Politics in dark times: reflections on Hannah Arendt

Moran, Shane

doi:10.1080/02589346.2013.798460

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 25 publications

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“…Although she has been criticized for separating the social from the political (Benhabib, 1996;Pitkin, 1998;Villa, 2001) and for attempting to purify politics (Ranciere, 2001), the strength and influence of her ideas are still immense (e.g. Borren, 2010Borren, , 2013Celik, 2013;Cioflec, 2012;Moran, 2013;Schaap, 2011;Sindic, 2013;Speight, 2011;Straume, 2012;Walsh, 2008).…”

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Hannah Arendt in the streets of Athens

Mavrommatis

2015

Current Sociology

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Athens for some time now has been an important site for civic protest. From the December 2008 'riots' to the Indignant protests and after the streets of Athens have been flaring up in scenes of turmoil and dissent. This article sheds light on a particular moment of this continuous political upheaval, the 2011 Aganaktismenoi movement that grew massively and disappeared into thin air in all but a few months. These political phenomena are approached by deploying Arendt's method of hermeneutic phenomenology and by trying to understand these events through a narrative analysis of participants' stories. Among others, this analysis reveals an emptiness of political narratives (words) that did not correspond with the newness of the political actions (deeds) and allegedly created obstacles for political newness to enter the world of old politics or post-politics. Judging it from the present, political newness as the major political promise of the Syntagma Square occupation did not materialize within the framework of contemporary (democratic) formal politics. Instead, through the passage of time, politics proper found different ways to become enacted through the emergence of a solidarity movement, but also regrettably, through the unimaginable rise of an extreme far-right.

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confidence: 98%

Hannah Arendt in the streets of Athens

Mavrommatis

2015

Current Sociology

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Topographies of Liberal Thought: Rand and Arendt and Race

Thomson

2020

Questioning Ayn Rand

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Rand and Arendt: the assonance is tempting. Yet these are two names rarely if ever voiced in the same breath. There are also some teasing circumstantial resemblances in their trajectories. Disembarking in the United States as bourgeois European Jews in flight from the totalitarian persecutions of early-twentieth century Europe-the one from Bolshevik Russia in 1926, the other Nazi Germany in 1941-both go on to enjoy sorts of philosophical prominence unusual for women in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet these parallels count for so little that the same biographer may write a life of each without mentioning the other. (Heller, 2009;Heller, 2015) Only, it seems, the contrarian genius of Spiked magazine has felt moved to unite them in print, under the deliciously paradoxical banner of an anti-feminist feminism. (Holdsworth, 2016) Otherwise, they might as well inhabit parallel, non-communicating universes. Or at least, since they did inhabit the same public sphere, it seems they occupy distant, maybe even radically dissymmetrical, areas of it. For while Rand addresses only the narrow, shady margin of the libertarian/neo-con right, Arendt has the run of the sunlit agora, commanding the respect of thinkers of widely diverging interests. It is not just a matter of appealing to distinct constituencies or sides. Rather their audiences are constituted in ways that are incommensurable, by an address that is either homogenizing or capable of diversity.If Arendt remains good to think with, even indispensable, in spite of whatever differences we may have with her, it is because she invites us to think in a way that is nuanced, capacious, and multifaceted. But Rand has only one side, offering a single point of entry, and a uniform issue; wearing ever deeper, with relentless trenchancy and driving tendentiousness, the same narrow furrow. This, then, would be why, in the city of political philosophy, one meets Arendt at every turn, and Rand hardly at all.In the last analysis, I cannot honestly say I demur from the broad outline of this account. I would be only too happy never to have to meet a Rand; and, although I have been aware of her since she was namechecked by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, I have hitherto managed to avoid the assignation with the greatest of ease. For this, I suppose, I am indebted to the topography outlined above. There are, nevertheless, some problems arising out of its common-sense appeal to the public sphere as a coherent urban space. For one thing, as some recent swellings seem to confirm, a Rand's narrowness may not preclude a certain power of amplification. There are pronouncements that proliferate in an algorithmic continuum whose most respectable (which is to say normalising) instances would be Jordan Peterson or Douglas Murray, that must remain all but incomprehensible without reference to Randian reason. And it does not matter if this 'reason' seems scarcely reasonable. This only means that the task of understanding how it functions as reason has yet to begin.Can the agora, which likes to think of itself...

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Totalitarian politics and individual responsibility: Revising Hannah Arendt’s inner dialogue through the notion of confession in J. M. Coetzee’sWaiting for the Barbarians

Niemi

2017

South African Journal of Philosophy

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Abstract:Hannah Arendt's writings concerning individual responsibility create an important-and underexamined-context for reading J. M. Coetzee's oeuvre, particularly his novel Waiting for the Barbarians. For Arendt, when a society fails to offer ethical codes of conduct to follow, people should determine those codes by themselves, since morality concerns people in their individuality during totalitarian times. Arendt's ideas bear important similarities to Coetzee's representation of the magistrate in the novel, as this character struggles to live with his conscience in a totalitarian regime. In Arendt's world, introspection is only needed when the world around us fails to guarantee moral laws, and even then one should not focus on oneself only but instead try to focus on the world around us. Coetzee, however, shows through the character of the magistrate how this internal dialogue easily becomes torturous in its nature. If political action is the most important aspect of Arendt's thinking, then Coetzee shows through the character of the magistrate how modern, conscientious humans cannot just act politically; instead, their action is always marked by their personal weaknesses, including their feelings of inadequacy. Nevertheless, even if Arendt emphasizes political action more than Coetzee, who shows that such action is necessarily marked by individual doubt, self-questioning and other personal inadequacies, the reliance on radical thinking, which is at odds with conformism, is a concern they share.

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Politics in dark times: reflections on Hannah Arendt

Cited by 3 publications

References 25 publications

Hannah Arendt in the streets of Athens

Hannah Arendt in the streets of Athens

Topographies of Liberal Thought: Rand and Arendt and Race

Totalitarian politics and individual responsibility: Revising Hannah Arendt’s inner dialogue through the notion of confession in J. M. Coetzee’sWaiting for the Barbarians

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