V. Dana

Hannah Arendt's rich and varied political thought is more influential today than ever before, due in part to the collapse of communism and the need for ideas that move beyond the old ideologies of the Cold War. As Dana Villa shows, however, Arendt's thought is often poorly understood, both because of its complexity and because her fame has made it easy for critics to write about what she is reputed to have said rather than what she actually wrote. Villa sets out to change that here, explaining clearly, carefully, and forcefully Arendt's major contributions to our understanding of politics, modernity, and the nature of political evil in our century.Villa begins by focusing on some of the most controversial aspects of Arendt's political thought. He shows that Arendt's famous idea of the banality of evil--inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann--does not, as some have maintained, lessen the guilt of war criminals by suggesting that they are mere cogs in a bureaucratic machine. He examines what she meant when she wrote that terror was the essence of totalitarianism, explaining that she believed Nazi and Soviet terror served above all to reinforce the totalitarian idea that humans are expendable units, subordinate to the all-determining laws of Nature or History. Villa clarifies the personal and philosophical relationship between Arendt and Heidegger, showing how her work drew on his thought while providing a firm repudiation of Heidegger's political idiocy under the Nazis. Less controversially, but as importantly, Villa also engages with Arendt's ideas about the relationship between political thought and political action. He explores her views about the roles of theatricality, philosophical reflection, and public-spiritedness in political life. And he explores what relationship, if any, Arendt saw between totalitarianism and the "great tradition" of Western political thought. Throughout, Villa shows how Arendt's ideas illuminate contemporary debates about the nature of modernity and democracy and how they deepen our understanding of philosophers ranging from Socrates and Plato to Habermas and Leo Strauss.Direct, lucid, and powerfully argued, this is a much-needed analysis of the central ideas of one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century

Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost political thinkers of the twentieth century, and her particular interests have made her one of the most frequently cited thinkers of our time. This Companion examines the primary themes of her multi-faceted work, from her theory of totalitarianism and her controversial idea of the 'banality of evil' to her classic studies of political action and her final reflections on judgment and the life of the mind. Each essay examines the political, philosophical, and historical concerns which shaped Arendt's thought, and which prompted her to become one of the most unapologetic champions of the political life in the history of Western thought.

This essay takes a critical look at the rubric “age of terror,” a rubric which has enjoyed a certain amount of theoretical and philosophical cachet in recent years. My argument begins by noting the continuity between this hypostatization and contemporary “war on terror” rhetoric, a continuity that is, in certain respects, ironic given the politics of the “age of terror” theorists. It then moves—via Machiavelli, Max Weber, and Hannah Arendt—to a consideration of the topics of state violence (on the one hand) and totalitarian terror (on the other). I use Arendt’s theorization of totalitarian terror for a dual purpose: first, to emphasize the gap between totalitarian terror and the more familiar “terror as means”; second, to question the characterization of recent Islamic terrorism as totalitarian in essence. Arendt’s distinctions between violence, terror and totalitarian terror help us avoid the Schmittian logic installed by advocates of the “war on terror” and by a variety of writers anxious to identify a ill-defined and generic “totalitarianism” as the transhistorical and transcultural “other” of liberalism. Keywords : terror; islamic terrorism; Hannah Arendt; Max Weber; totalitarianism; “Age of Terror”; liberalism; Machiavelli; evil as policy (Published online: 25 August, 2008) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics 2008. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v1i3.1861

This paper provides a phenomenological account of the writing of a young woman diagnosed with schizophrenia. The method of interpretation is to put ourselves in the place of the author drawing upon a combination of sympathy, reason, common-sense, experience, and an intersubjective world, common to us all (Schutz, 1945: 536). The result is the recognition of the person as also capable of putting herself in the place of others so as to understand their behavior. This role-taking success identifies the limits of the current sociological understanding of insanity's significance in social interaction as an instance of role-taking failure (Rosenberg, 1992).The very appearance of a piece of writing often permits one to recognize the presence of schizophrenia. The use of space may be quite bizarre. The varying margins betray the writer's changing mood. The letter may start at the bottom or side of the paper or very close to the top ..

