Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I TOTALITARIANISM AND NATIONALISM
- 1 Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism
- 2 Arendt and nationalism
- PART II POLITICAL EVIL AND THE HOLOCAUST
- PART III FREEDOM AND POLITICAL ACTION
- PART IV ARENDT AND THE ANCIENTS
- PART V REVOLUTION AND CONSTITUTION
- PART VI JUDGMENT, PHILOSOPHY, AND THINKING
- Select bibliography
- Index
2 - Arendt and nationalism
from PART I - TOTALITARIANISM AND NATIONALISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I TOTALITARIANISM AND NATIONALISM
- 1 Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism
- 2 Arendt and nationalism
- PART II POLITICAL EVIL AND THE HOLOCAUST
- PART III FREEDOM AND POLITICAL ACTION
- PART IV ARENDT AND THE ANCIENTS
- PART V REVOLUTION AND CONSTITUTION
- PART VI JUDGMENT, PHILOSOPHY, AND THINKING
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
There really is such a thing as freedom here [in America]. . . . The republic is not a vapid illusion, and the fact that there is no national state and no truly national tradition creates an atmosphere of freedom . . .
letter to Karl Jaspers, January 29, 1946“love of the Jews” would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person.
letter to Gershom Scholem, July 24, 1963Hannah Arendt is sometimes regarded as an important source of, or inspiration behind, contemporary communitarian political thought. There is some measure of truth to this view, but to think of her political theory as distinctively communitarian is more than a little misleading. For what characterizes communitarianism as a philosophical challenge to liberalism is a highlighting of how the self is constituted by collective or group identity, and an argument that insufficient concern with thick shared identities marks a central deficiency of liberal-individualist conceptions of political community. If, however, a properly communitarian argument emphasizes the collective constitution of selfhood, and the political salience of the shared identity so constituted, one would expect communitarians to exhibit significant sympathy for the politics of nationalism - a form of politics that places shared identity and thick communal attachments at the very core of its understanding of political life. Yet, as we shall see, Arendt's thought shows itself to be, in this respect, pronouncedly anti-communitarian. Thus an examination of Arendt's stance toward nationalism should help to clarify those aspects of her thought that are located at the furthest remove from specifically communitarian concerns. Though the Arendtian and communitarian critiques of liberalism do overlap in important ways, there is a fundamental respect in which Arendt's criticisms of liberalism are motivated by a very different set of theoretical concerns than those characteristic of the communitarian critique.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt , pp. 44 - 62Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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