Hannah Arendt seminar

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Below is the syllabus of the seminar on Hannah Arendt that I will teach this semester. (I’d still accept suggestions!) I’ve removed all the practical information except for my policy on AI, just in case that’s useful for other teachers.

Hannah Arendt (1906-75) personally experienced some of the great events of the 20th century, interacted with many famous contemporaries, and offered challenging arguments about totalitarianism and democracy, migration and human rights, Jewishness and Israel, modernity and science, feminism, activism, and the role of intellectuals. We will critically discuss her texts, her life, and her context and relate her ideas to other thinkers and issues of the present.

Objectives: To build an understanding of Arendt’s own thought in its context; To analyze and evaluate conflicting arguments about the major philosophical, historical, and strategic issues that confronted her; To learn to make stronger normative and interpretive arguments in writing and discussion.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) policy: This is a humanities seminar, and the entire rationale is that we can learn by intensively reading complex texts, discussing them with peers, and producing our own writing in response. Extensive research shows that “deep reading” has educational and spiritual benefits, while substituting AI summaries for reading causes substantial brain decay. I am not sure whether instructors can currently detect the use of AI or penalize it. It is your responsibility to learn in college, and you will not learn if you substitute AI tools for reading and writing. That said, I do not object to querying large language models (LLMs) for additional information and insights about the assigned texts and topics; using AI tools to translate texts that would otherwise be inaccessible to you; or even writing papers in your native language and using an AI tool to translate your work into English. Further discussion of whether and how to use AI is welcome.

Thursday, Jan 15: Introduction

During class, we will watch portions of a 1963 German television interview of Hannah Arendt to get a feel for her personality. And we will read and discuss Arendt’s “Klage” (“Lament” or “Complaint”), an early poem.

Tuesday, Jan 20: Martin Heidegger

Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” The New York Review, October 21, 1971. (Note that Arendt writes this when she is 65.)
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (1930), trans. W. McNeil & N. Walker (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), §16-17, §18c, §19-36

(Additional recommended reading for anyone who wants to write about Heidegger and Arendt: Jeffrey Andrew Barash, “Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and the politics of remembrance,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10.2 (2002): 171-182.

Thursday, Jan 22: Being Jewish, being a woman

Watch the PBS documentary, Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny.
Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, excerpts, and a letter from Arendt to Jaspers dated 9/7/1952, both in The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited by William Peter Baehr (Penguin 2000), pp. 49-72
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (Yale 1982), pp. 56-59 (a portion of chapter 2)

Tuesday, Jan 27: Statelessness, migration, and human rights

Arendt, “We Refugees.” (1943)
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, chapter 9 (“The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man”). You can skim or skip the historical detail from the bottom of p. 269 the last line on p. 276.

Not assigned, but useful if you want to focus on this topic: Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man? Download Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004): 297–310

Thursday, Jan 29: Nazism and Stalinism I

Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, chapters 11 and 12

Tuesday, Feb 3: Nazism and Stalinism II

Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, chapter 13

Thursday, Feb 5: How she uses history

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”
Arendt, “The Modern Concept of Histor., The Review of Politics, vol. 20, no. 4, 1958, pp. 570–90. You may read only pp. 585-590 (from “It has frequently been asserted that modern science was born when attention shifted from the search after the ‘What’ to the investigation of ‘How …” to the end).
David Luban, “Hannah Arendt and the Primacy of Narrative,” in Luban, Legal Modernism (University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp, 179-206
Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin, The Review of Politics, Jan., 1953, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Jan., 1953), pp. 76-84

[Additional recommended reading for anyone who wants to write about Arendt on historical narrative: Seyla Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative.” Social Research (1990): 167-196]

Tuesday, Feb 10: German war guilt

Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (1947), pp. 1-44.
Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility” (1945)

Thursday, Feb 12: From Europe to America

Arendt to Jaspers, letter dated 1/29/1946
Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt (Reaktion Books, 2021), pp. 97-117
Watch the 1963 interview and/or read it in Baehr, pp. 3-22. Note pp. 20-21 on coming to the USA.

