Her quote below attests to her preoccupation with politics and the nature of totalitarianism. Man's knowledge and expanded consciousness: therein lies his freedom,inner freedom embedded in that consciousness. Her book on Eichmann brings out Eichmann's use of stock phrases and his inability to think beyond those. She characterizes evil as being banal or indifferent to its own acts.Man's freedom is enlargement of consciousness and thinking beyond the box. Other books written:
Rahel Varnhagen: the life of a Jewess.
The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, edited with an introduction by Ron H. Feldman (1978) Life of the Mind Ed. Mary McCarthy, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, Ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994), Paperback ed. (New York: Schocken, 2005). Love and Saint Augustine Edited with an Interpretive Essay by Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Scott (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996/1998).
Arendt's work
deals with the nature of power, and the
subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism. Much of
her work focuses on affirming a conception of freedom which is synonymous with
collective political action among equals.
Arendt theorizes freedom as public and associative,
drawing on examples from the Greek "polis", American townships, the Paris
Commune, and the civil rights
movements of the 1960s (among others) to illustrate this conception of
freedom.
Another key concept in her work is "natality", the capacity to bring something new into
the world, such as the founding of a government that endures.
Her first
major book was The Origins
of Totalitarianism (1951), which traced the roots of Stalinist Communism and Nazism in both anti-Semitism and imperialism. The book was
controversial because it suggested an essential identity between the two
phenomena, which can be considered as completely separated in both origins and
nature.
Another key concept in her work is "natality", the capacity to bring something new into the world, such as the founding of a government that endures
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because
his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate
himself from necessity.
Hannah Arendt from my google bookmarks. Necessity is not necessarily incompatible with free choice but freedom must be extricated with great labor from necessity lest we float in a dreamstate of delusion thinking we are free when we are sleepwalking. I will research this thought of Hannah's and provide contextual photos and some possible photos and look for videos.
Posts
