Arendt and America

421 Pages·2015·2.17 MB·English

by  Richard H. King

Arendt and America

ARENDT AND AMERICA
Richard H. King
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Richard H. King is professor emeritus of U.S. intellectual history at the University of
Nottingham, UK. He is the editor of Obama and Race: History, Culture, Politics, coeditor of
Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Race, Nation, Genocide, and the author of
Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970, among other books.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2015 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Printed in the United States of America
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 31149- 4 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 31152- 4 (e- book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226311524.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
King, Richard H., author.
Arendt and America / Richard H. King.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 226- 31149- 4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978- 0- 226- 31152- 4 (e- book)
1. Arendt, Hannah, 1906–1975. 2. United States—History—20th century. 3. Political
scientists—Unites States—Biography. I. Title.
JC251.A74K56 2015
320.5—dc22
2015011456
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper).
To Steve and Larry

CONTENTS
Introduction: Hannah Arendt’s World 1
1 Guilt and Responsibility 25
2 The Origins of Totalitarianism in America 43
3 Rediscovering the World 69
4 Arendt, Tocqueville, and Cold War America 89
5 Arendt, Riesman, and America as Mass Society 109
6 Arendt and Postwar American Thought 125
7 Reflections/Refractions of Race, 1945– 1955 145
8 Arendt, the Schools, and Civil Rights 165
9 The Eichmann Case 189
10 Against the Liberal Grain 219
11 The Revolutionary Traditions 245
12 The Crises of Arendt’s Republic 271
Conclusion— Once More: The Film, Eichmann, and Evil 297
Acknowledgments 319
Notes 325
Index 393
vii

Introduction
Hannah Arendt’s World
At Hannah Arendt’s funeral, December 8, 1975, her friend of a half- century,
philosopher Hans Jonas, reflected on the difference it made that Arendt
had come to the United States. After suggesting that she had first become
politicized in her Parisian exile in the 1930s, Jonas observed: “Still, what
would have become of that, had she not come to these shores— who knows?
It was the experience of the Republic here which decisively shaped her
political thinking, tempered as it was in the fires of European tyranny and
catastrophe, and forever supported by her grounding in classical thought.
America taught her a way beyond the hardened alternatives of left and right
from which she had escaped; and the idea of the Republic, as the realistic
chance for freedom, remained dear to her even in its darkening days.”1 Cer-
tainly Arendt herself believed that there was something different— and
politically liberating— about the American political culture, particularly
the achievement of the Framers. Jonas aptly captured it with the phrase
“the idea of the Republic.”
If the Republic was the great American experience that Arendt responded
to, then the first of the two major themes of Arendt’s work is “beginning
anew.” In the last paragraph of “Ideology and Terror,” an essay added to the
second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958), she connected new
beginnings with what she called “natality”: “Beginning, before it becomes a
1