What We Are Reading:
“Hannah Arendt Changed My Life”

Roger Berkowitz

James Wallner has published a “review” of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition on the occasion of the new edition that appeared last year from the University of Chicago Press. 

Hannah Arendt changed my life. She taught me how to think deeply about the world. Her work helped me to recognize the many contradictions between how I have understood it and its reality. Reading Arendt, I grasped, for the first time, the essential difference between freedom and being ruled. I learned to accept the uncertainty and ambiguity inherent in political activity, and to appreciate how participating in politics enables imperfect individuals to transcend their limitations and discern what James Madison called “justice and the general good” in Federalist 51.
All of this happened by chance several years ago when I rediscovered Arendt while perusing an old bookshop in the Capitol Hill neighborhood where I lived in Washington, D.C. On one particular visit, I happened to pick up a first-edition copy of Between Past and Future. Standing there, in the narrow aisle of the musty shop, amidst many wondrous treasures, I read Arendt’s 1961 pearl from cover to cover.

In the years since that day, I have returned to that book many times (now tucked safely away in my personal library) whenever I needed help thinking through something that I did not fully understand. And I have explored the rest of Arendt’s corpus in that time hoping to find other goodly pearls of great price.

One of the most thought-provoking works that I discovered was her 1958 tract, The Human Condition, which was recently released in a second edition by the University of Chicago Press. Considered by many scholars to be Arendt’s major philosophical work, the book’s emphatic appeal to “think what we are doing” is just as relevant today as it was when it first appeared over sixty years ago.

Read more