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Why not, everyone is these days apparently? Some of the essay is just "guilt by association," but some of the quotes from her writing do not redound to her credit, but I don't know the texts to know whether this is cherry-picking. Curious what readers more knowledgeable about Arendt make of this hit piece?
There's an essay on Little Rock where she argues against forced desegregation and she has all the typical prejudices of a German Jew against Jews from Eastern Europe: I note that my parents who were about 10 years younger than her and German Jews, had the same prejudices. She refers to people from certain non-Westerm parts of the world as savages.
I believe that her prejudices are typical of someone of her generation. Didn't Levi-Strauss write a book called "The Savage Mind"?
I see no reason to write her off just because she had the prejudices of her time as we all do. In 50 years more "enlightened" generations will look down on us with the same scorn.
The author quotes the essay on Little Rock as the first quote in the article. The full quote in context is (the scan was a bit rough so I did the best I could to cut and paste):
"In order to illustrate this distinction between the political and the social, I shall give two examples of discrimination, one in my opinion entirely justified and outside the scope of government intervention, the other scandalously unjustified and positively harmful to the political realm. It is common knowledge that vacation resorts in this country are frequently "restricted" according to ethnic origin. There are many people who object to this practice; nevertheless it is only an extension of the right to free association. If I as a Jew I wish to spend my vacations only in the company of Jews, I cannot see how anyone can reasonably prevent my doing so; just as I see no reason why other resorts should not cater to a clientele that wishes not to see Jews while on a holiday. There cannot be a "right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement," because many of these are in the realm of the purely social where the right to free association, and therefore to discrimination, has greater validity than the principle of equality. (This does not apply to theaters and museums, where people obviously do not congregate for the purpose of associating with each other.) The fact 'that the "right" to enter social places is silently granted in most countries and has become highly controversial only in American democracy is due not to the greater tolerance of other countries but in part to the homogeneity of their population and in part to their class system, which operates socially even when its economic foundations have disappeared. Homogeneity and class working together assure a "likeness" of clientele in any given place that even restriction and discrimination cannot achieve in America."
Arendt is discussing a fairly dominant theory of social spheres that gives rise to a theory of civil society in both her work and the work of others. The passage is poorly written (and arguably illiberal) but it's wrong to say that we don't protect some private associational rights (churches, ethic self-help organizations, some camps, etc.).
Knowing some of Arendt's work and biography and knowing a modicum of relevant cultural history including, e.g., what it meant at the time to write to a friend about a distant part of the world (as in Arendt's letter to Jaspers from Jerusalem), I find no racist views on Arendt's part expressed or implied in any of the quotations offered in that 2016 article in the Jerusalem Post. Rather, this article seems to me to be a misguided, shameless, and sensation-seeking exercise in smug fingerpointing and handwaving. Arendt argued in that infamous essay of hers that desegregation involved issues that called for certain moderations in the planning and execution of the process. That is just realism, not racism. Something similar, I submit, holds true of the other cases mentioned in the Jerusalem Post article.
I Googled and found, I think, a scan of the original publication. It is worth a look:
https://www.normfriesen.info/forgotten/little_rock1.pdf
Here is one useful passage from page 48:
"Awareness of future trouble does not commit one to advocating a reversal of the trend which happily for more than fifteen years now has been greatly in favor of the Negroes. But it does commit one to advocating that government intervention be guided by caution and moderation rather than by impatience and ill-advised measures."
It may also be useful to note that Arendt argues (pp. 50-53), based on a certain distinction between the social and the political, in favour of a right to discriminate in the social realm as part of an exercise of one's right to free association, and modern ears may fail to notice that 'discrimination' is here used in a perfectly objective meaning and, thus, as far as I can see–especially, bearing in mind Arendt's distinction between the social and the political–in a perfecty unobjectionable manner.
This is pretty interesting: Çubukçu, A. Of Rebels and Disobedients: Reflections on Arendt, Race, Lawbreaking. Law Critique 32, 33–50 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-020-09271-x It cites Kathryn T. Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (2014), which I have not read but seems to be important in thinking about this question.
I have read a good amount of Arendt, including the big book. I have not examined each quotation from the article alongside the primary sources but my immediate sense is that the quotations are cherry-picked, particularly from passages where Arendt is not actually speaking in her own voice. I don't think any of the quotations are smoking guns. Like Heidegger and other German philosophers of the period, Arendt often writes in an indirect speech style, where she is summarizing or extrapolating viewpoints, arguments, ideologies, etc of others (some of which are controversial!), but not informing the reader that she is doing so. Similarly, when she writes with sarcasm and irony, she usually does not clue the reader in.
I am not familiar with the Gines book or Arendt's position on race in America but I would be interested to learn more.
In my field, which remains in some corners rather wildly obsessed with Arendt, this debate has been circling around for a little bit. I've mostly stayed out of it, not being an Arendt specialist, but I've had to confront it to some degree in *teaching* Arendt's work to undergraduates. My own view — which I would like to think is a scholarly view, though not a specialist one — is that the notorious Little Rock essay is not the smoking gun it's sometimes made out to be; what I personally have found the most troubling instead is how she talks about race and education in — of all places — her influential book "On Violence." There, in the endnotes to her rather patronizing remarks on Black student radicalism on campuses, one can find such sentences as this:
"Even more frightening is the all too likely prospect that, in about five or ten years, this 'education' in Swahili (a nineteenth-century kind of no-language spoken by the Arab ivory and slave caravans, a hybrid mixture of a Bantu dialect with an enormous vocabulary of Arab borrowings; see the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1961), African literature, and other nonexistent subjects will be interpreted as another trap of the white man to prevent Negroes from acquiring an adequate education." ("On Violence," Harcourt & Brace 1970, p. 96)
It is frankly rather difficult for me to think of any adequate description of this sentence that does not include the word "racist." And as a scholarly claim it's simply astonishingly shoddy even just at the formal level — which of us would allow a student to describe a foreign language or a foreign literature in such a dismissive way if their only citation was to an *encyclopedia article*?
