"A revelation that may force us to reconsider the traditional interpretation of Arendt's work."
Now published in English for the first time, Arendt's 1929 doctoral dissertation offers insights into her later political and philosophical constructions.
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"Largely 'residual reflections,' according to Kohn, these pieces appear to be quaint, irrelevant, and narrowly focused exercises, only faintly foreshadowing the 'bleak pessimism' of the 'terrible century' Arendt was later to dissect."
Compiled, edited, and briefly annotated by Hannah Arendt's longtime assistant Jerome Kohn (Political and Social Science/New School), this first of two projected volumes collecting Arendt's (1906-75) essays, addresses, and reviews up to 1954 contains two previously unpublished essays: "On the Nature of Totalitarianism" (1953) and "The Concern with Politics in Contemporary European Philosophical Thought" (1954).
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"And these explorations of the life of mind perfectly exemplify the vigorous life that she praises—most pertinently and accessibly in Volume One."
This book may sound forbidding, but do not be dissuaded, for it is a majestic work of deep humility and earnestness, and radiant imagination.
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"Arendt's insight into the psychology and the situation of pariah and parvenu is essential."
Intellectual history as biography; and biography as the reconstruction from letters and diaries of the inner life and passions of a Jew disenfranchised on account of "infamous birth."
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"With her air of authority and European worldly wisdom, Arendt often gets away with saws and sophistries; but politically-minded readers will relish the chance to tangle with her intelligence."
First published as a separate book in 1969, "On Violence" has become influential with its emphasis on the inverse relation between power and violence.
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Hierarchy of values, knowledge, sympathy, independence and lucidity of judgment, above all an historical mind—these are the attributes of the beneficent critic.
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"But no matter; as everyone knows, Miss Arendt writes like an angel who could outwit the devil; ten or twenty years from now her little book should still be one of the key references to an understanding of barbarism-and-bureaucracy, a 20th century phenomenon."
Hannah Arendt's superb study of Adolf Eichmann operates on a three-pronged front: as a legalistic clearing ground (the Israeli-or-International Court controversy; the relation to the Nuremberg and Successor trials; the forced deportations and "final solution"; Nazis, past and present, and West Germany today); as a psychological description (was Eichmann really a "perverted sadist" or was he "terribly and terrifyingly normal",- a sort of totalitarian age Everyman who no longer knows or feels what a "criminal act" is?); and as a philosophical query (what is the meaning of justice, what are the measurements of morality, when through Auschwitz and Buchenwald the very concepts of good and evil become banalities?).
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"A powerful indictment and illumination, both immediate and enduring."
Hannah Arendt is one of the world's most profound political scientists: her scholarship is sterling, her philosophical- psychological insights staggering; two of her books Origins of Totalitariansim and Human Condition are among the few significant works in her field and our era.
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"The most her book can do is make the average reader comprehend that his education is totally inadequate."
Between Past and Future is a collection of six long and rhetoric-filled essays that strive to measure how far modern man has strayed from the classical tradition, in both the way he educates his children and the way he evolves his outlook on life.
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"A highly serious and commanding study, written not only knowledgeably but eloquently."
A tri-partite study of anti-semitism (not merely the hatred of the Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest) and totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship) which examines political, social and historical forces with an impressive scholarship. Dr. Arendt traces the decline of European Jewry and their persecution as a powerless group under Hitler back to the preparatory causes and the rise of anti-semitism, follows their ascendant and falling social prestige through the 19th century.
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