Über Hannah Arendt

Judith N. Shklar has spent her life studying Hannah Arendt. In her texts, she paints an ambivalent picture of the philosopher, 22 years her senior, and returns to her again and again in her work, both appreciatively and full of wit and polemical acuity. Shklar values Arendt above all for her thoughts on exile and statelessness and for an ethos that upholds the promise of politics and the absolute new beginning that is possible at any time. At the same time, however, Shklar criticizes her as a highfalutin metaphysician and disenchanted Marxist with a penchant for political romanticism. "On Revolution" is a "disgraceful book" for Shklar, while "Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem" merely manages to reflect "epigonally and amateurishly" on politics with the haughtiness of the self-professed pariah. Against Arendt's heroic understanding of politics and her blindness to historical injustice, Shklar sets the praise of an impersonal proceduralism and her own liberalism of fear and rights-thus Shklar's work has come to stand not least against Arendt's thinking. With the texts collected here, it is now possible to trace the relationship between two central political theorists of the 20th century.