I do think there is a meaningful political and ideological-theoretical distinction to be drawn between "racism" and "white supremacy," where the latter entails a much more far-reaching and specific set of social and political commitments and beliefs. Perhaps this is an unfashionable distinction to make at present (at least on Twitter), but it does seem to me that there are many (white) racists who are not white supremacists, and I think it's probably fair to say that Arendt exhibited personal racism but wasn't a white supremacist in the politically salient sense.
My own takeaway on Arendt, after the experience of teaching her work in multiple classes simultaneously over the last year (I also taught her "On Revolution" in multiple classes), is basically this: There are many political features of her work and her argumentation that strike both students (including grad students) and scholars as strange, paradoxical, or confusing, particularly in a moment where many on the self-understood left have invested enormous energy in making Arendt into a canonical figure for liberal and left-ish intellectual projects; but almost all of these apparent paradoxes and interpretative dilemmas of her work quite simply melt away when one recognizes that Arendt is best understood as an *extremely thoughtful reactionary.* Arendt is a useful example of an intellectual-political type that has been made more or less illegible by the discursive carelessness of our own moment: she was an an anti-Nazi, anti-fascist, right-winger. The reactionary character of her thought is most evident in her absolutely fundamental anti-Marxism. This anti-Marxism was as significant a dimension of her intellectual and political project as her more well-known anti-Nazism. But it's only if we assume that Arendt is a more or less left-wing thinker — as seems to be so commonly assumed by those on the left who eagerly encounter her genuinely beautiful sentences and her genuinely thoughtful insights and want to think that they're not just beautiful and thoughtful but also true (which was my reaction when I read her as an undergraduate) — only then do her actually rather reactionary comments here and there on race or culture or whatever else seem surprising or strange.
Of course, because much of the self-understood left in the anglosphere today is functionally as anti-Marxist as Arendt was (including many who think of themselves as Marx-sympathetic or as post-marxist or whatever), this dimension of her thought is not, it seems to me, readily digestible in the contemporary online para-academic conversation on her work. And so we find ourselves in a strange moment where half of the pseudo-left wants to decry her as a white supremacist, and the other half wants to see in her our salvation from fascism or Trumpism, and neither side really has that much of interest about her to say.
In my field, which remains in some corners rather wildly obsessed with Arendt, this debate has been circling around for a little bit. I've mostly stayed out of it, not being an Arendt specialist, but I've had to confront it to some degree in *teaching* Arendt's work to undergraduates. My own view — which I would like to think is a scholarly view, though not a specialist one — is that the notorious Little Rock essay is not the smoking gun it's sometimes made out to be; what I personally have found the most troubling instead is how she talks about race and education in — of all places — her influential book "On Violence." There, in the endnotes to her rather patronizing remarks on Black student radicalism on campuses, one can find such sentences as this:
"Even more frightening is the all too likely prospect that, in about five or ten years, this 'education' in Swahili (a nineteenth-century kind of no-language spoken by the Arab ivory and slave caravans, a hybrid mixture of a Bantu dialect with an enormous vocabulary of Arab borrowings; see the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1961), African literature, and other nonexistent subjects will be interpreted as another trap of the white man to prevent Negroes from acquiring an adequate education." ("On Violence," Harcourt & Brace 1970, p. 96)
It is frankly rather difficult for me to think of any adequate description of this sentence that does not include the word "racist." And as a scholarly claim it's simply astonishingly shoddy even just at the formal level — which of us would allow a student to describe a foreign language or a foreign literature in such a dismissive way if their only citation was to an *encyclopedia article*?
I do think there is a meaningful political and ideological-theoretical distinction to be drawn between "racism" and "white supremacy," where the latter entails a much more far-reaching and specific set of social and political commitments and beliefs. Perhaps this is an unfashionable distinction to make at present (at least on Twitter), but it does seem to me that there are many (white) racists who are not white supremacists, and I think it's probably fair to say that Arendt exhibited personal racism but wasn't a white supremacist in the politically salient sense.
My own takeaway on Arendt, after the experience of teaching her work in multiple classes simultaneously over the last year (I also taught her "On Revolution" in multiple classes), is basically this: There are many political features of her work and her argumentation that strike both students (including grad students) and scholars as strange, paradoxical, or confusing, particularly in a moment where many on the self-understood left have invested enormous energy in making Arendt into a canonical figure for liberal and left-ish intellectual projects; but almost all of these apparent paradoxes and interpretative dilemmas of her work quite simply melt away when one recognizes that Arendt is best understood as an *extremely thoughtful reactionary.* Arendt is a useful example of an intellectual-political type that has been made more or less illegible by the discursive carelessness of our own moment: she was an an anti-Nazi, anti-fascist, right-winger. The reactionary character of her thought is most evident in her absolutely fundamental anti-Marxism. This anti-Marxism was as significant a dimension of her intellectual and political project as her more well-known anti-Nazism. But it's only if we assume that Arendt is a more or less left-wing thinker — as seems to be so commonly assumed by those on the left who eagerly encounter her genuinely beautiful sentences and her genuinely thoughtful insights and want to think that they're not just beautiful and thoughtful but also true (which was my reaction when I read her as an undergraduate) — only then do her actually rather reactionary comments here and there on race or culture or whatever else seem surprising or strange.