Tuesday, Feb 17: Modernity 1: Public and Private

Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 7-11, 17-21, 22-78

[Additional recommended article for anyone who wants to write about the public/private distinction in Arendt: Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, “Justice on relating private and public,” in Amy Allen (ed) Hannah Arendt (Routledge, 2017) 89-114.]

Thursday, Feb 19 : no class (substituting Monday schedule)

Tuesday, Feb 24: Modernity 2: Action

The Human Condition, 175-247

Thursday, Feb 26: Modernity 2: Political Freedom

Arendt, The Human Condition, 305-325
Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s communications concept of power,” translated by Thomas McCarthy, Social Research (1977): 3-24.

Tuesday, March 3: Israel

Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland: There is Still Time” Commentary. (1948)
Young-Bruehl, pp. 137-9, 173-81 (portions of chapter 4 and chapter 5)

Thursday, March 5: The Adolf Eichmann case I

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 3-67 (chapters I-V), 90–95

Tuesday, March 10: Adolf Eichmann II

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 112-150 (VII and VIII).

Thursday, March 12: Adolf Eichmann III

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 274-279 (chapter XV and epilogue)
Letters to Mary McCarthy, 9/20/1963 and Gershom Scholem 7/24/1963

[Additional recommended texts for anyone writing about Eichmann:

Sandra K. Hinchman, “Common Sense & Political Barbarism in the Theory of Hannah Arendt.” Polity 17.2 (1984): 317-339.
Peg Birmingham, “Holes of oblivion: The banality of radical evil.” Hypatia 18.1 (2003): 80-103.]

(March 14-22 = Spring Break)

Tuesday, March 24: The importance of truth (in the wake of the Eichmann controversy)

Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future, pp. 227-264

Thursday, March 26: Republicanism and revolution I

Arendt, On Revolution, 1963 (excerpts)
Counterpoint: Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A theory of freedom and government. Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 1-50 (or less)

Tuesday, March 31: Republicanism and revolution II

Arendt, On Revolution (excerpts)
Counterpoint: Christopher H. Achen, and Larry M. Bartels, “Democracy for realists: Why elections do not produce responsive government” (2017)

Thursday, April 2: Feminism and the public/private distinction

Amy Allen, “Solidarity after identity politics: Hannah Arendt and the power of feminist theory.” Philosophy & Social Criticism1 (1999): 97-118.
[Consider:] Mary G. Dietz, Turning Operations?: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics. Routledge, 2002, excerpts (hard copy in Tisch Library, not online)

Tuesday, April 7: The Civil Rights Movement

Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959), in Baehr, pp. 231-246
Young-Bruehl, pp. 308-18 (a portion of chapter 8)
The response from Ralph Ellison, discussion in Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers

Thursday, April 9: Violence in the 1960s

Arendt, On Violence (1970) excerpts
Arendt, Noam Chomsky, Robert Lowell, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Robert B. Silvers, Mitchell Goodman and Susan Sontag (debate), “The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?(1967)
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 173-5 (on Denmark), and 230-33 (on German resistance)
Chad Kautzer, “Political Violence and Race: A Critique of Hannah Arendt.Links to an external site.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture3 (2019)

Tuesday, April 14: Education

[Peter Levine is away]

Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” Between Past and Future, pp. 173-96
The final exam. for Hannah Arendt’s 1961 course]

Tuesday, April 21: Science

Arendt, “Man’s Conquest of Space.” The American Scholar (1963): 527-540.
Arendt, “Prologue,” The Human Condition (pp. 1-6)

Thursday, April 23: Final discussion

an international discussion of polarization

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Last October, THE CIVICS Innovation Hub and the European School of Politics convened an international group in Istanbul for a conversation about “trust and polarisation.” Kameliya Tomova has written a nice summary. I’ll paste the portion that mentions me below and recommend the rest as well. (Note that I was talking here about the world, not necessarily or specifically about US politics.)

