“... 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 ...”

“... writing book reviews for the Nation after 1941 and lengthy moralising essays for PR in 1950. Hannah Arendt first wrote for PR in 1944, after arriving in 1941 on the Upper West Side.Some of PR’s contributors, such as Lionel Trilling and the art historian Meyer Schapiro, were academics (they were both at Columbia); after the war, many of the others ...”

“... to do in the case of war crimes and political atrocities. It is much easier to follow the Hannah Arendt line and give up analysing such acts on the grounds that, in certain circumstances, anyone might – or even would – commit them. So, on the one hand, holding Myra Hindley at bay as ineluctably Other does not meet the question she ...”

“... it may seem that, despite their origins, neither development was particularly revolutionary. Hannah Arendt thought Robespierre was Marx’s ‘teacher in revolution’, but on the question of property, at least, the French revolutionaries were far from being Marxists – Robespierre defended private property rights all the way to the guillotine, and ...”

“... 1947, Joseph Horne, its director, took in twenty freight-cars of books and archives from Bavaria. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish historian Lucy Dawidowicz were among those who worked on the often agonising question of restitution. Where should the books go – to American Jewish institutions, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, or the surviving remnants of ...”

“... to a state of rightlessness in which duties are no longer required of them. In the latter case, as Hannah Arendt put it, ‘their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed, but that nobody wants to oppress them.’ Given that declarations of the rights of man seem to end up equating ...”

“... as well as in the media, but it is certainly not new. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt argued that ‘European imperialism played a crucial role in the development of Nazi totalitarianism and associated genocides.’ The ‘boomerang effect’, as defined by Aimé Césaire, identified European fascism as the homecoming of ...”

“... War liberalism and its sequels of neoconservatism and neoliberalism’. His reasons for including Hannah Arendt are more obscure, but seem related to his interest in the way his Cold War liberals, all of them Jewish, ‘performed their Jewish identities’, especially in relation to Zionism, ‘the nationalist movement with which … they were likeliest ...”

“... are.’ From here it would be a short step to sceptical democratic liberalism in the manner of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin or Richard Rorty, and perhaps to a celebration of politics as the noble art of fostering conversation across doctrinal divides. But that isn’t the route MacIntyre took. For him, liberalism is no more than a front for capitalist ...”

“... of fascism such as D’Annunzio and Marinetti. The 2022 congress displayed cardboard cut-outs of Hannah Arendt, the Fellini collaborator Ennio Flaiano and Pasolini, whom the FdI has claimed as a conservative. The official line became that the party wasn’t post-fascist, but afascist – another not so subtle distancing from the anti-fascism of the ...”

“... promised end, a mystery) that opens a last space for the human. This is hard to think about, and Hannah Arendt is helpful. In her book On Violence she ends by discussing Franz Fanon’s claim that armed struggle against an oppressor is to be welcomed as a great social equaliser, the destroyer of shame and subservience, and therefore (Fanon says) the ...”

“... by the fact of human plurality. Thus all action is in fact interaction. This is broadly what Hannah Arendt was getting at in The Human Condition (1958), where she defines action as a form of initiation, a giving birth to something, a revealing of oneself to others.In Arendt’s view, action in the political arena ...”

“... a picture of where we believe Nazi thought must end, but even then the picture is complicated. As Hannah Arendt suggested, ‘Eichmann … dimly realised that it was not an order but a law which had turned them all into criminals.’ They were criminals under international law, of course, but what were they at home? What is a crime if the rule of crime ...”

“... brilliant and independent women of her generation – Woolf being the glorious exception. Think of Hannah Arendt. Or of Colette, who once declared that women who were so stupid as to want the vote deserved ‘the whip and the harem’. (La Vagabonde, her novel-manifesto about a woman choosing her career and a single life over the love of a worthy man and ...”

“... and Walter Benjamin – I had a crush on Benjamin, actually, as a result of the essay with which Hannah Arendt introduced her selection of his work in Illuminations, and Susan Sontag’s ‘Under the Sign of Saturn’ (1978). I would have liked to have gone to Columbia, to study comparative literature with Edward Said, but I had no way to make that ...”