Hannah Arendt

25 Jun, 2020 320 Political science

In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt. She developed many of her ideas in response to the rise of totalitarianism in the C20th, partly informed by her own experience as a Jew in Nazi Germany before her escape to France and then America. She wanted to understand how politics had taken such a disastrous turn and, drawing on ideas of Greek philosophers as well as her peers, what might be done to create a better political life. Often unsettling, she wrote of ‘the banality of evil’ when covering the trial of Eichmann, one of the organisers of the Holocaust.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Lyndsey Stonebridge No other episodes
    Professor of Modern Literature and History at the University of East Anglia
  • Frisbee Sheffield 3 episodes
    Lecturer in Philosophy at Girton College, University of Cambridge
  • Robert Eaglestone No other episodes
    Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University London

Reading list

  • The Origins of Totalitarianism
    Hannah Arendt (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973) Google Books →
  • The Human Condition
    Hannah Arendt (University of Chicago Press, 1958) Google Books →
  • Between Past and Future
    Hannah Arendt (Penguin, 2006) Google Books →
  • On Revolution
    Hannah Arendt (Penguin, 2009) Google Books →
  • Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
    Hannah Arendt (Penguin, 2006) Google Books →
  • The Life of the Mind
    Hannah Arendt (Harcourt, 1978) Google Books →
  • The Portable Hannah Arendt
    Hannah Arendt (ed. Peter Baehr) (Penguin, 2003) Google Books →
  • Responsibility and Judgment
    Hannah Arendt (ed. Jerome Kohn) (Schocken Books, 2005) Google Books →
  • Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem
    S. Aschheim (ed.) (University of California Press, 2001) Google Books →
  • The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt
    S. Benhabib (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003) Google Books →
  • Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt
    S. Benhabib (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2010) Google Books →
  • Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question
    R. Bernstein (Polity Press, 1996) Google Books →
  • Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility
    P. Birmingham (Indiana University Press, 2006) Google Books →
  • Acting and Thinking: The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt
    L. Bradshaw (University of Toronto Press, 1989) Google Books →
  • Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought
    M. Canovan (Cambridge University Press, 1992) Google Books →
  • Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy
    L. Disch (Cornell University Press, 1994) Google Books →
  • Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship
    P. Hansen (Polity Press, 1993) Google Books →
  • Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World
    M. Hill (ed.) (St. Martin's Press, 1979) Google Books →
  • Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays
    L. Hinchman and S. Hinchman (eds.) (State University of New York Press, 1994) Google Books →
  • Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy
    B. Parekh (Macmillan, 1981) Google Books →
  • The Political Consequences of Thinking
    J. Ring (State University of New York Press, 1997) Google Books →
  • Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt
    D. Villa (Princeton University Press, 1999) Google Books →
  • The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt
    D. Villa (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2000) Google Books →
  • Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World
    Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (Yale University Press, 2004) Google Books →
  • Why Arendt Matters
    Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (Yale University Press, 2006) Google Books →

Related episodes

Programme ID: b08c2ljg

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08c2ljg

Auto-category: 320.01 (Political philosophy and theories)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello, Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 near Hanover in Germany, where her family rarely mentioned their Jewishness.