Hannah Arendt Essays (Examples)

The economy of the totalitarian state must be effectively directed with only so much control that the system can be directed effectively; it must obtain growth and combat economic problems to the best of its ability so as to ensure political, social and economic stability.

Conversely, Arendt argues that "the totalitarian dictator regards the natural and industrial riches of each country & #8230; as a source of loot and a means of preparing the next step of aggressive expansion."

Arendt thus labels the totalitarian economy as a war economy, but it is not necessary for a totalitarian leader to adopt such an economy as such economies finance expansionistic foreign policies and totalitarianism does not have to have an international focus; rather it must have a national focus. Arendt is too specific on this point and is once again directly attacking Hitler rather than discussing the realities of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism does…

In this respect, he fervently opposed all tendencies towards technocratic governance, which he identified both in the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe, and in the rapidly expanding welfare state of the ederal Republic under Adenauer. Technocracy, he asserted, is the objective form of the instrumental tendencies in human reason, and if it is not counterbalanced by the integrally human resources of cultural or rational communication it is likely to result in oppressive government. In this respect, he moved close to quite standard variants on political liberalism, and he endorsed limited government, relative cultural and economic freedom, and protection for society from unaccountable political direction. ourth, he also argued that a human polity requires a constitutional apparatus, enshrining basic rights, imposing moral-legal order on the operations of the state, and restricting the prerogative powers of the political apparatus. Like Kant, therefore, he advocated the institution of an international federation of states,…

Thus, power in the public realm is, by definition, a manifestation of the people, and it is the people who have the power to change the government's rule if they so desire.
Although Arendt's definition of the relationship between violence and power offers an explanation into how the cruelest of dictators can remain in power, her book, the Human Condition, Arendt also makes a case for the importance of speech in securing that public power that will allow rule in the public realm. To make this argument, Arendt begins by summarizing Aristotle, who stated that just two facets were "necessary and present in human communities" -- speech and action. Arendt suggests that from these necessary facets arose the "realm of human affairs" (25). Furthermore, Arendt describes the importance of speech in the early Greek democracy, in which words were considered a precursor to and more important than thought (25). In…

First, the mass public is greatly influenced by a monopolistic media while the importance of separate discussion circles is diminished proportionately with the increase of media. Second, the process of forming opinion is hold and spread from a center, making media markets "huge and centralized" (idem). Third, opinion is determined by unnatural causes due to manipulation of the public who is passively receiving information and not invited to discussion. Fourth, that only in the case of authoritarian forms of government, decision making is enforced by the power of fear and violence. (idem) Mills briefly describes a survey destined to gather data from people in the American Midwest, in a small city in Illinois. The questions of the survey, conducted twice at an interval of two months, shed some light into the way people change their mind. Mass media is responsible for a big part of people's opinions, but "person-to-person discussions"…

Likewise, the heroes are those who took actions to prevent the amassing of victims. Clearly, the individual Nazis do not fit into this category. (Arendt, 2006: p. 74).
Thus, Arendt leaves the question as to whether the individual Nazis were bystanders or murderers. To be a bystander, Arendt argues that the Nazi soldiers would have to be completely free of any act that perpetuated the actions. However, because the Nazis made numerous choices, from joining the party, from giving up their individuality and morals, and for following the theory of the final solution, it would seem that one would conclude that they are not innocent bystanders, as would be community members who did nothing in the face of their neighbors being taken away to their deaths. (Arendt, 2006: p. 57).

ased on this thinking, one would think that Arendt would conclude that all Nazis were guilty of crimes against humanity…

Vogt, Ellison and Arendt
The idea of a utopian society, a perfect Eden, has been a recurring theme in human literature, philosophy, religion, and commentary almost from the beginning of civilization. This recurrent theme is no accident: most cultures have, as a basis for their creation mythos, a utopian view of either the pre-human world or the post-human world. Sociological, this is a functionalist approach that serves to "validate, support, and imprint the norms of a give, specific moral order" and to authorize its moral code "as a construct beyond criticism and human emendation" (Campbell and Fairchild 221).

