Politics in Dark Times - Cambridge University Pressassets.cambridge.org/97805217/63707/frontmatter/9780521763707... · Seyla Benhabib part iii. politics in dark times 10 In Search

Politics in Dark Times

Encounters with Hannah Arendt

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

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science andPhilosophy at Yale University. She is the author of Critique, Norm andUtopia: 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 editedand coedited seven volumes, most recently with Judith Resnik, Mobilityand Immobility: Gender, Borders and Citizenship (2009). Her work hasbeen translated into fourteen languages, and she was the recipient of the2009 Ernst Bloch Prize for her contributions to cultural dialogues in aglobal civilization.

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Politics in Dark Times

Encounters with Hannah Arendt

Edited by

SEYLA BENHABIBYale University

With the assistance of

ROY T. TSAO

PETER J. VEROVSEKYale University






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First published 2010

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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 2010320.5092–dc22 2010024375

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






Contents

Notes on Contributors page vii

Introduction 1Seyla Benhabib

part i. freedom, equality, and responsibility

1 Arendt on the Foundations of Equality 17Jeremy Waldron

2 Arendt’s Augustine 39Roy T. Tsao

3 The Rule of the People: Arendt, Arche, and Democracy 58Patchen Markell

4 Genealogies of Catastrophe: Arendt on the Logic and Legacyof Imperialism 83Karuna Mantena

5 On Race and Culture: Hannah Arendt and Her Contemporaries 113Richard H. King

part ii. sovereignty, the nation-state, and the rule of law

6 Banishing the Sovereign? Internal and External Sovereigntyin Arendt 137Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen

7 The Decline of Order: Hannah Arendt and the Paradoxes ofthe Nation-State 172Christian Volk

8 The Eichmann Trial and the Legacy of Jurisdiction 198Leora Bilsky

v






vi Contents

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

part iii. politics in dark times

10 In Search of a Miracle: Hannah Arendt and the Atomic Bomb 247Jonathan Schell

11 Hannah Arendt between Europe and America: Optimism inDark Times 259Benjamin R. Barber

12 Keeping the Republic: Reading Arendt’s On Revolution afterthe Fall of the Berlin Wall 277Dick Howard

part iv. judging evil

13 Are Arendt’s Reflections on Evil Still Relevant? 293Richard J. Bernstein

14 Banality Reconsidered 305Susan Neiman

15 The Elusiveness of Arendtian Judgment 316Bryan Garsten

16 Existential Values in Arendt’s Treatment of Evil and Morality 342George 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 ConstitutionMaking under Occupation: The Politics of Imposed Revolution in Iraq (2009);Civil Society, Constitution and Legitimacy (2000); and From Neo-Marxism toDemocratic Theory (1993) and coauthor of Civil Society and Political Theory(1992). He is currently working on a book on constituent authority and anessay volume on dictatorship and modern politics.

Benjamin R. Barber is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos in New Yorkand Walt Whitman Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University. His seventeenbooks 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 MarketsCorrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole (2008). He ispresident and founder of CivWorld, the nongovernmental organization (NGO)that since 2003 has convened the annual Interdependence Day Forum andCelebration in a global city on September 12.

Seyla Benhabib is Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophyat Yale University. Some of her books include The Reluctant Modernism ofHannah Arendt (1996; reissued in 2003); The Rights of Others: Aliens, Citizensand Residents (2004; winner of the Ralph Bunche Award of the AmericanPolitical Science Association); Another Cosmopolitanism, with responses byJeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig, and Will Kymlicka, based on her BerkeleyTanner Lectures and edited by Robert Post (2006); and most recently Mobilityand Immobility: Gender, Borders and Citizenship (2009), edited with JudithResnik.

Richard J. Bernstein is Vera List Professor of Philosophy at the New School forSocial 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 Politicsand 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 ofTransformative Justice: Israeli Identity on Trial (2004).

Jean L. Cohen is Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University. She isthe author of Class and Civil Society: The Limits of Marxian Critical Theory(1982); Civil Society and Political Theory (1992) with Andrew Arato; andRethinking Intimacy: A New Legal Paradigm (2002). She is completing a bookfor Cambridge University Press on legality and legitimacy in the epoch ofglobalization.

Bryan Garsten is Professor of Political Science at Yale University and author ofSaving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (2006). He has alsowritten articles on themes related to representative government in the thoughtof 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, mostrecently The Specter of Democracy (2002); La naissance de la pensee politiqueamericaine (2005); and La democratie a l’epreuve: Chroniques americaines(2006). The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from theGreeks to the American and French Revolutions was published in 2010.

George Kateb is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics Emeritusat 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, OnLiberty, coedited with David Bromwich (2003); and Patriotism and OtherMistakes (2006).

Richard H. King is Professor Emeritus of American Intellectual History at theUniversity of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of Race, Culture and theIntellectuals, 1940–1970 (2004), and coeditor of Hannah Arendt and the Usesof History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide (2007). He is currentlyat work on The American Arendt, which will focus on Arendt’s impact onAmerican thought and the impact of her experience in America on her ownthought.

Karuna Mantena is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University.She has researched and written on empire and imperialism in modern polit-ical thought and, especially, on nineteenth-century British imperial ideology.She is the author of Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of LiberalImperialism (2010).






Notes on Contributors ix

Patchen Markell is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Universityof Chicago and the author of Bound by Recognition (2003). He is currentlywriting a book-length study of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition andis pursuing a longer-term project on conceptions of power, agency, and rule indemocratic theory.

Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, Germany. Her mostrecent books are Evil in Modern Thought (2004), which has been translatedinto 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), amongother books. His most recent book is The Seventh Decade: The New Shape ofNuclear Danger (2008). He is a Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute and alecturer in international studies and ethics, politics, and economics at YaleUniversity.

Roy T. Tsao has taught political theory at Yale, Georgetown, and Brownuniversities. He has published numerous articles on aspects of Arendt’s thought.

Peter J. Verovsek is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Yale Univer-sity. Before coming to Yale, he spent a year on a Fulbright Grant researchinghow memories of World War II continue to affect politics within the formerYugoslavia and in the relations of its successor states with Italy. His dissertationexamines the connection between memory and political community throughthe 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 imDenken Hannah Arendts (2010). He currently holds a postdoctoral position atthe 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 ConstitutionalPolitics” 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.






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Politics in Dark Times - Cambridge University Pressassets.cambridge.org/97805217/63707/frontmatter/9780521763707... · Seyla Benhabib part iii. politics in dark times 10 In Search