More in ‘Hannah Arendt’

Four marquee academics—the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, Canadian public intellectual Charles Taylor, social theorist Judith Butler, and religion historian-cum-one-man-show Cornel West—gathered at Manhattan’s Cooper Union yesterday for a panel discussion on “Rethinking Secularism: The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere.” We caught the second half of the program, when the latter two thinkers spoke. ...

Benjamin Disraeli, from an 1828 portrait by D. Maclise
At a time when most European Jews lived in abject poverty and weren’t even allowed to vote, Benjamin Disraeli’s career reached stratospheric heights. Intimate with royalty and the elite of British society, he was twice prime minister, and served as leader of the Tory party. Yet, because ...

Hannah Arendt
Last October, at a Bard College conference in honor of the hundredth anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s birth, Christopher Hitchens made an interesting, if troubling, argument about Arendt’s analysis of anti-Semitism in modern times. Hitchens’ argument went more or less like this: (a) Arendt treats anti-Semitism as if it can be understood in rational, historical ...

Martin Heidegger
The correspondence between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt was a rumor long before it was a book. In 1982, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt, For Love of the World, revealed publicly what Arendt’s friends had long known: that in the 1920s, Arendt and Heidegger had been lovers. But it was only in 1995 that ...