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Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy
In the Fall of 1970, Hannah Arendt delivered a series of lectures on Kant’s political philosophy. She was scheduled to teach Kant again in the spring of 1976, though her death in December 1975 prevented her from doing so. Indeed, the fact of her untimely death is central to the story of Arendt’s Kant lectures – both their origin and the scholarly attention given to them. Being lecture notes, they were, of course, not published – nor were they ever intended for publication. Relegated to a cardboard box and stored in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., they became the interest of a then-graduate student, Ronald Beiner, who sought to read them for the purposes of his dissertation research.10-31-2024
Quote of the Weeks
The Unquestioned Optimism of Futurists
This week, we are republishing an essay from Nikita Nelin, originally published in February, 2019.12-27-2019
“How is possible to learn something new from history?”[1]
By Denisse Mendoza JaimesIt is well-known that Hannah Arendt was a German Jewish political theorist who dedicated her life to understanding the meaning of political action in human life. During the interview “Zur person” with Günther Gaus, Arendt points out that her interest in history and politics started in 1933. She took part as a political actor recompiling antisemitic statements...
12-18-2019
Below the Surface.Underlying beliefs that most of us share
By David BrinTake the lesson of the Greatest Generation. Our Roosevelt-era parents and grandparents overcame a mélange of would-be plutocrats, populist tyrants and communist commissars to craft a social contract that unleashed a confident, burgeoning middle class, spectacular universities and science, vast infrastructure and entrepreneurship — plus a too-slow but ponderously-growing momentum toward justice.
12-05-2019
How Race Appears
By Thomas Chatterton WilliamsIn The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt laid out her concept of the polis — literally, an ancient Greek city state, but defined more broadly in Webster’s as “a state or society especially when characterized by a sense of community” — as a departure from the ancient understanding of the term...
11-20-2019
In Such Times
By Kenyon Victor AdamsLi-Young Lee describes poetry as an utterance on the ‘dying breath’ and considers the distinct physiologies of exhalation and inhalation. For Lee, the exhaling or dying breath is foundational to the poet’s work and therefore, in Baldwin’s expansive sense of poetry, the work of all artists. I see a connection between Lee’s proposal of the dying breath as the foundation for all poetic...
10-30-2019
The World in A Cathedral
By Amy SchillerIn May 2019, a fire destroyed a significant part of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. In the two days that followed, individuals and corporations pledged just under a billion Euros toward its repair.This incident hearkened quite directly to Arendt’s invocation of cathedrals as the archetypical example of worldliness, of creating a lasting world that endures beyond the cycles of human need and consumption.
10-16-2019
On the Authority of Children
By Chiara RicciardoneYou’ve seen clips of Greta Thunberg at the U.N. and the Climate Strikers on the streets; you remember how the March for Our Lives movement erupted after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. When Arendt asked in 1959 whether children were being tasked with changing the world, the Little Rock Nine were enacting the change decreed by Brown vs. the Board of Education. Now, high schoolers are the ones bringing lawsuits and demanding action to bring change.
10-07-2019
In the Archive with Hannah Arendt
By Samantha HillWhen Hannah Arendt arrived at the German Literature Archive in Marbach Germany in June 1975 to organize Karl Jasper’s papers, she stood up in the cafeteria and began reciting Friedrich Schiller by heart. She was fond of “Das Mädchen aus der Fremde”, but this is pure speculation. As Arendt said to Günter Gaus in her last interview, she carried German poems around in her hinterkopf. I’d wager she knew more than one.
09-25-2019
Swift as Thought
By Thomas Bartscherer
[W]hen one thinks of things that Homer used to say, the phrase “swift as thought” may not come immediately to mind. It is well known that Homeric epics are replete with formulas, phrases like “rosy-fingered dawn” or “swift-footed Achilles” that are often repeated. To my knowledge, however, there are only three instances in the Greek texts traditionally ascribed to Homer that approximate the English “swift as a thought”...
[W]hen one thinks of things that Homer used to say, the phrase “swift as thought” may not come immediately to mind. It is well known that Homeric epics are replete with formulas, phrases like “rosy-fingered dawn” or “swift-footed Achilles” that are often repeated. To my knowledge, however, there are only three instances in the Greek texts traditionally ascribed to Homer that approximate the English “swift as a thought”...
09-17-2019