Of course, because much of the self-understood left in the anglosphere today is functionally as anti-Marxist as Arendt was (including many who think of themselves as Marx-sympathetic or as post-marxist or whatever), this dimension of her thought is not, it seems to me, readily digestible in the contemporary online para-academic conversation on her work. And so we find ourselves in a strange moment where half of the pseudo-left wants to decry her as a white supremacist, and the other half wants to see in her our salvation from fascism or Trumpism, and neither side really has that much of interest about her to say.
[apologies if this comment is double-posted, I'm having some browser issues]
One more thing.
The article attacks Arendt for her use of "savage" to describe certain non-Western people.
I point out above that Claude Levi Strauss, an anthropologist from the days before anthropology banned talk of biological sex, titled one of his major works, The Savage Mind, which appeared in 1962.
I read the Savage Mind in 1970 in a graduate seminar conducted by Edward Said, the same Edward Said who has justly been recognized as one of the major thinkers of anti-colonial theory.
At no time did Professor Said criticize the fact that Levi Strauss referred to non-Western and/or colonialized peoples as "savages". That the use of that word was unacceptable did not occur to Professor Said in 1970.
So Arendt is just using the word as most educated people did in her lifetime. She can hardly be expected to live by the standards of 2023 in the 1960's or 1970's.
The Jerusalem Post article does not fairly characterize the extensive discussion of race ideology that Arendt provides in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The quotes that the article pulls from the book are taken from the introduction to Chapter 7, as well as the first subsection of that chapter. Those passages are readily available here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hannah-arendt-the-origins-of-totalitarianism#toc37. If you read those passages, it seems pretty clear that what Shawn says is correct: in the passages that look offensive, Arendt is simply characterizing other people's views. In fact, when Arendt expresses her own attitude toward race ideology and its adherents, that attitude is definitively negative. Indeed, she says race ideology "has always attracted the worst elements in Western civilization."
A minute or two with a search engine reveals that Arendt's piece "Reflections on Little Rock" seems to have been subjected to some unflattering scrutiny in recent years, for instance a 2015 piece in the journal _Critical Philosophy of Race_ called "Hannah Arendt, 'Reflections on Little Rock,' and White Ignorance."
I've read some (not a lot) of Arendt, but I don't think I've read the Little Rock piece. I think it's worth pointing out that the article was published in Dissent magazine in 1959. Arendt, or so I gather, opposed Eisenhower's federalizing of the Arkansas National Guard in 1957 to ensure desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock (which was of course required by the 1954 Sup Ct decision in Brown), a position that put her on the wrong side of the civil-rights struggle in the U.S., or at least on the wrong side of the movement to implement and enforce Brown v. Bd of Education.
That said, I doubt Dissent would have published anything by anybody that could have been fairly called "white supremacist." I believe Dissent published at least a few controversial things in its early years (the journal still exists, and is turning 70 this year), but the political views of its editors, and the general orientation of the magazine, would have precluded its publishing anything that was actually racist. The Arendt piece may be the closest it came to that line, but I doubt that it crossed it.
I mention the JP article in an essay I wrote on the subject. "Hannah Arendt, Anti-Black Racism, the Public Realm, and Higher Education." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2021.1978071
Apparently Arendt's essay had been commissioned by Commentary magazine in 1957. For whatever reason, it appeared in Dissent two years later, but with an editorial disclaimer stating that although the editors disagreed with Arendt's views, they chose to publish the piece nonetheless out of respect for "freedom of expression even for views that seem to us entirely mistaken" (quite a departure from today's mores).
This is from the book 'The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt,' by Seyla Benhabib, from 2003, which contains a rather lengthy discussion of this affair. It can be read here: https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/07/Little-Rock.pdf
The author of the piece seems to have a strangely Manichaean view of the world. Arendt isn't any longer to be a hero but must instead be shunned as a villain… surely a more appropriate attitude is that she was a complex and interesting thinker and person, with virtues and flaws, and attitudes and vocabulary dome of which we'd now eschew (though they were not uncommon amongst people of her time and background).
Thank you for this background.
It's been a long time since I read Levi-Strauss but:
1) "Sauvage" has different senses in French than English.
2) If it does that sense he is being ironic. For example from the beginning of the book: "This thirst for objective knowledge is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive’. Even if it is rarely directed towards facts of the same level as those with which modern science is concerned, it implies comparable intellectual application and methods of
observation. In both cases the universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs."
I'm not an Arendt scholar, but for some years now I have found her writing inspiring, especially her amazing study of the public-private-social relationships which displays scholarly rigor in the service of big meaty ideas, and her rich account of the varieties of human action, a good antidote to the fascination with finger-liftings in some quarters of analytical action theory that Annette Baier blames for her eventual abandonment of the subject.
It is always sad to learn about thinkers one admires so going astray in their thinking (cf. Dummett's introduction to Frege: Philosophy of Language), and I am saddened to learn about her support for segregation. At the same time, what others in the thread have said seems correct: it takes significant perversity to read the passages from OoT as anything but a presentation of the points in a voice that her work actually opposes. The article also displays some lazy scholarly tendencies, even when discussing the deplorable views on segregation. For example, the phrase 'the Negro Problem' was a stuck phrase employed by luminaries in the black intellectual tradition. It was the title of a volume to which authors like Du Bois, Washington, and Dunbar contributed (https://www.amazon.com/Negro-Problem-Classics-Black-Studies/dp/1591021065), and the phrase continues to occur in Du Bois's writing all the way to 'The Philadelphia Negro' where is occurs several times—though by then Du Bois preferred to speak of "problems", as he thought the issue had many facets. For all these thinkers, "the problem" was indeed the challenge of how to achieve equality in a racist U.S. context. None of them thought this an easy question. It seems to have continued to be used so for many years. We see it used in a phrase attributed to Louis Lomax to refer to MLK, as cited in this obituary from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/news/1968/apr/06/mainsection.jonathansteele.
