Few thinkers have addressed the political horrors and ethical complexities of the twentieth century with the insight and passionate intellectual integrity of Hannah Arendt. She was irresistible drawn to the activity of understanding, in an effort to endow historic, political, and cultural events with meaning. Essays in Understanding assembles many of Arendt’s writings from the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s. Included here are illuminating discussions of St. Augustine, existentialism, Kafka, and Kierkegaard: relatively early examinations of Nazism, responsibility and guilt, and the place of religion in the modern world: and her later investigations into the nature of totalitarianism that Arendt set down after The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951. The body of work gathered in this volume gives us a remarkable portrait of Arendt’s developments as a thinker—and confirms why her ideas and judgments remain as provocative and seminal today as they were when she first set them down.
From Publishers Weekly
This invigorating collection of Arendt's essays, lectures and reviews opens with a 1964 interview in which the noted political scientist and philosopher described her hair-raising escape in 1933 from Nazi Germany to Paris, then New York City. A central theme of these pieces, gathered from Partisan Review , the Nation and elsewhere, is the power of ideology to blind its adherents, whether in the service of Nazi or communist totalitarianism. Arendt (1906-1975) characterizes fascism as an antinationalist global movement inextricably linked to anti-Semitism. Elsewhere, she criticizes Sartre and Camus for nihilistic thinking. This first of three volumes of Arendt's uncollected works includes essays on Kafka's nightmare world, Kierkegaard, Augustine's Confessions as prototype of the modern psychological novel, Berlin cutural salons of the 1790s (which were open to Jewish women and men), the threat of nuclear war and Europe's image of the U.S. as a rootless nation. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Hannah Arendt sometimes denied that she was a philosopher, but these essays tell us why she may be remembered as the quintessential philosopher of our time. A German Jewish woman, she grew up in a country rich in thought and culture but unable to protect simple human decency. She fled to America, where political life was still possible but intellectuals were regarded as performers in a mental circus--entertaining but of little ultimate importance. To bring the two together, Arendt defined herself as a political theorist. But these essays show the roots of her political theory deep in the Western past; St. Augustine and Kant above all are visible. Her essays light up issues--the emancipation of women, federalism in eastern Europe, and many others--in a way that often makes them seem as if they were written yesterday. Briefly the mistress of Heidegger (noted here as a "fox" who "built a trap as his burrow") and the lifelong friend of Jaspers, she never became the prisoner of any movement. None of these essays is technical, and the translations are lucid. This first of three volumes of her uncollected or unpublished essays should have a place in any sizable library. - Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Hannah Arendt, distinguished writer, teacher, and humanist, died in 1975. Although she considered herself to be a political theorist and not a philosopher, from her earliest years her primary intellectual activity was that of seeking "to understand." In this collection of articles and essays--spanning nearly 25 years--Arendt exhibits a decidedly philosophical nature and the global concerns of a political scientist. Existentialism, Kierkegaard, and Kafka are featured topics. The "German problem," fascism, and the horrors of Nazism all come under the scrutiny of this exhilarating thinker, who tackled issues most crucial to life in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and to contemporary life as well. Two more volumes of Arendt's unpublished works are to follow later. Alice Joyce --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Hannah Arendt taught political science and philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and at the University of Chicago. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
The emancipation of women has to a certain extent become a fact: almost all professions stand open to today's woman, who, socially and politically, enjoys the same rights as man, including the right to vote and the right to run for office. In contrast to these tremendous steps forward, the restrictions imposed on women -especially in marriage, where their right to earn a living and acquire property still depends on their husband's consent-appear to be the "inconsequential" remains of a previous era, no matter how important they may be in individual cases. Looked at closely, however, women's emancipation, guaranteed in principle, has something formal about it. For, although today's women have the same rights legally as men, they are not valued equally by society. Economically, their inequality is reflected in the fact that in many cases they work for a considerably lower wage than men. If they were to work on the same pay scale, they would-in keeping with their social value-simply lose their positions of employment. This would definitely be a reactionary development, since at least for the time being the independence of women is economic independence from men. Only the so-called higher professions, such as medicine and law, are exempt from this paradoxical situation of having partially to renounce equality for the sake of equality. These professions are numerically unimportant, however, even if strictly speaking they are the ones that owe their privileges to the women's movement. The working woman is an economic fact, beside which the ideology of the women's movement marches along.
