Politics, Philosophy, Terror Politics, Philosophy, Terror ESSAYS ON THE THOUGHT OF HANNAH ARENDT Dana R. Villa P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S P R I N C E T O N , N E W J E R S E Y Copyright(cid:211) 1999byPrincetonUniversityPress PublishedbyPrincetonUniversityPress,41WilliamStreet, Princeton,NewJersey08540 IntheUnitedKingdom:PrincetonUniversityPress, Chichester,WestSussex AllRightsReserved LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData Villa,DanaRichard. Politics,philosophy,terror:essaysonthe thoughtofHannahArendt/byDanaR.Villa. p. cm. Includesbibliographicalreferences. ISBN0-691-00934-1(cloth:alk.paper).— ISBN0-691-00935-X(pbk.:alk.paper) 1.Arendt,Hannah—Contributionsinpoliticalsicence. I.Title JC251.A74V57 1999 320.5¢092—dc21 99-21302 ThisbookhasbeencomposedinJansonText Thepaperusedinthispublicationmeetstheminimumrequirements ofANSI/NISOZ39.48-1992(R1997)(PermanenceofPaper) http://pup.princeton.edu PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmerica 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (pbk.) TO SVETLANA Contents Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION 3 CHAPTER ONE Terror and RadicalEvil 11 CHAPTER TWO Conscience, the Banality of Evil, and the Idea of a RepresentativePerpetrator 39 CHAPTER THREE The Anxiety of Influence: On Arendt’s Relationship to Heidegger 61 CHAPTER FOUR Thinking and Judging 87 CHAPTER FIVE Democratizingthe Agon: Nietzsche, Arendt, and the Agonistic Tendency in Recent Political Theory 107 CHAPTER SIX Theatricality and the Public Realm 128 CHAPTER SEVEN The Philosopher versusthe Citizen: Arendt, Strauss, and Socrates 155 CHAPTER EIGHT Totalitarianism,Modernity, and the Tradition 180 CHAPTER NINE Arendt and Socrates 204 Abbreviations 219 Notes 221 Index 261 Acknowledgments I AM QUITE grateful to two institutions and the people who make them so friendly to scholars. First, I wrote many of these essays at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, which has been my summer “residence” for a number of years. I would like to thank Charles Maier, Abby Collins, Sandy Selesky, and Anna Popiel for enabling me to spend much fruitful time there. I would also like to thank two friends and colleagues at the Center, Seyla Benhabib and Danny Goldhagen, whose good humor and patience with my critical impulse is much appreciated. The other institution is theCenter for Human ValuesatPrince- ton University, where I wrote several chapters and put this book together while a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow in 1997–1998. I particularly want to thank George Kateb and Amy Gutmann, whose guidance of the Center made it the perfect place for col- legial but eminently serious intellectual exchange. I want to sin- gle out two of my fellow Fellows, John Kleinig and Bernard Reginster, from whom I learned much. The presence of Stephen Holmes, Jeremy Waldron, Josh Ober, Alexander Nehamas, John Cooper, and Harry Frankfurt at assorted Center events and politi- cal-philosophy colloquia was a delightful bonus. Several of the chapters in this book began life as conference presentations. Seyla Benhabib organized a major Arendt confer- ence at Harvard in 1996, from which I received much feedback and stimulation. A spring 1997 conference in Potsdam, organized by Gary Smith around Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, put me in touch with the work of many German and Israeli scholars, as did an international gathering on Arendt in Jerusalem organized by Steven Aschheim later that year. Finally,a conference on totalitari- anism at Yale organized by Michael Halberstam and Michael Hol- quist in early 1996 helped me gain some comparative perspective on the Nazi and Soviet cases.Mythanks to theorganizersandpar- ticipants atall these events. I would also like to thank Fred Dolan, Peter Digeser, Susan Shell, Jim Schmidt, Mark Lilla, Omer Bartov, Andy Rabinbach, Peter Euben, Tracy Strong, and Josh Dienstag for helpful critical ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS comment and insight, and Tycho Manson, Cathy Ciepiela, Tom Levin, Elizabeth Cousens, and Giovanna Borradori for equally helpful distraction. I am grateful to Ann Wald at Princeton Uni- versity Press for her sustained interest in my work. I am also in- debted to Michael Walzer, Joan Scott, Clifford Geertz, and the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study for providing the ideal place to bid this project adieu and embark on another. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Virginia Barrett Villa and Alfred Villa, once again. The book is dedicated to Svetlana Boym, who knows why. Chapter 7 initially appeared in Political Theory, vol. 26, no. 2 (1998): 147–72, copyright (cid:211) Sage Publications, reprinted by per- mission, Sage Publications. x