Benjamin is one of the few 20th century philosophers who can convey profound thoughts in language that isn't at all opaque. His sentences are always perfectly clear - no pretentious literary or Marxist jargon (thank God). The only thing that makes it slow reading is that you always want to stop, put the book down, and think about what he's just said.

For example, a passage from his essay on Kafka:

'The definition of it which Kafka has given applies to the sons more than to anyone else: "Original sin, the old injustice committed by man, consists in the complaint that he has been the victim of an injustice, the victim of original sin." But who is accused of this inherited sin - the sin of having produced an heir - if not the father by the son? Accordingly the son would be the sinner. But one must not conclude from Kafka's definition that the accusation is sinful because it is false. Nowhere does Kafka say that it is made wrongfully. A never-ending process is at work here, and no cause can appear in a worse light than the one for which the father enlists the aid of these officials and court offices . . . '

This is not opacity for the sake of being opaque; he is trying to get at something incredibly complex, something that (unlike most literary criticism) actually helps you appreciate Kafka and understand him a little better. Benjamin doesn't peel away layers of an onion to arrive at a single shining insight; he presents a simple idea, expands on it a little, and lets you put on the layers of complexity yourself. Read these essays carefully, and it will be obvious why entire schools of thought have sprung up around single paragraphs, why people have devoted their lives to figuring out the ramifications of a single sentence . . .

Benjamin accomplishes something rare: in writing about art, he succeeds in telling us something about life in modern times. And his insights never seem forced; they flow naturally from what he is discussing. For example, his essay on Leskov, "This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activies that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the comminity of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained."

A simple little paragraph on storytelling, but soon you start thinking about how the art of writing has changed since Benjamin's time, and what effect television and the movies have had on the way we live, on "boredom" and mental relaxation . . . anyway, I'm probably starting to get pretentious which Benjamin, thankfully, never does.

Above all this entire collection is filled with something increasingly rare nowadays, a genuine love of books. Forget all the Marxist stuff in other reviews, all Benjamin is really doing, finally, is talking about some books that he likes. That he succeeds in doing much more is a testament to his brilliance.

This is the only theoretical text that I have read, with pleasure, in recent memory. Given the conventional prolixity, obfuscation, and circumlocution of contemporary academic prose in the humanities, the fact that you can read Benjamin with pleasure marks him as outstanding.

Benjamin's project was itself outstanding. He aimed at a synthesis of Marxism, mysticism, German romanticism--in a sense, theology, materialist philosophy, and poetry. His critical approaches and thinking embodies the characteristics he praises in literary texts; Benjamin thinks poetically.

This eclectic collection of material, emphasizing Benjamin's later (and more Marxist) ideas, is not unlike a sampler of related but different confections. It's mistaken to think of Benjamin's various intellectual leanings as discrete ideologies or outright contradictions; instead, to borrow from Wittgenstein, consider his ideas to be different members of a family that resemble one another and are clearly related but live different lives in different contexts.

Benjamin's essay "Unpacking my Library," for example, looks on the surface like a confession of self-indulgence, but (in my opinion) deals in a clever and powerful way with the ways in which we inherit, buy, trade, classify, and value our heritage and cultures. This is truly fascinating material!

For Walter Benjamin, the defining characteristic of modernity was mass assembly and production of commodities, concomitant with this transformation of production is the destruction of tradition and the mode of experience which depends upon that tradition. While the destruction of tradition means the destruction of authenticity, of the originary, in that it also collapses the distance between art and the masses it makes possible the liberation which capitalism both obscures and opposes. Benjamin believes that with the destruction of tradition, libratory potentialities are nonetheless created. The process of the destruction of aura through mass reproduction brings about the "destruction of traditional modes of experience through shock," in response new forms of experience are created which attempt to cope with that shock.

