Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:
On the evening of Dec. 4, 1975, Hannah Arendt was sitting in her living room on Riverside Drive in Manhattan when she suddenly slumped over in the presence of her dinner guests. Less than two months before, she had celebrated her 69th birthday; now, she was dead from a heart attack. Arendt certainly had her share of readers and admirers, but as one of her contemporaries later put it, at the time of her death “she was scarcely considered to be a major political thinker.”
In the decades since, Arendt has become such a revered figure that it can be hard to recall how controversial she was during her lifetime. The historian Tony Judt, writing in 1995, noted her “curious and divided legacy.” Arendt specialized in the big political questions that would naturally preoccupy a German Jew who had fled Europe during World War II — totalitarianism, violence, the problem of evil. Some of her Anglo-American critics dismissed her as too, well, European. Arendt preferred “metaphysical musings upon modernity” (Judt’s words) to the empirical data that has long been an obsession of American political scientists. But for Arendt’s admirers, the United States was in dire need of such “metaphysical musings.” They saw her as a teller of hard truths: someone who could teach a self-identified liberal democracy, flush with confidence in its superiority and resilience, about the modern ills it too often tried to ignore.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.