Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss

Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss PDF Author: Peter Graf Kielmansegg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521599368
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Examines influence of Arendt's and Strauss' background in pre-World War II Germany on their perception of American democracy.

Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss

Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss PDF Author: Peter Graf Kielmansegg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521599368
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Examines influence of Arendt's and Strauss' background in pre-World War II Germany on their perception of American democracy.

The Crisis of German Historicism

The Crisis of German Historicism PDF Author: Liisi Keedus
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316241092
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss - two major political thinkers of the twentieth century, both of German-Jewish background and forced into exile in America - were never friends or intellectual interlocutors. Yet they shared a radical critique of contemporary idioms of politically oriented discourses and a lifelong effort to modify reflective approaches to political experience. Liisi Keedus reveals how Arendt's and Strauss's thinking about political modernity was the product of a common intellectual formation in Weimar Germany, by examining the cross-disciplinary debates guiding their early work. Through a historical reconstruction of their shared interrogative horizons - comprising questions regarding the possibility of an ethically engaged political philosophy after two world wars, the political fate of Jewry, the implications of modern conceptions of freedom, and the relation between theoria and praxis - Keedus unravels striking similarities, as well as genuine antagonisms, between the two thinkers.

Thinking in Public

Thinking in Public PDF Author: Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812224345
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Long before we began to speak of "public intellectuals," the ideas of "the public" and "the intellectual" raised consternation among many European philosophers and political theorists. Thinking in Public examines the ambivalence these linked ideas provoked in the generation of European Jewish thinkers born around 1900. By comparing the lives and works of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Leo Strauss, who grew up in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair and studied with the philosopher—and sometime National Socialist—Martin Heidegger, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft offers a strikingly new perspective on the relationship between philosophers and politics. Rather than celebrate or condemn the figure of the intellectual, Wurgaft argues that the stories we tell about intellectuals and their publics are useful barometers of our political hopes and fears. What ideas about philosophy itself, and about the public's capacity for reasoned discussion, are contained in these stories? And what work do we think philosophers and other thinkers can and should accomplish in the world beyond the classroom? The differences between Arendt, Levinas, and Strauss were great, but Wurgaft shows that all three came to believe that the question of the social role of the philosopher was the question of their century. The figure of the intellectual was not an ideal to be emulated but rather a provocation inviting these three thinkers to ask whether truth and politics could ever be harmonized, whether philosophy was a fundamentally worldly or unworldly practice.

Thinking Founding Moments with Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin

Thinking Founding Moments with Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin PDF Author: Eno Trimçev
Publisher: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft
ISBN: 9783848735501
Category : Political science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Contemporary political theory has lost sight of founding moments by recasting the problem as illustrative of the more general creativity of politics. This book sets out to re-find founding moments by way of a dialogue between Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. Bound by its beginning in the practical experience of citizens and its end in the theoretical articulation of political life, the dialogue relocates founding moments as a problem of understanding; namely, a founding moment is the result of the effort made to understand it. Since understanding proceeds dialectically, the account of founding moments that are understood must be something other than a faithful retelling of historical events. This book explores both how and why a founding moment that can be understood displaces the historical event it relates to and also examines the relationship that the founding moment retains to that historical event.

Politics, Philosophy, Terror

Politics, Philosophy, Terror PDF Author: Dana Villa
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400823161
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Hannah Arendt's rich and varied political thought is more influential today than ever before, due in part to the collapse of communism and the need for ideas that move beyond the old ideologies of the Cold War. As Dana Villa shows, however, Arendt's thought is often poorly understood, both because of its complexity and because her fame has made it easy for critics to write about what she is reputed to have said rather than what she actually wrote. Villa sets out to change that here, explaining clearly, carefully, and forcefully Arendt's major contributions to our understanding of politics, modernity, and the nature of political evil in our century. Villa begins by focusing on some of the most controversial aspects of Arendt's political thought. He shows that Arendt's famous idea of the banality of evil--inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann--does not, as some have maintained, lessen the guilt of war criminals by suggesting that they are mere cogs in a bureaucratic machine. He examines what she meant when she wrote that terror was the essence of totalitarianism, explaining that she believed Nazi and Soviet terror served above all to reinforce the totalitarian idea that humans are expendable units, subordinate to the all-determining laws of Nature or History. Villa clarifies the personal and philosophical relationship between Arendt and Heidegger, showing how her work drew on his thought while providing a firm repudiation of Heidegger's political idiocy under the Nazis. Less controversially, but as importantly, Villa also engages with Arendt's ideas about the relationship between political thought and political action. He explores her views about the roles of theatricality, philosophical reflection, and public-spiritedness in political life. And he explores what relationship, if any, Arendt saw between totalitarianism and the "great tradition" of Western political thought. Throughout, Villa shows how Arendt's ideas illuminate contemporary debates about the nature of modernity and democracy and how they deepen our understanding of philosophers ranging from Socrates and Plato to Habermas and Leo Strauss. Direct, lucid, and powerfully argued, this is a much-needed analysis of the central ideas of one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.

Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss PDF Author: Robert Howse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107074991
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
"Leo Strauss is known to many people as a thinker of the right, who inspired hawkish views on national security and perhaps even advocated war without limits. Moving beyond gossip and innuendo about Strauss's followers and the Bush administration, this book provides the first comprehensive analysis of Strauss's writings on political violence, considering also what he taught in the classroom on this subject. In stark contrast to popular perception, Strauss emerges as a man of peace, favorably disposed to international law and skeptical of imperialism - a critic of radical ideologies (right and left) who warns of the dangers to free thought and civil society when philosophers and intellectuals ally themselves with movements that advocate violence. Robert Howse provides new readings of Strauss's confrontation with fascist/Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, his debate with Alexandre Kojáeve about philosophy and tyranny, and his works on Machiavelli and Thucydides and examines Strauss's lectures on Kant's Perpetual Peace and Grotius's Rights of War and Peace"--

The Legacy of Leo Strauss

The Legacy of Leo Strauss PDF Author: Tony Burns
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1845406613
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Leo Strauss was a political philosopher who died in 1973 but came to came to prominent attention in the United States and also Britain around the beginning of the War in Iraq. Charges began emerging that architects of the war such as Paul Wolfowitz and large numbers of staff in the US State and Defense Departments had studied with, or been influenced by, the academic work of Strauss and his followers. A vague, but powerful, idea was generated in the popular press that a group known as the Straussians had been instrumental in the long-range strategic planning of American foreign policy, both to advance American interests and to encourage democratic revolutions outside the West. This volume of essays opens up the topic of Leo Strauss and the Straussians to those outside the relatively narrow circles who have been concerned with him and his followers up to now.

Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics

Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics PDF Author: Nasser Behnegar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226821161
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Can politics be studied scientifically, and if so, how? Assuming it is impossible to justify values by human reason alone, social science has come to consider an unreflective relativism the only viable basis, not only for its own operations, but for liberal societies more generally. Although the experience of the sixties has made social scientists more sensitive to the importance of values, it has not led to a fundamental reexamination of value relativism, which remains the basis of contemporary social science. Almost three decades after Leo Strauss's death, Nasser Behnegar offers the first sustained exposition of what Strauss was best known for: his radical critique of contemporary social science, and particularly of political science. Behnegar's impressive book argues that Strauss was not against the scientific study of politics, but he did reject the idea that it could be built upon political science's unexamined assumption of the distinction between facts and values. Max Weber was, for Strauss, the most profound exponent of values relativism in social science, and Behnegar's explication artfully illuminates Strauss's critique of Weber's belief in the ultimate insolubility of all value conflicts. Strauss's polemic against contemporary political science was meant to make clear the contradiction between its claim of value-free premises and its commitment to democratic principles. As Behnegar ultimately shows, values—the ethical component lacking in a contemporary social science—are essential to Strauss's project of constructing a genuinely scientific study of politics.

Heidegger's Jewish Followers

Heidegger's Jewish Followers PDF Author: Samuel Fleischacker
Publisher: Duquesne
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
"Given Heidegger's eventual alliance with Nazism, these essays examine the questions of how Heidegger's thought affected his most prominent Jewish students (Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Emmanuel Levinas) and how they responded to this influence in the development of their own philosophies" -- Provided by publisher.

The Public Realm and the Public Self

The Public Realm and the Public Self PDF Author: Shiraz Dossa
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 088920831X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
From the time she set the intellectual world on fire with her reflections on Eichmann (1963), Hannah Arendt has been seen, essentially, as a literary commentator who had interesting things to say about political and cultural matters. In this critical study, Shiraz Dossa argues that Arendt is a political theorist in the sense in which Aristotle is a theorist, and that the key to her political theory lies in the twin notions of the “public realm” and the “public self”. In this work, the author explains how Arendt’s unconventional and controversial views make sense on the terrain of her political theory. He shows that her judgement on thinkers, actors, and events as diverse as Plato, Marx, Machiavelli, Freud, Conrad, Hobbes, Hitler, the Holocaust, the French Revolution, and European colonialism flow directly from her political theory. Tracing the origins of this theory to Homer and Periclean Athens, Dossa underlines Arendt’s unique contribution to reinventing the idea and the ideal of citizenship, reminding us that the public realm is the locus of friendship, community, identity, and in a certain sense, humanity. Arendt believes that no one who prefets his or her private interest to public affairs in the old sense can claim to be fully human or truly excellent.