Category Archives: civic theory

Juergen Habermas (1929-2026)

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Jürgen Habermas died on Saturday. His death has been the occasion for several substantial and interesting obituaries. So far, I prefer Gal Beckerman’s in the New York Times.

I took a seminar on Habermas in 1988, when I was a college junior. Georgia Warnke was the professor, and I have kept her useful packet of readings to this day. Habermas crystallized my early thinking about politics and philosophy and has remained a pillar for me ever since. I discuss him in most of my books, with the most general and extensive presentation in chapter 5 of What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life (2022) The title of that book basically captures Habermas in a phrase. I have also recorded a 29-minute introductory lecture on him.

It is misleading to treat Habermas as a proponent of rational, civil discourse. (See “Habermas with a Whiff of Tear Gas,” 2018). I suspect that more Americans have read Iris Marion Young’s critique of Habermas (“Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy, Political Theory, 2011) than have read Habermas itself. The late and lamented Iris Young caricatured him in that article. If Habermas wanted everyone to talk calmly all the time, then why did he conclude his two-volume magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, with a celebration of disruptive social movements?

Habermas lived so long and became famous so early that his public role is itself an interesting phenomenon. Apparently, Ronald Dworkin remarked that even Habermas’ fame is famous, and it is worth asking why someone who wrote such thorny theory occupied the position of (arguably) the most influential German thinker for half a century.

I took a whole semester course on Habermas–in English, on the other side of the Atlantic–when he still had 38 years ahead of him. That is an indication of his stature. But it does not mean that he shaped the course of history, or even of scholarship.

In Postwar, Tony Judt discusses “the demise of the continental intellectual.” On May 31, 2003, Habermas plus Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Richard Rorty, and several other leading thinkers published coordinated essays against the Iraq War in distinguished European newspapers. The result “passed virtually unnoticed. It was not reported as news, nor was it quoted by sympathizers. No-one implored the authors to take up their pens and lead the way forward. … The whole project sputtered out. One hundred years after the Dreyfus Affair, fifty years after the apotheosis of Jean-Paul Sartre, Europe’s leading intellectuals had thrown a petition–and no one came” (pp. 785-7).

I am not quoting Judt today to cast aspersions on Habermas, whose work was deep and broad. I suspect that changes in media and communications have reduced the influence of serious intellectuals. Besides, Habermas may never have wanted to be the new Jean-Paul Sartre. Elsewhere, I have discussed how Michel Foucault (born just three years before Habermas) deliberately shunned the role of the “universal intellectual”; and perhaps we are better off without such people. By all accounts, Habermas welcomed criticism and learned from a wide range of responses. He modeled what he advocated: listening and learning from others. I think his work will long outlive him.

See also: introducing Habermas; saving Habermas from the deliberative democrats; Habermas with a Whiff of Tear Gas: Nonviolent Campaigns and Deliberation in an Era of Authoritarianism; Matthew G. Specter, Habermas: An Intellectual Biography, and many other posts.

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

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

 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”.

See also: “People Are Not Points in Space: Network Models of Beliefs and Discussions“; US polarization in context; class inversion as an alternative to the polarization thesis

Hannah Arendt: “The problem wasn’t what our enemies did, but what our friends did”

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Here is a clip that resonates today. It is from Hannah Arendt’s 1964 interview on German television. The journalist Günter Gaus takes her through her life, from her childhood in Königsburg to the controversy about her 1963 Eichmann book.

At this point in the conversation, Arendt has been describing her work in France in 1933-1941. As an activist, social worker, and educator, she had helped to move Jewish refugee teenagers from France to kibbutzim in Palestine.

She concludes, “So that was roughly the activity [Tätigkeit]”. In her later theoretical writing, Arendt combines that word with other terms to differentiate three major human “activities”: labor, thinking, and action. Her work in France was the third kind of activity, “Die Tätigkeit des Handelns”: talking and working with others to change the world. That is how she defines politics, and “freedom is exclusively located in the political realm” (The Human Condition, p. 31),

She asks Gauss whether he would like to hear how she turned to this “activity.”

He nods, and she says, “You see, I came from purely academic activity [what she would call “thinking”], and in that respect, the year ‘33 made a very lasting impression on me, first positive and second negative. Or I would say, first negative and second positive.”

It is surprising that there was anything positive about 1933, but I suspect Arendt was thinking of how it had propelled her from thinking into action.

She continues, “Today, one often thinks that the shock of the German Jews in ’33 came from the fact that Hitler seized power. Now, as far as I and people of my generation are concerned, I can say that this is a curious misunderstanding. It was of course very bad. It was political. It wasn’t personal. That the Nazis are our enemies, my God, we didn’t need Hitler’s seizure of power to know that. It had been completely evident to anyone who wasn’t an idiot for at least four years that a large part of the German people were behind it. Yes, we knew that too. We couldn’t have been surprised by it.”

Gauss says, “The shock in 1933 was that something general and political turned into something personal.”

