On a day when the New York Times’s Paul Krugman is celebrating the work of Richard Hofstadter, the paper also marks the coming centennial of the birth of Hannah Arendt, an event that is the subject of academic conferences in which commentators marvel at the relevance of Arendt’s writings to today’s world:
Just over a week ago, at Yale University, a conference on Arendt alluded to current controversies in its title, “Crises of Our Republics,” with many speakers amplifying the allusion…
The political scientist Benjamin R. Barber, for example, dismissed the idea that Islamist fundamentalism was in any way totalitarian but suggested that given the current administration in the United States, an “American Eichmann is not altogether impossible.”
“I feel the American Republic is in the deepest crisis of my lifetime,” said the writer Jonathan Schell, fearing that though Arendt’s “checklist” for totalitarianism is only partly satisfied by current conditions in the United States, “we are on the edge of that abyss.” The philosopher Susan Neiman, the author of a subtle book, “Evil in Modern Thought,” interpolated her discussion of the crimes of Hitler and Stalin with wonder about whether more guilt should be ascribed to Dick Cheney or Paul Wolfowitz for the war in Iraq. The political scientist George Kateb, after giving a supple discussion of Arendt’s views of morality, turned angry when applying her ideas to the current scene, seeing “the rudiments of a police state” here, and finding evidence of the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War.