I would have thought the standing of Arendt as an intellectual giant would be owed not to these less known writings, but to her still unparalleled study of totalitarianism, her perceptive treatment of how such systems arose leading up to Nazi Germany, and to her insightful analysis of society and the place of intellectual pursuits therein (influential to thinkers like Habermas). Of course, the author makes no mention of these, nor is there any attempt to consider any relation between these ideas and the few passages they focus on. It is lazy work, playing up to our love to feel morally superior.
Let me preface this by saying that I have no idea what goes in political science, but I find this comment quite strange.
First, I think that seeing Arendt as being of the left or of the right in some binding ideological sense is just not an available option to folks who have read a significant amount of her work. It seems entirely clear that she was absolutely a chauvinist in terms of the so-called superiority of the Western intellectual tradition as conceived and presented by what we'd now call the elite German universities in the first quarter of the 20th c. This kind of prejudice was, it seems to me, common enough in German-trained thinkers left and right (cf. Adorno and Heidegger). There were important Jewish thinkers in/around Germany who worked with various dedication within Jewish thought (Cohen, Rosenzweig, Buber, Benjamin), but I think it'd be an overstatement to say that Jewish thought, much less any non-European thought, was taught in any mainstream way in Germany at the time we're talking about. AFAIK, Arendt did not study with or work with these folks. Her intellectual interests were not in Judaism or Jewish thought/ The comments from the footnote quotes are indefensible, but this way of thinking (Western chauvinism) is absolutely the result of the training Arendt pursued and received. She would, I think, vociferously (and wrongly!) defend "the Western tradition" as the most philosophically developed. Although these days few would defend that particular statement, it seems clear from the recent discussions of Asian, African, Indigenous, Latin-American philosophy's reception that Anglo-American philosophy still operates on something like this principle. She thinks the training she got was fantastic and wants the university to focus on continuing that kind of training, esp. for the historically oppressed. I think this maps directly onto her experience as a Jewish woman who trained in Western/Christian thought. You can look at her work in the Varnhagen book on what she calls the pariah and parvenu for indications of her thought on “minority,” historically oppressed group culture and thought. We can certainly disagree with her here, but the position is not one founded on race but rather on culture.
Second, and maybe this is ungenerous, but this comment seems to argue that being anti-Marxist is to be reactionary. If that is the definition we are using (“reactionary” = anti-Marxist), then Arendt was a reactionary. If, however, we mean by reactionary “opposing political or social progress or reform; (hence, loosely) extremely conservative” (OED), Arendt was not a reactionary. She was a Western chauvinist, her writing was often—as has been noted here—undergirded by an absolutely unrepentant irony, she did not kowtow to views with which she disagreed, and had a careerlong hatred for pieties of any kind. This is part of what makes her writing so bracing. It also leads her to unapologetically contrarian and sometimes shitty positions. She despised Zionism, had little interest in feminism, and of course the Eichmann book was scandalous in some parts of the Jewish intellectual community (if I remember correctly, she lost a close friend or two as a result).
Third, more worrisome is what seems to be the presupposition in this comment that one cannot have a considered anti-Marxist without being a reactionary. It’s simply the case that there is more to leftism than Marxism, that there is left thought that is not Marxist, and that both theoretical and practical Marxism contain within them a number of—let’s say—problems. Arendt spent a lot of time with Marxists (Benjamin, Adorno, &, her second husband Blucher to take some examples). She read Marx closely and thought about Marxism a great deal. If one cannot have a thoughtful and principled objection (not to say correct) to Marxism without being a reactionary, we have a problem.
I’ll close with a quote from The Human Condition and leave it to the reader if this is reactionism:
“My contention is simply that the enormous weight of contemplation in the traditional hierarchy has blurred the distinctions and articulations within the vita activa itself and that, appearances notwithstanding, this condition has not been changed essentially by the modern break with the tradition and the eventual reversal of its hierarchical order in Marx and Nietzsche. It lies in the very nature of the famous "turning upside down" of philosophic systems or currently accepted values, that is, in the nature of the operation itself, that the conceptual framework is left more or less intact” (17)
Claude Lévi-Strauss's book was originally published in French as La pensée sauvage (1962). The published English translation is called 'The Savage Mind' but it might be better to translate it as 'wild thought'. The term 'sauvage' in French can mean 'wild' or 'untamed', e.g. 'wild flowers', fleurs sauvages, wilderness (pays sauvage). merleau-Ponty for instance speaks of 'l'être sauvage' = 'wild being'.
In fact, if anything, the book is arguing for the existence of indigeneous thought forms that operate outside of the binary logic of Western thought.
Part of the problem with "Reflections on Little Rock" seems to be the narrow view Arendt took of what counts as a basic human right. The last sentence of the piece is: "…it seems highly questionable whether it was wise to begin enforcement of civil rights in a domain [i.e., public education] where no basic human and no basic political right is at stake, and where other rights — social and private — whose protection is no less vital, can so easily be hurt."
