Two titans of 20th-century thought, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, are explored in depth: their lives, loves, ideas, and politics.

In an utterly unique approach to biography, On Love and Tyranny traces the life and work of the iconic German Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt, whose political philosophy and understandings of evil, totalitarianism, love, and exile prove essential amid the rise of the refugee crisis and authoritarian regimes around the world. What can we learn from the iconic political thinker Hannah Arendt? Well, the short answer may be: to love the world so much that we think change is possible. The life of Hannah Arendt spans a crucial chapter in the history of the Western world, a period that witnessed the rise of the Nazi regime and the crises of the Cold War, a time when our ideas about humanity and its value, its guilt and responsibility, were formulated. Arendt’s thinking is intimately entwined with her life and the concrete experiences she drew from her encounters with evil, but also from love, exile, statelessness, and longing. This strikingly original work moves from political themes that wholly consume us today, such as the ways in which democracies can so easily become totalitarian states; to the deeply personal, in intimate recollections of Arendt’s famous lovers and friends, including Heidegger, Benjamin, de Beauvoir, and Sartre; and to wider moral deconstructions of what it means to be human and what it means to be humane. On Love and Tyranny brings to life a Hannah Arendt for our days, a timeless intellectual whose investigations into the nature of evil and of love are eerily and urgently relevant half a century later.

A new portrait of Henry Kissinger focusing on the fundamental ideas underlying his policies: Realism, balance of power, and national interest. Few public officials have provoked such intense controversy as Henry Kissinger. During his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he came to be admired and hated in equal measure. Notoriously, he believed that foreign affairs ought to be based primarily on the power relationships of a situation, not simply on ethics. He went so far as to argue that under certain circumstances America had to protect its national interests even if that meant repressing other countries’ attempts at democracy. For this reason, many today on both the right and left dismiss him as a latter-day Machiavelli, ignoring the breadth and complexity of his thought. With The Inevitability of Tragedy, Barry Gewen corrects this shallow view, presenting the fascinating story of Kissinger’s development as both a strategist and an intellectual and examining his unique role in government through his ideas. It analyzes his contentious policies in Vietnam and Chile, guided by a fresh understanding of his definition of Realism, the belief that world politics is based on an inevitable, tragic competition for power. Crucially, Gewen places Kissinger’s pessimistic thought in a European context. He considers how Kissinger was deeply impacted by his experience as a refugee from Nazi Germany, and explores the links between his notions of power and those of his mentor, Hans Morgenthau—the father of Realism—as well as those of two other German-Jewish émigrés who shared his concerns about the weaknesses of democracy: Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt. The Inevitability of Tragedy offers a thoughtful perspective on the origins of Kissinger’s sober worldview and argues that a reconsideration of his career is essential at a time when American foreign policy lacks direction.

The tragedy of totalitarianism, one of the most important turns in the modern philosophy and history of the West undergirds the intellectual relationship between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. The rise of totalitarianism caused the disruption of traditional metaphysical and political categories and the necessity of a painstaking forging of new languages for the description of reality. This book argues that Arendt’s answer to Heidegger’s philosophy, intelligible only within the wider context of both thinkers’ struggles with the philosophical tradition of the West, also opens up a new horizon of conceptualizing the relationship between philosophy and education. Paulina Sosnowska develops Arendt's thesis of the broken thread of tradition and situates it in the wider context of Heideggerian philosophy and his entanglement with Nazism, and consequently, questions the traditional relationship between philosophy and education. The final parts of this book return to the problem of dialogue between philosophy, thinking, and university education in times when the political and ethical framework is no longer determined by the continuity of tradition, but the caesura of twentieth-century totalitarianism.

The detailed story of the passionate and secret love affair between two of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century--Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Drawing on their previously unknown correspondence, Elzbieta Ettinger describes a relationship that lasted for more than half a century, a relationship that sheds startling light on both individuals.

The acclaimed biographer presents “a perceptive life of the controversial political philosopher” and author of Eichmann in Jerusalem (Kirkus Reviews). Hannah Arendt was a polarizing cultural theorist—extolled by her peers as a visionary and berated by her critics as a poseur and a fraud. Born in Prussia to assimilated Jewish parents, she escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1933. Arendt is now best remembered for the storm of controversy that surrounded her 1963 New Yorker series on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a kidnapped Nazi war criminal. Arendt’s first book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, single-handedly altered the way generations around the world viewed fascism and genocide. Her most famous work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, created fierce debate that continues to this day, exacerbated by the posthumous discovery that she had been the lover of the philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger. In this comprehensive biography, Anne C. Heller tracks the source of Arendt’s contradictions and achievements to her sense of being a “conscious pariah”—one of those rare people who doesn’t “lose confidence in ourselves if society does not approve us” and will not “pay any price” to gain the acceptance of others.

