Education, crisis, and the human condition: Arendt after 50 years

Teachers College Record

Volumn 112, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 375-385

  Higgins, Chris ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

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EID: 77950684533     PISSN: 01614681     EISSN: 14679620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (74)

1. For an overview of Arendt's life and work, the best place to start is Young-Bruehl's biography: Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982), 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004);
2. see also Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006)
3. and Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press).
4. Two volumes dedicated to Arendt appeared shortly after her death: Terence Ball, ed., Political Theory and Praxis: New Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977)
5. and Melvin A. Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt, the Recovery of the Public World (New York: SL Martin's Press, 1979). Then a flurry of essay collections appeared in the mid to late 1990s:
6. see, for example, Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K Hinchman, eds., Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994);
7. Bonnie Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (State College: Penn State Press, 1995);
8. Larry May and Jerome Kohn, eds., Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later (Cambridge, MA: MTT Press, 1996);
9. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997);
10. Dana Villa, ed.. The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
11. and Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky, judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
12. Monographs on Arendt followed a similar trend. Notable early books include Margaret Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1974);
13. Bhiku Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1981);
14. and George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984).
15. N.B., Can ovan revised this early position in M. Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994). A short list of monographs during the 1990s Arendt Renaissance includes:
16. Phillip Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History, and Citizenship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993);
17. Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994);
18. Maurizio Passerin d'Entrevès, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (New York: Routledge, 1994);
19. Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996);
20. John McGowan, Hannah Arendt: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998);
21. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998);
22. Kimberley Curds, Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999);
23. Margaret Betz Hull, The Hidden Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002);
24. and Mary G. Dietz, Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002).
25. Important exceptions to mis rule include (leaving to the side previous work on Arendt by the issue's contributors): Joe Dunne's chapter on Arendt in his important book on techne, phronesis, and teaching; Mordechai Gordon's fine edited volume; Eric Gorham's interesting book on the college, political science classroom as stage for Arendtian action; and a rich and diverse series of articles starring Arendt by Aaron Schutz. See Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: Practical fudgment and the Lure of Technique (1993), revisions paperback with a foreword by Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 88-103;
26. Mordechai Gordon, Hannah Arendt and Education: Renewing Our Common World (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001);
27. Eric B. Gorham, The Theater of Politics: Hannah Arendt, Political Science, and Higher Education (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000);
28. Aaron Schutz, "Creating Local 'Public Spaces' in Schools: Insights from Hannah Arendt and Maxine Greene," Curriculum Inquiry 29, no.1 (1999): 77-98;
29. Aaron Schutz and Pamela A. Moss, "Habermas, Arendt, and the Tension between Authority and Democracy in Educational Standards: The Case of Teaching Reform," in Philosophy of Education 1999, ed. Randall Curren (Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 2000), 42-53;
30. Aaron Schutz, "Teaching Freedom? Postmodern Perspectives," Review of Educational Research 70, no. 2 (2000): 215-51;
31. Aaron Schutz, "Is Political Education an Oxymoron? Hannah Arendt's Resistance to Public Spaces in Schools," in Philosophy of Education 2001, ed. Suzanne Rice (Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 2002), 324-32;
32. Aaron Schutz, Theory as Performative Pedagogy: Three Masks of Hannah Arendt," Educational Theory 51, no. 2 (2005): 127-50; and
33. Aaron Schutz, "Caring in Schools Is Not Enough: Community, Narrative, and the Limits of Alterity," Educational Theory 48, no. 3 (2005): 373-93. Meanwhile, in all of the many general collections of essays on Arendt's work, only one chapter of one volume foregrounds educational issues:
34. Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Political Children," in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (State College: Penn State University Press, 1995), 263-284
35. Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education" (1958), in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, trans. Denver Lindley (New York: Penguin, 1977), 173-96;
36. Hannah Arendt, "Reflections on Litde Rock," Dissent 6, no.1 (1959): 46-56,
37. reprinted in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Shocken, 2003), 193-213. Arendt also gave an (unpublished) address on higher education at Bryn Mawr College in 1971, a copy of which is in the Bryn Mawr archives.
38. I learned of this address thanks to Anne O'Byrne, "Pedagogy without a Project: Arendt and Derrida on Teaching, Responsibility and Revolution," Studies in Philosophy and Education 24, no. 5 (2005): 389-409.
39. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958), 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). To call this her magnum opus is to take nothing away from such monumental works as Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem, or The Life of the Mind.
40. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), new edition with added prefaces (San Diego: Harcourt, 1973);
41. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil(1963) (New York: Penguin, 1977); and
42. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1971), ed. Mary McCarthy (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1981).