In opposition, a dystopia, becomes part of the anti-heroic paradigm in that all the benefits of an overall utopian society are almost backwards. hat was good, now seems evil, what was light, dark. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt, in Ideology and Terror: A New Form of Government, sees one of the maxims of…

Language
Power and Language

The concept of power has been examined closely by many philosophers throughout human history. These philosophers have different ideas of what power is, but they all, in some way, believe that the concept of language is central to power. In On Violence, Hannah Arendt quotes several such definitions. She says that power may be "making others act as I choose," "to command and be obeyed," or "the instinct of domination" (36-7). All of these definitions have some basis in the reality of the concept, but the two philosophers who will be the focus of this essay, Arendt and Nietzsche, disagree with this basic premise and attempt to quantify power in different terms. They also make the case of the centrality of language to power. In other words, that there is a language to power, and the creation of power, that needs to be understood before the…

Language, Liteay and Cultual Studies
The piece of witing eviewed in this document is the initial paagaph in Hannah Aendt's essay entitled "Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papes." This paagaph is typically tenchant, as vitually all of Aendt's wok is. Howeve, one can undestand the incisiveness of this paagaph by evaluating its stuctues and the liteay conventions the autho employs thoughout it. Doing so eveals that this paagaph pimaily functions as an intoductoy paagaph to an essay about the commonality of lying in politics.

The basic stuctue of this paagaph is fom boad to naow. Fo the most pat, the final sentence of the paagaph functions as the thesis of the entie document: essentially that the Pentagon Papes -- which was a govenment odeed manuscipt about the eality of the Vietnam Wa and the delibeate deceptions that wee used on the public to manipulate its conception of this…

Human Condition
hat Caught My Attention

Hannah Arendt is a German philosopher who has refused to call herself a philosopher, but her work has been praised as being influential and brilliant (though controversial) in its originality and in its bold departure from what other philosophers have written about the human condition. hat I found most compelling, and even appalling, is the way in which Arendt differentiates between "labor" and "work"; those are words that are most often used interchangeably but for Arendt, they are worlds apart in their true meaning.

ork vs. Labor -- a rather radical position by Arendt

In The Human Condition Arendt describes work and labor as two vitally different things. The laborer of today is similar to the slaves of ancient Greece, she explains. In fact those individuals whose whole lives totally revolve around labor (perhaps an example would be the farm laborers who toil in…

Holocaust Politics
Totalitarianism's Controversial Notions

The human social animal's capacity for collective tyranny and violence in Hannah Arendt's seminal work

Since the publication of her 1951 work on The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt has received much criticism as a philosopher and an historian for her theory of the human, historical development of notions of society or what Arendt terms 'the social.' From the social organizations of the salon, which were loose and diffuse, and based on ideological alliances, human beings evolved in their organization, she suggests, to alliances upon material interests in the forms of classes. But the nationalist and imperialist movements of the 19th century perverted these previous mental and material social alliances in history, to create the manifestation of 'the masses' that enabled totalitarianism to take hold in Germany, Russia, and other areas of the world.

Critical to Arendt's conception of totalitarianism is her notion of the…

Role of Memory in Shaping Morality
Oscar Wilde once wrote that, "The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory." The role of memory and remembering in shaping moral decisions is a concept that is central to sections of Hannah Arendt's Responsibility and Judgment and Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals as both texts wrestle with how one knows that an action is morally wrong. It is a question that goes back to the earliest days of philosophical inquiry under Socrates: Does the understanding of morality come inherently from something within man or is it merely inculcated by society and thereby remembered. Drawing from her own experiences as a German Jewish refugee and after World War II as a reported at the Nuremberg Trials, Arendt argues that morality must exist beyond the scale of the individual as there is too much variability within humanity's perspective on moral…

Of the six conflicts (within the fifty mentioned) that resulted in 200,000 or more deaths, three were between Muslims and non-Muslims, two were between Muslim cultures, and just one involved non-Muslims on both sides. The author references a New York Times investigative piece in which fifty-nine ethnic conflicts were reported in forty-eight locations in 1993. In "half these places Muslims were clashing with other Muslims or with non-Muslims"; in thirty-nine of the conflicts groups from different civilizations were engaged, and two-thirds of those were between "Muslims and others" (Huntington, 257).