Peter Levine, political theorist and civic scholar, cautioned against treating all forms of division as equivalent. “Is the problem that two sides are too far apart,” he asked, “or that one side is organised around hate and the other around love and dignity?” The answer to that question, he suggested, has profound consequences for whether and how we even attempt dialogue. Levine argued that not all polarisation reflects symmetrical extremes — sometimes one side advances exclusion while the other defends basic rights. In such cases, the work of bridging may look very different, or may not be appropriate at all.

Building on this concern, human rights and peace activist Harsh Mander warned that insisting on symmetry between “sides” can normalise authoritarian or dehumanising positions. Drawing on his experience in India, he asked: “If I say Muslims deserve to live with dignity, and that’s seen as an ‘extreme’ view, then what is the centre? Mild dehumanisation?” The language of depolarisation and how broadly it’s currently being used, he argued, risks collapsing injustice into mere disagreement if moral asymmetries are not explicitly acknowledged.

Others spoke of perception gaps — the distance between what we think others believe and what they actually do. When people have limited direct contact and rely instead on distorted signals from online spaces, they tend to assume others hold more extreme and internally consistent positions than is often the case. Peter Levine noted that quantitative research frequently reinforces this assumption by treating political identities as coherent blocks — for example, presuming that someone who holds a conservative position on one issue will do so across others. In practice, he argued, people’s views are far more fragmented and situational. These misperceptions reduce willingness to cooperate, until direct interaction or clearer information disrupts the assumed coherence of the “other side”.

Caedmon’s Hymn and modern responses

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According to Edward Hirsh, “English poetry began with a vision.” He’s referring to “Caedmon’s Hymn,” probably the earliest surviving verse in Old English. It’s embedded in a story that Bede wrote around the year 730 CE. Seamus Heaney calls this story “the myth of the beginning of English sacred poetry.”

Bede tells of an exemplary monk of Whitby Abbey during the time when St. Hilda was its abbess. This monk’s poetry turned many toward God. Bede explains that Caedmon never learned from human beings to make poetry. In fact, during banquets, when “it was decreed that all should sing,” and the harp was about to be passed to him to take his turn, he would rise from the middle of the company and go to his own house.

One night, he fled the singing and went to the village stables to tend the cattle he was responsible for. He completed his chores, fell asleep, and dreamt of a figure who said, “Caedmon, sing me something.” He replied that he couldn’t sing; that’s why he had come home from the banquet. The dream-figure insisted that he sing about the “beginning of creatures.” Caedmon found himself singing a poem that he had never heard before in praise of the Creator.

Bede includes this poem in Latin, acknowledging that it loses its “beauty and dignity” in translation. However, thanks to medieval scribes who added the original to the margins of many Bede manuscripts, we have the Old English text.

When Caedmon awoke, he remembered the words, added “many more,” and sang them to the local reeve (a magistrate), who took him to see St. Hilda. She and the learned men of her abbey were impressed and began explaining various biblical narratives to Caedmon. He became a monk and turned Bible stories into the “best songs,” instructing and inspiring people to shun lives of crime and to love truth and good deeds.

Caedmon’s poem, ostensibly the oldest in English, is also an invitation to think about the origins and purposes of poetry in general and its connection to other kinds of work, other kinds of knowledge, and other creatures. Several modern poets have responded to these questions.

Denise Levertov writes as Caedmon, beginning:

All others talked as if
talk were a dance.
Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet
would break the gliding ring.
Early I learned to
hunch myself
close by the door:
then when the talk began
I’d wipe my
mouth and wend
unnoticed back to the barn
to be with the warm beasts,
dumb among body sounds
of the simple ones.

She imagines that Caedmon takes his inspiration from the physical beauty of the stable where he is most at home:

I’d see by a twist
of lit rush the motes
of gold moving
from shadow to shadow
slow in the wake
of deep untroubled sighs.
The cows
munched or stirred or were still. I
was at home and lonely,
both in good measure.

Jean Beal focuses on Caedmon’s fear when the harp comes his way. She writes alliterative verse that hints at the Old English form, beginning: “Hearing the harp, like hearing my enemy’s horn ….”

Some critics have seen W.H. Auden’s “Anthem” as an echo of Caedmon’s song.