However, there was a basic human right at stake — the right not to be stigmatized (and thereby psychically harmed) by being required by law (i.e., state statute) to attend school only with those of one's own race. That's why the Supreme Court in Brown said that de jure segregated schools — regardless of the financial resources that might be made available to them — were inherently unequal and that a de jure segregated school system was likely (I'm paraphrasing the opinion) to have effects on the hearts and minds of Black children that could never be undone.
In French the title of Lévi-Strauss's book is “La Pensée sauvage”, a play on words that also means “Wild Pansies”: it's still strange to me when I go into a French pharmacy and I see a bottle of “pensée sauvage” on sale right next to the melatonin and the St. John's wort. The French “sauvage” and the German “wild” are perfect equivalents, and when both Lévi-Strauss and Arendt use these terms they have in mind that which contrasts not with the civilized but with the domesticated, the barnyard pig as opposed to the wild boar, for example. So it doesn't exactly have the negative connotation that “savage” does for us in contemporary English, and if anything it's domestication that I would think both of them see somewhat critically. Finally, both of them knew how to harness and adeptly make use of charged language in order to make subtle points, which is a lost art.
As to Arendt's political position, when questioned by Hans Morgenthau: What are you? Are you a conservative?
Are you a liberal?
She answers: I don't know. I really don't know and I've never known. And I suppose I never had any such position. You know the left think I am conservative, and the conservatives sometimes think I am left…And I must say I couldn't care less…I don't belong to any group…I never was a socialist. I never was a communist. I come from a socialist background. My parents were socialists. But I myself never…But not because I want to be so original—-it so happens that I somehow don't fit.
From Thinking Without a Banister, pages 470-472
As Justice Douglas wrote, perhaps Brown erred on that point, and the deal harm of segregation was promoting white supremacy: "Even a greater wrong was done the whites by creating arrogance instead of humility and by encouraging the growth of the fiction of a superior race." DeFunis v. Odegaard, 416 U.S. 312, 336 (1974)
The overwhelming impression conveyed by the quotations in the Jerusalem Post article is that even if Arendt attached a lot of qualifiers and sophistry to her remarks, her underlying beliefs are unequivocally racist and non-white inferioracist. Commenters above remark on the context of these quotes, but if somebody says, e.g., "South Asians are crude and stupic, but this does not mean that we should ban them from public accommodations," I am going to say that this person has racist beliefs, regardless of her ameliorative opinions about how to apply said racist beliefs. This is what I'd like to say about Arendt. Untenured political theorist quotes her remarks about Swahili. Did s/he take these remarks out of context? Were they merely reports of somebody else's opinions? If not, then they are racist and Euro- (i.e., white) supremacist. Why is anybody dancing around this? (Similarly, the remarks quoted in the Jerusalem Post about South Africa.) So, when (for example) Juan Pineros Glasscock writes: "I am saddened to learn about her support for segregation. AT THE SAME TIME . . . " I wonder why the ameliorative comment is needed or relevant in the context of the JP article.
I assume people are "dancing around this" because it's disappointing when someone who is otherwise thoughtful and perceptive turns out to harbor such nasty, parochial prejudices. Alas, the evidence now seems to be that she does. (The JP piece, of course, is rather Manichean, but that's a separate issue: there is more to Arendt than her parochial prejudices.)
Saul Bellow was more than a novelist but a Jewish thinker though hardly of Arendt's stature as a theorist, who served on The Committee for Social Thought- if I remember right he has a mixed record too. You can add him to the list- he was a great writer
The more we know about anyone the more we see how imperfect they are. Idealizations tend to be illusions. The more we know ourselves the more we see our shadow sides and immature sides and the desires, temptations and negative emotions that lie beneath the surface. So, all of the above is not exactly surprising. The question for me really is how to understand it. Does Arendt evince hate? Do her theoretical thoughts here politically connect with how she treats people of diverse races? Are her descriptions of groups relative to a specific historical situation or proposed as somehow essential? Is her point mainly to assert the inferiority or viciousness of some group or other, or is her main focus and point something different, and what is that? And how much of this is about policy and strategy rather than some ontological claim about races or cultures? Some of what is being said she said obviously to our contmporary ears sounds terrible, and definitely outside the current overton window. But in context is it possible to have a more generous reading? could one entertain the conflict between rights to privacy and free association with other rights claimed by other groups? One could read here the contempory discussion of trans women in sports, locker rooms, or in women's antirape shelters for example. Rights often conflict and politics can be the arena of negotiating how to reconcile them. ANd, could one ask the question about whether forced integration or bussing and so on, by state power, may be violating other rights, nevermind be counterproductive, without being seen as a villian? In any case, having read arendt it is just difficult to see her as a villain, even if perhaps wrong.
One implication is that this foe of Nazis was somehow as bad as them, plus there's the fact that "Jews" did not count as "white" demographically until recently. Did she consider herself "German" then what kind and what way? Was she a supremacist or just a snob?
One of Arendt's virtue, perhaps her foremost virtue, is her intellectual courage, her willingness to stand alone against the herd, including the intellectual-elite herd.
Her book, Eichmann in Jersusalem put the whole New York intellectual, mostly Jewish milieu against her because of her portrayal of Eichmann as a upwardly mobile bureaucrat, who was not particularly anti-semitic and who, according to Arendt, did not think. Not that Eichmann was stupid, he was efficient at working out train schedules, but he did not reflect upon what he was doing.
That was scandalous at the time and still is. Arendt stood her ground and although since then, some studies of Eichmann have shown that Eichmann was more of fanatical Nazi than Arendt believed, her Eichmann is a recognizable human type, probably today sitting in front of a computer screen sending drones to assassinate "terrorists" in Syria while sending tender messages to his wife and kids with his I-phone.
