Yiyang Zhuge: Translating Hannah Arendt Across Worlds

 

Yiyang Zhuge translator of Hannah Arendt and Plutarch

At a recent conversation hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center in New York City, Roger Berkowitz interviewed Yiyang Zhuge. Her work represents a remarkable intellectual bridge between languages, traditions, and political worlds. Still a graduate student at Boston College, Zhuge has already emerged as a significant figure in bringing Western political thought—especially the work of Hannah Arendt—to contemporary Chinese readers.

Roger Berkowitz and Yiyang Zhuge

Zhuge’s recent translation of The Human Condition into Mandarin, published this year in China, has already sold 15,000 copies—an impressive number for a dense philosophical text. The year before, her translation of Plutarch’s Moralia reached an even wider audience, with 36,000 copies sold. These numbers suggest not only the quality of her work but also a growing appetite among Chinese readers for classical and modern texts that explore politics, ethics, and the human condition.

Plutrach's Moralia translated from Greek to Mandarin by Yiyang Zhuge

What makes Zhuge’s work even more striking is the path that led her there. She came to the United States at the age of fifteen and attended a private high  school with little knowledge of English. In an environment where she faced social difficulties, language itself became both refuge and passion. She immersed herself in study, mastering not only English but also Greek, Latin, and German. That linguistic range enabled her to translate Arendt not from English but from German.  Arendt wrote her major works in both English and German. Zhuge and Berkowitz mentioned some of the differences between the German and English version of The Human Condition including Arendt’s quotations of German poetry in the edition she wrote in German. 

The Human Condition translated from German to Mandarin by Yiyang Zhuge

Zhuge’s work is not limited to translation. She has built a substantial following through a Mandarin-language YouTube channel where she discusses politics and feminism. In doing so, she participates in a broader intellectual project: creating a space for political thought that crosses cultural and linguistic boundaries. Her translations and public engagement bring thinkers like Arendt into conversation with contemporary Chinese audiences, where questions of authority, freedom, and public life carry particular urgency.

Zhuge's translation of Men in Dark Times will be published later in 2026 

Her current effort to publish a Mandarin translation of Men in Dark Times highlights the challenges of that project. The text, with its reflections on individuals who maintained moral clarity under oppressive conditions, must pass through China’s censorship process. That negotiation itself underscores the stakes of Zhuge’s work. Translation under censorship is not only an intellectual exercise but also a political act.

Zhuge’s story highlights language as a form of freedom. From a teenager struggling to find her place in a new country to a scholar translating some political philosophy from the 20h century and the ancient world, she has turned linguistic mastery into a means of connection and influence. In bringing Arendt into Mandarin, she is not only translating words but opening a space for thought—one that, like Arendt’s own work, insists on the importance of thinking in difficult times.

Hoping Against Facts: Belief in Progress

 

The end of the Cold War seemed, for a brief moment, to vindicate the modern belief in progress. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many observers concluded that liberal democracy had triumphed not only politically but historically. Communist regimes fell across Eastern Europe, democratic institutions spread, and markets opened. It appeared that history itself was moving in a clear direction. The twentieth century’s ideological struggle had ended, and democracy had won.

Yet the decades that followed quickly complicated that confidence. Events after the Cold War increasingly suggested that the belief in inevitable progress—so sharply criticized by Hannah Arendt—rested on far shakier ground than many assumed.

One of the earliest signs appeared in Russia itself. After the Soviet collapse, many hoped the country would evolve toward stable democracy. Instead, the brutal First Chechen War revealed how fragile the new order was. Violence, corruption, and political instability quickly undermined the democratic experiment. Within a decade, Russia had moved toward the centralized authoritarianism that defines it today.

China offered another early warning. While Western observers sometimes hoped that economic liberalization would eventually lead to political openness, the Chinese Communist Party made its intentions unmistakably clear during the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. The violent suppression of democratic protests demonstrated that economic modernization did not necessarily produce political freedom. China would grow richer and more powerful, but not more democratic.

The optimism of the early 1990s suffered another blow with the terrorist attacks of September 11 attacks. The attacks revealed that ideological conflict had not disappeared with the Cold War. Instead, new forms of global struggle—rooted in religious extremism and geopolitical instability—had emerged. The wars that followed reshaped global politics and exposed the limits of American power to shape political outcomes abroad.

The Middle East seemed briefly to challenge this pessimism during the Arab Spring. Mass protests toppled dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, raising hopes that democratic reform might finally take root across the region. Yet those hopes proved fragile. In many countries the uprisings gave way to civil war, renewed authoritarianism, or political chaos. The dream of a democratic Middle East faded almost as quickly as it appeared.

Even within established democracies, confidence in steady progress began to erode. By the mid-2010s, political polarization, populist movements, and declining trust in institutions signaled growing strain within democratic systems themselves. In countries long considered stable, including the United States, political norms that once seemed secure began to look more vulnerable.

Taken together, these developments illustrate a central insight of Arendt’s political thought. In works such as On Violence and The Human Condition, she warned against the comforting belief that history moves automatically toward improvement. Scientific and technological progress may advance steadily, but political life does not follow the same pattern. Human institutions remain fragile because they depend on human action—choices made by citizens, leaders, and societies.

