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Hannah Arendt and the specter of totalitarianism
"This book treats Hannah Arendt as a distinctly political writer who attempts to carve out a way in which humanity, poised between the Holocaust and the atom bomb, might reclaim its position as the creators of a world fit for human habitation. Marilyn LaFay argues that Arendt tries to bring a humanity into modernity, rejecting the argument that Arendt is an 'antimodernist lover of the Greek polis.' Rather, Arendt tries to politically reconcile the potential of humanity with the demands of the modern condition: she encourages us to locate and use the expressive element of the modern for our political ends. This work identifies the paradox of Arendt's choice of an expressive, existentialist interpretation of politics over that of a politics of vision and imagination, concluding that Arendt's politics leads to little more than political aesthetics"--
"This work positions Arendt as a political writer attempting to find a way in which humanity, poised between the Holocaust and the atom bomb, might reclaim its position as the creators of a world fit for human habitation. Arendt privileges an expressive, existentialist interpretation of politics over that of a politics of vision and imagination. What I argue is lacking in her political discussions is an understanding of political goals. Modernity, for her, is undifferentiated from totalitarianism. She offers us a psychological resistance to the totalitarian rather than focusing on potential outcomes of political life"--
Machine generated contents note:Introduction1. Love and Saint Augustine: The Abstracted Neighbor2. Rahel Varnhagen: The Strangeness of Me3. The Origins of Totalitarianism: A Surfeit of Superfluousness4. Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Crisis of Conscience5. On Revolution: The Fragility of Rights6. Arendt's Public Sphere: Locating a Political Existential7. The Encumbrance of History.
Includes bibliographical references and index
Critical political theory and radical practice