Keeping in mind this book was published in 1996 -- and updated data employing Huntington's Muslim-violence theme is not immediately available -- it is worthy of note that of the twenty-nine wars (that involved 1,000 or more deaths in a year's time) in 1992, twelve were intercivilizational, and of those dozen, nine were between Muslims and non-Muslims (257). Huntington raised…

Strauss and Nature
Strauss is contending that the "self-evident" natural rights of man are no more apparent because of a creeping relativism in thought and an increasing dependence on legalism. Thus, "the legislators and the courts" decide what is "right" and what is not. In a sense, the lament of Strauss for the loss of common sense, especially regarding what is naturally good and lawful is appreciable. It is just. On the other hand, it could be argued that the "natural right" that Jefferson believed in was not as "self-evident" as imagined but rather more imaginary than "self-evident." Strauss asserts that this line of argumentation is the result of the subjectivist attitude and perspective of modern philosophy. hile subjectivism is a deadly form of philosophy and kills all sense of truth, as Plato shows in Euthyphro, it is the natural consequence of what Strauss identifies in his last sentence of…

Social psychology is a very broad field that takes in the many varieties of group dynamics, perceptions and interactions. Its origins date back to the late-19th Century, but it really became a major field during and after the Second orld ar, in order to explain phenomena like aggression, obedience, stereotypes, mass propaganda, conformity, and attribution of positive or negative characteristics to other groups. Among the most famous social psychological studies are the obedience experiments of Stanley Milgram and the groupthink research of Irving Janus (Feenstra Chapter 1). Authority figures are very important in influencing the behavior and attitudes of groups, as advertising pioneers like Edward Bernays and Nazi propagandists like Josef Goebbels realized early in the 20th Century. Human beings naturally categorize others into groups, and attribute values, attitudes and stereotypes to them, while they also tend to favor members of their own group (Feenstra Chapter 2). Social psychologists have…

It is necessary to control the workers and make them dependent on the government. The policy also makes it possible for the government to direct all its resources on a single project -- typically the major "goal" of a regime such as war.
Complete government control on weapons, although not an exclusive characteristic of totalitarian governments precludes the chances of successful uprisings.

Case Studies: Specific Examples of Totalitarian egimes

The Soviet Communist regime under Joseph Stalin, the fascist regime under Mussolini in Italy and Nazi regime led by Adolf Hitler are typical examples of totalitarian regimes.

Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin: As observed earlier, it is debatable whether Karl Marx had clearly envisaged the formation of totalitarian governments by the application of his Communist theory. However, the first country to adopt Communism, i.e., the Soviet Union soon degenerated into the worst type of totalitarian government imaginable under Joseph Stalin who…

Nearing the end of the 1960s, the analytic or language philosophy became the central focus point which led to the isolation of the classroom setting and the problems that came with it (Greene, 2000).
Most of the educational philosophers of the time were inclined towards restricting themselves to the official aspects and problems like the sovereignty of the system without any influence from the society and the surrounding environment and the assessment of the calls and school structure conducted for its growth or for the progression of the epistemology that it embodied (Greene, 2000).

All those setups that seemed to be coming across as invasive or seemed to add a personalized bias where it didn't belong were quickly identified and removed. This was one of the reasons that led to the obsession of the possible consequences that could exist due to the practicality of the philosophical theories. Inflexibility was adeptly…

Consumption, Society and Culture
Cultural Industry

There are two social processes which are linked with each other and provide the basis of popular culture in modern capitalist societies. These two processes are related with production and consumption of cultural goods. In the first step, the commodities are produced in the light of customers' desirable features and packaged in culturally acceptable methods. In the second step, the products are used by their respective target markets as status symbols to satisfy self-esteem needs. The identification of the target market as a considerable portion of society is largely based on its presentation in fine arts particularly TV programs, music shows and films (Benjamin, 1968).

