Samantha Rose Hill's Reading List

"I began with this book because it’s her first major work published in English. When I’m introducing Hannah Arendt in a lecture, I often begin by saying that her work is about two questions that are interconnected. The first question is, ‘how can we protect spaces of freedom?’; the second question is, ‘is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?’ I begin with The Origins of Totalitarianism because it’s a study of the various elements that crystallized in the appearance of totalitarianism in the 20th century. Arendt writes about the decline of the nation state, the privatisation of public political institutions. She writes about the rise of what today we would call ‘fake news’ and political propaganda. She writes about our inability to distinguish fact from fiction. She writes about mass rootlessness, homelessness. And she writes about the necessity of solitude and the dangers of loneliness. It’s a 597-page book. When you get to the last ten pages, she says that loneliness is the underlying cause of all totalitarian movements. Why loneliness? Because loneliness radically cuts us off from human connection. It makes us desperate for meaning. It turns us back against ourselves in a dangerous way that leads us down rabbit holes in thinking that make it impossible for us to judge and to tell the difference between fact and fiction. She says it’s one of the most desperate experiences a human being can have. When we experience loneliness, we’re hungry, desperate for meaning and connection. Ideology, or ideological propaganda, provides simple solutions for complex human problems that feed that hunger, that need for place and meaning. Yes. The lonely are particularly vulnerable to ideological thinking in whatever form it might take. Importantly, for Arendt, loneliness also means that we are not only cut off from conversation with others, but we’re cut off from having conversation with ourselves. So, loneliness fundamentally compromises our ability to think and our ability to judge. Solitude, she says, is that condition where I keep myself company. And that’s very different from loneliness. Solitude is necessary. The private realm is necessary. The space of the four walls is necessary. We need to be able to retreat from the public world to be alone with ourselves and to think in a way that’s nourishing for ourselves. No, I wouldn’t call it a work of history. Arendt says it’s not history. She’s employing Walter Benjamin’s understanding of ‘constellation’, drawing together the elements that crystallized in totalitarianism and she gestures towards that in her first preface to the book. She’s thinking about how the different parts fit together. She doesn’t want to offer a historical account that’s reductive in any way, or seems to follow a kind of logical sequence of events—because some things are not fully comprehensible, like death camps, for example. And so how do we try to understand that which is incomprehensible? Also, importantly for her, a historicist argument would imply that the Holocaust was fated to happen in some way: because X happened, Y happened, Z happened, and then there it is. She doesn’t want to offer that kind of account."

"Ah, yes. The Human Condition . In German she titled it Activa oder Vom t ätigen Leben , which translated means the Life of Action . I read The Human Condition as a study of protecting spaces of freedom that are necessary for human action in the world. She writes about these tripartite distinctions between private, social, public and between labor, work and action. She discusses worldly alienation in the modern age. She’s thinking about the different activities we engage in on a daily basis and the different realms of life we’re constantly navigating and the activities that correspond with those realms. “ The Human Condition began as a study of the totalitarianian elements in Marx” I think we’re experiencing something analogous right now, this collapse between the private, social and public spheres in our quarantine conditions. Everything is taking on a new colour. But when we see the boundaries between private, social and public collapsing, when we see the politicization of private life, for Arendt that’s a red flag that totalitarianism is emerging. The Human Condition began as a study of the totalitarianian elements in Marx . She read Marx very seriously. He influenced her thinking in a number of ways, but she also disagreed with him profoundly. Her chapter on “Labor” begins, “In the following chapter, Karl Marx will be criticized.” Arendt disagrees with Marx’s elevation of labor as the fundamental activity of the human condition. If our fundamental quality is our ability to labor, and Marx wants to liberate man from labor, then what will we do with a society of laborers who do not have to labor? As Arendt puts it, she did not share Marx’s great faith in capitalism. Yes, the opposite, in the sense that Arendt reads Marx’s elevation of labor as a break in the tradition of western political thought. I think it’s also a great work to read right now, to think about world-building and plurality. Her understanding of plurality is the idea that men and not man inhabit the earth and make the world in common. We live together with one another. No, Arendt always turns away from universal claims. She always upholds the particular over the universal. She is a conceptual thinker. She’s wrestling with these terms in order to begin to understand the contemporary moment that she’s writing about. Something that happens with the emergence of totalitarianism for her, and part of her turn against philosophy, was the idea that the concepts and categories, the banisters we hold onto in our thinking to help us understand the world, are no longer relevant. We need new language; we need new concepts to understand the world today. But that doesn’t mean we can just get rid of the old concepts like ‘authority’, ‘freedom’ ‘justice’, or ‘the good life’ . We have to think with them; but we also can’t just rely upon them as frameworks for understanding. Yes. The way that you frame it reminds me of her metaphor for Walter Benjamin’s methodology in her introductory essay to the edited volume of his work she compiled, Illuminations. It is of a pearl diver and the need to go diving through the wreckage of the past to reclaim what can be saved. She doesn’t argue that we should do away with the past. And she doesn’t favour drawing analogies with the past in order to understand the current situation, but we also, in some sense, carry those gems with us, those conceptual ideas like ‘the good’ and we have to rethink them as a traditional problem of metaphysics . We have to engage with and think about these questions anew. We can’t just reflexively rely upon them in our thinking."