Allegoresis and collection are the twin foci around which the elliptical writings of Walter Benjamin orbit. The former, as a mode of criticism, transforms the latter practice into a version of materialist historicism. Instead of constructing further barriers between his own practice and the practices of the historical moment he would transcend, Benjamin embraces the underside of his own theories in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." There he proclaims the disintegration of the aura and champions the revolutionary potential which is thus released. It will be of use therefore, to look at some of his other references to the aura. It's as though Benjamin takes more seriously than Marx the notion that capitalism contains its own subversion--the path to subversion is not to resist and revolt, but to accede and accelerate...

Most of the most contentious contemporary issues, like abortion, euthanasia and healthcare, welfare, tobacco, and suchlike, concern the problem of life. The argument can be made, and Arendt makes it, that the modern state, in its care for life, has moved from the power over death (capital punishment) to the power over life. It is Arendt's purpose to show that modern politics, in its absorption the public by the private, turns politics into economics (the household), where formerly the care of "life" was located. In a world in which there is neither the immortality of the state nor the individual, bare life becomes the highest value. (Strauss makes the argument that a politics that begins in the state of nature leads directly to "humanitarianism," to a politics devoted to eliminating suffering, and the argument is the same.) A politics devoted to life leaves no "space" (a decidedly unGreek word, used again and again by Arendt and every hip business exec today) for politics, for the play of concealment and disclosure, darkness and light, bright shining words and the privacy and darkness of pain, defecation, eating, love, etc. It is Heidegger put to good use, and Arendt reminds us that the elimination of the politics, or its suppression, is inseparable from a Seinsvergessenheit, but the real life-and-death issue is better grasped by Schmitt and Strauss, who do not fall into the trap of aestheticizing politics.

this book starts off with a breathtaking reflections on the launch of the sputnik. arendt seemingly places us before the launch as witness, evoking the kind of awe, wonderment, fear and anxiety that must arise from such a sight. the prologue is amazing.

i could easily come up with at least a dozen potential research projects from this book that arendt just touches on the surface. (as is the case with arendt's philosophy, it is, at its best, always very suggestive but, at its worst, she never follows through on the initial offering.)

and arendt considered this book as her response to the influence of heidegger; i think that this is a most correct assessment. in fact, this is the great heidegger-book that heidegger himself never could have written. in my view, the latter heidegger pales in comparison (on subjects such as technology, poetry, speech, and history, arendt tops her former mentor). heidgger was truely out-foxed by this book.

i suspect that even the amateur (defined here as the lover of an entity-x) will find much in this book to make this a life-changing experience. in philosophy we often talk of such 'life-changing' books but they are really few in number. this is one such book.

be on the look out for the moment where the discussion of nietzsche's conception of the promise effortlessly morphs into the birth of christ as a miracle. (note: for arendt, the miracle isn't christ but the birth itself, for that matter any birth).

full of grace, this book will be devastating and ultimately redeeming.

Hannah Arendt makes the case that what distinguishes human beings is that they are constantly making new beginnings. This leads her to theories of social action that have implications for our self esteem, our "making of ourselves" and how we influence and participate in social action.

She reveals the implications of this inherent tendency to "make new beginnings" in the uncertainty of outcomes of our action. What we start we cannot know the outcome of beforehand. That is, in significant part, because those who come along after we start something will add or change with their own capacity for making new beginnings.

This says we need social attributes of foregiveness. She also develops the importance of promising in a culture so that we can create some certainty by this social action.

She is writing about social action and involvement in the broad social life. But she could as easily be writing about entrepreneurship and corporate life or any any other social activity.

A stimulating book indeed!

Jaspers and Arendt cover everything and everyone: Sartre, Heidegger, Marx, Goethe, Camus; post-WWII Germany, "the infinitely complex red-tape existence of stateless persons," the Cold War, the "senile" Eisenhower administration, Eichmann, totalitarianism, the atom bomb, local democracy--it's all there. So too is a life-long, extremely close friendship between people who weathered a war from different sides of the globe, who faced cold war terror in radically different ways, who loved their spouses intensely but felt somehow separated by differences in world-view tracable to ethnicity(Gertrude was ethnically Jewish and Heinrich was ethnically Christian). Her admiration of him, her intellectual debt to him, her love for him; his seeming amazement at her vivacity, his admiration of her intellect, his cold, German form of love--and the walls cracking, and his sentiment sometimes pouring through.