Her phrase for Eichmann was "the banality of evil", not that the evil Eichmann did was minor, but that he was not a
monster, a James Bond villain, but a completely "normal" (more "normal" than me, said the Israeli psychologist who examined him) middle class person.
That intellectual independence and courage led her to make some mistakes, from our point of view, such as her views on Little Rock, but all in all, it seems like a virtue worth celebrating.
Speaking for myself, I was not "dancing around" anything but rather responding to the argument that the Jerusalem Post actually made. The Jerusalem Post took a few quotes from the Origins of Totalitarianism in which Arendt describes odious race ideologies that she harshly criticizes elsewhere in the text, falsely suggested that those quotes represented Arendt's own views, and then relied on that misrepresentation as the basis for its argument that students today should not be "subjected to this rubbish." Of course, if that rubbish really did characterize the arguments Arendt advanced in the Origins of Totalitarianism, then there would be little value in teaching the book to students, but the reality is that the rubbish was included in the book for the purpose of illustrating the pernicious effect it had on modern history, and students certainly should be taught about that. The JP does a similarly sloppy job with Arendt's essay on Little Rock: although one may criticize her opposition to school desegregation, it is unfair to say that the article was written "in support of segregation," as the JP does. Elsewhere in the essay, Arendt expresses her support for desegregation in places of public accommodation (e.g., buses, restaurants, and theaters), and says it is "outrageous" to criminalize interracial marriage. My comment was responding to those arguments and characterizations that were the focus of the JP article. I wasn't addressing any possible argument that someone could make about Arendt.
Hi Mohan,
Just replying to the part about my comment: To be very clear, the comment is not meant to be "ameliorative" in any usual sense. It's rather meant to be corrective of some of the views presented in the article, which seem like clear misinterpretations and inaccuracies in it, as well as of the argument from 'thinker X had some deplorable views' to 'their *whole* philosophy must be condemned as white supremacist'.
Brian is undoubtedly correct to say that people are disappointed that Arendt would be racist is such a "banal" way, to use her phrase. I don't think one needs to be "Manichean" about this. She was a great thinker in all sorts of ways. And i don't want to say that she was a bad person through and through. (Though I have no idea whether she was or not.) Look: there is a very simple fact here. She was an unthinking, unreflective, unphilosophical boor about race. That's what led to her mistakes about Little Rock and South Africa, a lazy acceptance of stereotypes that some bandied about in her time. (After all, if her "opinion" about Swahili sounds extreme, think of Evelyn Waugh.) It's important for us today to realize that such negative stereotypes were by no means so common in the mid-twentieth century that she should be excused on the grounds that she merely reflected the spirit of her times. It's a joke to say that she was led to these views by "intellectual independence and courage."
Arendt's "intellectual independence and courage".
Let's take Little Rock. I was 11 when that occurred and without giving it a thought, I believed that forced desegregation was good because that's what my parents believed and in addition, the liberal media that I was beginning to consume confirmed that belief.
I've never given it a thought in my life. It's just part of my unthought-out intellectual baggage. I've always been pro-civil rights. I even participated in CORE as a teenager.
My impression is that most people don't think through these kinds of things. They belong to a political tribe and they defend the principles of their tribe. They come to that tribe through their education, their family or their peer group. My tribe is the left. I committed to the left as a teenager and I'll die with the same commitment.
Arendt thought through all these things. She made a lot of mistakes. Perhaps she was less rational than she believed that she was, but still, I find her determination to think through everything admirable.
I don't do it myself and I don't see many people around me doing it either. I do see a lot of rationalization of previous political and moral commitments.
@Mohan
My take on Arendt is that she was a snob and felt superior to most Jews and most Germans and most Americans and most readers of this blog and not just colonized peoples- you have to separate the psychological issue from the ethical judgment
I stay clear of ethical judgments- Leave that to God who does not exsit
You write:
"Look: there is a very simple fact here. She was an unthinking, unreflective, unphilosophical boor about race. That's what led to her mistakes about Little Rock and South Africa, a lazy acceptance of stereotypes that some bandied about in her time."
Seeing that you think Arendt "was an unthinking, unreflective, unphilosophical boor about race", I cannot believe that you even read her essay on Little Rock.
Incidentally, so far I have not come across one decent piece of evidence that Arendt can be seen to hold a racist view in that piece, 'Reflections on Little Rock'. Do you have one?
Dear Stan,
I said what I said on the basis of the quotes given in the article in the Jerusalem Post, particularly those that concerned South Africa and Swahili. I didn't say that she expressed racist opinions in the essay on Little Rock. But since you challenged me about this (and, you're right, not before–thank God) I turned to the essay on Little Rock. And I found a poorly informed, casually argued, but for all of this, and odiously smug and self-satisfied screed, arguing a patently regressive position in a patronizing tone.
For a leading example of why I found it racially insensitive (to say nothing more) turn to the passage about the desegregation of education that concludes the second part of the essay. Here Arendt takes issue with the Federal decision to enforce desegregation "in, of all places, the public schools." (For after all, Blacks had equal, albeit segregated, educational opportunities in 1954 Arkansas, right?) And then she writes the following: "I think no one will find it easy to forget the photograph . . . showing a Negro girl, accompanied by a white friend of her father, walking away from school . . . The girl, obviously, was asked to be a hero–that is, something neither her absent father nor the equally absent representatives of the NAACP felt called upon to be. . . Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world?" Now, if you don't find anything offensive in this passage, I can't help you.
