I am blogging a bit lightly this month, partly because I have wanted to reserve time for relatively sustained reading, mostly in two areas.

First, I am planning a new course on the life and thought of Hannah Arendt. To that end, I have been rereading a lot of her own work and reading some of her articles for the first time. I also reviewed Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s landmark biography (1982) and recent biographies by Samantha Rose Hill (2021) and Lyndsey Stonebridge (2024), plus many interpretive articles, old and new.

I really admire Young-Bruehl’s biography. She misses some information that has come to light in the 44 years since she published it, but she summarizes Arendt’s ideas and the work of other thinkers reliably and insightfully and paints a vivid portrait of her subject.

I am struggling to appreciate The Origins of Totalitarianism as much as I did when I first read it, notwithstanding my deep appreciation for Arendt’s political theory. At least on its face, this is a work of empirical, narrative history, and it includes many claims that don’t seem empirically right to me.

Just for example, Arendt views racism as basically a 19th century phenomenon and largely ignores transatlantic slavery. I can understand that racism took a new form in the 1800s, and I agree that it became more of an ideology then. (Arendt defines ideologies as “systems based upon a single opinion that proved strong enough to attract and persuade a majority of people and broad enough to lead them through the various experiences and situations of an average modern life.”) In his 2017 history of 19th century Britain, David Cannadine also emphasizes that racism hardened into an ideology in the later Victorian Era. Still, Arendt’s overall argument is distorted by a failure to address slavery.

I also wonder whether Arendt’s historical scholarship on European Jewry holds up. It is a little hard to tell, because Origins of Totalitarianism has been cited almost 30,000 times, and I haven’t found needles of historical scholarship in that haystack of political theory. Meanwhile, when I scan histories of Jewry, she does not appear as a source.

Second, I have collected my own writing about the inner life and personal ethics in an evolving collection called Cuttings: Ninety-Nine Essays About Happiness. Reviewing this collection when I prepared to present about happiness in Kyiv in June, I realized that Montaigne is really my model, and I interpret him as a kind of Skeptic in the tradition of the ancient Greek Skeptical School, except that Montaigne adds empathy for others’ suffering. I explored how this combination resembles Buddhism here.

My attraction to this way of thinking about ethics dates back to my 1998 book, Living Without Philosophy. With an eye to writing at least an article about Montaigne-style Skepticism, I have been reading and appreciating Richard Bett’s How to Be a Pyrrhonist (2019), Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne (2010), and some texts by Sextus, Plutarch and Montaigne himself.