I was on research leave last year finishing up my book, White Power: Policing American Slavery, which will be published next year (yay!). But I’m back to teaching this fall, and am thrilled that one of my classes is my undergraduate seminar on Hannah Arendt’s writings about totalitarianism. Maybe “thrilled” isn’t quite the correct word. Because the reality is that the class meets in a city currently under occupation by militarized police forces and the military itself. My goal in teaching this class in the past has been to give students some tools with which to make sense of the world. My goal in teaching this class this semester is to give students some tools with which to make sense of their world. It is a daunting and terrifying task.
I’ve made some changes to the syllabus from the last time I taught it. This class is much easier to teach today than it was even a few years ago, due to the existence of Samantha Rose Hill’s terrific intellectual biography of Arendt. Hill’s book is written for the lay reader, and it is punchy and short. So, perfect for the undergraduate classroom. I’ve also benefitted from reading works by Daniel Maier-Katkin, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and especially, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings' superb biography of Walter Benjamin. The latter has inspired me to push a bit harder into Arendt’s time in Paris and her vexed readings of Marx. I’m a late arrival to Jon Nixon’s Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship (2016), which also highlights the importance of Arendt’s personal and intellectual relationships to her own work.
Readings
Week 1: The Rediscovery of Arendt
Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt (Reaktion Books, 2021), 7-15.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (Yale University Press, 1982), preface and ch. 1
Margarethe von Trotta, Hannah Arendt (color, 2013)
Week 2: Why Arendt Now?
Peter Christoff, “The Book that Changed Me: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem…” The Conversation (2022), https://theconversation.com/the-book-that-changed-me-hannah-arendts-eichmann-in-jerusalem-and-the-problem-of-terrifying-moral-complacency-187600
Olivia Goldhill, “Hannah Arendt was the Philosopher to Reference in 2017,” Quartz, December 23, 2017, https://qz.com/quartzy/1162378/hannah-arendt-the-thinker-on-totalitarianism-is-popular-in-the-trump-era
Samantha Rose Hill, “Reading Arendt Now,” Hannah Arendt Center, May 5, 2019, Bard College
David Bromwich, “The Evolution of the Political Lie,” Literary Hub, September 6, 2022, https://lithub.com/the-evolution-of-the-political-lie-david-bromwich-on-hannah-arendt-and-complicity/
Week 3
Arendt’s Mentors—Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger
Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt, 16-49.
“Karl Jaspers,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/jaspers/
Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, 1953
Young-Bruehl, For Love of the World, chapter 2
Seyla Benhabib, “The Dialogue with Martin Heidegger,” in The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 102-22.
Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt, 50-53, 70-96.
Hannah Arendt, “On Walter Benjamin,” Lecture (1968),
[0:00 up to 26:00]
Samantha Rose Hill, “Walter Benjamin’s Last Work,” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 9, 2019, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/walter-benjamins-last-work/
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253-265.
Week 4: Arendt Discovers Stateless Personhood
Tuesday, September 16
Reading to complete before class:
Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt, 97-105.
Arendt, “We Refugees,” (1943) in Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York, 1978), 264-74.
Richard King, Arendt and America (2015), Introduction, 25-42.
Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt, 118-25.
Young-Bruehl, For Love of the World, 111-63.
Arendt letter to Heinrich Blucher, 1950
Arendt, “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule,” Commentary (1950)
II. THE PROBLEM OF TOTALITARIANISM
Week 5: The Origins of The Origins
Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt, 126-32.
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, vii-88.
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 89-157.
Karuna Mantena, “Genealogies of Catastrophe: Arendt on the Logic and Legacy of Imperialism,” in Politics in Dark Times, ed. Seyla Benhabib (2012), 83-112.
Week 6: The Origins of Totalitarianism
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 158-97, 222-227, 250-66
Young-Bruehl, For Love of the World, 200-211 (ch. 5)
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 290-302, 305-88, 389-479.
III. THE BANALITY OF EVIL
Week 7: The Problem of Evil
Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt, 158-66.
Young-Bruel, For Love of the World, 328-339.
Reading: Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 3-35, 56-134.
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 135-219.
Week 8: The Problem of Evil, Ctd.
Reading to complete before class:
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 220-279.
Week 9: The Trial of Hannah Arendt
Henry Schwarzchild to Hannah Arendt, March 6, 1963, Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress.
Arnold Forster, Memoranda of March 11 and March 27, 1963 (both entitled, “New Yorker Magazine Serialization of Hannah Arendt’s ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’), Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress.
Michael Musmanno, “Man with an Unspotted Conscience,” New York Times, May 19, 1963.
Hannah Arendt, “Letter to the Editor,” New York Times, June 23, 1963.
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 209-11.
Michael Musmanno, “A Reply from Judge Musmanno,” New York Times, June 23, 1963.
Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 127-45.
Seyla Benhabib, “Whose Trial? Adolf Eichmann’s or Hannah Arendt’s? The Eichmann Controversy Revisited,” in Benhabib, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (Princeton, 2018), 61-79.
IV. LYING IN POLITICS
Week 10: Truth and Lies in American Politics
Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt, 173-5.
“Truth and Politics,” The New Yorker, February 25, 1967
Young-Bruehl, For Love of the World, 373-8
Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” New York Review of Books, November 18, 1971
V. ARENDT APPLIED: TRANSLATING ARENDT TO THE PRESENT
Week 11: The Arendtian Tradition
Tuesday, November 4
Reading to complete before class: Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Crown, 2017).
VI. ARENDT APPLIED: PUTIN AND PUTINISM
Week 12: Legacy Totalitarians
Timothy Snyder, “Politics Returns to Russia: The Consequences of the Ukrainian Counter-Offensive,” Thinkingabout.substack.com, June 6, 2023.
Matthew Blackburn, “The Morphology of Putinism: The Arrangement of Political Concepts Into a Coherent Ideology, Journal of Political Ideologies (2024), 1-31.
VII. ARENDT APPLIED: TRUMP AND TRUMPISM
Week 13: The Present Crisis
Adam Serwer, The Cruelty is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America (New York: One Book, 2021).