“It is in the very nature of totalitarian regimes to demand unlimited power. Such power can only be secured if literally all men, without a single exception, are reliably dominated in every aspect of their life.”
-Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951, 456).
I’ve been deeply immersed in Hannah Arendt’s writings since I took a class, “The Thought of Hannah Arendt,” with the legendary University of Chicago professor, Herman Sinaiko, back in 1998. Sinaiko passed away in 2011, after a fifty-seven year teaching career, but not before “poisoning the minds” (as he used to put it) of legions of University of Chicago undergrads with a life-long passions for thinking with and about the work of Hannah Arendt.
It was a frigid Chicago winter, and we met in an overheated if beautiful room in the stunning Harper Library. I can’t say I understood everything I read. I also remember writing a disastrously undisciplined paper about the philological method. But damn, I loved that class—every minute. Above all, I was taken with Arendt’s identification of the rise of totalitarianism as a fundamental challenge to modernity and the Enlightenment. It was thinking—about history, governance, law and power—in a peaceful space, with a willing and skilled teacher.
Nothing could have been further from this experience than teaching my Arendt course, “Arendt, Ethics, Citizenship” in the fall semester of 2025. I am deeply privileged to have a job as a professor, and when it comes to teaching, to have a job as a professor at American University. Life on our campus is far, far from perfect, but American gives professors the space to develop interdisciplinary courses for undergraduates. Over the years, I’ve jumped at the chance to teach these seminars—I’ve taught on on the intellectual history of the state; on critical race theory and history; and my favorite, this introductory seminar on Hannah Arendt’s early writings.
What made this semester so challenging was the Trump Administration’s invasion of Washington, D.C. Against this backdrop, reading The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem went beyond the thought experiments and theoretical exercises that they had been when I taught the course in years past. In the tony Northwest quadrant of the city we saw little of the violence, demand for papers, arrests or deportations that Trump’s secret police (and the shameful DC Metro police, who have cooperated willingly with the invasion since the beginning, and continue to do so) rained down on victims in the city’s Southwest and Southeast. There was a highly publicized secret police threat—issued face-to-face—to storied Tenleytown restaurants, Cheff Geoff’s and Millie’s. There were occasional rumors of Trump’s forces using Tenleytown parking lots to prepare for whatever came next, and these were close enough to campus to cause a great deal of fear. But nothing like the reign of terror Trump’s secret forces visited on other parts of the city. Nonetheless the fear on campus, and in my class, was palpable, especially around the seemingly very real possibility that the secret police forces and their local enablers would push north and west.
Seminars are entirely about the students. Instructors can bring guidance, but students are the heart and soul. Their energy will be the seminar’s energy. With this seminar I won a lottery, it seems, because these students were among the best undergradautes I’ve ever had the privilege to teach. A few had a background in continental philosophy. A few others had read some of Arendt’s other works. Most had no background at all in anything Arendtian. As a group, however, they gelled quickly and engaged in spirited discussion and debate. The beauty of teaching this class is usually to see the light bulb alight when students encounter ideas like “the banality of evil,” “the right to have rights,” and the “atomization” thesis. In this class the light bulbs were alit, yes, but the real joy came in the back-and-forths on one hand, and in the constant revisiting of texts themselves. It was bound to happen given that my copy of Origins dates back to 1998, but the spine finally dissolved because of this class’ incessant turns back to key passages. Maybe the only time I’ll ever be thankful for a book falling apart!
You can peruse the readings below, but the real goal of this post is to say “bravo!” to the students. While we were in the classroom, none of us were on the front lines of protests standing up to Trump’s secret police. But in a sense, the students’ journey through the Arendtian opus while residing in an occupied city was in itself an act of intellectual bravery. One that I’ll never forget for the rest of my career, while simultaneously wishing that future students will never have to replicate.
Arendt, Ethics, and Citizenship (Fall, 2025; American University)
Week 1: The Rediscovery of Arendt
-Excerpts from Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt (Reaktion Books, 2021)
-Excerpts from Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (Yale University Press, 1982)
-In-class screening: Hannah Arendt (2011)
Week 2: Why Arendt Now?
-Excerpts from Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt
-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
Tuesday, September 9: Arendt’s Mentors—Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger
-Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt
-Selected excerpts from the works of Martin Heidegger
-“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
Reading to complete before class:
Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt, 50-53, 70-96.
Hannah Arendt, “On Walter Benjamin,” Lecture (1968),
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
Week 4: Arendt Discovers Stateless Personhood
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), excerpts
Arendt correspondence with Heinrich Blucher, 1950
Arendt, “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule,” Commentary (1950)
Week 5
Week 5: The Origins of The Origins
Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt
King, Arendt in America
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, vii-55.
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: Origins, ctd.
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, xvii-xxii (again), 158-266
Young-Bruehl, For Love of the World, 200-211 (ch. 5)
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 267-479.
Week 7: The Problem of Evil
Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt
Young-Bruel, For Love of the World
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 3-134.
Week 8: The Problem of Evil, Ctd.
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 135-219.
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.
Week 10: Truth and Lies in Politics
Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt, 173-5.
Arendt-Mary McCarthy Correspondence
“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
Week 11: The Arendtian Tradition
Tuesday, November 4
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Crown, 2017)
Excerpts from Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism
Week 11
Research week
Week 12
Week 13: The Present Crisis
Tuesday, November 18
Adam Serwer, The Cruelty is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America (New York: One Book, 2021),
Student selected news articles and commentaries
Assignments
-weekly response papers
-midterm and final
-Research project
The major goal of the project is for you to design a college level class that Arendt might teach if she were still alive today and teaching at American University.
Your syllabus should feature readings and other materials you think Arendt would have selected, and should encompass both primary and secondary sources. The paper should explain: (1) what is the argument that Arendt would offer students in this class? (2) Why would Arendt have selected this topic and these readings? (3) Which of Arendt’s works would help her make sense of the topic?
The presentation should offer your colleagues a glimpse of the major choices and themes of the syllabus.