Social system is a comprehensive study, whose knowledge is mandatory to understand the popular culture. Artifacts represent the cultural symbols, yet these artifacts are strongly influenced by the taste and choice of professionals and cultural elites. There are many…

Auschwitz gave to Promo Levi when he dared to ask the "hy?" question. To be sure, the guard was simply attempting to be cynical and sarcastic rather than reflective or philosophical, but LaCapra is also critical of Claude Lanzmann for failing to ask this question enough in Shoah. All of the Germans who Lanzmann interviewed were either perpetrators of complicit bystanders, and they spent a great deal of time explaining what, where and how the Holocaust happened, while also denying or minimizing their own responsibility. Franz Suchomel, the S.S. guard at Treblinka, was a notable exception to this rule, but Lanzmann interviewed him with a hidden camera after promising to keep his identity anonymous. Almost all of the Jewish survivors described what happened in painful detail, and Lanzmann's preference was to make them literally relive their experiences, but they were not asked why. ith a few exceptions the resistance leader…

Cosmopolitanism International Law and the Persistence of the Sovereign Nation-State
Seyla enhabib can only point to the European Union as an effective and practical example of transnationalism or post-nationalism in today's world. International law and organizations have certainly become more important than they were in 1945, but integration has proceeded much farther in Europe than any other region of the world. Today, this has become a political, social and cultural arrangement, not simply a free trade zone established to create larger markets for capitalist interests. Most rational observers would agree that this has been beneficial for all concerned and that the condition of Europe today is far preferable to that in 1918 or 1945. Will Kymlicka has no argument against European integration per se, and even welcomes the expansion of liberal nation-states to areas once ruled by fascists and Communists. His main argument with ehabib is that the nation-state cannot…

Tyack and Cuban with Dewey on Social Change
David Tyack and Larry Cuban do share similar views to John Dewey about the nature of the traditional education system in the United States as well as its origins. Public education as it exists today is a product of the 19th Century industrialization and urbanization process, which created schools that resembled factories, timetables and schedules, and teachers who acted like bosses on a factory floor. Dewey of course abhorred this system and criticized it unmercifully for decades, both in the way it was structured and the type of information it imparted to students. In the history of American education, there has never been a more vocal, prominent and outspoken critic of the traditional system than Dewey, and none has been the subject of greater wrath from conservatives and traditionalists, even decades after his death. Tyack and Cuban are well aware of the…

Peace
As Masciulli (n.d.) points out, "few consistently peaceful societies and cultures exist or have existed historically, and clearly none that has been a macro culture or civilization," (332). Human nature also has a clear tendency toward patterns of behavior that can incite antagonism or violence. Defensiveness, protectionism, predation, and self-preservation are innate behaviors rooted in animal instincts. Peacemaking and peacekeeping efforts worldwide can alleviate suffering and ameliorate the effects of violence, but even these well-meaning efforts do not constitute an overall shift in global consciousness. Therefore, it is unrealistic to expect global peace in this lifetime but it is becoming increasingly possible to envision a world that becomes more peaceful one generation at a time. Peace, if it is possible in this lifetime, depends on radical paradigm shifts.

The first step toward achieving peace is realizing that violence is a state of mind, and that state of mind can…

Ma Pastoral Theology -- Spiritual Abuse
HEN THE SYSTEM BECOMES THE PERSECUTOR

Veenhuizen's dissertation explores spiritual abuse, using Relational Theology to understand a healthy spiritual relationship vs. spiritual abuse. In Relational Theology, God offers a bilateral covenant with Him and with others of unreserved love and commitment with the gifts of blessing to anyone accepting His offer. Spiritual abuse sharply contrasts with God's covenant. Spiritual abuse has existed for quite some time; consequently, theological writers such as Veenhuizen and mental health professionals have all addressed the causes, discernment and treatment of spiritual abuse.