The events of the past three decades underscore her point. Moments that seemed to confirm the triumph of democracy turned out to be temporary openings rather than permanent transformations. Progress, if it exists at all, must be continually defended and renewed.

Arendt did not deny the possibility of improvement. She believed that human beings possess the capacity to create new political beginnings through collective action. But she insisted that such achievements are never guaranteed. Freedom and democratic institutions survive only when people actively sustain them.

The decades since the Cold War have shown how quickly optimism about historical progress can fade. They have also reminded us of Arendt’s deeper lesson: history does not move forward by necessity. Its direction remains open, shaped by the decisions people make in their own time.

Hannah Arendt and the Illusion of Progress

"On Violence" is one of the essays in the book

Crises of the Republic by Hannah Arendt

 

In her essay On Violence, Hannah Arendt offers a lucid critique of the modern belief in historical progress. Writing in the late 1960s amid political upheaval, student revolts, and widespread violence in American cities, Arendt challenges the idea—deeply embedded in modern Western thought—that history moves steadily toward moral or political improvement. For Arendt, this belief is not an ancient insight but a relatively recent intellectual construction.

She traces the idea historically. In the seventeenth century, she notes, the concept of inevitable progress was largely unknown. Early modern thinkers saw human affairs as cyclical or contingent rather than steadily improving. 

Ancient Greeks looked back to a Golden Age.

Romans looked back to the founding of Rome from the ashes of Troy.

Jews and Christians look back to Eden and a march of sin only to be relieved by the Messiah.

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century began to change this perspective. Philosophers increasingly believed that reason, science, and education could gradually improve human society. By the nineteenth century, the idea of progress had hardened into something close to certainty. Scientific and technological breakthroughs seemed to demonstrate that human knowledge advanced continuously. Many thinkers then assumed that moral and political life must be advancing as well.

Arendt rejects this leap. In On Violence, she argues that technological progress does not imply moral progress. The twentieth century, in her view, destroyed that illusion. Two world wars, the rise of totalitarian regimes, and the development of weapons capable of annihilating humanity demonstrated that increased scientific capability can coexist with unprecedented brutality. Indeed, modern technology often magnifies violence rather than restrains it. For Arendt, the assumption that history inevitably turns toward improvement is therefore a philosophical error—an unsupported faith rather than a proven truth.

The arc of history occasionally bends toward justice, but can just as easily snap back toward patriarchal tyranny. 

Yet Arendt’s critique of progress does not amount to pure pessimism. Her earlier work The Human Condition offers a more subtle view of human development. In that book she analyzes the fundamental activities of human life—labor, work, and action—and explores how modern society has transformed them. Although she does not embrace the Enlightenment narrative of inevitable progress, she does acknowledge that human beings continuously reshape their world. Through “work,” humans build durable structures, institutions, and technologies that alter the conditions of life on earth. Through “action,” they create new political possibilities through persuasion.

In this sense, Arendt recognizes change and improvement, but she refuses to call it progress in the philosophical sense. Progress implies a predictable direction, a historical law guaranteeing advancement. Arendt insists that no such law exists. Human achievements remain fragile and reversible because they depend on political judgment and collective responsibility. Civilization can advance, but it can also collapse.

Another striking element of The Human Condition reinforces this position: Arendt assumes that humanity’s future will remain on earth. Writing during the early space age, she reacts skeptically to fantasies of escaping the human condition through technological mastery. Even as science expands human power, our political and moral challenges remain rooted in the earthly world we share.

Taken together, On Violence and The Human Condition reveal Arendt’s distinctive position. She rejects the comforting belief that history inevitably moves toward improvement. The catastrophes of the twentieth century demonstrate that progress is not guaranteed. Yet she does not deny human creativity or the possibility of building better institutions. What she rejects is the illusion that improvement will occur automatically.

For Arendt, the future is not secured by historical progress but shaped by human action. Whether societies become more just or more violent depends not on the momentum of history but on the choices people make.

Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution: The Book That Explains Why Revolutions Keep Failing

 Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution is the book people come to later, after reading The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. On Revolution explains why modern political movements, even well-intentioned ones, so often collapse into chaos, violence, or empty spectacle. Why nearly all revolutions begin with a cry for freedom and end under tyranny. Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, has called On Revolution Arendt’s most important work for our time. 

I didn't read On Revolution to learn about 18th-century history, but that aspect fascinated me the most from my first (of three) readings. I read the book to understand why most revolutions fail. Why do today's movements and “moments” of rising against tyranny today feel simultaneously urgent and powerless—why they generate outrage and mobilization but fail to produce lasting freedom.

Arendt’s central claim: "most modern revolutions confuse liberation with freedom, and the confusion destroys them."

Liberation is not freedom

Liberation means being freed from something—tyranny, poverty, occupation, oppression. Freedom, in Arendt’s sense, means the ability to "act politically with others in a durable public space." It means founding something that lasts: institutions, laws, assemblies, and a shared world where people appear to one another as equals.

The American Revolution, she argues, succeeded because it understood this difference. The French Revolution (and the Russian Revolution) failed because it didn’t.

