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“... had fewer rights than oligarchies. Above all, he remarks – in an implicit polemic against Hannah Arendt and other admirers of the playful Greek democracy – that ‘the demos recognised the instrumental role of politics and were more concerned in the end with the substantive decisions.’ He might have added, as at other times he comes close to ...”

“... like William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, films like The Night Porter, and in the writings of Hannah Arendt, George Steiner, Bruno Bettelheim and a host of others. But on the subject of the nuclear holocaust there is a deafening silence. It is as if, somehow, the entire topic had been declared out of bounds, as if it were ‘unthinkable’. Such a ...”

“... of ephemera, facts on the ground. (‘Facts and events are infinitely more fragile things,’ Hannah Arendt said at around the same time, ‘than axioms, discoveries, theories.’) Origo doesn’t have to dissimulate or wrestle with her un-Italian sensibility; her sensibility becomes her method as a biographer. At the best end of the Anglo-American ...”

“... don’t look so good seen through Saunders’s unsentimental eyes. Here is McCarthy writing to Hannah Arendt about a lavishly subsidised event in Venice in July 1960 (others in attendance were Moravia, Iris Murdoch and Herbert Read): The main event, from the point of view of sheer scandal, was a series of furious clashes between Mr Shils and William ...”

“... and boiling oil, and quartered – are a classic case in point. Terror in this sense can have what Hannah Arendt called ‘totalising’ effects: her examples are the French and Russian revolutionary terrors that aimed at restarting history. Second, Dower suggests how closely terror in its modern political sense is connected to the urge to reject ...”

“... is no evidence that the prospect of punishment deters would-be perpetrators of mass atrocities. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, ‘no punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely ...”

“... an individual or group’. The assumption of classical political theory was, he claims (following Hannah Arendt), that zoe, or ‘bare life’, did not belong in the public realm but remained within the private sphere of the household. For this reason, ‘the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis – the politicisation of bare life as such ...”

“... who wouldn’t pay £4000 for freedom and democracy? ‘What convinces masses are not facts,’ Hannah Arendt said, not without the cultural pessimism about ordinary people characteristic of her time, ‘and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.’ There is only so much one can do to ...”

“... After all, sex and violence are two experiences that tend to leave people lost for words (Hannah Arendt described violence as ‘mute’). In McBride’s hands, they re-find their natural affinity, together precipitating a crisis of speech. She is the writer of sexual abuse, now recognised as one of the hallmarks of the new century. In The Lesser ...”

“... living through the crises of the early 20th century. In the essay on ‘Anti-Semitism’ Hannah Arendt brutally dismissed the idea that the old historiography provided an adequate explanation for the convulsions that had driven her into exile: ‘Jewish History, which for two millennia has been made not by Jews but by those people that surround ...”

“... still mattered and not all citizens were equal – particularly in the colonial world. Jews, as Hannah Arendt once remarked, were an ‘inter-European element in a nationalised Europe’, who ‘did not form a class of their own and … did not belong to any of the classes in their countries’. This applied just as much to the financial elite as it ...”

“... social cannot disguise the fact that his is a theory conceived entirely in terms of the former. As Hannah Arendt once noted approvingly of the American Revolution, this was a fight ‘against tyranny and oppression, not against exploitation and poverty’.For Arendt, it was the other sort of revolution, motivated by ...”

“... argument that man is a political animal, the argument restated as a theory of freedom by Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future (1961). Then you will believe that, as Arendt maintains, ‘freedom . . . and politics coincide’ and that ‘this freedom is primarily experienced in action.’ Faced with these ...”

“... be able to extricate ourselves from the obvious insanity of this position, there is no answer,’ Hannah Arendt wrote fifty years ago, reflecting on the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union. Then, as now, an apocalyptic mood had become quite normal. There is some solace in the fact that as bad as things seemed to ...”

“... left-right divide’. He seemed proud of quotes he’d found that made Michael Oakeshott echo Hannah Arendt – ‘whose work has really influenced my work’ – and Matthew Arnold agree with Lenin, though ‘you couldn’t be further apart than Lenin and Arnold on most things.’ It’s difficult to give a fair account of his argument. It’s not ...”