Hannah Arendt's rich and varied political thought is more
influential today than ever before, due in part to the collapse of
communism and the need for ideas that move beyond the old
ideologies of the Cold War. As Dana Villa shows, however, Arendt's
thought is often poorly understood, both because of its complexity
and because her fame has made it easy for critics to write about
what she is reputed to have said rather than what she actually
wrote. Villa sets out to change that here, explaining clearly,
carefully, and forcefully Arendt's major contributions to our
understanding of politics, modernity, and the nature of political
evil in our century.
Villa begins by focusing on some of the most controversial
aspects of Arendt's political thought. He shows that Arendt's
famous idea of the banality of evil--inspired by the trial of Adolf
Eichmann--does not, as some have maintained, lessen the guilt of
war criminals by suggesting that they are mere cogs in a
bureaucratic machine. He examines what she meant when she wrote
that terror was the essence of totalitarianism, explaining that she
believed Nazi and Soviet terror served above all to reinforce the
totalitarian idea that humans are expendable units, subordinate to
the all-determining laws of Nature or History. Villa clarifies the
personal and philosophical relationship between Arendt and
Heidegger, showing how her work drew on his thought while providing
a firm repudiation of Heidegger's political idiocy under the Nazis.
Less controversially, but as importantly, Villa also engages with
Arendt's ideas about the relationship between political thought and
political action. He explores her views about the roles of
theatricality, philosophical reflection, and public-spiritedness in
political life. And he explores what relationship, if any, Arendt
saw between totalitarianism and the "great tradition" of Western
political thought. Throughout, Villa shows how Arendt's ideas
illuminate contemporary debates about the nature of modernity and
democracy and how they deepen our understanding of philosophers
ranging from Socrates and Plato to Habermas and Leo Strauss.
Direct, lucid, and powerfully argued, this is a much-needed
analysis of the central ideas of one of the most influential
political theorists of the twentieth century.
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