The Limits of Democracy

...She claims Arendt anticipated that the West's averting its eyes from Auschwitz would be repeated elsewhere as it was in Rwanda...

...They were meant to continue matters left unfinished in her great work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951...

...But her intellectual legacy leaves much to be pondered before it can be practiced...

...In modern American intellectual history she was also something of a feather pillow to lapsed Marxists, to radicals falling from the heady heights of the '60s and looking for a place to land...

...But longtime readers of The New Leader could well remind him that her dualism is good old American pragmatism-from Charles Peirce, who insisted all ideas must be tested in their operations, to Sidney Hook, who insisted ideas that cannot be verified in action are "dogma...

...Power further esteems her for bringing philosophy to on the problem of evil...

...Arendt died in 1975, and ThePromise of Politics represents a series of papers and lectures she had been working on in the '50s...

...the idea of tradition in political thought...

...author, "John Adams" Hannah Arendt was a demanding thinker, a learned political philosopher who as a student had escaped Nazi Germany, a "homeless" mind with wideranging interests, from Aristotle to John Adams to Martin Heidegger...

...We are treated in the first half of the collection to discussions of Socrates...

...Actually, such a vision emerged in the late ' 80s and it led to the end of the Cold War...

...Many of the '30s Old Left who abandoned radicalism sought solace in religion and the possibility of regeneration through faith...

...Too bad that Hannah Arendt passed away a decade before the Geneva and Reykjavik summits...

...Arendt again reminds us, as did Raymond Aron many years ago, that our modern political predicament had analogies in the ancient world, especially in the writings of Thucydides and Homer...

...In a series of texts published after her death, on the subjects of thinking, judging and willing, Arendt sought to explain why the rational mind of the West failed to prevent the horrors of the 20th century, why the faculty of reason proved helpless to assure the survival of human rights...

...A younger generation has embraced her for upholding the life of democratic politics as a solution to the problems that confront us...

...She may well have been the most influential political philosopher of our times...

...Kohn is so taken by Arendt's distinction between thought and action, philosophy and politics, thinking and doing, that he declares, "The split between thinking and acting is characteristic of Arendt as it is of no other modern thinker...

...Montesquieu's theory of human action, with monarchy operating on the basis of honor, democracy on the basis of virtue, and tyranny on the basis of fear...

...That book outraged some for drawing parallels between Nazism and Communism, leaving the impression that the Soviet Union was no different from the Third Reich in its ideological zeal and methods of terror...

...Here Arendt played an important role, more important than that of John Dewey, who saw little value in turning to the past to face the problems of the present...

...It was the electoral implications of democracy that prevented the U.S...

...Yet that is where Arendt 's political philosophy seems unpersuasive...

...they envisioned the possibility of regeneration not in economics and the working class, but in civic politics and the virtues of the public good...

...In the case of the '60s New Left, many who became disillusioned with Marxism discovered another alternative in classical republicanism...

...Once war broke out, historians and poets held, there wouldbe no limit as reason came to its end and the sole result would be massive mutual destruction...

...Curiously, President Ronald Reagan intuited such an outcome when he rejected the notion of "mutually assured destruction" and the whole idea of the politics of deterrence and retaliation, urging Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev that they must work together to overcome the "nightmare of annihilation...

...What if the judgment about what had to be done was indeed "handed down from above," from the Supreme Court or the Vatican...

...Arendt and her editor are offering as a solution to the problem the very description of it...

...from taking action in response to the Jewish plight in the '40s and the Rwandans in the '90s...

...It is as though Arendt was present at Port Huron, Michigan, in 1962, when the idea of "participatory democracy" was first formulated...

...Take the Holocaust and Rwanda...

...But with Reagan, Gorbachev and Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher it was not democracy that saved the world, it was leadership-a notion almost alien to Arendt's democratic political philosophy...

...plus a short piece on the passage from Hegel to Marx...

...All these subjects have been covered in her previous writings, such as The Human Condition and On Revolution...

...The new volume of essays was put together by Professor Jerome Kohn, who has written a valuable Introduction to Arendt's oeuvre...

...Among young academics it was Arendt who revived interest in the wisdom of classical antiquity...

...The substance of the unpublished essays he brings together, though, has been so articulated in previous texts that they read like little more than filler...

...The pragmatic problem with Hannah Arendt's political philosophy is that its claims needed to be tested against the realities of history, against experience itself...

...Political judgment is not a matter of knowledge...

...Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Bill Clinton both dared not do what the public might regard as unpopular...

...Reviewed by John Patrick Diggins Professor of history, Graduate Center of the City University of New York...

...The failure of America to act morally may be due to democratic politics itself...

...It does not eliminate risk but affirms human freedom and the world that free people share with one another...

...For all the fetish of democracy and human plurality, what America really requires is a politics of vision provided by moral leadership...

...Samantha Power, author of the prize-winning A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2002), praises Arendt for her prescience...

...Followersof Arendt have allowed themselves to believe political solutions to moral questions can be arrived at by means of politics itself...

...Arendt, however, was concerned about the fate the Jews suffered in the Holocaust, a subject she took up in Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she coined the expression "banality of evil" to explain why the most horrendous crimes of humanity can be carried out by the most ordinary functionaries...

...Kohn captures Arendt's conviction perfectly when he tells us people can only act with proper thought through the arena of politics that involves interacting with others...

...In "Introduction Into Politics," she observed that the Cold War made the history of Greece more relevant than ever, with its thinkers trying to save their regimes from "a war of annihilation" by bringing politics to bear on the rivalry of conflicting regimes, by opening up diplomacy to the saving remnant of human discourse...

...The most valuable treatise in this anthology, "Introduction Into Politics," makes up its second half and was hitherto unpublished in English...

...The depth of her appreciation of politics can be glimpsed in her contention that the only standards of judgment with any degree of dependability are in no sense handed down from above but emerge from human plurality, the condition of politics...

...Greek thinkers were haunted by the suicidal madness that devastated the ancient city-states and left republics as lifeless as a barren desert...