The average situation of the professional woman is much more complicated. Not only must she accept, despite her legal equality, less remuneration for her work, but also she must continue to do socially and biologically grounded tasks that are incompatible with her new position. In addition to her profession, she must take care of her household and raise her children. Thus a woman's freedom to make her own living seems to imply either a kind of enslavement in her own home or the dissolution of her family.
These "contemporary women's issues" constitute the starting point of A. Riihle-Gerstel's book. She describes the many ways by which women characteristically try to deal with their situations. Proceeding from the correct insight that the biological factor of motherhood is not simply a factum brutum but can also be modified by social changes, she follows a method that is based on an individual psychology and its global claim that all human achievements, positive and negative, are the result of an original overcompensation. This theory, applied not just to the life history of a given individual, but to an entire class, makes it possible to recognize typical overcompensations and even to discern their models. The description of these models-the housewife, the princess, the demoness: the compassionate, the childish, the capable, the shrewd, the overstressed-is the strongest and most original contribution of this book.
The author sees the position of women in contemporary society as doubly complicated. First, apart from her own social class, as a housewife she is the propertyless employee of a male employer, especially when she lives in a bourgeois or petty bourgeois environment. She is not even a proletarian, not even an independent salaried worker. Second, as a working woman she is almost always a salaried employee. The ambivalence of these conditions becomes especially clear when considered from a political point of view. Women in this situation have not gone forward on political fronts, which are still masculine fronts. And, furthermore, whenever the women's movement crosses a political front it does so only as a unified, undifferentiated whole, which never succeeds in articulating concrete goals (other than humanitarian ones). The vain attempt to found a women's political party reveals the problem of the movement very sharply. The problem is like that of the youth movement, which is a movement only for the sake of youth. A women's movement only for the sake of women is equally abstract.
If women saw their situation clearly, they would, according to Riihle-Gerstel, associate themselves with the mass of the working classes, despite their constant struggle for equality in that realm. This way their political coordination would rest upon the social situation sketched above. But both this political recommendation and the analysis of the social situation are problematic. The typical housewife becomes a propertyless employee only when her marriage breaks up. At that point, for the first time, she can enter the proletarian situation (the author means to say: for the first time, her proletarian situation becomes clear to her). But this analysis does not take into account the reality that, even in the case of divorce, the woman is in most cases still caught up in the social unit to which she belongs. Identifying woman's dependence on a man with that of the employee on the employer proceeds from a definition of the proletarian much too oriented on the individual. The individual should not be the unit of analysis, but, rather, the family, which is either proletarian or bourgeois, regardless of whether in one case a proletarian woman may be treated like a princess and in another case a bourgeois housewife like a slave.
Despite its verbosity, this book is instructive and stimulating. Its conclusion, "The Balance Sheet of Femininity," is presented with a slightly tasteless pathos. Further, the main basis for her study, a research sample which included only 155 subjects, was not large enough to support the sweeping conclusions the author draws. The statistics frequently lack the kind of sociological and geographical spread that would legitimate her generalizations. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
Few thinkers have addressed the political horrors and ethical complexities of the twentieth century with the insight and passionate intellectual integrity of Hannah Arendt. She was irresistible drawn to the activity of understanding, in an effort to endow historic, political, and cultural events with meaning. Essays in Understanding assembles many of Arendt’s writings from the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s. Included here are illuminating discussions of St. Augustine, existentialism, Kafka, and Kierkegaard: relatively early examinations of Nazism, responsibility and guilt, and the place of religion in the modern world: and her later investigations into the nature of totalitarianism that Arendt set down after The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951. The body of work gathered in this volume gives us a remarkable portrait of Arendt’s developments as a thinker—and confirms why her ideas and judgments remain as provocative and seminal today as they were when she first set them down.
