The Enduring Radicality of Hannah Arendt

Interest in the mid-twentieth-century German Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt seems to be anything but waning. For many, it seems, she remains an important companion to come to grips with the contemporary world, how it came to be, and how scared or hopeful we should feel. The three books reviewed here are centered on significantly different themes, but they all reflect thought-provoking attempts to keep Arendt as a companion for thinking about the present, even when they deal with the past or with seemingly abstract philosophical questions. Toward the end of the introduction to her biography on Arendt, Samantha Rose Hill notes that while Arendt did not expect her poems, journals, and love letters to be made public, she might have imagined others “discovering her papers and finding friendship in them as she had done with Rahel [Varnhagen]” (15). Perhaps more than anything, Hill’s biography is indeed an intimate portrayal of Arendt, as if she was writing about an old friend. It is an especially common tendency among commentators on Arendt to write either with a sense of palpable hostility or, as here, a strangely deep familiarity and intimacy. One may even speculate that the choice to write a biography of Arendt was driven more by a wish to share this intimacy and familiarity than by a