"...race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death...” from Origins of Totalitarianism
June 6-9
Hudson Valley, NY
Rekindling the art of thinking together
This year's text seminar read Arendt's writings on race, racism, and antisemitism. As an intensive two-day workshop, the seminar’s goal was to pursue the thread of race in Arendt’s thought through her writings and to understand the meaning of race for Arendt. In addition, the seminar asked how the category of race frames and structures her critical project in not always acknowledged ways.
We invited scholars from all fields to propose to read closely and critically a specific passage or text by Arendt on race or racism. Watch the video above for an overview.
Historical Background
Hannah Arendt is one of few canonical political thinkers who wrote extensively about race. The Origins of Totalitarianism contains two key chapters on the emergence of racism as a political ideology and the way racism works through bureaucratic as opposed to legal governance. As a Jew who suffered through the rise and reign of Nazism, she analyzed antisemitism as a form of racism. In seeking to understand the ideological power of antisemitism, she came to understand both antisemitism and racism as anti-legal, anti-national, and globalist ideologies based upon quasi-scientific ideas of racial superiority and inferiority. Race, she argued, is "not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death."
Arendt’s arrival in the United States in 1940 confronted her with new racial and racist dynamics, particularly with the legacy of slavery and anti-Black racism but also with new forms of “minority” activism. In fact, her most prominent conceptual contribution to political theory, the notion of power, may have taken inspiration from what were arguably the most important grassroots political phenomena of her time, Civil Rights and the Black Power movements that followed it.
Historical Background
Hannah Arendt is one of few canonical political thinkers who wrote extensively about race. The Origins of Totalitarianism contains two key chapters on the emergence of racism as a political ideology and the way racism works through bureaucratic as opposed to legal governance. As a Jew who suffered through the rise and reign of Nazism, she analyzed antisemitism as a form of racism. In seeking to understand the ideological power of antisemitism, she came to understand both antisemitism and racism as anti-legal, anti-national, and globalist ideologies based upon quasi-scientific ideas of racial superiority and inferiority. Race, she argued, is "not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death."
Arendt’s arrival in the United States in 1940 confronted her with new racial and racist dynamics, particularly with the legacy of slavery and anti-Black racism but also with new forms of “minority” activism. In fact, her most prominent conceptual contribution to political theory, the notion of power, may have taken inspiration from what were arguably the most important grassroots political phenomena of her time, Civil Rights and the Black Power movements that followed it. A look at her library and references shows that Arendt was aware both of contemporary research on race, (for instance of the work of Ruth Benedict who, in her 1940 book Race: Science and Politics, deconstructs the concept of race) as well as of analyses of the political strategies of anti-racist activism as described, for instance, in Arthur Waskow’s From Race Riot to Sit-In (1966). She also wrote, often scathingly, about student and Black Power activism and ideas, such as those outlined in the “Black Manifesto” (1969) of the National Black Economic Development Conference under James Foreman. Privately, Arendt’s archive shows some traces of correspondence on the question of race. Namely, she read and responded to James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. Her one attempt to engage in public discourse around U.S. racism was her publication of the essay "Reflections on Little Rock," which sought to warn against forced integration of schools.
In the last decade, scholarly and public attention has raised the question of Hannah Arendt’s standing on the question of race, particularly as it relates to her understanding of the Black experience in the United States. Her writings on antisemitism, colonialism, and racism show not so much a unified theory of race or racism than an impulse to draw parallels between racialized minorities on the one hand and an effort to situate race within fundamental distinctions such as private and public, political and social on the other. Above all, Arendt distinguishes racism as an ideology of legal superiority from what she alternatively calls race thinking, prejudice, or social discrimination. These distinctions place race squarely in Arendt’s political project, but they have also drawn criticism that raises questions not only about Arendt’s ideas on race, but about her notion of politics as a whole.
What is the Text Seminar?
Each year the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network and the Arendt Center hosts a Text Seminar. We bring together OSUN scholars and up to two outside international experts for one week to read closely a classic work of political or democratic thinking. Read about past years' texts below!
2021: Karl Popper's The Open Society
For our inaugural Text Seminar, we read Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. This is the book that greatly influenced the founder of OSUN, George Soros. It is one of the great works of political thinking that defends liberal freedom over and against totalitarian movements.The inaugural text seminar occurred in July 2021 in Rhinebeck, NY, near Bard College’s New York campus.
This year’s seminar revisited Hannah Arendt’s pivotal work The Human Condition (1958), alongside the German version, Vita activa. Oder vom tätigen Leben (1960). There are key differences between the two versions, including new arrangements of ideas, changes in emphasis and quotations, and new allusions to philosophical and literary traditions. The books are exemplary of Arendt’s postwar writing practice, in which she prepared different versions of her writing for German and English-speaking audiences.