Volume 42, Number 6 · April 6, 1995
At Home in This Century
By Tony Judt
Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954
by Hannah Arendt, edited by Jerome Kohn
Harcourt Brace, 458 pp., $39.95
Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975
edited and with an introduction by Carol Brightman
Harcourt Brace, 412 pp., $34.95
Hannah Arendt died twenty years ago, leaving a curious and divided legacy. To some she represented the worst of 'Continental' philosophizing: metaphysical musings upon modernity and its ills unconstrained by any institutional or intellectual discipline and often cavalierly unconcerned with empirical confirmation. They note her weakness for a phrase or an aperçu, often at the expense of accuracy. For such critics her insights into the woes of the century are at best derivative, at worst plain wrong. Others, including the many young American scholars who continue to study and discuss her work, find her a stimulating intellectual presence; her refusal to acknowledge academic norms and conventional categories of explanation, which so frustrates and irritates her critics, is precisely what most appeals to her admirers. Twenty years after her death they see her desire for a 'new politics' of collective public action vindicated by the revolutions of 1989, and her account of modern society in general and totalitarianism in particular confirmed by the course of contemporary history. Both sides have a point, though it is sometimes difficult to remember that they are talking about the same person.
Review, 6804 words
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