Foundation of Relational Theology

Veenhuizen's dissertation correctly shows that there are various definitions of Spiritual Abuse (Veenhuizen, 2011). The most inclusive one found in my research is from Lisa Oakley's "Developing safeguarding policy and practice for Spiritual Abuse" (Oakley & Kinmond, 2014). After studies and interviews with numerous survivors of Spiritual Abuse, Oakley and her team concluded…

Authoritarianism vs. Democratic Leadership: Why People Choose
Because politics is a social expression, it is natural for philosophers and political scientists to examine the sociology of a group of people regarding their choices of leaders whom they choose to support. In terms of choosing to support a democratic or non-democratic leader, the Frankfurt School of philosophers (Arendt, Adorno, Fromm, Nevitt et al.) show that society can be manipulated into choosing as the powerful elite, who control the media and the manner in which the public masses think, prefer them to choose. In other words, there is an art of deception and manipulation exercised by the purveyors of mass media. On the other hand, there is also a willingness on the part of the public to ascribe to the views of a demagogue, who projects himself vividly, with force, conviction and articulation. Such a leader can attract masses to supporting a…

slavery and citizenship in Aristotle's Politic:
Aristotle believes that most people in the world can be enslaved devoid of injustice as they are born to be slaves. At the same time some are born to be free and dominate as masters. Most modern critics have smeared these concepts of Aristotle. In this paper the writer evaluates the concepts of citizenship and slavery in light of Aristotle's politic to reveal not only Aristotle's thinking but also how his views are inferred by contemporary philosophers.

One is forced to do the disagreeable task of reading Aristotle's account of slavery because of such divergence in the opinions of the expert scholars. If one takes a look onat Aristotle's account of slavery, he/she will notice that on one hand; his opinion about slavery is that the enslavement of someone can't be proved as acceptable merely based on weak arguments and on the other hand;…

German-Jews. The history of German-Jewish conflict is widely known but many might wonder why it started in the first place. Why would Germans show such extreme hatred for an ethnic group while the other did not seem to have threatened the latter? This question is certainly strange but answer is worth seeking which also helps us understand the concepts of conformity and social perception that affects global conflicts of such magnitude. The German-Jewish conflict is as much grounded in ugly realities of imperislaims and racism as any other. Arendt discovered two important innovations that were cultivated during the rise of modern imperialism i.e. "race as a principle of the body politic" and "bureaucracy as a principle of foreign domination." (Arendt, p. 185) While racism was seriously grounded in the fear of the white man, bureaucracy emerged as a result of over exaggerated and entirely false sense of protection that white…

" "We tried to call you." "Why didn't you return my call?" For some reason, not for lack of trying, I nearly always forget to charge my cell phone. It is not that I am anti-technology. I spend too much time on my computer and Internet. There is something psychologically taking place with me and that cell phone. And, it gets me into trouble. When I need to make a phone call when I am away from home, I cannot find a pay phone. They are quickly being removed or broken and unfixed. I can go for miles without finding one. Once I ran into a police station to see if they had a pay phone and even they had removed the one in the hallway for the public.
I am amputated unless I remember to charge my phone.

We are undergoing a communication shock, as when the printing press…

Power
Stone presents a model of power that identifies nonofficial and invisible types of power that are more important than visible electoral clout. Social capital, cultural capital, and economic capital are within the province of this invisible type of power. Specifically, Stone identifies several types of unofficial and invisible power including potential power, nondecision making, and anticipated reactions. Nondecision making is defined as "the capacity of elite groups to restrict the scope of community decision making," effectively "not making" decisions while effectively making decisions that are of great importance to the disenfranchised community and the individuals that comprise it. Stone also refers to contextual forces that impact the manifestation and usefulness of power, and conceptualizes "systemic power," which is defined as "the impact of the larger socioeconomic system on the predispositions of public officials," (979). Lukes presents his argument about power from the perspective of the oppressed. His research question…

This is true with a new generation of immigrants, as well. While many people see Hispanics as a cause of additional strain on our societal resources, many of these people are coming here for the same opportunities and advantages that our own ancestors came her for - a better life and to follow their dream. They work in industries that white Americans shun, such as agriculture, domestic labor, and hospitality, and they do it willingly, rather than grudgingly. These people hold on to their culture, but they also assimilate into American culture, just as Appiah notes. It would be impossible for them to move to the U.S. And live as they had in their own country. They adapt and conform, and hold on to the values and traditions that are the most important to them.

