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I'ARTISAN REVIEW
overstated when she suggested that the Jewish people had avoided political
action for two millennia!
Equally problematic was her insistence on seeing modern anti-Semitism
as inextricably connected to imperialism and to the collapse of the nation–
state-an assumption that reflected her dismissive and rather superficial view
of modern nationalism . Not only was her own explanation of the roots of
modern anti-Semitism seriously flawed (overstressing as it did the pan–
movements and their supra-national aspects) but she offered no concrete
indication as to what might have consti tuted an adequate Jewish response to
Nazism. However, Bernstein rightly points to Arendt's insights into the sig–
nificance of the Nazi camps and their
allti-lltilitariall
function. He also shows
how many of her concepts of action and poli tics ul timately derived from her
incisive analysis of total domination.
In
1945, Hannah Arendt declared: "The problem of evil will be the fun–
damental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe." She proved
factua ll y wrong but in the 199()s this dismal fai lure of postwar intellectuals
to confront such a central issue is cOll1ing to haunt us all. Arendt, at least,
tried to grapple wi th it, however unsatisfactorily. Ini tially, she had believed
in the existence of the Kantian notion of "radical evil," re-interpreting it to
mean the act of making human beings superfluous as human beings.
Subsequently, as in her Eichmann book, evil becall1e "banal"-a case of
monstrous deeds without 1l10nstrous motives- best accounted for, so she
believed, by her category of thoughtlessness. L3ut this notion, too, hardly
resolves the issue, though L3ernstein does a good job in unpacking the con–
text and meaning of Arendt's controversial theory about the "banali
ty
of
evil"-revealing both her insights and her blindness.
Bernstein makes a convincing case that sOll1e of Arendt's deepest con–
cerns about history and politics were indeed shaped by her writings on the
Jewish question, without being reducible to thell1. Her earliest concerns had
been to open a space tor the possibili ty of a Jewish poli tics, tor a new begin–
ning that would rupture the paralyzing historical continui ties of Diasporic
existence. For a time she found her answer in Zionism, but by 1948 she had
become seriously disill usioned wi th Zionist ideology and poli tics, which in
her eyes had abandoned its revolutionary promise. Hencctorth, her main
effort was devoted to underst:mding poli tics and the world in which she
lived-a world which had wi tnessed evil that was both radical and banal. It
was through the unending process of understanding (thinking and judging)
as Hannah Arendt once wrote, that " we come to terillS with and reconcile
ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at hOll1e in the world ." Each of these
books in their different ways testifY to the seriousness of her eHort and help
us to
under~tand
Hannah Arendt's own thought, in all its tensions and inner
compl exi
ty.
