Tuesday, October 24, 2006

"Yet one of Young-Bruehl's chief strategies for showing Arendt's relevance today is to speculate on what her mentor would have thought about events since her death. As Young-Bruehl dissects The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), a veritable "field manual" for identifying an enemy, we get sentences such as, "She would, for example, have taken the measure of Slobodan Milosevic's government from his talk about 'Greater Serbia,' a phrase he obviously and purposefully modeled on Hitler's 'Greater Germany.'" And, "It seems to me that Hannah Arendt, had she been alive in 2001, would have gone straight to her writing table to protest that the World Trade Center was not Pearl Harbor and that 'war on terror' was a meaningless phrase." At the same time, Young-Bruehl acknowledges, "Neither I, her biographer, nor anyone else should presume to know what Hannah Arendt would have thought about any event, trend, idea, person, or group that she did not look upon with her own fiercely observant eyes and the eyes of her uniquely and inimitably brilliant mind.""