The American founders, to their eternal credit and our benefit, were obsessed with founding.  They fought to write constitutions and found legislatures, courts, and lasting programs. They worried less about the social questions such poverty, hunger, and inequality and more about how to build a political structure that could outlast them. They created a space for citizens to act together across generations.

The French revolutionaries, by contrast, became consumed by suffering. Once “the people” were redefined as the hungry masses, politics was no longer about public freedom—it became a moral crusade to eliminate misery. And misery, Arendt insists, has no natural limit. Once the revolution defines itself by alleviating suffering, it must keep escalating, because suffering is endless. That is how revolutions devour themselves.

In Arendt’s formulation, compassion is a terrible political guide.

Not because suffering isn’t real—but because it can’t be organized into stable institutions. You can relieve hunger. You cannot found freedom on pity.

Why revolutions radicalize

This is where On Revolution becomes eerily contemporary.

Arendt shows how revolutions tend to slide from political action into moral absolutism. Once a movement defines itself as the voice of “the people,” anyone who disagrees becomes an enemy of humanity itself. Violence becomes justified. Due process evaporates. The revolution must keep purifying itself to remain “true.”

That logic did not die in 1794. It is alive in every movement that substitutes "moral righteousness for political construction."

Arendt is not saying people shouldn’t care about injustice. She is saying that "you cannot build a republic out of rage, resentment, or suffering alone." Those are forces of destruction, not creation.

What the American founders understood—better than almost anyone before or since—is that politics is not primarily about justice in the abstract. It is about "creating a space where people can argue, act, compromise, and govern themselves without killing each other."

That space is fragile. It must be designed, protected, and institutionalized. Once it disappears, no amount of moral fervor can replace it.

The lost tradition of councils

One of the most fascinating parts of On Revolution is Arendt’s recovery of what she calls the “council tradition.” In almost every major revolution—American town halls, French sections, Russian soviets, Hungarian workers’ councils—ordinary people spontaneously create local bodies to govern themselves. These are moments of genuine political freedom: people speaking, voting, deliberating, acting together.

And then, almost without fail, (except in America) these councils are crushed—by parties, bureaucracies, or charismatic leaders.

Why? Because councils represent horizontal power, while modern politics is obsessed with vertical power: seizing the state, controlling the apparatus, winning elections, commanding the police and military. The councils threaten elites of every ideology because they distribute power too widely.

Arendt believed the greatest tragedy of modern revolutions is not that they fail—it’s that they destroy their own most democratic institutions in the process of “winning.”

That insight alone makes On Revolution worth reading in the 21st century.

Why Berkowitz is right

When Berkowitz calls this Arendt’s most important book for our time, he is pointing to something uncomfortable: we live in an age of permanent political agitation with very little political creation.

Everywhere you look, people are mobilized. Very few are building.  Social media creates movements without institutions. Outrage without constitutions. Protests without durable structures. Everyone feels morally outraged; almost no one is founding anything that can last.

Arendt would recognize this instantly. She would say we are drowning in liberation movements that cannot produce freedom. We are very good at tearing down. We are terrible at building a shared world.

On Revolution is not a book you read once and “get.” It is deeply critical of the modern left and deeply skeptical of the modern right. It admires the American founding while being merciless about its blind spots. It honors revolutionary courage while condemning revolutionary excess. And it is written with Arendt’s characteristic clarity: sentences that are lucid and full of insight, but often complex. 

[An aside:  I shared my enthusiasm for Arendt with a friend who is an Arendt skeptic.  There are a lot of Arendt critics who dislike her conclusions in Eichmann in Jerusalem. I had the book with me when we met for coffee. My friend opened the book randomly to the opening sentence of chapter 3, read it aloud and said, "What does that mean." It was 82 words with three dependent clauses. I stammered "I'll get back to you."]

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The hardest thing On Revolution asks us to accept is this: Freedom is boring.

Not in lived experience—but in structure. Freedom requires procedures, rules, institutions, compromise, and limits. It requires people to lose elections and accept it. It requires citizens to live with people they dislike. It requires slow, frustrating, incremental change. It requires grace. And as Arendt says explicitly, it requires forgiveness. 

Revolutionary passion, by contrast, feels alive. It feels pure. It feels righteous. And it burns itself out.

Arendt understood that if you want a society where people can keep acting together, you must give up the dream of moral perfection. You must choose a flawed, procedural, human republic over the intoxicating fantasy of total justice. That's why the woke left felt so wrong with its on line banishing of people. When the Trump right silences critics with death threats they are no better than the left.

In an age of endless crisis and constant mobilization, Hannah Arendt’s message is quietly radical: the goal is not to feel righteous—it is to build a world where freedom can endure.

Arendt might say we’re watching a classic revolutionary pathology play out in slow motion: movements replacing politics with moral crusade. When that happens, institutions stop being arenas for disagreement and start being treated as obstacles to righteousness. Courts, universities, media, legislatures—once they fail to deliver the “correct” outcome, they’re declared illegitimate. That’s how democratic organs get hollowed out from the inside.

You see it on both ends of the spectrum. One side tries to discredit elections, the other to delegitimize speech and process. Different flags, same impulse: “If you disagree, you don’t belong.” That’s exactly the move Arendt warned about—the moment when “the people” becomes a moral category rather than a political one.