Thus, it would seem Appiah would oppose the Secure Fence Act as an act of…

Through policies of systematic discrimination and persecution of national minorities, Serb nationalists indirectly strengthened the radical wing of Albanian nationalist movements. The wing was represented by KSA (Kosovo Liberation Army). Most of the KSA leadership, Hedges writes, has formerly been imprisoned for separatist activities, and many were imprisoned by the Tito's communist government. The KSA's ideological base, Hedges writes, comes from a bizarre mixture of fascist and communist factions. Later in the 1990s, KSA began to receive financial and logistical support from Islamist radical groups in the Gulf States as well.
Hedges argues that KSA initially did not have the support of the majority. The radical group began to garner support after the policies pursued by Ibrahim Rugova have allegedly failed. The continuing mistreatment of Kosovo Albanians by the Serbian state and the inability of the international community to resolve the issue (for example, the European Union's recognition of Yugoslavia…

Even when some people decided enough was enough, the authority figure would tell the 'teacher' that the full responsibility was that of the experimenter, the 'teacher' would not be responsible and thus the shocks continued.
There is some basis to believe that people simply want to please others whom they believe to be superior to them. There is also the need to conform to certain group rules in order to feel that we are accepted. However, Zimbardo also claims that people don't need a group to influence us; he believes that there is a lot of influence that comes from a single source -- another person, which was the case in the Milgram experiment. There was not a group urging these 'teachers' on; there was one man in a laboratory coat whom the 'teachers' believed to be of some kind of powerful and intelligent person.

The shocking results from the…

Cold ar has brought renewed interest in civilizations as a source of identity and conflict. The Cold ar had allowed the world to be divided into two distinct camps: one directed by Communist philosophy and the other directed by democratic ideals. This division often resulted in considerable conflict but at least everyone occupied a definable position. All this changed, however, with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The collapse of Communism presented the possibility of a more peaceful world. Gone was the constant state of tension between the two ideologies. Democracy was now the prevailing political ideology and the door was open for the growing trend toward globalization to progress in earnest. This feeling of euphoria, however, was short-lived and new barriers soon emerged to construct new walls and barriers between the various worlds' nation-states.

In some cases actual walls have been constructed such as the proposed wall between the…

Memory refers to a mental process where information is encoded, stored, and retrieved for use (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968). The process of memory is not, contrary to what many believe, like a tape recorder that accurately records events. Instead, our recollection of events is pliable and subject to a number of influences (Loftus, 1979). For instance Buckley-Zistel (2006) discussed how the recollection of the past of horrific events such as the 1990's genocide in wanda is influenced by variables such as the roles of the people during the event or their current living situation. Connerton (2008) attempted to disentangle the notions that remembering is usually considered a virtue and forgetting is necessarily a failing of a person or people. He noted that forgetting is not necessarily a unitary phenomena and that forgetting might have a purpose. Even though wandans claim that remembering the genocide is important to avoiding reoccurrences in…

Memoirs are effective forms of writing to use for a number of reasons. As a 20th Century American, one can look upon memoirs as both a telling of a time past and a time present; memoirs show a piece of our history, and thus by extension a piece of one's own identity as an American.
A less effective form of writing is that of social science argumentation, which asks us to believe various results of tests, polls, and studies. While an effective means of persuasion, it is not quite as stirring as that of the 'simple' memoir, or story of our 'own' people.

This paper will examine two writings which have been studied this year- that of Margaret Meade's "Coming of Age in Samoa" as well as Whittaker Chambers's "Witness." These two memoirs show different sides of America, and Americans. Meade's "Coming of Age" speaks of a time when she…

Progressivism began as a social movement and evolved into a political movement, according to materials published by George Washington University (www.gwu.edu). Early in the social movement progressives were concerned about poverty, racism, greed and "class warfare," and they believed that those problems could be best addressed through education, a safer environment, and a workplace that was fair and safe (www.gwu.edu). Who were those considered to be progressives? The George Washington University narrative explains that they live "mostly in the cities," they had graduated from colleges and universities, and their beliefs included the belief that "…government could be a tool for change" -- and among the most vocal and visible social reformers / progressives were Jane Addams and journalists Jacob Riis and Ida Tarbel (www.gwu.edu).
Progressive journalists wrote investigative pieces that exposed "the evils of corporate greed" and they presented a balanced view of immigration and ethnicities, all the time "…urging…