It's a warm book up until the very last entry, Arendt's address at Jaspers' funeral. That's enough to send a shiver up your spine--but only if you read it in the context of everything else.

In 1926 Hannah Arendt was a student of Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg University. What began as the questions of a student to her teacher in 1926 blossomed into a friendly correspondence that ended with Arendt's forced emigration from Nazi Germany to the United States, with a stopover in France in the 30s, and then resumed in the Postwar years completely transformed into a rich, detailed dialogue between colleagues and friends, taking on a father-daughter feeling in many of the letters.

It was during the years after 1945 that the two examined everything about their world and themselves. Of particular importance were the dual issues of German guilt for the war and, for Jaspers, what it meant to be a Jew, for not only was Arendt and her husband Jewish, but also Jaspers's wife. This issue becomes intertwined in their conversations about the future of West Germany, the Suez War of 1956, and Arendt's trip to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann. When they shift the political into the personal, Martin Heidegger, a colleague of Jaspers and a teacher of Arendt, is there for taking. The passages concerning Heidegger are quite gossipy at times and lend the reader a voyeuristic look into the private worlds of Arendt and Jaspers. It's almost as if when things get dull and weighty, a little dirt about Heidegger adds just the spice to make the letter memorable.

The other strong point of this book is the portrait Arendt paints of politics in 1950s America, succinctly analyzing the Eisenhower (and later Kennedy) Administrations, describing the collapse of the cities in the 60s, and the "pointless" war in Vietnam. It's almost as if a mirror were held up to history, as insights about those turbelent times pour forth from every letter dispatched.

An invaluable book, not only for those interested in the scholarly events of the times, but for anyone interested in the history of the times.

This book was written at a time when the great power of the world were well on the way to becoming so openly nukers that little corners of the world, and individuals, especially, might be disregarded with impunity by whatever powers wanted to destroy them for their own purposes. What is truly frightening about this situation is the realization that any excuse, race, use of illegal drugs, possession of weapons, sleeping in the Chinese embassy on the night of May 7, 1999, having a sinful Messiah for a minister, putting kids in daycare in a federal building, etc., might end up being considered a deadly mistake if those who have high-powered explosives are working in a system which will allow them to blame one of their enemies for the tragedy which will be the subject of the news.

I happened to be reading a book on the KGB before I started reading this, and the situation at the time of the death of Stalin, then Beria, seems to fall in the sense of how this book claims that individuals don't matter to the system. Once Stalin was dead, having served Stalin was of no benefit to Beria. When Stalin was ruler, it was dangerous for anyone to get more votes than Stalin, as Kirov did shortly before his death. The denunciations of Stalin which followed Stalin's death did not end the practices which Stalin had been denounced for engaging in, any more than the attempt to impeach an America president in 1999 prevented any American from lying about his private life under oath forever after.

Long after this book was written, the political system in the Soviet Union started to allow a broader selection of candidates, and Sakharov was the most popular politician in the Soviet Union at the time of his death from a heart attack. Sakharov had been an inventor of a sandwich design hydrogen bomb, which was first successfuly tested by dropping it from an airplane on November 22, 1955, a mere 8 years before an American president died under more suspicious circumstances, possibly related to his support for a ban on such tests.