43. According to Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt did the bulk of the research and writing for The Human Condition from 1952 to 1956. In late 1957, when the book was in revisions or already in press, Arendt turned to the relation of education and politics at the request of the editors of Commentary, who wanted her views on desegregation. This assignment, and the experience of seeing the starling photograph of Elizabedi Eckford taunted by the angry white mob as she was escorted to school, prompted Arendt to write "Reflections on Litde Rock." However, the editors of Commentary were alarmed by Arendt's position and, after a long delay, finally agreed to publish it if accompanied by a scathing critique by Sidney Hook. Arendt chose to pull the essay from Commentary and instead placed it with Dissent, where it finally appeared in 1959. It was this controversy that led Arendt to write The Crisis in Education," clarifying how the conceptual structure developed in The Human Condition (particularly the concept of natality and the private-public-social distinction) informed her view on the relation of education to politics. The controversy was so protracted, however, that "Crisis" ended up arriving in print before the essay it was meant to follow. See Elizabedi Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 278-79, 313-17.
44. The publishing history of "Crisis" is as follows: It began as a lecture that Arendt delivered in Bremen in May 1958. That same year, this German version was published as a pamphlet, Hannah Arendt, Die Krise in der Erziehung (Bremen, Germany: AngelsachsenVerlag, 1958). The essay was translated for publication in Partisan Review,
45. see Hannah Arendt, The Crisis in Education," Partisan Reviews, no.4 (Fall 1958): 493-513. The translation was further revised for inclusion in the 1961 six-study version of Between Past and Future. For a look at Arendt's editing of the Partisan Review version, including the deletion of the information about the Bremen lecture,
46. see the Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress online at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendditml/arenddiome.html: Speeches and Writing File, 1923-1975 n.d., Books-Between Past and Future-First draftPages 108-150, Image 3.
47. This is not to say that the articles that follow limit themselves to these three works alone. This special issue includes discussions of other works by Arendt-such as On Revolution, Men in Dark Times, The Life of the Mind, and "What Is Freedom?" -and puts Arendt in conversation with other thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michael Oakeshott, and Amartya Sen. See Hannah Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" (1958) in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1977), 143-72;
48. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963) (New York: Penguin, 1977);
49. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (1968) (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1970);
50. and Arendt, The Life of the Mind.
51. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), trans. F. Max Müller (Garden City, NY: Anchor/MacMillan, 1966);
52. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788), trans, and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
53. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner/MacMillan, 1951);
54. Immanuel Kant, "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" (1785), in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What Is Enlightenment? trans. Lewis White Beck (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 3-82;
55. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (1784-95), trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1984);
56. Immanuel Kant, Education (1803), trans. Annette Churton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1960).
57. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Emile: Or on Education" (1762), trans, and ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
58. Martin Buber, "Education" (1926), in Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 83-103;
59. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer as Educator" (1874), trans. William Arrowsmith, in Unmodern Observations: Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, ed. William Arrowsmidi (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 147-226;
60. Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970);
61. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Genealogy of Morals" (1887), in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1969), 3-200.
62. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, truth and Method ( 1960), trans, rev. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall, 2nd rev., Continuum Impacts ed. (New York: Continuum, 2004), 119-24,138-52, 285-304, and esp. 305-334.
63. Indeed, we can identify a deep affinity here among several thinkers who are not ordinarily thought of as forming a single school: Hannah Arendt, John Dewey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael OakeshotL AU these thinkers acknowledge the importance of practice-community-tradition, emphasizing, after Hegel, Sittlichkeit over Moralität, and reaching back toward Aristotle for a conception of praxis-phronesis. Certainty there are differences in the way Aristode and Hegel come down to each: for example, it comes through Marx for Arendt and Maclntyre (whose Aristode was also inflected by Aquinas); through Heidegger for Arendt and Gadamer; dirough Bradley for Oakeshott; dirough Marsh, Torrey, and the St Louis Hegelians for Dewey; and so on. Despite these differences, all the members of this "school" of neo-praxis philosophy sought to reconnect the present with tradition (which they saw in dynamic terms, not static terms), to broaden ethics beyond dilemmas and obligations, and to ground philosophy in the particulars of time, place, practice, and text Because each was critical of aspects of enlightenment rationality, late capitalism, and liberal-individualism-in short, modernity-this radical group of thinkers is sometimes mistakenly uiought to be politically conservative.
64. Arendt, The Crisis in Education," 173, 174 (subsequent "Crisis" page numbers in this paragraph and the next appear in parenttheses).
65. This is Richard Rorty's phrase but applies as well to Arendt's view. See Richard Rorty, "Education as Socialization and as Individualization," in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), 120.
66. Arendt, The Crisis in Education," 196.
67. Julian Edgoose, "Hope in the Unexpected: How Can Teachers Still Make a Difference in the World?" Teachers College Record 112, no.2 (2010).
68. Chris Higgins, "Human Conditions for Teaching: The Place of Pedagogy in Arendt's Vita Activa," Teachers College Record 112, no.2 (2010).
69. Geoffrey Hinchliffe, "Action in a Shared World," Teachers College Record 112, no.2 (2010).
70. Natasha Levinson, "A 'More General Crisis': Hannah Arendt, World-Alienation, and the Challenges of Teaching for the World As It Is," Teachers College Record 112, no.2 (2010).
71. Eduardo M. Duarte, "Educational Thinking and the Conservation of the Revolutionary," Teachers College Record 112, no.2 (2010).
72. Stephanie Mackler, "And Worldlessness, Alas, Is Always a Kind of Barbarism: Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Educating in Worldless Tunes," Teachers College Record 112, no.2 (2010).
73. Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, "Schools as Architecture for Newcomers and Strangers: The Perfect School as Public School?" Teachers College Record 112, no.2 (2010).
74. Gert Biesta, "How to Exist Politically and Learn from It Hannah Arendt and the Problem of Democratic Education," Teachers College Record 112, no.2 (2010).