Hannah Arendt [1906-1975] and Isaiah Berlin [1909-1997] rank among the premier political theorists of the postwar years. They understood that the totalitarianism of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia had exploded all the accepted categories of political thought and moral principles of the Western tradition. Their wide-ranging response was to expose the flaws of the Western political tradition that had permitted totalitarianism to appear and to reconstruct political philosophy on anti-totalitarian premises. This SDG covers their unique analyses of the historical causes of totalitarianism and their controversial solutions as well as other contributions to political theory.
We will examine Arendt’s analyses of the historical Jewish social and political situation in Europe pre Hitler, the nature and causes of totalitarianism, the most important of which is Plato’s disparagement of the active life in the Greek polis as inferior to philosophy, her take on Machiavelli’s principles of “good” government, the absence of the respect for authority in contemporary society and her controversial report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann.
Berlin also seeks the causes of totalitarianism and identifies one such cause as monism, the view that all moral questions have but one answer and are in principle knowable. He accuses Plato as the origin of this fallacy and defends pluralism, the view that genuine values are many, may conflict with one another and, in many cases, there is not one right moral answer. We will address Berlin’s perspective on “positive” and “negative” liberty, and his extensive dialogue with Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment figures in his exploration in the history of ideas.
1. Peter Baehr, "Editor's Introduction," The Portable Hannah Arendt, pp. vii - liv [44 pp.]
Hannah Arendt, "Overview. What Remains? The Language Remains: A Conversation with Günter Grass," The Portable Hannah Arendt, pp. 3 - 22. 19 pp.
Noel Annan, "Foreword," pp. ix -xv [7 pp.]; Roger Hausheer, "Introduction," The Proper Study of Mankind, xxiii - xxxvi [13 pp.]
2. Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," The Proper Study . . . " pp. 191 - 242. 51 pp.
3. Berlin, "The Counter-Enlightenment," The Proper Study . . ." pp. 243-268. 45 pp.
4. Berlin, "The Originality of Machiavelli," The Proper Study . . ." pp. 269 - 325. 57 pp.
5. Berlin, "Herder and the Enlightenment," The Proper Study . . ." pp. 359 - 435. 76 pp.
6. Berlin, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," The Proper Study . . . " pp. 436 - 498. 42 pp.
7. Berlin, "Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism," in The Crooked Timber . . . , pp. 91 - 175. 84 pp.
8. Arendt, "The Jews and Society," The Portable . . ., pp. 75 - 103. 28 pp.
9. Arendt, "Total Domination," The Portable . . . pp. 119 - 145. 27 pp.
10. Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" The Portable . . . pp. 438 - 461. 23 pp.
11. Arendt, "What Is Authority?" The Portable . . . pp. 462 - 507. 46 pp.
12. Arendt, "The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure," The Portable . . . pp. 508 - 539. 31pp.
13. Arendt, "The Social Question," The Portable . . . pp. 247 - 277. 30 pp.
14. Arendt, "Heidegger the Fox" pp. 543 - 444, and excerpts from Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 313 - 416, The Portable . . . . 105 pp.
Peter Baehr, ed., The Portable Hannah Arendt. Penguin, 2000.
Henry Hardy & Roger Hausheer, eds., The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays by Isaiah Berlin. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1997.
Henry Hardy, ed., The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas by Isaiah Berlin. Princeton University Press, 1991.
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