I haven't forgotten that someone posted a message after I had reviewed a book which didn't discuss any nuclear weapons whatever. This shows what kind of thing can happen when a person who reads a lot gets involved with those whose totalitarianism expects more respect than I happen to believe that any media deserve at the moment. Not everything that I have written has been posted, and it might be easiest for me to complain about family values totalitarianism. No one would think that the things which are done are limited to those acts which could be printed in a family newspaper, but the media can use family values as an excuse to ignore the most upsetting stories. Reviews of books are not supposed to get too personal, but sometimes the subject matter of the account makes any attempt to comprehend what is in the book offensive. In my own case, I tried to review a book by Gennifer Flowers called PASSION AND BETRAYAL in which the personal is covered by a little black nightie, but not for long. This might be personally embarrassing for the author and a friend of hers, but the danger that some form of totalianism might be criticized in that book would hardly occur to anyone who did not know about the episode when her neighbor with the video camera was getting beat up by guys who kept asking, "Where's the tape?"

Hannah Arendt describes totalitarianism as a system of total domination based on a combination of propaganda and terror. She bases it primarily on a policy of keeping the population off balance by systematically arresting and executing members that it decides are "objectively guilty" because of their religion, their economic status, or other arbitrarily selected criteria. She draws a distinction between merely authoritarian and totalitariam regimes based on the arbitrariness of the selection process of its victims. The victims in totalitarian regimes bear no relationship to concerns of security; rather they are based upon some such ideological foundation as race or social status.

"Friends" is the operative word in the title of this beautiful volume of letters spanning over the course of thirty years. We get two women, two friends, who happen as well to be two of the best writers of the second half of the 20th century. They are inimate and candid, and let us into the lives of these two writers in a way that biographies do not. They were keenly perecptive about each other's works and loves. MCCarthy has numerous illicent affairs, and four marriages, and we see her grappling with her own desires in her letters to Arendt, who it seems sometimes played intermediary. Arendt is less inclined to let McCarthy, and thus us, into her emotional life, but when she does, it is explosive. Carol Brightman, McCarthy's biographer, has written an illuminating and insightful introduction that gives a brief overview of both women's careers and delves into the physcology of their relationship with each other, a relationship that lasted the test of time, and long periods of seperation. Arendt, based in New York, moved around the states at various distinguished teaching posts, while McCarthy, based in Paris, traveled to Italy, and later Vietnam. The fact that the two intimate corresspondants did not come together more often is the one truly surprising element of their relationship. But it also shows us that some of the best friendships are those carried out through letters.

This book has become something of a classic. It unearths a mass of detail about Arendt's life - the pages on her upbringing and experiences before her flight from Europe are particularly memorable. However, the main focus is kept firmly on the way Arendt's thought developed during her life. The author [who knew Arendt in her later years] is well versed in philosophy and political thought and so her account becomes a useful companion to studies of Arendt's many contributions to modern thought: 'totalitarianism', 'the banality of evil', the loss of public space in the contemporary west and much more. This book is not the kind of simple minded attempt to reduce thought to biography that we see all too often. While it is no hagiography [Arendt comes in for some serious criticism on occasion], it ends with a sense of celebration for a life well lived, one of passionate thinking motivated by 'love of the world'

Hannah Arendt On The Holocaust: A Study Of The Suppression Of Truth by Jules Steinberg (Professor of Political Science, Denison University) is a scholarly, critical, seminal assessment of the writings of Hannah Arendt. Meticulously deconstructing the internal contradictions of Arendt's scholarship, the aspects of Arendt's work that encourage murderous totalitarian regimes, and Arendt's failure to understand or admit the true horrific nature of the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt On The Holocaust is a powerful, exhaustively researched rebuttal to Hannah Arendt's writings and a welcome addition to the growing library of Holocaust studies and a highly recommended addition to academic reference collections.

If Hannah Arendt has always intrigued you, but you never managed to read one of her books all the way through (or you wish you had read Arendt), this is the book for you. McGowan tells the story of her intellectual life, her passions, her ethics, her principles--in clear and readable prose that makes Arendt and her era come alive. I think it's the best little book ever written about Hannah Arendt.