The tragedy is that Americans are still surrounded by the very tools Arendt thought precious—local institutions, courts, assemblies, constitutional processes—but more and more activists treat those tools as corrupt by definition. They want purity, not procedures. That’s the road that leads away from freedom, even when it’s paved with good intentions.

Sadly, On Revolution predicts nothing good in the current situation in Iran.  The Jihadis that run the country have already murdered thousands. They could murder tens or hundreds of thousands and believe they are doing God's will. And if the mullahs fall whatever follows them will be more interested in power than freedom. 

 

JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times--The 17th Annual Fall Conference of the Hannah Arendt Center

 

“We’re back from Covid! Finally,” said Christine Gonzalez Stanton, bursting with genuine joy, at the opening of the 17th annual fall conference of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. Stanton is the executive director of the Hannah Arendt Center and one of the organizers of the conference. After years of difficulties with travel for attendees and speakers along with masking and distancing, this year saw the main auditorium and breakout sessions packed with conference goers. The attendees included students from Bard and many local high schools and colleges as well as members of the Hannah Arendt Center. Everyone crowded together in the common areas and the lunch line and registration area.

The conference, titled JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times, was held in Olin Hall on the campus of Bard College. To attend the conferences each year, I drive from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to attend the two-day gathering, this year on October 16 and 17, so I usually arrive as the first session is beginning. This year I drove well past Olin Hall to find parking, another indication that the attendance was much higher than in recent years. I have been attending the conferences since 2019, so after one year of a packed auditorium, Covid affected everything, including parking, which was easy in 2021 when the conference returned to in-person sessions after a webinar in 2020.

In future posts I will write more about the talks that comprise the conference program. I will admit, I had trouble linking Joy as a theme to Hannah Arendt. I have read all her works, many as part of the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center. Joy is not the first word that comes to my mind in works defining totalitarianism, chronicling the modern history of revolutions, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and presenting a unique view of love in Saint Augustine.  

Roger Berkowitz made a compelling case for connecting Hannah Arendt to the theme of the conference in his opening remarks. Other presenters tied various expressions of joy to their fields of study and to our current hour. In a discussion session, Teju Cole mentioned the joy one can feel in triumph over an opponent.

My own experience of joy is the overflow of happiness seen among friends and family at moments of reunion—possibly returning from a war, recovering from a serious illness, or after a long time apart. This bubbling happiness I have felt and seen in others is what I saw when Christine Stanton effused about this year’s conference soon after it began. She was in a moment of joy. 

That moment reflected the summary of Joy on the conference website: "Joy is at once more visceral and more risky than happiness. What brings you joy? Joy can emerge in a lover's gaze, in the transcendence of Beethoven's late sonatas, in the embrace of a once-wayward child. Joy is not mere happiness; nor is it satisfied contentment. Joy is the lasting delight we feel when touched deeply by what matters most." 

Following the theme of the conference, joy is most vivid in dark times or in the shadow of dark times. In Iraq, when helicopter crews returned from dangerous missions, sometimes in blackout sandstorms, the happiness bubbled over. The normal stoic affect of pilots, crew chiefs, and door gunners fell away for a while to share deep delight.

The conference presenters, necessarily, were trying to define and discuss joy, which requires dissecting—fatal for the subject of the study. Like those trying to define humor or love, they were striving to explain what ultimately must be experienced.

I couldn’t stay for every panel, but I didn’t need to. The theme of the conference wasn’t confined to the program. I saw joy in the crowded hallways, in the greetings between old friends, in the simple fact that people crowded together again after the disruption of the Covid years. It was the same kind of joy I’ve seen in soldiers home from war, reunited with their families. 

Joy also happens in small moments.  I had a chance to talk with Hillary Harvey, the communications manager of the Hannah Arendt Center between sessions. It was fun to catch up. It was the same with several other people I ran into during breaks and lunch. People I met at conferences since 2019 and who, like me, come back year after year.  It was fun to share small joys in the larger context of joy in dark times.

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind—left unfinished at her death in 1975—explores what it means to live a reflective human life. Though only the first two volumes, Thinking and Willing, were completed, they show how our minds work, how we deal with thinking and willing.  If death had not taken her, we would know much more about the process of judging, of looking into our own experience and evaluating the world around us. In addition to defining the modes in which our mind works Arendt wanted to look deeper into what she had seen in the trial of Adolph Eichmann, to ask why thoughtlessness could coexist with education and intelligence. Her answer was to return to the activity of the mind itself: thinking, willing, and judging.

In his lectures on The Life of the Mind at the Hannah Arendt Center, Roger Berkowitz said the key sentence of the entire book is in the Introduction on page 15 of the paperback edition:

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same.  (These words are italicized in the book.)

Thinking as Interior Dialogue

For Arendt, thinking is not problem-solving or information processing but a withdrawal from the world into an inner dialogue. This is her Socratic inheritance: the “two-in-one” conversation where I, as thinker, am alone in the company of myself. This dialogue is a withdrawal from the world. Thinking refers to the present, to the here and now of existence, but in a way that suspends action. It is an activity that strips away worldly entanglements and confronts the mind with meaning rather than facts. Arendt insists that thinking is not about producing results; it is about keeping oneself in dialogue, preventing the collapse into thoughtlessness.

