Robert Zaretsky at The American Scholar:
A half-century after Arendt’s death, she has been canonized by political commentators who use—and frequently misuse—phrases and terms Arendt either coined (the banality of evil) or made current (totalitarianism). In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, sales of Arendt’s 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, were so sudden and explosive that Amazon briefly ran out of stock. Moreover, academic interest in Arendt shows no sign of flagging. The number of conferences and centers, monographs, articles, books, and documentaries devoted to Arendt’s life and work continue to proliferate. She was even the subject of an eponymous 2012 feature film by German director Margarethe von Trotta. And all of this while many of the philosopher’s previously undiscovered writings are emerging from various archives. As Thomas Meyer remarks in his own new biography, the 430 published works listed in a recent bibliography pale in comparison to the hundreds of manuscripts, correspondences, and transcripts that have yet to be published.
Meyer’s exploration of a daunting array of archival holdings help make Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind—the subtitle is a nod to Arendt’s last and unfinished book—an intriguing work.
more here.
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