Samantha Rose Hill on Hannah Arendt: “You see the politics on her face”
In 2017, just one year after Donald Trump was elected president, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism sold out on Amazon as it improbably reached #4 on its bestseller list — seventy years after its original publication date. Yet in her new book on Arendt, Samantha Rose Hill warns us that the renowned philosopher would not have wanted us to look to her political writings as an analogy for what’s happening today. “She was not a feminist, a Marxist, a liberal, a conservative, Democrat or Republican,” Hill writes. Arendt would have been very uncomfortable being placed in any political group.
In Hannah Arendt, Hill explains that Arendt was more interested in the process of thought — of reconciling ourselves to the world so that we can properly deal with it — than in articulating transcendent truths (which, according to her, did not exist). Along the way, Hill illuminates a warmer, more personal side of Arendt than we’ve seen in op-eds and think pieces over the past few years. It’s an image that complicates the idea of Arendt as an unsentimental thinker, which I came to know during my time in academic philosophy. I asked Hill to share some of the images she looked to in crafting her portrait of Arendt, revealing a person who did not believe in progress and was not a utopian thinker, but wrote impassioned poetry and loved to shop.
—Regan Penaluna for Guernica
1. “She liked to wear Ferragamo shoes and had a manicure every two weeks.”
Guernica: You use Twitter to amplify an alternative vision of Arendt, and I love these photos you tweeted of her laughing and smiling. She has such joie de vivre here. Tell me more about why you shared these images.
My hope is to change the way people engage with Hannah Arendt’s life and work. In the public imagination, there’s this very serious view of Arendt in black and white, chain smoking, bent over a table, and talking about evil and Nazism. But in the archive, you start