In thinking, Arendt says we are not searching for truth, but for meaning.  This search for meaning is individual and unique.  It may or may not lead to truth. 

In the context of Eichmann, this withdrawal is central. She believed Eichmann’s evil was thoughtless precisely because he lacked this inner two-in-one. He conformed, he obeyed, but he never withdrew to examine whether what he was doing was right. To think is to interrupt the chain of command within oneself, to stand back and confront reality in the present tense.

Willing as the Struggle with the Future

If thinking is rooted in the present, willing is oriented toward the future. It is the inner effort to control what is not yet, to choose between possibilities, to force action upon the world. Arendt describes willing as a divided, restless power: the will affirms and denies at once. Unlike the serenity of the thinking dialogue, willing is conflictual, almost violent. We both want and do not want; we command ourselves and resist our own commands.

Where thinking withdraws from the world, willing strains against it. It is the mind’s way of asserting itself against time, against the uncertainty of what comes next. For Arendt, this tension is central to understanding political action: willing is the seed of freedom, but also of frustration. We are never at peace with the will because the future is never securely ours.

Thinking, Judging, and Willing

Arendt’s tripartite scheme assigns each faculty a temporal orientation. Thinking deals with the present; judging, with the past; willing, with the future. Judging, which she did not live to write, she connected to Kant’s Critique of Judgment and his idea of reflective judgment—how we make sense of past events, how we discern meaning after the fact.

Together, they give us three aspects of our inner life: thought that withdraws from the world, judgment that brings the past into evaluating the present, and will that looks to the future. The activity of the mind found in this temporal triad, is always in motion, changing and subject to chance as is all life.

The Christian Inheritance of the Will

The most striking feature of Willing is Arendt’s deep dive into the Christian tradition. She traces the genealogy of the will not to Greek philosophy, where the concept is largely absent, but to the New Testament. In Saint Paul she finds the first language of inner division: “the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.” The will appears here as torn between flesh and spirit, desire and command.

Augustine, whom Arendt calls the first Christian philosopher, builds on this Pauline insight. For him, the will is not simply choice but the innermost movement of the self toward or away from God. In Confessions, Augustine describes the paralysis of a divided will, torn between sin and obeying God. Arendt shows this is the decisive turn: the will becomes the core of human subjectivity, the theater of inner conflict.

Aquinas later systematizes the will into scholastic doctrine, aligning it with reason and natural law. Here the will finds its place within a rational order, no longer pure division but an instrument that can be directed toward the good. Arendt is less enamored with Aquinas than with Augustine, but she acknowledges the power of this tradition: Christianity gave the West the very concept of a faculty oriented to the future, an inner command that makes freedom both possible and perilous.

Along with Paul, Augustine and Aquinas, Arendt writes at length about Duns Scotus, a scholastic thinker who accepts contingency in life and through contingency shows that we truly have free will.  The first time I read The Life of the Mind I was unaware of Scotus.  In reading Arendt, I am delighted to find people and ideas I had never encountered. 

The Life of the Mind is brilliant. Arendt writes not as a metaphysician spinning systems but as a thinker who wrestles with the facts of experience and the inheritances of tradition. Her exploration of the inner dialogue of thinking shows why reflection matters in a world of conformity. Her analysis of the will uncovers both its torment and its promise: the divided power that enables freedom but guarantees restlessness.

That she died before completing the volume on Judging is a loss, but the fragments we have are enough to make her point. To be human is to be suspended between past, present, and future, always in dialogue with ourselves, never fully at rest. Arendt’s book is not a manual but an invitation to return to that dialogue, to resist thoughtlessness, and to confront the responsibilities of freedom.

The Bureaucrat of Death: Adolf Eichmann and the Machinery of the Holocaust

(This post is edited and improved by ChatGPT. The original version is here.) 

In 1932, Adolf Eichmann was an unemployed Austrian drifting through a country in political and economic chaos. Desperate for work, he crossed into Germany and joined the rising Nazi Party—more out of need than ideology.

Eichmann soon found employment in the Nazi campaign to make Germany Judenrein—free of Jews. Between 1933, when Hitler rose to power, and the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the regime's goal was deportation, not yet mass murder. During this period, the Nazis expelled Jews from the Reich, often forcing them to navigate a labyrinth of bureaucracy that made escape painfully slow.

Eichmann, however, had a talent for logistics. He centralized the deportation process by bringing all necessary agencies under one roof. What once took months now took days. But the streamlining came at a cost: Jews were stripped of their assets and left with barely enough to reach their destinations. Many ended up in British-controlled Palestine, Spain, or other countries the Nazis never conquered. Though they lost everything, they escaped the coming catastrophe.

Once the war began, deportations largely halted. For over two years, Eichmann and others involved in Jewish expulsion waited as the Nazi leadership decided on a new direction. In the meantime, local massacres claimed the lives of millions of Jews, carried out near their homes by bullets rather than gas.

Then came January 1942. At the infamous Wannsee Conference, the Nazi regime formally adopted the “Final Solution”—the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews. Eichmann’s organizational prowess, once used to deport Jews out of the Reich, was now repurposed for industrial-scale murder. He managed the transportation of victims to Auschwitz and other death camps with cold precision.