Yours sincerely,
Mohan
There is a mini-industry of trying to find damning quotations by famous progressive intellectuals and activists (Marx, Gandhi, for example, Arendt in this case), and use these to trash their entire life and work. It is one thing to point out that these individuals expressed some prejudices at certain times, and another thing altogether to deduce from that that their entire work is to be condemned because of that. Marx used some antisemitic phrases, Gandhi expressed some anti-African feelings, Arendt seems to have held some racist attitudes. BUT, the key question is: are these attitudes central in any way to their intellectual and political work? The answer is unequivocally NO. This is not to excuse any expression of bigotry, but please do not let one little tree obscure your view of the big forest.
"Arendt often writes in an indirect speech style, where she is summarizing or extrapolating viewpoints, arguments, ideologies, etc of others (some of which are controversial!)". Yes. I don't know the passages to which you are referring, but this form of indirect speech often involves the use of the subjunctive, which is not readily translatable into English. She frequently uses it sarcastically in Eichmann in Jerusalem, leading to frequent misreadings.
Just to add something about the source: most people here no doubt never heard of Mr. Frantzman and never read the Jerusalem Post, and you do not miss anything. They are vile right-wing propaganda agents, whose main goal is to 'expose' liberal/left critics of Israeli policies as a bunch of hypocritical, antisemitic, fake-progressives. This does not mean that they necessarily fabricate quotations (although they do do that frequently), but they definitely (1) take them out of context, and (2) deliberately conflate personal reflections or preferences with principled political positions and actions. Arendt did indeed express prejudices, cultural, ethnic, even racial, and there is no need to hide this or become apologetic about that. But did she ever advocate the denial of equal rights to anyone, forced segregation, ethnic cleansing, land dispossession, and other such practices which the Jerusalem Post is very happy to support when when undertaken by their 'own' state and public officials? Pointing to a highly-dubious source does not invalidate the evidence, but it may call for a little caution before rushing to join the shaming parade.
If you had read Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, you would be aware that one of CRT’s leading critiques of the civil rights movement was, as summarized in the introduction to that volume, that “the exclusive focus on the goal of school integration responded to the ideals of elite liberal public interest lawyers rather than to the actual interests of black communities and children.” Were they racist too? I think not.
Based on the part of the Little Rock essay I've read, I wouldn't call it racist, but it's a blinkered and shallow take on the issue of school integration. It borders on the absurd to write, as Arendt did (and as I quoted in a previous comment), that "no basic human right" and "no basic political right" was at stake when it came to de jure segregation in public education.
The passage you quote from the book on Critical Race Theory is simply wrong. The civil rights movement did not focus "exclusively" on the issue of school integration. There was litigation and activism and protest around the same time about segregated transportation for example (the Montgomery bus boycott was in 1955, I believe). As for the notion that the push to end segregated dual-school systems and integrate public schools did not respond "to the actual interests of black communities and children," that's just ludicrous. I don't see how anyone who knows even a bit about public education esp (though not only) in the U.S. South in the first half of the 20th century could make that statement.
@BY
Perhaps–not that I have to agree with CRT on every single point. Still, one does have to acknowledge that the Brown decision had a number of unforeseen bad consequences, such as the large scale dis-employment of black teachers. Nevertheless, Arendt's main reason for thinking that education was not suitable arena for civil rights enforcement was orthogonal to this, and in my opinion, completely silly and trivial. She assimilated segregation in schools to freedom of association. So, it was for her an extension of her right to prefer to spend her summer vacation with other Jews. "To force parents to send their children to an integrated school against their will means to deprive them of . . . the private right over their children and the social right to free association." The result of desegregation would, she thought, be greater conflict between the races: "The achievement of social, economic, and educational equality for the Negro may sharpen the color problem in this country instead of assuaging it."
I think when they say “exclusive focus,” they are talking about the choice to prioritize the objective of school desegregation rather than the alternative objective of seeking improvements in the educational quality of black schools. They are not saying that school desegregation was the exclusive focus of the civil rights movement overall. You are being too dismissive when you say that no one who knows “even a bit about pubic education … in the U.S. South” could possibly subscribe to their critique of the school desegregation movement. The critique was first articulated by Derrick Bell, who had extensive experience with this subject: working as a NAACP lawyer from 1960 to 1966, Bell “administered 300 desegregation cases regarding schools and restaurant chains in the South.” https://hls.harvard.edu/today/derrick-bell-1930-2011/ And I’m not saying I necessarily subscribe to the CRT view, I’m just saying that the line of argument Arendt was pursing in the passage that @Mohan Matthen quoted—school desegregation efforts were not necessarily serving the interests of black students—happens to be very similar to a view that has been advanced by a group of scholars who almost certainly were not white supremacists. I agree with @Mohan Matthen that this isn’t Arendt’s primary argument against school desegregation.
Derrick Bell was wrong about a lot of things, including this. But I suggest we not get further derailed into discussing his views and return to Arendt.
Samuel Moyn has recently written about and mentioned Arendt in interviews:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/901493
Her dismissive views of non-whites were in keeping with those of her fellow Cold War liberals:
https://leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S230907
It's been known for a long time that Arendt was not just visually impaired, but "blind" when it came to race:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/critphilrace.3.1.0052
It could be argued this "blindness"–so ably captured in J.M. Coetzee's 'Waiting for the Barbarians'–is central to thorny race relations in settler colonies (also worth keeping in mind 'International Relations' started out as 'Race Relations' as Robert Vitalis has reminded those with short memories).