Arendt replies, “No. Well, first, that too. First, the general and political did become a personal fate, if one emigrated. Secondly, you know what conforming is. [She uses Nazi jargon, Gleichschaltung, which could perhaps be translated as preemptive capitulation.]. And it meant that friends were conforming. Yes, it was never a personal problem. The problem wasn’t what our enemies did, but what our friends did. Well, uh, what happened back then in the wave of Gleichschaltung–which was pretty voluntary, anyway, not under the pressure of terror–above all, in this sudden abandonment, it was as if an empty space had formed around me.”

For Arendt, this empty space would not only be cruel and disillusioning but would also reveal that she could not act freely when surrounded by the people she had counted as friends. “Action is entirely dependent on the presence of others” and requires interaction with them [The Human Condition, p. 23].

She adds:

Well, I lived in an intellectual milieu, but I also knew other people, and I could see that among the intellectuals, [conforming] was the rule, so to speak; and among the others, not. And I’ve never forgotten that story.

I always thought back then (I was exaggerating a bit of course): ‘I am leaving Germany. Never again! Never again will I touch this intellectual business. I don’t want to have anything to do with this community.

“I was, of course, not of the opinion that German Jews or German-Jewish intellectuals would have acted any differently if they had been in a different situation. I didn’t think so. I was of the opinion that it had to do with this profession. I’m speaking of that time–I know more about it now than I did back then.

I learned about this interview from the new PBS documentary, Hannah Arendt: Facing History, which I generally recommend. See also: Hannah Arendt: I’m Nothing but a Little Dot; “Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt; Reading Arendt in Palo Alto; Arendt, freedom, Trump (from 2017); Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent; notes on Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution; what is the basis of a political judgment? etc.

the meanings of ‘civility’

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If you Google the word “civility,” the Internet tells you that it means “formal politeness and courtesy in behavior or speech.” This bothers me a bit because the word has had other meanings. Besides, demanding “formal politeness and courtesy” in politics can be a way of suppressing criticism and agitation. William H. Chafe describes how calls for civility were used against Martin Luther King, Jr. in Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom.

My favorite meaning of the word “civility” (or its analogue in Italian: civiltá) comes from the Italian renaissance. For proponents of renaissance republics, civility meant speech and behavior that was egalitarian. Civility existed among people who treated each other as equals and therefore spoke plainly, practically, and with an absence of formal politeness.

For example, in the Discourses (book LV), Machiavelli writes, “Republics where political life has been maintained uncorrupted do not tolerate any of their citizens to be gentlemen, or to live in the manner of gentlemen: rather, they maintain equality among themselves. … ” He adds that in lands where many rich men live idly on inherited wealth, “there has never been any republic, nor any political life; because such generations of men are completely enemies of all civiltá.”

The last word is sometimes translated as “civil government.” Thompson’s Victorian translation simply says, “Such persons are very mischievous in every republic or country.” But literally, the idle rich are enemies of civility for Machiavelli, because civility is a conversation among equals aimed at making collective decisions.

Using the common Latin noun civis (“citizen”) as a root, it was possible to construct an abstract noun, meaning something like “citizenness”–civilitas. That word would be understandable in Latin, but it was rare, surviving only in a couple of texts. For one ancient author (Quintilian) civilitas meant the art of government; for another (Suetonius), it meant courteousness. They were thinking of different attributes of a Roman citizen. I doubt that anyone would have noted this range of meanings before the modern era of Latin lexicons.

Nevertheless, the Latin word civilitas was available to be imitated in modern languages, either by authors who found it in Quintilian or Suetonius or by those who re-invented it from its root meaning of “citizen.”

Around 1384, John Wylciffe used “civility” when translating this Biblical passage (Acts 22:26-28):

26 And when this thing was heard, the centurion went to the tribune, and told to him, and said, What art thou to doing? for this man is a citizen of Rome.

27 And the tribune came nigh, and said to him [Paul], Say thou to me, whether thou art a Roman. And he said, Yea.

28 And the tribune answered, I with much sum got this freedom. [Wycliffe's original version: "I with moche summe gat this ciuylite," Wycliffe's note: "cyuylitee, either fraunchise, either dignite of citeceyn."] And Paul said, And I was born a citizen of Rome.

Wycliffe first wrote “civility” for the New Testament Greek word politeian, and then revised it to “freedom,” meaning the rights enjoyed by a Roman citizen. The King James Version simply says: “And Paul said, But I was free born.”

In 1598, an English author helpfully explained, “Policy is derived from the Greek word politeia which in our tongue we may term civility; and that which the Grecians did name politic government, the Latins called the government of a civil commonwealth, or civil society.”

These meanings were political and related to republican government. However, Shakespeare used “civility” to mean something similar to “tameness” and “patience” and as the opposite of “distemper” (Merry Wives of Windsor iv. ii. 23).

In short, people have coined or re-invented the word “civility” several times to capture aspects of what they imagined Roman citizens to be like. Some of their associations involved politeness, and others involved equal rights. It is a shame to remember only the former.

Sources: My translation of Machiavelli. English references from the Oxford English Dictionary with my modernized spellings. See also learning from the Florentine republic; civility as equality; civic republicanism in medieval Italy: the Lucignano council frescoes; what does the word civic mean?;