Front Matter

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-12722-6 - Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt Edited by Seyla Benhabib Frontmatter More information

Politics in Dark Times Encounters with Hannah Arendt

This outstanding collection of essays explores Hannah Arendt’s thought against the background of world-political events unfolding since Septem- ber 11, 2001. It engages in a contentious dialogue with one of the greatest political thinkers of the past century, with the conviction that she remains contemporary. Themes such as moral and political equality, action, natality, judgment, and freedom are reevaluated with fresh insight by a group of thinkers who are themselves well known for their original contributions to political thought. Other essays focus on novel and little-discussed themes in the literature by highlighting Arendt’s views on sovereignty, international law and genocide, nuclear weapons and revolutions, imperialism and Eurocentrism, as well as her contrasting images of Europe and America. Each essay displays not only superb Arendt scholarship but also stylistic ﬂair and analytical tenacity.

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University. She is the author of Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (1986); Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contem- porary Ethics (2002); Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (coauthored with Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, 1996); The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996); The Claims of Cul- ture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (2002); The Rights of Oth- ers: Aliens, Citizens and Residents (2004); and Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations (2006). She has edited and coedited seven volumes, most recently with Judith Resnik, Mobility and Immobility: Gender, Borders and Citizenship (2009). Her work has been translated into fourteen languages, and she was the recipient of the 2009 Ernst Bloch Prize for her contributions to cultural dialogues in a global civilization.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-12722-6 - Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt Edited by Seyla Benhabib Frontmatter More information

Politics in Dark Times Encounters with Hannah Arendt

Edited by SEYLA BENHABIB Yale University

With the assistance of ROY T. TSAO

PETER J. VEROVSEKˇ Yale University

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Politics in dark times : encounters with Hannah Arendt / edited by Seyla Benhabib. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-521-76370-7 (hardback) – isbn 978-0-521-12722-6 (paperback) 1. Arendt, Hannah, 1906–1975. 2. Political science – Philosophy. I. Benhabib, Seyla. II. Title. jc251.a74p66 2010 320.5092–dc22 2010024375

isbn 978-0-521-76370-7 Hardback isbn 978-0-521-12722-6 Paperback

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This publication has been supported by a generous grant from the John K. Castle Fund housed in Yale’s Program on Ethics, Politics and Economics. The Castle Fund was established in honor of Reverend James Pierpont, one of Yale’s original founders.

Contents

Notes on Contributors page vii

Introduction 1 Seyla Benhabib

part i. freedom, equality, and responsibility 1 Arendt on the Foundations of Equality 17 Jeremy Waldron 2 Arendt’s Augustine 39 Roy T. Tsao 3 The Rule of the People: Arendt, Archeˆ, and Democracy 58 Patchen Markell 4 Genealogies of Catastrophe: Arendt on the Logic and Legacy of Imperialism 83 Karuna Mantena 5 On Race and Culture: Hannah Arendt and Her Contemporaries 113 Richard H. King

part ii. sovereignty, the nation-state, and the rule of law 6 Banishing the Sovereign? Internal and External Sovereignty in Arendt 137 Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen 7 The Decline of Order: Hannah Arendt and the Paradoxes of the Nation-State 172 Christian Volk 8 The Eichmann Trial and the Legacy of Jurisdiction 198 Leora Bilsky

vi Contents

9 International Law and Human Plurality in the Shadow of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin 219 Seyla Benhabib

part iii. politics in dark times 10 In Search of a Miracle: Hannah Arendt and the Atomic Bomb 247 Jonathan Schell 11 Hannah Arendt between Europe and America: Optimism in Dark Times 259 Benjamin R. Barber 12 Keeping the Republic: Reading Arendt’s On Revolution after the Fall of the Berlin Wall 277 Dick Howard

part iv. judging evil 13 Are Arendt’s Reﬂections on Evil Still Relevant? 293 Richard J. Bernstein 14 Banality Reconsidered 305 Susan Neiman 15 The Elusiveness of Arendtian Judgment 316 Bryan Garsten 16 Existential Values in Arendt’s Treatment of Evil and Morality 342 George Kateb

