The Trouble with Nowhere

Martin Jay, 1 June 2000

The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy 
by Russell Jacoby.
Basic Books, 256 pp., £17.95, April 1999, 0 465 02000 3
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Utopias: Russian Modernist Texts 1905-40 
edited by Catriona Kelly.
Penguin, 378 pp., £9.99, September 1999, 0 14 118081 1
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The Faber Book of Utopias 
edited by John Carey.
Faber, 560 pp., £20, October 1999, 9780571197859
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The Nazi War on Cancer 
by Robert Proctor.
Princeton, 390 pp., £18.95, May 1999, 0 691 00196 0
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... of Nazism does not really add weight to Jacoby’s lament. Perhaps the main problem, as Hannah Arendt pointed out long ago in The Human Condition, is that utopianism is grounded in the kind of political thinking that relies on the model of man in the singular as homo faber, who can fabricate his world, rather than men in the plural as political ...

Rwanda in Six Scenes

Stephen W. Smith: Fables of Rwanda, 17 March 2011

... is open to question and, indeed, bears re-examination. ‘Freedom of opinion is a farce,’ Hannah Arendt wrote in 1966 in ‘Truth and Politics’, ‘unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.’ The problem with Rwanda is not only that opinions and facts have parted company but that opinion takes ...

Angry or Evil?

Michael Wood: Brecht’s Poems, 21 March 2019

The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht 
translated by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine.
Norton, 1286 pp., £35, December 2018, 978 0 87140 767 2
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... cheque, an advance abolition of the need for forgiveness. But these moments are remarkably rare. Hannah Arendt says one of Brecht’s ‘great virtues’ was that he ‘never felt sorry for himself – hardly ever was even interested in himself’. The person he called ‘poor B.B.’ feels like a character in one of his plays, and we hear the ...

At the Staatsgalerie

Thomas Meaney: George Grosz, 16 February 2023

... album.’ ‘George Grosz’s caricatures are actually not satire but realistic reportage,’ Hannah Arendt wrote. ‘We know these types. They live all around us.’In our own time, Grosz’s great theme – the domestic horror show of bourgeoisie – seems to have vanished as a subject, or perhaps it’s just got better at camouflage. But once ...

Weaponising Paperwork

William Davies: The Windrush Scandal, 10 May 2018

... a process of constant auditing to punish and deter. If it seems senseless, that’s the point (as Hannah Arendt wrote, ‘To use reason when reason is used as a trap is not “rational”’). The coalition government was fond of the idea of ‘nudges’, interventions that seek to change behaviour by subtle manipulation of the way things look and ...

Bring me another Einstein

Matthew Reisz, 22 June 2000

American Pimpernel: The Man who Saved the Artists on Hitler’s Death List 
by Andy Marino.
Hutchinson, 416 pp., £16.99, November 1999, 0 09 180053 6
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... save the artistic élite of Occupied Europe but it was hard to determine who should be included. (Hannah Arendt was pointed out by Otto Hirschmann as ‘a woman who will someday be famous’.) Chagall would only consider leaving Europe once Fry had assured him that there really were cows in America. He was arrested in Marseille, where he was waiting for ...

Sock it to me

Elizabeth Spelman: Richard Sennett, 9 October 2003

Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality 
by Richard Sennett.
Allen Lane, 288 pp., £20, January 2003, 9780713996173
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... puzzles, presences’. Impersonality, as Sennett understands it (acknowledging a debt to Hannah Arendt even while offering what he takes to be a corrective to her views), does not keep people of different racial or ethnic or economic backgrounds from engaging fruitfully with one another; on the contrary, it prevents robust social relations from ...

Enemies For Ever

James Wolcott: ‘Making It’, 18 May 2017

Making It 
by Norman Podhoretz.
NYRB, 368 pp., £13.98, May 2017, 978 1 68137 080 4
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... the heart of “Manhattan”, began.’ He is invited for the first time to philosopher-doyenne Hannah Arendt’s New Year’s Eve party, attends a small dinner party at Mary McCarthy’s ‘meticulously furnished apartment’, and receives his ‘first summons’ to a posh Park Avenue salon stocked with ‘titled European ladies’ and similar ...

The crematorium is a zoo

Joshua Cohen: H.G. Adler, 3 March 2016

The Wall 
by H.G. Adler, translated by Peter Filkins.
Modern Library, 672 pp., £12.99, September 2015, 978 0 8129 8315 9
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... somehow to compromise and to select, otherwise there is no end to it. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt seized on the mention of this book by H.G. Adler as a rare moment of nuance in the trial: The reason for the omission was clear. [Adler’s book] describes in detail how the feared ‘transport lists’ were put together by the Jewish Council ...

You’ll Love the Way It Makes You Feel

Mark Greif: ‘Mad Men’, 23 October 2008

Mad Men: Season One 
Lionsgate Home Entertainment, £29.99, October 2008Show More
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... the 1950s still possessed. My favourite is the Emasculating Lady Psychologist – a cross between Hannah Arendt and the Wicked Witch of the West – who heads the firm’s research department, appears in the first episode and then, alas, isn’t invited back to exhibit her horribly fake German accent until Episode 6. (‘Freud, you say,’ mocks Don ...

Door Closing!

Mark Ford: Randall Jarrell, 21 October 2010

Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy 
by Randall Jarrell.
Chicago, 277 pp., £10.50, April 2010, 978 0 226 39375 9
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... Gertrude Johnson has long been linked with McCarthy, for instance, and Irene Rosenbaum with Hannah Arendt. The book’s self-effacing narrator is a poet who bears a striking resemblance to Jarrell himself. I say ‘self-effacing’, but only in so far as he takes a backseat in the various scenes the book dramatises; his descriptions of the people ...

Not Many Dead

Linda Colley, 10 September 1992

Riot, Risings and Revolution: Governance and Violence in 18th-Century England 
by Ian Gilmour.
Hutchinson, 504 pp., £25, May 1992, 0 09 175330 9
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... so much as the fact that they did not need to resort to weapons in order to make their point. As Hannah Arendt argued, controlled and moderate popular violence can be highly effective as a means to achieve short-term ends and dramatise grievances. Most mass violence in 18th-century England was of this limited and ritualistic kind. As such, and as ...

Malise Ruthven discusses the Beirut massacre

Malise Ruthven, 4 November 1982

... Vladimir Jabotinsky, is the obverse of the anti-semitism which it may serve to perpetuate. As Hannah Arendt observed: ‘European Zionists ... have often thought and said that the evil of anti-semitism was necessary for the good of the Jewish people. In the words of a well-known Zionist in a letter to me discussing the original Zionist ...

Ruin and Redemption

David Simpson: Psychoanalysing Zionism, 23 June 2005

The Question of Zion 
by Jacqueline Rose.
Princeton, 202 pp., £12.95, April 2005, 0 691 11750 0
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... well as a lineage of secular and sceptical Zionists and sceptics about Zionism per se, including Hannah Arendt, Hans Kohn, Martin Buber and Ahad Ha’am, she portrays the divisions within and about Zionism both as a terrifying legacy and as a source of hope against the grain of current history. The terror comes from the willingness of modern Israelis to ...

Double Game

David Nirenberg: Maimonides, 23 September 2010

Maimonides in His World 
by Sarah Stroumsa.
Princeton, 222 pp., £27.95, November 2009, 978 0 691 13763 6
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... intellectual openness’ of the liberal German world whose collapse drove Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem into exile. ‘Relative’ is a problematic term. Christian Europe seems to be Stroumsa’s (implicit) measure of comparison, and again the judgment makes some sense. Maimonides’ family’s decision to seek exile in North ...