By 1944, his methods were devastatingly efficient. In Budapest, working with the cooperation of certain Jewish leaders, Eichmann deported nearly half a million Hungarian Jews to their deaths in just three months.

Eichmann was no mastermind of evil in the comic book sense. He was a functionary—a man of forms, files, and timetables. When the orders were to deport, he deported. When the orders were to kill, he ensured the trains ran on time. He was an amoral bureaucrat who helped send over three million Jews to their deaths, not out of personal hatred, but out of dutiful obedience.

After the war, Eichmann disappeared. He hid in Austria before escaping to Argentina through the infamous “Rat Line” — a network assisted by Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal. At the time, Pope Pius XII, whose papacy has been heavily criticized for its silence during the Holocaust, remained in power. In Argentina, Eichmann lived under an alias but eventually bragged about his role in the genocide.

In 1960, Israeli agents captured him and brought him to trial in Jerusalem. He was convicted and executed in 1962.

I've read and reread Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt’s account of his trial. Her concept of the “banality of evil”—that horrific crimes can be committed by ordinary people who simply follow orders—remains controversial. Many critics of her work, both then and now, have not actually read it.

I strongly recommend all of Arendt's works, several of which I've summarized briefly in other posts. Among them, The Origins of Totalitarianism stands out as the most essential for understanding the ideological and structural roots of the Holocaust.

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Recommended Works by Hannah Arendt:

• 📘 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Modern Classics)

• 📗 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harvest/Harcourt)

• 📕 The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press)

• 📙 Between Past and Future (Penguin)

• 📒 On Revolution (Penguin)

• 📓 Responsibility and Judgment (Schocken)

These books provide not only a window into Arendt’s profound political thought but also a vital lens on totalitarianism, moral responsibility, and the capacity of ordinary people to commit extraordinary crimes.

Tribe by Sebastian Junger -- The Ancient Roots of Many Problems of the Modern World

In October, I went a conference on Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism.  The first and featured speaker was Sebastian Junger, author of seven books that, in part, describe the lives of modern tribes in America including soldiers, commercial fishermen, and others who risk their lives in their work.  Junger said, "The real and ancient meaning of tribe is the community that you live in, that you share resources with, that you would risk your life to defend."

He is also the co-director with Tim Hetherington of the documentary Restrepo, the record of a year with soldiers on one of the most dangerous outposts in Afghanistan. The soldiers of Battle Company, 2nd of the 503rd Infantry Regiment 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team are the definition of a tribe.

Humans as a species are tribal.  Forming tribes and living as tribes describes most of human history. In the book, Junger shows that people who live without tribes, without the community and deep connections tribes afford, are adrift and often unhappy without knowing why.  

Junger said it was a commonplace in frontier America that people who went from civilization to Native American tribal life did not come back.  Whatever civilization could offer, those who left would not return. 

As I read the book, I felt I was learning the secret code of my life--the yearning for a tribe.  I grew up in a Boston suburb in the 1950s and 60s, not connected to extended family or religion or even a sports team.  I joined the military shortly after high school graduation in 1971 and loved being part of a group with a mission. I got out after being blinded in a missile explosion, but healed completely and re-enlisted within a year.  

After three years as a tank commander on the East-West border, I got out, went to college, got a professional job, then a quarter-century later re-enlisted and deployed to Iraq for a year.  That deployment ended 15 years ago this month.   

In an odd twist, I saw Restrepo right after it was released in late June 2010 in an NYC theater, a few months after I returned from deployment.  I walked out of the theater and wanted to go to Afghanistan.  

Belonging to a tribe has been normal for we humans in all of recorded history and before.  The cosmopolitan drive in us allows great learning, great invention, modern medicine and all the wonders of the modern world, but it does satisfy our need for deep human connection.  Tribes do that. Tribe, the book, explains the history and present reality of the tribal impulse in our lives.

Hannah Arendt Center Conference 2024: Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism, 1st Morning

 

On October 17 and 18 the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College held its annual conference. This year's topic was Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism: How Can We Imagine a Pluralist Politics? 

Hannah Arendt Center Founder and Academic Director Roger Berkowitz introduced the topic of the conference. He began with his own tribal connections: his family, his Jewish faith, and other close-knit groups. As a cosmopolitan he has "passport stamps from many countries" where he has friends and family and colleagues in addition to writing books and articles and being part of intellectual communities: a cosmopolitan with many tribes.

He then talked about the conflict between those committed to a cosmopolitan view of the world and those who see humans through a tribal lens.  I would try to summarize, but the opening speech of the conference is the latest episode of the Reading Hannah Arendt podcast so anyone so inclined can listen to the Roger's opening remarks.

The first speaker was Sebastian Junger, like Berkowitz, embodies the title of the conference.  

As a cosmopolitan, he has written seven books, earning #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list, and numerous articles earning a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award and a Peabody Award.  His documentary film Restrepo (with co-director Tim Hetherington) won a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and was nominated for an Academy Award.

But the central subject of his writing is tribalism. His book Tribe explores the lure of tribalism and its place in modern life. Junger said the definition of a tribe is "What happens to you happens to me."  The willingness to die for fellow tribe member is another mark of a tribe.   