Theodor Adorno once wrote an essay to "defend Bach against his devotees." In this book Dana Villa does the same for Hannah Arendt, whose sweeping reconceptualization of the nature and value of political action, he argues, has been covered over and domesticated by admirers who had hoped to enlist her in their less radical philosophical or political projects. Against the prevailing "Aristotelian" interpretation of her work, Villa explores Arendt's modernity, and indeed her postmodernity, through the Heideggerian and Nietzschean theme of a break with tradition at the closure of metaphysics.Villa's book, however, is much more than a mere correction of misinterpretations of a major thinker's work. Rather, he makes a persuasive case for Arendt as the postmodern or postmetaphysical political theorist, the first political theorist to think through the nature of political action after Nietzsche's exposition of the death of God. After giving an account of Arendt's theory of action and Heidegger's influence on it, Villa shows how Arendt did justice to the Heideggerian and Nietzschean criticism of the metaphysical tradition while avoiding the political conclusions they drew from their critiques. The result is a wide-ranging discussion not only of Arendt and Heidegger, but of Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Habermas, and the entire question of politics after metaphysics

This paper seeks to evaluate the political dimensions to Alasdair MacIntyre's thought. It does so by examining his virtue ethics in light of the political vision set out in Dependent Rational Animals and elsewhere. Key to MacIntyre's project is a form of local community that challenges the modern market and nation-state. This challenge and its philosophical underpinnings situate him as a distinctive figure within contemporary democratic thought. Against his critics, a central claim is that MacIntyre does not fall foul either of a nostalgic anti-pluralism or an unreflective conservatism. In fact, his theory is amenable to the idea of a non-subjectivist pluralism and displays a highly sophisticated understanding of the processes of change and critique. There are, however, significant problems. These spring from MacIntyre's excessive hostility to modern liberal realities. A near totalising critique, it threatens not only to undercut his Aristotelian philosophy of practice, but also leads him to an insupportable bifurcation of state and community. As regards the state, civil liberty, and distributive justice, MacIntyre can avoid self-contradiction and a despairing purism only if he takes a more moderate stance

In this essay I trace the relationship between philosophy and politics in Hannah Arendt’s work, with specific reference to the tension between her Socratic commitments and her appeal to “common sense” or sensus communis. I argue Arendt’s idea of a “common sense of the world” gives rise to a conception of the public realm that has too much shape and integrity to fit the often misty and particulate nature of contemporary reality. This is not the familiar critique of Arendt as a nostalgic Grecophile. Rather, it is a critique aimed at the phenomenological concept of “world” underlying her analysis. This concept—derived, but notably different, from Husserl’s and Heidegger’s respective conceptions—relies on background practices and understandings that are thick enough to sustain both a common public culture and a shared “sense of the world.” I suggest that Arendt’s appeal to a sensus communis runs aground of the moral and value pluralism that both Weber and Berlin have suggested are constitutive features of modernity. I conclude with some remarks on the relationship between Arendt’s critique of modernity and Socratic philosophical critique and Frankfurt School Critical Theory.

This study examined associations between level of sport participation, goal and sportspersonship orientations, and moral reasoning in sport and nonsport situations and orientation by sport participation interactions. Participants were individuals with elite, high school, and youth sport participation. When judging sport situations, individuals who participated in elite sports demonstrated poorer moral reasoning than those who participated in high school and youth sports. At low levels of sportspersonship, individuals who participated in youth sports demonstrated higher moral reasoning than those who participated in high school and elite sports. When judging nonsport situations, moral reasoning was positively related to positive sportspersonship and negatively related to ego orientation but did not differ by sport participation. Within sport, sport participation and goal and sportspersonship orientations play a critical role in moral reasoning. However, these orientations may be more important than sport participation in moral reasoning beyond the sport context.

Many critics bemoan the lack of civic engagement in America. Tocqueville's ''nation of joiners'' seems to have become a nation of alienated individuals, disinclined to fulfill the obligations of citizenship or the responsibilities of self-government. In response, the critics urge community involvement and renewed education in the civic virtues. But what kind of civic engagement do we want, and what sort of citizenship should we encourage? In Socratic Citizenship, Dana Villa takes issue with those who would reduce citizenship to community involvement or to political participation for its own sake. He argues that we need to place more value on a form of conscientious, moderately alienated citizenship invented by Socrates, one that is critical in orientation and dissident in practice. Taking Plato's Apology of Socrates as his starting point, Villa argues that Socrates was the first to show, in his words and deeds, how moral and intellectual integrity can go hand in hand, and how they can constitute importantly civic--and not just philosophical or moral--virtues. More specifically, Socrates urged that good citizens should value this sort of integrity more highly than such apparent virtues as patriotism, political participation, piety, and unwavering obedience to the law. Yet Socrates' radical redefinition of citizenship has had relatively little influence on Western political thought. Villa considers how the Socratic idea of the thinking citizen is treated by five of the most influential political thinkers of the past two centuries--John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss. In doing so, he not only deepens our understanding of these thinkers' work and of modern ideas of citizenship, he also shows how the fragile Socratic idea of citizenship has been lost through a persistent devaluation of independent thought and action in public life.Engaging current debates among political and social theorists, this insightful book shows how we must reconceive the idea of good citizenship if we are to begin to address the shaky fundamentals of civic culture in America today