Moyn spends more time on Arendt (starting around minute 30) in this interview:
This discussion is probably courting its natural end-by date for blog comments, but I'd like to thank dec for the references in comment 44. Michael Burroughs' article (the third link in dec's comment 44) is particularly valuable–I am sure that many will want to take a different point of view than the author, but the references are very telling. (I find the comment by and Arendt's subsequent correspondence with Ralph Ellison particularly stunning.) What strikes me with particular force is that all you Arendt scholars ought to have reacted to the Jerusalem Post article with the apologetic fatigue of the sort we hear from devotees of Hume–"Our hero isn't perfect, but what else is new? S/he's a great thinker for all that"–rather than the vituperation directed against the JP revelations. (JP is a right wing paper . . . what else would you expect from them? Racism? There isn't any at all in the Little Rock piece. Etc.) After all, racism seems to have permeated even works such as the Origins of Totalitarianism.
Having read the Jerusalem Post piece as well as all the comments in this thread, I'd like to make a few scattershot observations. I'll preface this by saying I'm certainly not an Arendt scholar — and indeed no commenter on this thread, to the best of my recollection, has identified himself/herself/themselves as an Arendt scholar (though some commenters are considerably more familiar with Arendt's work than others).
The Jerusalem Post piece is rather sloppily written, and its 'hero vs. villain' framing is kind of silly. As others have pointed out, the JP article takes certain quotes, at least from The Origins of Totalitarianism, out of context (or else misconstrues them). All that said, the JP piece points to some real issues: it's pretty clear that Arendt had serious blind spots, to say the very least, on race. (Evidence of racism is, if anything, clearer in some of the early writings of her contemporary George F. Kennan (they were born a couple of years apart), and historians and political scientists certainly haven't stopped reading him.)
It would be interesting to know what Arendt scholars whose names I'm familiar with, like Patchen Markell or Dana Villa — or others who have published on Arendt, like, for example, Seyla Benhabib or George Kateb or Steven Klein — think about this matter, but none of them has participated in this thread, so one can only guess.
Judging from some comments in this thread, Arendt is definitely being taught in courses, and that's as it should be; but it would also be appropriate to assign critical scholarly pieces such as those that have been referenced here. (That's not advice to myself, since I don't teach, but a number of people on this thread do.)
Just hearing a recent quote of our former president speaking of migrants 'spoiling the blood of america' left me wondering whether this discussion was somehow forgetting the forest for a single insignificant tree. As far as I can tell, the whole issue we are discussing is whether Arendt fully understood the history of the situation of african americans, whether she had some residual prejudices of her educated european class about the differences between groups [races, cultures, classes], and whether she wrongly and perhaps naively applied her categories or rights, and the distinctions beteen the social, the private, and the political to the situation of race relations in america in the 50s. My point here is that even if one reads this in the worst possible way, it still pales next to our former presidents statement.
You inspired me to track down Ellison's comment and the letter Arendt wrote to him after reading his comment.
Ellison's comment: "At any rate, this too has been part of the American Negro experience, and I believe that one of the important clues to the meaning of that experience lies in the idea, the ideal of sacrifice. Hannah Arendt's failure to grasp the importance of this ideal among Southern Negroes caused her to fly way off into left field in her 'Reflections on Little Rock,' in Dissent magazine, in which she charged Negro parents with exploiting their children during the struggle to integrate the schools. But she has absolutely no conception of what goes on in the minds of Negro parents when they send their kids through those lines of hostile people. Yet they are aware of the overtones of a rite of initiation which such events actually constitute for the child, a confrontation of the terrors of social life with all the mysteries stripped away. And in the outlook of many of these parents (who wish that the problem didn't exist), the child is expected to face the terror and contain his fear and anger precisely because he is a Negro American. Thus he's required to master the inner tensions created by his racial situation–and if he gets hurt, then his is one more sacrifice. It is a harsh requirement, but if he fails this basic test his life will be even harsher." https://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/sites/default/files/AdvancedProof.TheReporter.pdf
Arendt's letter to Ellison: "While reading Robert Penn Warren's Who Speaks for the Nego I came across the very interesting interview with you and also read your remarks on my old reflections on Little Rock. You are entirely right: it is precisely this 'ideal of sacrifice' which I didn't understand; and since my starting point was a consideration of the situation of Negro kids in forcibly integrated schools, this failure to understand caused me indeed to go into an entirely wrong direction. I received, of course, a great many criticisms about this article from the side of my 'liberal' friends or rather non-friends which, I must confess, didn't bother me. But I knew that I was somehow wrong and thought that I hadn't grasped the element of stark violence, of elementary, bodily fear in the situation. But your remarks seem to me so entirely right, that I now see that I simply didn't understand the complexities in the situation." https://twitter.com/Samantharhill/status/1048926936393809920/photo/1
I don't see how Ellison's comment or Arendt's response to his comment supports the notion that Arendt was a white supremacist or a segregationist, which is what the Jerusalem Post called her.
A retired Professor of Rhetoric I know used to engage with "openly" racist types in online fora for her own research (no kidding, as she has published on ante-bellum pro-slavery arguments and contemporary racism).
One of the tropes she ran into on a recurring basis–amply seen in comments above–was hair-splitting definitions of what constitutes "racism" (usually in scare quotes) or white supremacy. The interesting thing was that quite a few–spread across the spectrum of racism–tended to define the term in such a manner that anything short of someone in a Klan outfit shouting the N word would fail to pass their stringent test of true racism. The more sophisticated varieties of racism (aka ethnic chauvinism) such as aversive racism–that many from Arendt's milieu owned up to writing essays entitled 'My Negro Problem–and Ours'–remain entirely absent from these ingeniously argued apologias.
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