War and the film Restrepo show the life of an Army company defending the most exposed outpost in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. Soldiers form a tribe. In Restrepo one of the soldiers says that guys who hate each other's guts would risk their lives for each other. 

I saw Restrepo just after returning from a year's deployment to Iraq in 2010.  I have not seen a better or more candid documentary of war, any war, than Restrepo. 

Just after the conference I read Junger's book The Perfect Storm the story of the commercial fishing boat Andrea Gail lost with all hands in a terrible storm in 1991.  Junger describes the tribe of the people who fish for a living and the dangers they face.  We also see the rescue services of the Coast Guard and the Air National Guard saving the lives of doomed boats in the terrible storm. We also learn about the rescuers lost and terribly injured during the rescues. The end of the book follows those dealing with the loss of loved ones in that terrible storm.  War and disaster always have this long tail of family and communal suffering. Junger shows us the many struggles of thos left behind.

I will have to leave the rest of the conference for another post.  This post is already very long and long after the event.

The Concept of History, Chapter 2 of "Between Past and Future" by Hannah Arendt

When we say history is written by the victors, we are assuming or accusing the historians of writing propaganda.  But as Hannah Arendt makes clear in the 2nd chapter of Between Past and Future history began with Homer's impartial view--writing about greatness and courage on both sides of the tragic war that lead to the founding of Rome by the defeated.  

Here is Arendt on impartiality in history in Ancient Greece:

Impartiality, and with it all true historiography, came into the world when Homer decided to sing the deeds of the Trojans no less than those of the Achaeans, and so to praise the glory of Hector no less than the greatness of Achilles. This Homeric impartiality as it is echoed by Herodotus who set out to prevent “the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory,” is still the highest type of objectivity we know. Not only does it leave behind the common interest in one's own side and one's own people, which up to our own days characterizes almost all national historiography, but it also discards the alternative of victory or defeat which moderns have felt expresses the “objective” judgment of history itself and does not permit it to interfere with what is judged to be worthy of immortalizing praise. Somewhat later, and most magnificently expressed in Thucydides, there appears in Greek historiography still another powerful element that contributes to historical objectivity. It could come to the foreground only after long experience in polis-life, which to an incredibly large extent consisted of citizens talking with one another. In this incessant talk, the Greeks discovered that the world we have in common is usually regarded from an infinite number of different standpoints, to which correspond to the most diverse points of view. In a sheer inexhaustible flow of arguments, as the sophists presented them to the citizenry of Athens, the Greek learned to exchange his own viewpoint, his own “opinion”—in the way the world appeared and opened up to him δοκει μοι, “it appears to me,” from which comes δοξα, or “opinion”—with those of his fellow citizens. Greeks learn to understand—not to understand one another as individual persons, but to look upon the same world from one another's standpoint, to see the same in very different and frequently opposing aspects. The speeches in which Thucydides makes articulate the standpoints and interests of the warring parties, are still a living testimony to the extraordinary degree of this object activity.

The Concept of History, Chapter 2 of Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt, pg. 51-2

I wrote about the Preface of Between Past and Future here.

Quoting Hannah Arendt: Not Easy, but No Excuse for Fake Quotes

On Friday, 6 September, the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, will begin the discussion of "Between Past and Future" first published in 1961. 

Recently, Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic direct of the HAC, wrote an excellent essay about the problem of made up quotes of Hannah Arendt and by extension all authors.  He is right. Read it here. 

Last month an insightful essay on this book was published on the HAC site.  It begins with a quote from Arendt's preface to the work that I marked as "theme" in the margin.  Here is the essay by Mark Aloysius, S.J.

The opening quote on the essay shows why quoting Arendt can be so difficult.  The 70-word sentence has three independent clauses, with three dependent clauses. Reading this sentence made me glad I am old enough to have diagrammed sentences in elementary school. The quote is an entirely appropriate opening for an essay on the HAC web site, but not the kind of thing that would get likes on TikTok or Snapchat. 

Here is the quote:

Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it is broken in the middle, at the point where ‘he’ stands; and ‘his’ standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which ‘his’ constant fighting, ‘his’ making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence.”
(Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Penguin Books, 10).

One of my many reasons for being a member of the HAC is the discussions that guide the reading of Arendt's complex thought.  After reading Arendt's preface, I transcribed the paragraph that the above quote is in. The 263-word paragraph has just five sentences. One is a simple16-word sentence quoting William Faulkner.  The other four have 60, 36, 70 and 81 words.  

The relatively snappy 36-word sentence has two dependent clauses.  The closing 81-word sentence has two independent clauses and four dependent clauses.  Arendt was not writing for social media.  

In a decade and a half of reading Arendt, the former ad writer in me has never found her quotable, but I have been able to discuss with enthusiasm what she has said with people who care about the human condition (to make a pun) in all of its complexity.

Here is the paragraph I transcribed:

"The first thing to be noticed is that not only the future—“the wave of the future”—but also the past is seen as a force, and not, as in nearly all our metaphors, as a burden man has to shoulder of whose dead weight the living can or even must get rid of in their march into the future. In the words of Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It is not even the past.” This past, moreover, reaching all the way back into the origin, does not pull back but presses forward, and it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past.  Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a  continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it's broken in the middle, at the point where “he” stands; and “his” standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which “his” constant fighting, “his” making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence.  Only because man is inserted into time, and only to the extent that he stands his ground does the flow of indifferent time break up into tenses; it is this insertion—the beginning of a beginning, to put it in Augustinian terms—which splits up the time continuum into forces which then, because they are focused on the particle of the body which gives them their direction, begin fighting with each other and acting upon man in the way Kafka describes."

