Social Research articles from December 2007

Social Research archives from December 2007

Editor's introduction.(Editorial)
December 22, 2007... THIS IS THE SECOND OF TWO ISSUES CELEBRATING THE 100TH YEAR of Hannah Arendt's birth. Together the two issues present a variety of different perspectives on her work and testify to her strong continuing influence on Western thought. However,...

Guest editor's introduction.(Editorial)
December 22, 2007... Tell all the truth, but tell it scant--Success in Circuit lies --Emily Dickinson THE FIRST PART OF HANNAH ARENDT'S ESSAY "THE GREAT TRADITION," subtitled "Law and Power," which was published in the previous issue of Social Research...

The great tradition II. Ruling and being ruled.(Essay)
December 22, 2007... IF NOW, IN THE LIGHT OF MONTESQUIEU'S INSIGHTS, WE RECONSIDER THE TRADITION not from its end but from its beginning and ask ourselves what role the experience of rule played, in what realm of life it was chiefly located, we should remember that...

Against the sovereignty of philosophy over politics: Arendt's reading of Plato's cave allegory.(Hannah Arendt)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... HANNAH ARENDT IS CELEBRATED AS ONE OF THE GREAT PHILOSOPHERS of our time. But is such a celebration truly legitimate? Indeed, as surprising and as paradoxical as it may seem, Hannah Arendt has always demonstrated a strong opposition to...

Arendt, Heidegger, and the Tradition.(Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... IN THIS ESSAY I WANT TO SUGGEST THAT THE ANTAGONISM MANY critics feel toward Arendt's attempt to conceptualize action as an end in itself--as a "pure" form of praxis--rests on a fairly basic misunderstanding. What is this...

Arendt, Heidegger, Jaspers: thinking through the breach in tradition.(Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers )(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... I FOR MUCH OF THE 1920S AND THE EARLY 1930s, HANNAH ARENDT, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers shared a common world of thought and experience. In particular, * they shared a sense of the thoroughgoing crisis within modernity; *...

Hannah Arendt: politics, opinion, truth.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... THE DIVERGENCE BETWEEN PHILOSOPHICAL TRUTH AND POLITICAL opinion has solidified into a "political philosophy" that, for Arendt, lacks legitimacy. The Platonic victory over the Sophists--a victory for which Socrates was fraudulently...

Truth, lies, and politics: a conversation.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... EY-B: WHEN JEROME KOHN AND I FIRST MET HER--AND EACH OTHER--IN A spring and summer 1968 seminar at the New School, Hannah Arendt was 62, smoking away nervously and talking with that astonishing intensity and energy of thought. During the...

The elusiveness of Arendtian judgment.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... Truly political activities... cannot be performed at all without the presence of others, without the public, without a space constituted by the many. --Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture" As a spectator you may understand the "truth" of...

"... sed victa Catoni": the defeated cause of revolutions.
December 22, 2007... Qui cherche dans la liberte autre chose qu'elle-meme est fait pour servir. (He who desires from liberty anything other than itself is born to be a slave.) --Tocqueville Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni. (The victorious...

A state on trial: Hannah Arendt vs. the state of Israel.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... WHETHER SHE LIKED IT OR NOT, ARENDT WAS AN EXCEPTIONAL WOMAN in her own way, as much as she was, apparently, malgre elle, an "exception Jewess." (1) And equipped precisely with both just qualities and reputations she burst into the national...

Europe and its refugees: Arendt on the politicization of minorities.(Hannah Arendt)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... IN JANUARY 1940, A FEW MONTHS BEFORE HER INTERNMENT IN FRANCE, Hannah Arendt wrote in a very distinct and programmatic letter to her friend Erich Cohn-Bendit that "All minority policies, not only those affecting the Jewish minority, are doomed...

Organized innocence and exclusion: "nation-states" in the aftermath of war and collective crime.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... But it is only an illusion that nationalism's goal is a state. Although "organic" national states look like a natural product of the idea about an "organic" nation and defensive nationalism seems to be the only guarantee of preservation of its...