The International Origins of Hannah Arendt’s Historical Method

Abstract

Abstract. This article examines the multiple ways in which Hannah Arendt's thought arose historically and in international context, but also how we might think about history and theory in new ways with Arendt. It is commonplace to situate Arendt's political and historical thought as a response to totalitarianism. However, far less attention has been paid to the significance of other specifically and irreducibly international experiences and events. Virtually all of her singular contributions to political and international thought were influenced by her lived experiences of and historical reflections on statelessness and exile, imperialism, transnational totalitarianism, world wars, the nuclear revolution, the founding of Israel, war crimes trials, and the war in Vietnam. Yet we currently lack a comprehensive reconstruction of the extent to which Arendt's thought was shaped by the fact of political multiplicity, that there are not one but many polities existing on earth and inhabiting the world. This neglect is surprising in light of the significant 'international turn' in the history of thought and intellectual history; the growing interest in Arendt's thought within international theory; and, above all, Arendt's own unwavering commitment to plurality not simply as a characteristic of individuals but as an essential and intrinsically valuable effect of distinct territorial entities. The article examines the historical and international context of Arendt's historical method, including her critique of process-and development-oriented histories that remain current in different social science fields, setting out and evaluating her alternative approach to historical writing.[T]his system of relationships established by action, in which the past lives on in the form of a history that goes on speaking and being spoken about, can only exist within the world produced by man, nesting there in the stones until they too speak and in speaking bear witness, even if we must first dig them out of the earth.- ' (1955: 5). To be sure, Arendt most often described herself as a political theorist and she should not be read as a conventional historian of imperialism, totalitarianism, and revolution, though she wrote significant books on these subjects. Yet Arendt approached even the most philosophical of questions historically.Some of her earliest scholarly writing engaged with philosophies of history; she consistently sought to establish the historical grounds for her political theory; and she actively embraced and sought to theorize the role of historical experience on political and historical thought. She argued that thought and historical writing is not only bound to time, but also the character of the times governs the possibility of thinking the relationship of the past to the present in a fully historical and political manner. These seemingly simple avowals have profound implications for the task of considering the relation between history and theory, especially historical-theoretical sensibility and method. Given the enormit...

Genealogy of Experiential Frames: Methodological Notes on Arendt

“…In a sense, the examination of Arendt in relation to genealogy has been a long time coming. The historical elements in Arendt's thought have received increasing attention in recent years, and the link between her thought and that of Foucault has been comprehensively established (Owens 2017;King and Stone 2007;Yaqoob 2014;Braun 2007;Blencowe 2012). Furthermore, Nietzsche was one of the philosophers Arendt read early on in her life, and an enduring presence in her letters, notes, and lectures.…”