In Minima Moralia – the fragmented, maddeningly difficult book of 1951 in which TW Adorno asked what kind of good life it is possible to live in a fragmented, maddeningly difficult world – the German philosopher wrote: “Repudiation of the present cultural morass presupposes sufficient involvement in it to feel it itching in one’s fingertips, so to speak, but at the same time the strength, drawn from this involvement, to dismiss it.” Adorno was wrestling with the proper stance to be assumed by the intellectual, who could neither afford to be so removed from their milieu as to lose sight of it altogether, nor so immersed in it that they would drown in its particulars. How could a politically engaged thinker be just close, and just distant, enough?
There was no love lost between Adorno and Hannah Arendt, the subject of Lyndsey Stonebridge’s compelling and original new book. Arendt blamed him, somewhat unfairly, for failing to help their mutual friend Walter Benjamin escape the Nazis, precipitating his devastating suicide, and once proclaimed, when her husband suggested inviting Adorno for dinner, “Der kommt uns nicht ins Haus!” – “That one’s not coming into our house!” The dilemma that Adorno so brilliantly articulated, however, was also the one that Arendt faced. As German Jews of the same generation, both were steeped in the philosophical and cultural traditions of their homeland. When the Nazis rose to power and it became clear that this society could produce not just Kant and Beethoven but Himmler and Kristallnacht, both fled to the US. Both questioned whether the traditions they had absorbed, not just of Germany but of European thought stretching back to ancient Greece, could be used to understand the obscenities through which they were living, or were inadequate – even complicit – with them.
As Stonebridge shows, what distinguished Arendt was her determination to gather up the fragments of these political and philosophical traditions and to reinvent them. Educated in philosophy by Husserl, Heidegger and Jaspers, but above all by her own voracious reading and passionately individual adventures in thought, Arendt brought this erudition and rigour to bear on the political turmoil of the mid-20th century. Her deepest concerns were with the nature of human beginnings – with the innovations and surprises of which people are capable, and the futures that their acts make possible; with the fact of human plurality – the fundamental variety of our common and fragile life that makes true thought possible; and with the possibility of love, which is for Arendt, as Stonebridge elegantly puts it, “the infinitely precious apprehension of and pleasure in human otherness… Love is the pre-political condition of us being together in the world in the first place”. Arendt clung on to these key commitments with the opposite of naive idealism. They were the basis of her lifelong exploration of the ways in which nazism and totalitarianism deform and nullify these fundamental capacities, and of the beleaguered but revolutionary possibilities that nonetheless remain. Her very way of being – idiosyncratic and original, while still feeling the shared world itching at her fingertips – embodied these ideals.
The pressing relevance of Arendt’s work was suggested when her sprawling magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism, shot up the bestseller lists following Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Stonebridge’s book is an interesting generic mixture that itself feels like a sign of the times: it combines biography, critical assessment of Arendt’s legacy, practical handbook for action (six of the 10 chapters begin “How to…”), and musings on the current geopolitical situation. Stonebridge is clear-eyed on the limitations as well as the scope of Arendt’s vision, confronting head-on the aspects that have perplexed or outraged her recent readers. She acknowledges Arendt’s appalling blind-spot when it came to analysing race in her adopted homeland, especially her shocking criticisms of the parents of Elizabeth Eckford – one of the Little Rock Nine – the black teen who was attacked and abused for attending a newly integrated school.
Stonebridge is equally critical, but more understanding, of Arendt’s continued relationship with her philosophical mentor and erstwhile lover Heidegger long after his committed nazism had become common knowledge. And she rightly defends Arendt against the anger aimed at her famous account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann and the banality of his evil. Arendt, she shows, never claimed that Eichmann did not know what he was doing, but rather skewered the fundamental limitations of thought and imagination that made his actions possible. While Stonebridge is too tactful to assert it openly, the generic mixtures of the book are partly inspired by Arendt herself, whose own “rare talent for literary biography” – from her early book on the Jewish salonnière Rahel Varnhagen to the study of Eichmann – was of a piece with her central principles: “Being able to think from another’s point of view was a lifelong ethical, intellectual and political commitment.”
If Stonebridge’s analytical tact is a virtue when it comes to unpicking Arendt’s complexities, it also limits the book’s hold on our present moment. The gestures towards our current predicaments are powerful, but often vague. The threats of resurgent totalitarianism are largely restricted to references to Trump and Putin – figures so cartoonishly appalling that the danger they represent is almost too obvious, too easy to agree about. Perhaps further specifics would have limited the scope of Stonebridge’s book, made it date more quickly, but I expected both a more global perspective – neither Bolsonaro nor Orbán, to mention only the most obvious recent examples, garner a mention – and a more local one, given that Stonebridge is British and UK-based, and the current state of British politics seems so obviously to cry out for an Arendtian reading. I found it impossible to read Arendt’s defence of politics as a space for thinking meaningfully with others without lamenting the terms on which the looming general election will be contested. What would Arendt have said of a vicious government determined to deport refugees to another continent, and an opposition so timorous that it attacks only the cost of the scheme, not the underlying evil? Furthermore – while these events are too recent for the book to have addressed them directly – when neither major party can respond to the horrors unfolding in Gaza with even the bare minimum of calling for a cessation of hostilities, how can we avoid what Stonebridge calls “a fatal collapse into cynicism”?
Joe Moshenska is professor of English literature at Oxford University
We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience by Lyndsey Stonebridge is published by Jonathan Cape (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