Seamus Heaney entitles his Caedmon poem “Whitby-sur-Moyola.” This place sounds like an English village, but the Moyola is a river in Ulster near where Heaney grew up. I think Caedmon reminds Heaney of his ancestors. In “Digging,” he writes of his father, “By God, the old man could handle a spade. / Just like his old man.” Working the soil becomes Heaney’s model for poetry: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”

In “Whitby-sur-Moyola,” Heaney adopts the perspective of someone who can recall Brother Caedmon, now deceased. This narrator admires Caedmon as an agricultural laborer: “the perfect yardman, / Unabsorbed in what he had to do / But doing it perfectly, and watching you.” Caedmon had finished learning poetry: “He had worked his angel stint. He was hard as nails.” Although the monk had mastered this learned art, his inspiration always came from the stable:

His real gift was the big ignorant roar
He could still let out of him, just bogging in
As if the sacred subjects were a herd
That had broken out and needed rounding up.
I never saw him once with his hands joined
Unless it was a case of eyes to heaven
And the quick sniff and test of fingertips
After he’d passed them through a sick beast’s water.
Oh, Caedmon was the real thing all right.

I’ll take a turn:

Caedmon

How do you tell people where it comes from,
This stuff you produce professionally,
These words that the young are told they must heed?
You know that somehow it started with work,
With loneliness, with silence and with fear.
First, you stood at a slight angle to life.
When it was your turn, you could only be
Like the warm silent beasts with steaming breath.
Then you found your voice, and the credit came.
They even began to give you the first turn.
Since you can't explain it, you make up a tale:
A dream in a stable when words just flowed. 
It’s no less true than other things you say.

propose a Civic Studies panel for the American Political Science Association meeting

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122nd APSA Annual Meeting (with the theme of “Democracy Under Threat: How to Understand, Protect, and Rebuild”) will take place on September 3–6, 2026 in Boston. Civic Studies is a “related group” within APSA. As such, we organize panels.

Civic Studies invites proposals for panels, round tables, and individual papers that make a significant contribution to the Civic Studies field; articulate a civic studies perspective on some important issue; or contribute to theoretical, empirical, or practical debates in civic studies. We especially encourage proposals that emphasize actual or potential civic responses to the threats to democracy

Civic Studies is a field defined by diversity yet connected by participants’ commitments to promoting interdisciplinary research, theory, and practice in support of civic renewal: the strengthening of civic (i.e., citizen-powered and citizen-empowering) politics, initiatives, institutions, and culture. Its concern is not with citizenship understood as legal membership in a particular polity, but with guiding civic ideals and a practical ethos embraced by individuals loyal to, empowered by, and invested in the communities they form and re-form together. Its goal is to promote these ideals through improved institutional designs, enhanced public deliberation, new and improved forms of public work among citizens, or clearer and more imaginative political theory.

The Civic Studies framework adopted in 2007 cites two ideals for the emerging discipline: “public spiritedness” (or “commitment to the public good”) and “the idea of the citizen as a creative agent.” Civic studies is an intellectual community that takes these two ideals seriously. Although new, it draws from several important strands of ongoing research and theory, including the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom and the Bloomington School, of Juergen Habermas and critical social theory, Brent Flyvbjerg and social science as phronesis, and more diffuse traditions such as philosophical pragmatism, Gandhian nonviolence, the African American Freedom Struggle. It supports work on deliberative democracy, on public work, on civic engagement and community organizing, among others.

APSA members can submit panels here. The deadline is January 14 (and apologies for the short notice), but people who form ideas late should contact me.

a resource for students on social movements and activism

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In a recorded interview with the Story Preservation Initiative, I discuss “landmark cases and civic turning points—including the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Brown v. Board of Education, the United Farm Workers boycott, and Watergate—to illustrate how people came together to reinforce core democratic principles of equality, justice, and the rule of law.”

This recording and related documents are meant as a resource for teachers and students, particularly in high schools.

I also discuss “the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ skills young people need to participate effectively in civic life—how communities organize, how coalitions form, and how citizens can work together to effect change.” And I mention “skills that support meaningful participation, including listening, debating, respecting opposing viewpoints, and learning from history.”