Seyla Benhabib is an amazing thinker known throught the world. She displays her intelligence and knowledge through this book.

Hannah Arendt is probable one of the most astute political and moral thinkers of the previous century.

The book approaches Eichmann as a competent but morally vacant burueacrat who sinks into the 'banality of evil' not out of a malicious hatred of the Jews but rather out of a perverted sense of duty and respect for authority. He perverts the Kantian categorical imperative to read - you have the duty to do what society instructs of you - instead of - you have the duty to act in yourself as you would expect society to act towards you. Some reviewers have misread this moral emphasis of Arendt as a defence of Eichmann This is completely false and a basic misunderstanding of her moral argument.

Her brave mentioning of the fact that the Eichmann Trial was probable not in truth a trial but a show to justify retribution as well as the illegality of his kidnapping deserves praise. The fact that Eichmanns council never used this in his defence as well as the fact that technically Eichmann contravened no law in Germany whilst exercising his duties ,gave me the idea that if there was someone in Israel that could saved him from the gallows it would have been Hannah Arendt. Ironic as I have not read a better condemnation of the man from any other author.Then again she also paints the picture of a man making no real effort to avoid his fate but being without the moral fibre to actively seek it out made no effort to hide his identity from anyone. Eichmann wanted to get caught and seeked in his trial and sentence final recognition for his contorted sense of remorse Although the sincerity of his remorse is not doubted it is the nature of his remorse that remains highly questionable. And that is Hannah Arendts exclamation mark behind the banality of this mans' evil.

Her synopsis of the fate of the Jews in various countries during the holocaust is also very valuable to casual students of the Shoah.

Arendt explores the man who superficially seems to be the mastermind of the death of countless Jews and other undesireables. However, Arendt examines the "banality" of evil, thus concluding that neither Eichmann nor the Germans were entirely responsible for these attrocities, instead, she spreads the guilt to others as well (including the Jewish communities that cooperated with the Nazi authorities, much to the disgust of many Jews). Her intelligent argument points out that the Holocaust was not a phenomenon that can only be ascribed to the immensely evil Eichmann or German people because they were passive sheep who either pretended not to notice the attrocities or actively cooperated and shed their guilt by believing the huge lies from the Nazi state and propaganda machine. This may lead the reader to the conclusion that many other societies are not immune to the stupefaction that the Germans underwent during the Third Reich. Third Reich Germany may seem to many an ethereal and ghoulish nightmare, seperated from our world by eons but it is not. How do you like them apples mate?

A lot has been written and said about the Holocaust. This small book by a respected philosopher about the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem is the largest and most thought provoking of them all. Why? Because it analizes through the personal experience of an "employee" of the killing machine, the intimate aspect of evil, how banally can it stem out of the most ordinary persons. Rosseau wrote that "homo homini lupus" and Arendt clearly follows up. It also provides factual historical insight about how the Nazi solution to the jewish problem evolved from expatriation or relocation to physical annihilation. From another perspective, that of the victims, answers the question that many other authors ignore or circumvent. How so few (in the R.S.H.A. and S.S.) could find, control and deport so many ? In almost all the countries the hearding of the victims and their shipment could not have happened without the active participation of the Jewish Councils and other jewish authorities which were empowered by the Nazis for that purpose. The self delusion of the leaders of the jewish communities is clearly recorded by Arendt up to the appalling and pathetic case of Dr. Kastner in Hungary who saved 1,684 people at a cost of 476,000 victims. From a juridical standpoint, Arendt valiantly raises certain doubts about the fairness of the trial. It also analizes the political impact of Eichmann's veredict and its influence upon future trials (in Germany) of Nazi war criminals. THIS CONTROVERSIAL BOOK IS A MUST FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN THE TRAGEDY OF THE HUMAN CONDITION,THE POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS THAT LED TO EICHMANN'S ABDUCTION AND TRIAL AND THE REAL WORKINGS OF THE HOLOCAUST.