From Publishers Weekly
This invigorating collection of Arendt's essays, lectures and reviews opens with a 1964 interview in which the noted political scientist and philosopher described her hair-raising escape in 1933 from Nazi Germany to Paris, then New York City. A central theme of these pieces, gathered from Partisan Review , the Nation and elsewhere, is the power of ideology to blind its adherents, whether in the service of Nazi or communist totalitarianism. Arendt (1906-1975) characterizes fascism as an antinationalist global movement inextricably linked to anti-Semitism. Elsewhere, she criticizes Sartre and Camus for nihilistic thinking. This first of three volumes of Arendt's uncollected works includes essays on Kafka's nightmare world, Kierkegaard, Augustine's Confessions as prototype of the modern psychological novel, Berlin cutural salons of the 1790s (which were open to Jewish women and men), the threat of nuclear war and Europe's image of the U.S. as a rootless nation.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Hannah Arendt sometimes denied that she was a philosopher, but these essays tell us why she may be remembered as the quintessential philosopher of our time. A German Jewish woman, she grew up in a country rich in thought and culture but unable to protect simple human decency. She fled to America, where political life was still possible but intellectuals were regarded as performers in a mental circus--entertaining but of little ultimate importance. To bring the two together, Arendt defined herself as a political theorist. But these essays show the roots of her political theory deep in the Western past; St. Augustine and Kant above all are visible. Her essays light up issues--the emancipation of women, federalism in eastern Europe, and many others--in a way that often makes them seem as if they were written yesterday. Briefly the mistress of Heidegger (noted here as a "fox" who "built a trap as his burrow") and the lifelong friend of Jaspers, she never became the prisoner of any movement. None of these essays is technical, and the translations are lucid. This first of three volumes of her uncollected or unpublished essays should have a place in any sizable library.
- Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Hannah Arendt, distinguished writer, teacher, and humanist, died in 1975. Although she considered herself to be a political theorist and not a philosopher, from her earliest years her primary intellectual activity was that of seeking "to understand." In this collection of articles and essays--spanning nearly 25 years--Arendt exhibits a decidedly philosophical nature and the global concerns of a political scientist. Existentialism, Kierkegaard, and Kafka are featured topics. The "German problem," fascism, and the horrors of Nazism all come under the scrutiny of this exhilarating thinker, who tackled issues most crucial to life in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and to contemporary life as well. Two more volumes of Arendt's unpublished works are to follow later. Alice Joyce --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Hannah Arendt taught political science and philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and at the University of Chicago. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
Compiled, edited, and briefly annotated by Hannah Arendt's longtime assistant Jerome Kohn (Political and Social Science/New School), this first of two projected volumes collecting Arendt's (1906-75) essays, addresses, and reviews up to 1954 contains two previously unpublished essays: On the Nature of Totalitarianism'' (1953) andThe Concern with Politics in Contemporary European Philosophical Thought'' (1954). The personal, affectionate, and slightly apologetic introduction places these mostly fugitive pieces in context, but it is still difficult to see evidence here of the seminal role Arendt was to play in modern political theory, especially in analyzing the nature and dangers of totalitarianism and the mercurial nature of justice, which she explored in her popular, controversial, and, she believed, misunderstood Eichmann in Jerusalem. Kohn's collection opens with Arendt's defense of that study and some personal reminiscences expressed in a 1964 interview with G'nter Gaus. The volume also offers commemorative addresses on St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Karl Jaspers as well as re-evaluations of the forgotten, such as Friedrich von Gentz (1764-1832), and of the fleeting, the Berlin Salon from 1789-1806. There are book reviews ranging from the anachronistic 1933 German monograph On the Emancipation of Women and Karl Mannheim's heady Ideology and Utopia to Denis De Rougement's unlikely history of Satan, The Devil's Share. Included too are essays on the foreign-language press in America, on postwar Germany, fascism, communism, the atom bomb, McCarthyism, more characteristic ethical reflections on guilt and responsibility, and concise histories of French and German existentialism. Largely residual reflections,'' according to Kohn, these pieces appear to be quaint, irrelevant, and narrowly focused exercises, only faintly foreshadowing thebleak pessimism'' of the ``terrible century'' Arendt was later to dissect. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
On the Emancipation of Women
(1933)
The emancipation of women has to a certain extent become a fact: almost all professions stand open to today's woman, who, socially and politically, enjoys the same rights as man, including the right to vote and the right to run for office. In contrast to these tremendous steps forward, the restrictions imposed on women -especially in marriage, where their right to earn a living and acquire property still depends on their husband's consent-appear to be the "inconsequential" remains of a previous era, no matter how important they may be in individual cases. Looked at closely, however, women's emancipation, guaranteed in principle, has something formal about it. For, although today's women have the same rights legally as men, they are not valued equally by society. Economically, their inequality is reflected in the fact that in many cases they work for a considerably lower wage than men. If they were to work on the same pay scale, they would-in keeping with their social value-simply lose their positions of employment. This would definitely be a reactionary development, since at least for the time being the independence of women is economic independence from men. Only the so-called higher professions, such as medicine and law, are exempt from this paradoxical situation of having partially to renounce equality for the sake of equality. These professions are numerically unimportant, however, even if strictly speaking they are the ones that owe their privileges to the women's movement. The working woman is an economic fact, beside which the ideology of the women's movement marches along.