Short-listed for the Tractatus Essay Prize, an examination of the innovative strategies Arendt used to achieve intellectual freedom After observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt articulated her controversial concept of the “banality of evil,” thereby posing one of the most chilling and divisive moral questions of the twentieth century: How can genocidal acts be carried out by non-psychopathic people? By revealing the full complexity of the trial with reasoning that defied prevailing attitudes, Arendt became the object of severe and often slanderous criticism, losing some of her closest friends as well as being labeled a “self-hating Jew.” And while her theories have continued to draw innumerable opponents, Arendt’s work remains an invaluable resource for those seeking greater insight into the more problematic aspects of human nature. Anchoring its discussion in the themes of translation, forgiveness, dramatization, and even laughter, Unlearning with Hannah Arendt explores the ways in which this iconic political theorist “unlearned” recognized trends and patterns—both philosophical and cultural—to establish a theoretical praxis all her own. Through an analysis of the social context and intellectual influences—Karl Jaspers, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger—that helped shape Arendt’s process, Knott has formed a historically engaged and incisive contribution to Arendt’s legacy.

Hannah Arendt is one of the most important political theorists of the 20th century. This book focuses on how, against the professionalized discourses of theory, Arendt insists on the greater political importance of the ordinary activity of thinking.

Kathleen B. Jones brings a scholar's insights and a lyrical voice to this philosophical memoir about her thirty-year fascination with Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th century's most controversial thinkers. With Arendt as her guide, Jones recounts stories from her own life interwoven with Arendt's life and work, demonstrating Arendt's enduring relevance to thinking about the dilemmas of modern life. Editorial Reviews "An extraordinary accomplishment! First off, the writing is beautiful. Diving for Pearls is both biography and autobiography. As a biography of Hannah Arendt it is scholarly and sensitive, guided by Arendt's own hauntingly autobiographical biography of Rahel Varnhagen. As autobiography, it is literary, honest and thoughtful in the Arendtian sense of being actively engaged in thinking. Jones adopts Arendt as a thinking partner, and moves with her toward existential responsibility and gratitude for one's own life. Arendt commented that love is a kind of friendship across the distance the world puts between us. Kathleen B. Jones shows us how love and friendship are possible even across the distance in time the world puts between generations." Daniel Maier-Katkin, author of Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness "Kathleen B. Jones has done what is rarely possible: writing with stunning intellect from the depths of her own heart. In Diving for Pearls, as in all of her work, Jones emulates Arendt by letting no thought go unexamined, no belief unchallenged, no tradition remain a sacred cow. With her typical no-holds-barred honesty, Jones weaves the fascinating story of her own life through this study of Arendt, probing the difference between what we are and who we are, to get at what it means to live authentically and ethically both as individuals and as citizens of the many communities we inhabit." Laurel Corona, author of Until Our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love and Partisan Resistance, and The Mapmaker's Daughter. "Kathleen B. Jones "slips into the skin" of Hannah Arendt to masterfully weave Arendt's thought and life together with significant moments in her own life story. What Jones finds illuminates the lives of female thinkers and the links between intellectual women across time and place. A beautifully written exploration of memory, loss, responsibility, and love, this book is an exemplar of passionate and engaged political thinking." Lori Marso, author of Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity: The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women.

Visualizing Atrocity takes Hannah Arendt’s provocative and polarizing account of the 1961 trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann as its point of departure for reassessing some of the serviceable myths that have come to shape and limit our understanding both of the Nazi genocide and totalitarianism’s broader, constitutive, and recurrent features. These myths are inextricably tied to and reinforced viscerally by the atrocity imagery that emerged with the liberation of the concentration camps at the war’s end and played an especially important, evidentiary role in the postwar trials of perpetrators. At the 1945 Nuremberg Tribunal, particular practices of looking and seeing were first established with respect to these images that were later reinforced and institutionalized through Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem as simply part of the fabric of historical fact. They have come to constitute a certain visual rhetoric that now circumscribes the moral and political fields and powerfully assists in contemporary mythmaking about how we know genocide and what is permitted to count as such. In contrast, Arendt’s claims about the “banality of evil” work to disrupt this visual rhetoric. More significantly still, they direct our attention well beyond the figure of Eichmann to a world organized now as then by practices and processes that while designed to sustain and even enhance life work as well to efface it.