"Yes, it’s men and women in dark times, but Arendt always used “man.” The title for this book is taken from Bertolt Brecht’s great poem, ‘ An die Nachgeborenen’ , which is translated as ‘To Posterity’ or ‘To Those who Come After’ which begins, ‘Wirklich, ich lebe in finisteren Zeiten!’ (‘Really, I’m living in dark times’). This is a collection of essays about people she was close to, and also some people she wasn’t so close to, but who had a significant impact upon her intellectual development, such as Rosa Luxemburg, whom she actually went to see once with her mother at a rally. I know. Do you ever wonder if people will look back on our time and think about the public intellectuals we have today and their milieus in the same way that we look back upon those of Paris in the 1930s? When you asked me to pick the five best books, I thought about the word ‘best’ and it felt like a sacrifice not to include Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil on the list. But thinking about the people that might go to this website and look for a set of books to introduce them to a thinker, I asked myself what the books were that made me fall in love with Hannah Arendt as a thinker and which included her most beautiful writing. And I really think that some of her most beautiful writing is in Men in Dark Times . Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Her essay on “Humanity and Our Times”, which she delivered as the Lessing address when she received the Lessing Prize, is a timeless meditation on what it means to retain one’s humanity in dark times. I also find myself continually going back to her ‘ Laudatio’ for Karl Jaspers, which is a brilliant piece of writing about the importance of listening and conversation and allowing for silence and world-building and common humanity. These essays are so intimate that I think they make themselves available to any reader, and offer portraits of some of the most important political thinkers of the 20th century. It was first published in 1955 and then it went through a few pressings. It’s also worth mentioning that there are essays here on Hermann Broch, Walter Benjamin, and the poet Randall Jarrell. What you also get in this book is a sense of Arendt’s poetics and her engagement with poets. There is her essay on Bertolt Brecht and the Brecht controversy and how we hold poets accountable, her essay on Walter Benjamin and how he wasn’t a poet but rather a poetic thinker. Well, Hannah Arendt wouldn’t call herself a philosopher. She rejected that label probably most famously in her televised interview in 1964 with Günter Gaus, where she says that she’s a political theorist. She turns away from philosophy after the burning of the Reichstag, and then, when she returns to philosophy in The Life of the Mind , her final work, she engages in what she calls ‘the dismantling of metaphysics’. I think she’s turning away from any kind of transcendent philosophy to think about materiality and to think about how we might orient ourselves in the present. She rejects anything like a Platonic idea of truth in that sense. I think we see in there a real critique of Heidegger. If we think about her grappling with these fundamental problems of metaphysics, like ‘what is the nature of being?’, ‘what is meaning?’, ‘how do we create meaning?’, ‘what is the purpose of life?’, ‘what is the good life?’, she’s certainly engaging in all of these questions and she was schooled in the tradition of German philosophy, the western tradition of political philosophy, but she didn’t understand herself to be doing the work of philosophy. She doesn’t easily fit into any box. Sometimes it seems as if she’s doing the work of phenomenology. Sometimes it seems she’s doing the work of metaphysics. Sometimes she is a biographer. Yes. Arendt did not have much respect for Simone de Beauvoir. She didn’t think she was that smart. She did interact with her, and with Sartre and Camus. She thought Nausea was a brilliant book. She said that was Sartre’s best book. She wrote to Karl Jaspers ‘Camus is probably not as talented as Sartre but much more important, because he is much more serious and honest’ In an early letter to Mary McCarthy she says something like, ‘Simone de Beauvoir’s not really worth engaging with. One should just flirt with her instead.’ Arendt was not a feminist…"

