstructs the milieu and contribution to civilization of the Weimar German-Jewish and non-Jewish intellectual community.For some years following her untimely death Hannah Arendt's work was taken seriously by a privileged few in the academies,but in 2011 the late Elisabeth Young-Bruehl who had been a doctoral student of Hannah Arendt followed up with her eloquent plea for the real significance of Hannah Arendt's work and legacy in "Why Hannah Arendt Matters."Recently the German Jewish philosopher Willi Goetschel at The University of Toronto in "The Invention of Jewish Thought" quarreling with the neglect of Weimar Jewish thinkers or the banishment of their work to the archives, emphasized the legacy rather than the historicization of Weimar Jewish thinkers as a foundation for the intellectual community to build on..Since her death divergent interests have tried to appropriate Hannah Arendt's work to advance their own causes, but Hannah Arendt, a utopian Zionist whose introduction to Zionism preceded the declaration of the State ,would never have agreed to the divorce of Jewishness and Zionism attempted by the Jewish academic and polemicist Judith Butler in her recent "Parting The Ways", who misappropriates Hannah Arendt's argument in" Eichmann in Jerusalem" for her own purposes .Hannah Arendt never positioned herself as a devotee of any ideology or religious belief as a foundation for thinking, and remained until her death a courageous, divergent, independent thinker, pursuing the truth as she saw it, and always open to a reflexive revision of previous thoughts.To the extent that Hannah Arendt's essaying is grounded in a discourse engaging Enlightenment ideas and the pursuit of reason ,her personal experiences and efforts to reconcile her experiences and thought are hidden from the reader.Elisabeth Young-Bruehl humanises the image of Hannah Arendt by revealing her as an emotional and vulnerable human being in search of a father figure, as well as a consummate, courageous, passionate and original thinker who believed that she was addressing real problems such as the absence of an International Criminal Court and the parlous state of judicial remedies for crimes against humanity.The recent publication of Hannah Arendt's voluminous correspondence has brought to light her very human efforts to reconcile her feelings and thoughts and to defend her version of truth.Although her project was incomplete at her death there has recently been an overwhelming outpouring of efforts to participate in her project, apply the lessons of her work, ( some of it a distortion of her position),and a celebration of her contribution to social and political thought.

エルサレムのアイヒマン裁判についての本を遥か昔に読み、あの本のせいで「ユダヤ民族への愛がない」とゲルショム・ショーレムに非難されたとか、現在でも彼女を嫌うユダヤ人が多いとか、アーレントの肝の太さを示す逸話に興味を持って本書に手を出してみました。かなり以前に読んだもので記憶が曖昧です。アーレントがイデオロギー的には類別困難な人らしいということは分かりました。公民権運動盛りの頃の言動など刺激的で印象に残っています。黒人学生の人数割当制度に対して「学問の場とはそういうものではない」と怒り、学区の人種隔離政策撤廃運動に際しては、子供たちを政治の矢面に立たせる運動家たちを「大人として無責任である」と痛烈に批判したりと、一筋縄ではいかない鋼の思想家らしい。政治の意義は、個人の嗜好の満足でも集団価値の確立でもなく、積極的な市民参加によって「公的空間」を維持することである、というような主張をおぼろに読み取った記憶があります。文化、習慣、宗教、民族、人種といった伝統的紐帯に基づいた政治的コミュニティにアーレントが批判的だったというのは私の読み方が間違っているのかもしれませんが、いまひとつ理解の及ばないところです。20世紀前半の大激動を間近で見て、伝統的枠組みによる価値創造を捨てざる得ないと思惟したのか。こういう知の巨人の思想を安易に理解するのは危険ですが。下世話な部分では、ハイデガーとの愛人関係などは面白い書き方がされてはいませんね。ほぼ同時期に読んだシモーヌ・ヴェイユの『The Need For Roots』をボロボロにして読み返したのとは対照的に、本書を読む限りアーレントとはあまり縁を感じなかったというのが正直な感想。アーレントの説くあるべき社会的枠組みの精神的支柱が分からなかったせいか。理論だけで人間社会を作れるのかしら、と。結局、この本で勢いをつけて何冊かアーレントを読もうという思惑は意気込み倒れに終わりました。ともあれ、本人の著作を精読する根性はないがアーレントに興味のある方にはお薦めです。

This book has become something of a classic. It unearths a mass of detail about Arendt's life - the pages on her upbringing and experiences before her flight from Europe are particularly memorable. However, the main focus is kept firmly on the way Arendt's thought developed during her life. The author (who knew Arendt in her later years)is well versed in philosophy and political thought and so her account is a useful companion to studies of Arendt's many contributions to modern thought:'totalitarianism', 'the banality of evil', the loss of public space in the contemporary west and much more. The book is not the kind of simple minded attempt to reduce the thought to biography that we see all to often. While it is no hagiography (Arendt comes in for some serious criticism on occasion), it ends with a sense of celebration for a life well lived, one of passionate thinking motivated by 'love of the world'.