and with contrasting plausibil–
ity, have been accused of Nazi
sympathies, Nietzsche before the
fact, Heidegger for more sub–
stantial reasons."
Unlike Wolin, however, I
was trying
to
see more than
irony in the situation. For what
disturbed me was the extent to
which the political existential–
ists, with their exaltation of
pol–
itique pour la politique
and
denigration of reason, utility
and morality, provided few safe–
guards against the Fascist threat.
Arendt's variant of the tradition
seemed to me
to
provide not very
many more. Or, as George Kateb
put it in an essay written after
my own and far more friendly to
Arendt, her justification of
greatness and glory as ends in
themselves was "playing with
fire."
Botstein's attempt
to
protect
Arendt against any and all criti–
cisms is perhaps a measure of
her unique power
to
evoke
deeply felt responses. Her mem–
ory, however, would be better
served by making a more sober
assessment of the strengths and
weaknesses of her thought. Han–
nah Arendt was too unsentimen–
tal a thinker to confuse hagiog–
raphy with critical appreciation;
would that some of her current
admirers were as tough-minded
as she.
MARTIN JAY
313
Leon Botstein Replies:
I regret that Mr. jay, in his
reply to my response to his origi–
nal article on Hannah Arendt,
thinks I set out to defend Han–
nah Arendt. Unfortunately,
upon reading
Mr.
jay's original
piece, I failed to recognize
Arendt sufficiently either to de–
fend or criticize. Rather, my pur–
pose was
to
refute Mr. jay.
I would like to address three
minor points with which jay
begins. First, I did not state or
imply that I found Arendt's
reading of Marx "beyond re–
proach." I sought only to point
out that Arendt's method was,
on occasion, to use authors as
reinterpreted props for her own
theoretical positions. In my
view, the historical accuracy or
plausibility of her interpretation
of a past thinker was not neces–
sarily linked to the power or
cogency of her own political
theoretical claims. These inter–
pretations served a useful pur–
pose in leading Arendt
to
her
own argument; as interpreta–
tions they could have been mis–
taken, as in the case of Marx, she
developed a simplified, al–
though plausible and histori–
cally understandable construct.
Second, his own words, pri–
marily "allegation" and "com–
plicity," reveal a lack of under–
standing of what the Eichmann
book sought to demonstrate: a
