Book in Review: Why Arendt Matters, by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. 240 pp. $22.00 (cloth)

• Date: 01 October 2007
• Published date: 01 October 2007
• Author: Dean Hammer
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591707305067
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Theory

Volume 35 Number 5

October 2007 689-692

© 2007 Sage Publications

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689

Why Arendt Matters, by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl.

New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006.

240 pp. $22.00 (cloth).

DOI: 10.1177/0090591707305067

With the centenary of Hannah Arendt’s birth and after nearly two

decades in which an explosion of scholarship has elevated Arendt to almost

canonical status, Young-Bruehl takes a step back to ask a more general

question: why does Arendt matter? Young-Bruehl seems to provide two

answers. The first answer speaks to all of us who have engaged with

Arendt’s scholarship (or, in the case of Young-Bruehl, with Arendt herself)

over the years. Arendt matters quite without us knowing it because she infil-

trates our thinking. She permanently alters the terms by which we view and

understand our political world even if we cannot always defend or give a

sufficiently analytic justification to her terms or arguments. Young-Bruehl’s

second answer is aimed at a generation just now learning about Arendt.

Young-Bruehl addresses the enduring qualities of Arendt’s thought by

showing how her works continue to speak to the problems of our age.

Young-Bruehl organizes her argument around the centrality of “thought-

lessness” to Arendt’s scholarship. Thoughtlessness appears in two guises: as

the thoughtlessness of political actors who endanger the political world (most

famously in Eichmann’s “banality”) and in the thoughtlessness of historical

analogies for making sense of the novelty of human affairs (notably totalitar-

ianism and statelessness). Young-Bruehl focuses on four texts—The Origins

of Totalitarianism,The Human Condition,On Revolution, and Life of the

Mind—providing a gloss of the fundamental themes of these books and then

extending Arendt’s mode of analysis to a series of contemporary issues.

In the first chapter,Young-Bruehl discusses The Origins of Totalitarianism,

recalling her own initial encounter with the text in a seminar by Hans

Morgenthau. Morgenthau had described Arendt as the “first to understand

fascism” (p. 34). Young-Bruehl characterizes the understanding conveyed in

Origins as akin to a “field manual” aimed at addressing one fundamental

question: “Would it be possible, by understanding totalitarianism, to judge

future totalitarianisms accurately as they arose or in their infancy” (pp. 34-

35)? After providing a summary of the arguments and reception of Origins,

Young-Bruehl takes up this challenge, using the “manual” to identify totali-

tarian aspects of our contemporary world. Young-Bruehl points to some dif-

ferent ways in which four elements of totalitarianism identified by Arendt