Thinking without a Banister

James Miller

• Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger by Elzbieta Ettinger
  Yale, 139 pp, £10.95, October 1995, ISBN 0 300 06407 1
• Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Uncollected and Unpublished Works by Hannah Arendt, edited by Jerome Kohn
  Harcourt Brace, 458 pp, $39.95, May 1994, ISBN 0 15 172817 8
• Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought by Margaret Canovan
  Cambridge, 298 pp, £12.95, September 1995, ISBN 0 521 47773 5
• Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy edited by Carol Brightman
  Secker, 412 pp, £25.00, July 1995, ISBN 0 436 20251 4
• Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 1926-1969 edited by Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, translated by Robert and Rita Kimber
  Harcourt Brace, 821 pp, $49.95, November 1992, ISBN 0 15 107887 4

Twenty years after her death, and nearly half a century after The Origins of Totalitarianism established her international reputation, Hannah Arendt looms larger than ever – as a philosopher, as a political theorist, as an exemplary analyst of history. Jürgen Habermas has expressed admiration for her, as have avowed Post-Modernists, who share her declared freedom from metaphysical and moral presuppositions. Democratic intellectuals in Eastern Europe – Vaclav Havel, for one – have endorsed a distinction first stressed by Arendt, between the authoritarianism of old-fashioned dictatorships and what she described as the ‘total domination’ practised by modern-day totalitarian regimes. In addition, the anti-Communist uprisings of 1989 seemed to bear out her thesis that revolution in its essence is not social (as Marx thought) but political, and that true political power flows only from below, from a people spontaneously acting in concert.