Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics

Preface

This book originates in an unusual conference that was held at Bard College to celebrate Hannah Arendt’s one-hundredth birthday. For the conference, “Thinking in Dark Times: The Legacy of Hannah Arendt,” we invited a wide range of public intellectuals, artists, journalists, and academics from across the disciplines to address the relevance of Arendt’s thinking. The speakers were given particular questions to respond to, questions such as, “Is totalitarianism a present danger?” “What is the activity of democratic citizenship?” “What does it mean to think about politics?” In addition, we asked the participants to limit their remarks to ten minutes. The effort was to encourage talks that avoid the regalia of disciplinary posturing and specialized jargons and move straight to the provocative questions at the very heart of Arendt’s project. Looking over the transcripts after the conference, we quickly recognized that the talks not only spoke in a provocative and incisive way, but they also revealed the passionate and engaged embrace of political and ethical thinking that is too frequently lost among the layers of interpretation and scholarship that deadens much writing about Arendt. We therefore asked the participants to expand and polish their essays for publication. At the same time, we asked that they make an effort to preserve the style and form of the original oral presentations . The essays that follow are the result. They are as a whole shorter than typical academic essays, and they have fewer footnotes and scholarly trappings. Instead, they present efforts to think with and, at times, against Arendt in her call for thinking. The book, like the conference that inspired it, is very much rooted in Bard College. Bard has a long and meaningful association with Hannah Arendt. Her husband, Heinrich Blücher, taught at Bard for seventeen years and was instrumental in designing Bard’s common-course core curriculum. Arendt herself was a professor and friend of Bard’s current president, Leon Botstein. Blücher and Arendt both are buried on the Bard campus, a short walk from Arendt’s personal library, which is currently housed at Bard’s Stevenson Library . In addition, Bard hosts the Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking. To give a feel for Arendt’s intellectual life and to offer to others a glimpse into world of her personal library, we include in this volume a Preface  wide range of images taken from the books and manuscripts of the Hannah Arendt Library. rb, Jk, tk acknowledgments This volume is a work of twenty-five contributors and three editors and would never have been finished without the assistance of many others. From the beginning, Bard’s President Leon Botstein encouraged and supported our efforts . Funding for the conference, which also supported publication of this book, was generous and came from Michael Steinhardt, Richard Gilder, Wendy and Alex Bazelow, Barbara Dobkin, and the Center for Constitutional Rights. In planning the original conference, we were assisted greatly by Debra Pemstein and Mary Strieder. In addition, a number of Bard students—Alice Baker, Cassandra Cornell, Anthony Daniel, Noah Levine, and Elizabeth Snowden— assisted in preparing the manuscript for publication. Serena Randolph donated time and talents to photograph material from the Arendt Library. Cassandra Cornell took on the responsibility of organizing the index. Finally, we are deeply indebted to Helen Tartar, Thomas C. Lay, and Eric Newman at Fordham University Press. This book is dedicated to Jenny Lyn Bader and Mary Katz. Preface ...