Index 375

Notes on Contributors

Andrew Arato is Dorothy H. Hirshon Professor in Political and Social The- ory at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Constitution Making under Occupation: The Politics of Imposed Revolution in Iraq (2009); Civil Society, Constitution and Legitimacy (2000); and From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory (1993) and coauthor of Civil Society and Political Theory (1992). He is currently working on a book on constituent authority and an essay volume on dictatorship and modern politics. Benjamin R. Barber is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos in New York and Walt Whitman Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University. His seventeen books include the classic Strong Democracy (1984), issued in a new twentieth- anniversary edition in 2004; the international best-seller Jihad vs. McWorld, now in thirty languages (1995); and, most recently, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole (2008). He is president and founder of CivWorld, the nongovernmental organization (NGO) that since 2003 has convened the annual Interdependence Day Forum and Celebration in a global city on September 12. Seyla Benhabib is Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University. Some of her books include The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996; reissued in 2003); The Rights of Others: Aliens, Citizens and Residents (2004; winner of the Ralph Bunche Award of the American Political Science Association); Another Cosmopolitanism, with responses by Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig, and Will Kymlicka, based on her Berkeley Tanner Lectures and edited by Robert Post (2006); and most recently Mobility and Immobility: Gender, Borders and Citizenship (2009), edited with Judith Resnik. Richard J. Bernstein is Vera List Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His books include Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question

vii

viii Notes on Contributors

(1996); Freud and the Legacy of Moses (1998); Radical Evil: A Philosophi- cal Interrogation (2002); and The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11 (2005). His most recent book is The Pragmatic Turn (2010). Leora Bilsky is Professor of Law at Tel-Aviv University and the author of Transformative Justice: Israeli Identity on Trial (2004). Jean L. Cohen is Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University. She is the author of Class and Civil Society: The Limits of Marxian Critical Theory (1982); Civil Society and Political Theory (1992) with Andrew Arato; and Rethinking Intimacy: A New Legal Paradigm (2002). She is completing a book for Cambridge University Press on legality and legitimacy in the epoch of globalization. Bryan Garsten is Professor of Political Science at Yale University and author of Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (2006). He has also written articles on themes related to representative government in the thought of Hobbes, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Benjamin Constant. Dick Howard is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State Univer- sity of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of fourteen books, most recently The Specter of Democracy (2002); La naissance de la pensee´ politique americaine´ (2005); and La democratie´ al’` epreuve:´ Chroniques americaines´ (2006). The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the American and French Revolutions was published in 2010. George Kateb is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics Emeritus at Princeton University. His books include Hannah Arendt: Politics, Con- science, Evil (1984); The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Cul- ture (1992); Emerson and Self-Reliance (1994, 2002); John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, coedited with David Bromwich (2003); and Patriotism and Other Mistakes (2006). Richard H. King is Professor Emeritus of American Intellectual History at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970 (2004), and coeditor of Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide (2007). He is currently at work on The American Arendt, which will focus on Arendt’s impact on American thought and the impact of her experience in America on her own thought. Karuna Mantena is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She has researched and written on empire and imperialism in modern political thought and, especially, on nineteenth-century British imperial ideology. She is the author of Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (2010).

Notes on Contributors ix

Patchen Markell is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of Bound by Recognition (2003). He is currently writing a book-length study of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and is pursuing a longer-term project on conceptions of power, agency, and rule in democratic theory. Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, Germany. Her most recent books are Evil in Modern Thought (2004), which has been translated into nine languages, and Moral Clarity: A Guide to Grown-Up Idealists (2008), a New York Times Notable Book. Jonathan Schell is the author of The Fate of the Earth (1982) and The Uncon- querable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (2004), among other books. His most recent book is The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (2008). He is a Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute and a lecturer in international studies and ethics, politics, and economics at Yale University. Roy T. Tsao has taught political theory at Yale, Georgetown, and Brown universities. He has published numerous articles on aspects of Arendt’s thought. Peter J. Verovsekˇ is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Yale Univer- sity. Before coming to Yale, he spent a year on a Fulbright Grant researching how memories of World War II continue to affect politics within the former Yugoslavia and in the relations of its successor states with Italy. His dissertation examines the connection between memory and political community through the development of the European Union. Christian Volk received his doctoral degree from Aachen University (Germany) in 2009. He is the author of Die Ordnung der Freiheit. Recht und Politik im Denken Hannah Arendts (2010). He currently holds a postdoctoral position at the Humboldt-University in Berlin and is working on his Habilitationsprojekt “The Paradigm of Post-Sovereignty: Law and Democracy in a Global Order.” Jeremy Waldron is University Professor at New York University School of Law. He is the author of Law and Disagreement (1999) and God, Locke and Equa- lity (2002) among other books. He is the author of “Arendt’s Constitutional Politics” in Dana Villa (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (2001) and “What Would Hannah Say?” in The New York Review of Books, March 15, 2007.