New book on Hannah Arendt: “She can help us orient ourselves in the world”

“There’s actually no other political theorist I enjoy reading as much as Hannah Arendt. I don’t always agree with her premises and conclusions, but her writing encourages me, as a reader, to think things through for myself,” he says, adding “Her life is fascinating, from her childhood and education in Germany, via some years in exile in France in the 1930s, and then onward to the US in the early 1940s, where she lived until her death in 1975.”

Forced to flee from Germany

Arendt was born in what was then German Königsberg, now Russian Kaliningrad, and grew up in a secular Jewish family. She studied philosophy at university and was forced to flee Germany in the 1930s due to Nazism. Her major breakthrough as an author came with The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, in which she examines the emergence of Nazism and Stalinism.

Anders Burman first came across Hannah Arendt whilst studying in Gothenburg in the 1990s, he explains, but it was not until much later that he began to read her work in earnest.

“Together with Ulrika Björk, a philosopher at Södertörn University, I organised a symposium on Arendt in 2010, which subsequently became an anthology. Since then I’ve constantly returned to her ideas – reading and translating texts, editing anthologies, writing my own articles, participating in debates, symposia and conferences, and running courses. Among other things, I run a course on classic works in the history of ideas, focusing on Arendt’s book The Human Condition.”

In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt discusses what distinguishes the various forms of human activity, which she defines as labour, work and action – with human action being what makes humans political beings. In his book, Burman explains Arendt’s thinking: “Through action and politics, something new can be brought into the world, something that breaks with both labour’s cyclical logic and work’s instrumental nature.”

Her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which was published in English in 1963, is perhaps her best known, and the most discussed. It is a report of the trial of SS officer Adolf Eichmann, a major figure in the deportation of millions of Jews to concentration and extermination camps during World War Two. Arendt has been criticised for downplaying the crimes of Eichmann and the Nazis through her use of the phrase “the banality of evil”.

What did Arendt mean by “the banality of evil”?

“In the early 1960s, Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Jerusalem. Arendt attended the trial and wrote a series of articles about it, which were later compiled into A Report on the Banality of Evil. Despite the sheer scale of his crimes, Arendt did not see a sadistic monster or even a fanatical ideologue in Eichmann, but a surprisingly ordinary, obedient, career-minded bureaucrat who let himself be governed by the system’s logic without reflecting on its consequences. That, Arendt argued, was the core of evil: the absence of independent thought.”

Which of Arendt’s works do you find most interesting?

“Well, it’s still The Human Condition – at least it’s the richest in terms of philosophy. But she also wrote many other fascinating books, ranging from her doctoral thesis on Augustine’s concept of love to what we actually do when we think.”

In what ways is her work relevant today?

“My book’s subtitle is ‘Political thought in dark times’. That was how Arendt described her own time, as she had been deeply affected by her experiences of World War Two: totalitarianism, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb. In some respects, we are also living in dark political times, and I believe that Arendt can help us orient ourselves in the world.”

For people who have not previously read Arendt, Burman recommends Between Past and Future, a collection of essays which she described as exercises in political thought.

“They cover everything from tradition and education to freedom and authority. Arendt really asks the reader to keep on reflecting on these things themselves. It’s really thought-provoking reading, and still very interesting and relevant for understanding the world we live in today,” says Burman.