Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Speaks on Hannah Arendt

In light of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's recent and untimely passing, we thought it would be appropriate to post two different clips of her speaking about Hannah Arendt. Young-Bruehl was, of course, a student of Arendt as well as her biographer.

The first is an NPR interview from 2006 which marked what would have been Hannah Arendt's 100th birthday. While Young-Bruehl addressed Arendt's writings about Eichmann and the banality of evil, she also discussed Arendt's thoughts on McCarthyism and her fear of close-minded thinking in the United States:

But she, of course, was more worried as the 1950s went on about the implications of the way in which America and its allies opposed Stalin. She was as concerned about this as she was about the Stalinist regime.

Then she was most worried there had come about in America a kind of frame of mind that was quite rigid and obsessional itself, and Joseph McCarthy was the exemplar of this, that found any means to justify the end of anti-communism reasonable.

Listen to the NPR interview here.

The second piece, considerably longer, is a lecture Young-Bruehl delivered at an April, 2010 Conference on Hannah Arendt. Her lecture is entitled, "The Promise of Hannah Arendt's Politics." One of the topics she discussed was Arendt's Post WWII perception of cosmpolitanism and the negative impact of statelessness:

While efforts were being made after the War toward a world politics, a politics in which states could put their resources to the world concerns they shared, working for world peace, intellectuals of various backgrounds were considering the meaning of cosmopolitanism in that historical moment –a window of opportunity before the so-called Cold War gripped the world.  In 2002, looking back on this post-war moment ...two British political theorists, Fine and Cohen, contributing to an essay collection called Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, named the moment  “Arendt’s moment.”  Hannah Arendt had offered an analysis  of “crimes against humanity” that was, they argued, defining of the moment.

By concentrating their attention on Arendt’s thoughts about international law and the 1945 Nuremberg Trials, Fine and Cohen overlooked, I think, the centerpiece of Hannah Arendt’s cosmopolitanism, which was her critique of the late 19th and 20th century sovereign nation-states, which, she emphasized, were states that had turned on groups of their own people, eliminating some and creating wave upon wave of stateless others.

No leaders ... had, in Hannah Arendt’s estimation, grasped fully the key stumbling block to any harmonious world organization of nation-states and any Universal Declaration of Human Rights: the problem of statelessness.

Listen to Young-Bruehl's speech here.