"Well, we’re all wandering up and down a staircase without banisters to hold on to, endlessly, never arriving at wherever we’re going because thinking itself is an endless process. This was the secret metaphor she kept for herself in thinking about how to think about thinking. It is really a reference back to the need to find new language and concepts and categories to hold onto in thinking in order to understand our present moment. Yes. She was critical of Descartes. I think about those banisters as the concepts and categories we hold onto in thinking, that allow us to make judgments about what’s happening in the world. Arendt isn’t writing systematic philosophy like Kant, aiming to arrive at a concept of ‘the judgment of the beautiful’, but she’s very interested and engaged with the concept of ‘judgment’ and wants to understand what judgment is in our world today. I reviewed Thinking Without a Banister when it was published in 2018 for the LA Review of Books . It is an edited volume, which I think is a great introductory overview to Hannah Arendt’s work. It is full of interviews that give you a sense of her as a person, conversations where she’s teasing out what she meant by ‘the banality of evil’—most readers of Arendt are familiar with that phrase, even if they haven’t read Eichmann . It has some of the early work on Marx that was never published, some of her essays of cultural criticism, some book reviews. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I taught an introductory course on Arendt two years ago using this as the main text, and it was a wonderful way of getting a general sense of who Hannah Arendt was, but it also includes all of her major concepts, categories, and terms, her distinction between labour, work, and action, and her understanding of freedom. There are also essays on Heidegger and her essay on W H Auden. This is a really wonderful book. It was edited by Jerome Kohn, who was one of Hannah Arendt’s students. He’s the literary executor of Arendt’s estate. He’s published most of the posthumous volumes we have of Hannah Arendt’s work, and really we have him to thank for Arendt’s legacy as it endures in the world today. It depends who the person is that’s reading Hannah Arendt for the first time. So, if the list of books I gave you is being picked up by somebody who is completely new to Hannah Arendt, I would probably give them Thinking Without a Banister first because that way they can play, they can pop around, they can explore, they can get a sense of her language and her concepts and categories and then go back to Origins and The Human Condition , which are her two major works about the emergence of totalitarianism and freedom and protecting spaces of freedom. And then Men in Dark Times is really a collection of humanistic essays about what it was like to be alive in the 20th century, about poetry and conversation and—very importantly for Arendt—friendship."

"Even though I’m writing a biography of Hannah Arendt myself, I wanted to include the major intellectual biography of her on the list. It was published in 1982 and remains the go-to Arendt biography. It’s quite long. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl knew Arendt. When Arendt died in 1975 she really wasn’t that well known outside of New York intellectual circles… Yes. It wasn’t until the 1980s and Young-Bruehl’s biography and then the discovery of the Heidegger letters that she became so well-known and a figure of interest in contemporary philosophy and political theory. She’s still not as recognized in Germany today as she could be. She’s not recognized in the way Adorno is, for example. This biography a wonderful telling of Arendt’s life. It is from a letter to Karl Jaspers that I believe was written in 1956 and also occurs as an entry in one of her thinking journals. In one of her thinking journals, “ Warum ist es so schwer, die Welt zu lieben ”—“why is it so hard to love the world?” Yes, I did, together with the picture of the actual entry. When she was finishing The Human Condition , she wrote to Karl Jaspers, ‘Only now, only this late in life, am I beginning to understand what it means to love the world. To love the world is to love it with all of the evil and suffering in it, and I would like to dedicate my magnum opus The Human Condition to you and to call it Amor Mundi , ‘for the love of the world’.’ So, the intended title for The Human Condition was Amor Mundi. Of course, Arendt was quite fond of flipping Nietzsche on his head. So, this is a playful flip of amor fati —’the love of fate.’ She’s thinking about what it means to build the world in common, poiesis , the fabrication of the world that we collectively make through language, through architecture, through art, through sculpture, through building. What always strikes me is that Hannah Arendt saw the worst her century had to offer, and her question was how to love the world. I don’t know if I would say that’s Young-Bruehl’s framing mechanism for the biography. The book is a deep-dive intellectual history of Hannah Arendt. One of the frames that Young-Bruehl uses is friendship, which is so important to Hannah Arendt and certainly relates to ‘love of the world’. But ‘love of the world’ as an idea in Arendt’s writing relates to this idea that we have to see the world and to take the good and the bad with equanimity, that we can’t be attached to either radical hope or radical despair or some idea of what it is we might want the world to be, but rather that we have to face the world as it is and love it anyway. My biography is an introductory biography to the life and works of Hannah Arendt. I have tried to fill in some of the gaps that have been left empty, simply because materials were not publicly available at the time. I talk about Hannah Arendt’s poetry and about her internment in Gurs and escape, which I’ve pieced together through different accounts that have emerged since Young-Bruehl’s biography was published. The framework for my biography comes from a panel discussion about her work where she says: “What is the subject of our thought? Experience and nothing else.” I’ve tried to tie the life of action together with the life of the mind. That’s a great question. Hannah Arendt is somebody whom I think with, but I don’t always agree with her. Her writing provokes me to thinking, and if I’m completely honest the thinker I feel closest to is Walter Benjamin. Reading Walter Benjamin is the only time I ever feel at home in the world. Adorno is also somebody who’s very important for me. I’m that word people love to use but don’t love in reality—interdisciplinary. Marx and Freud are also very important for me. But just as important for me are people like Virginia Woolf and Tennessee Williams and D H Lawrence . These are thinkers I also return to, to hold on to something in my own thinking. The other day I was teaching The Human Condition and a student called me an Arendtian. I laughed and said, ‘I must protest.’ As a friend says, I’m Arendtian enough to know not to be an Arendtian. Arendt’s work isn’t a roadmap into the future, but it is something we can hold on to in thinking about the world."