‘Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin’ Review: Clash of the Titans

wsj.com

23 points·apollinaire··4 comments

In the second paragraph the author refers to Arendt, almost off-handedly, as an "apologist for Nazism". This strikes me as deeply offensive and wrong-headed. I'm no intellectual but I've read plenty of Arendt, including the referred-to "Banality of Evil" and in no way was it an apology for or defense of Nazism.

Arendt famously described Eichmann as "neither perverted nor sadistic... terrifyingly normal." Now, my understanding is that modern scholarship has repudiated this view. Eichmann, they now believe, was indeed a malicious and violent anti-semite, and Arendt was bamboozled by a cunning liar at his trial.

This very well may be true, but it certainly does not make Arendt a Nazi apologist. The quoted passage was condemnatory in the extreme. It was written (as an article for the New Yorker) in Arendt's detached and ironic style, but certainly it was not an excuse or apology for Nazi functionaries.

That line is calling Heidegger a Nazi apologist, not Arendt.

Agreed, though to be fair the sentence is a bit obtuse in that regard. The only clear indicator this remark applies to "philosophical influence" (Heidegger) and not Arendt is the gender of the pronoun (him), which can be easily missed, as gendered pronouns are more often noise than signal.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/BngdA

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