The average situation of the professional woman is much more complicated. Not only must she accept, despite her legal equality, less remuneration for her work, but also she must continue to do socially and biologically grounded tasks that are incompatible with her new position. In addition to her profession, she must take care of her household and raise her children. Thus a woman's freedom to make her own living seems to imply either a kind of enslavement in her own home or the dissolution of her family.
These "contemporary women's issues" constitute the starting point of A. Riihle-Gerstel's book. She describes the many ways by which women characteristically try to deal with their situations. Proceeding from the correct insight that the biological factor of motherhood is not simply a factum brutum but can also be modified by social changes, she follows a method that is based on an individual psychology and its global claim that all human achievements, positive and negative, are the result of an original overcompensation. This theory, applied not just to the life history of a given individual, but to an entire class, makes it possible to recognize typical overcompensations and even to discern their models. The description of these models-the housewife, the princess, the demoness: the compassionate, the childish, the capable, the shrewd, the overstressed-is the strongest and most original contribution of this book.
The author sees the position of women in contemporary society as doubly complicated. First, apart from her own social class, as a housewife she is the propertyless employee of a male employer, especially when she lives in a bourgeois or petty bourgeois environment. She is not even a proletarian, not even an independent salaried worker. Second, as a working woman she is almost always a salaried employee. The ambivalence of these conditions becomes especially clear when considered from a political point of view. Women in this situation have not gone forward on political fronts, which are still masculine fronts. And, furthermore, whenever the women's movement crosses a political front it does so only as a unified, undifferentiated whole, which never succeeds in articulating concrete goals (other than humanitarian ones). The vain attempt to found a women's political party reveals the problem of the movement very sharply. The problem is like that of the youth movement, which is a movement only for the sake of youth. A women's movement only for the sake of women is equally abstract.
If women saw their situation clearly, they would, according to Riihle-Gerstel, associate themselves with the mass of the working classes, despite their constant struggle for equality in that realm. This way their political coordination would rest upon the social situation sketched above. But both this political recommendation and the analysis of the social situation are problematic. The typical housewife becomes a propertyless employee only when her marriage breaks up. At that point, for the first time, she can enter the proletarian situation (the author means to say: for the first time, her proletarian situation becomes clear to her). But this analysis does not take into account the reality that, even in the case of divorce, the woman is in most cases still caught up in the social unit to which she belongs. Identifying woman's dependence on a man with that of the employee on the employer proceeds from a definition of the proletarian much too oriented on the individual. The individual should not be the unit of analysis, but, rather, the family, which is either proletarian or bourgeois, regardless of whether in one case a proletarian woman may be treated like a princess and in another case a bourgeois housewife like a slave.
Despite its verbosity, this book is instructive and stimulating. Its conclusion, "The Balance Sheet of Femininity," is presented with a slightly tasteless pathos. Further, the main basis for her study, a research sample which included only 155 subjects, was not large enough to support the sweeping conclusions the author draws. The statistics frequently lack the kind of sociological and geographical spread that would legitimate her generalizations. --This text refers to the paperback edition.