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt seemed a very different book this year than when I first read it the first time in 2011.  Twelve years ago, I had never visited a Nazi Death Camp. I had not even visited a Holocaust museum. Since 2017 I have visited ten death camps in four countries.  The book was much more vivid in this reading. 

Since 2018, I have been a member of the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Over the past three months, I have listed to weekly 30-minute introductions of the chapters of the book by Roger Berkowitz, the director of the Hannah Arendt Center.

The book is a compilation of essays first published in the New Yorker magazine in 1963 in five parts.  Later in the year the essays were published as a book.

Arendt reported on the trial for the New Yorker and considered both her essays and the later book as a work of journalism. The "journalist" in this case was a philosopher of considerable renown and a Jew who narrowly and early escaped the Holocaust.  She was a refugee in France before finding her way to America.  

The essays and the book cover the trial and give background on the life of Adolf Eichmann as well as a country-by-country accounting of the Holocaust. Arendt makes clear that Eichmann's role in transporting Jews to death camps required the  cooperation of Jewish leaders to be as terribly effective as it was.  

In Bulgaria and Denmark, the Nazis got very little cooperation from Jews or the government and most Jews survived the war.  In the countries conquered by both the Soviets and the Nazis, the Jews were almost completely wiped out. Less than one percent of the Jews in the Baltic Republics survived the war. Poland was not much better.  More Jews survived in Germany than in the worst countries in the east.  

Eichmann was most effective in Hungary where cooperation by Jewish leaders made possible deportation of a half million Jews in less than a year.  Arendt makes clear that Eichmann was a mid-level Nazi bureaucrat with a talent for logistics who was able to move three million people to death camps. He was a horrible person who deserved death, but he was not a titanic evil person with a plan like Adolf Hitler.  

The waves of criticism that crashed on Arendt after the publication of the book had much to do with the portrayal of Eichmann as a shallow functionary rather than a personification of evil.  The controversy that began in 1963 continues today as evidenced by comments in the Virtual Reading Group from people who strongly disagree with Arendt on Eichmann.  Some of the discussion were heated (but polite).

The reading group is recorded and available in the podcast "Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz" hosted by Jana Mader, the Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center.

Breakout Sessions at the Hannah Arendt Conference 2023: Friendship & Politics

In addition to the general sessions at the 2023 Hannah Arendt Conference, I enjoyed the breakout sessions. I wrote about some of the general sessions at the conference here.

Jana Mader

The first was a session titled: Is Reading a Poem an Act of Friendship? led by Ann Lauterbach and Jana Mader.

Ann Lauterbach

The session began with Ann Lauterbach talking about her work, particularly her eleventh collection of poetry Door published this year.  She also read from her work. 

Jana Mader, Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center, guided the discussion on poetry as an act of friendship. I chose this breakout session because of the group I formed on Camp Adder in Iraq 2009 to read Inferno and Aeneid.  

Mader is also the host of the new podcast "Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz. 

After the breakout session, I talked with Stephanie Frampton, a literature professor at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Her research area is Ancient literature so she was delighted to talk about soldiers reading Virgil and Dante. 

Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian

I went to a second breakout session titled: Friendships and Federations of Care: Forms, Alliances, and Multiverses led by Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian, an award-winning designer of experiences, creative director and director.  During a discussion about spaces we learn and teach in someone asked about unusual places in which we have taught classes.  

I was the only one in the room who had taught a class inside a tank turret.  

My classroom in 1976 an M60A1 Patton tank on 

the south gunnery range, Fort Carson, Colorado.

Friendship & Politics: 15th Annual Conference at the Hannah Arendt Center, Bard College

Two of my favorite subjects in life and in philosophy are Friendship and Politics. 

So I was delighted to attend the 15th Annual Conference at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. This year’s title was: 

Friendship & Politics.

Roger Berkowitz

The opening talk was by Roger Berkowitz, director of the Hannah Arendt Center. He talked about Arendt's view of friendship as the center of a good life and critical to functioning politics.  

Esther Perel

There were so many good discussions, all in person and available on Zoom.  The one that most filled Olin Hall was on Friday morning.  Psychotherapist, international best-selling author and popular TED talk presenter Esther Perel discussed the Power of Friendship with psychologist and professor Marisa Franco, also a best-selling author and popular TED talk presenter.  Several groups of students filed in just before the Perel and Franco spoke.  

Marisa Franco

Franco talked about her recent book Platonic. She talked about the importance of friendship then Esther Perel asked the audience questions about their relationships and the importance of friendship in their lives.  

Niobe Way

Niobe Way made another high-energy presentation about her work on the crisis of connection in modern life and the crisis of masculinity.  She Professor of Developmental Psychology and the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity at New York University. 

Earlier this year I attended the Summer Social at the Hannah Arendt Center. 

I went to two of the several breakout sessions.  More about those in the next post.