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[upbeat music]
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Ladies and gentlemen, uh,
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could I please have your attention? Can you dig it? [cheering]
Jonah Goldberg
Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media. It is Tuesday morning, March 31st. I came downstairs to prep for this podcast. It was in the middle of Pete Hegseth or Chesty McBroseph giving a press conference about things going on in, in Iran, and things are heating up. Trump has announced that he’s gonna pull… he may pull out of Iran without securing the Strait of Hormuz. So of course, I thought this was the perfect moment to do an episode on who was Hannah Arendt. So in that vein, we have today as our guest,
Jonah Goldberg
the Hannah Arendt guy.
Roger Berkowitz
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
Roger Berkow- Roger Berkowitz is the founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, and a professor of politics, philosophy, and human rights at Bard College. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, and he has a new book coming out this October, for which we may bring him back to discuss, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World. Roger Berkowitz, uh, welcome to The Remnant.
Roger Berkowitz
Jonah, it’s a real pleasure to be here.
Jonah Goldberg
And so, uh, we will not do the standard question of what’s your book about because it’s not out yet, and instead we’ll do the question for which this was built. Can you, uh, just give us, uh, sort of Brian Lamb C-SPAN style, who was Hannah Arendt?
Roger Berkowitz
It’s actually an interesting question because, you know, sometimes you want to study Aristotle, and you say, “Aristotle was born, he died, now let’s read the book.” Hannah Arendt’s life mattered. She was, uh, born in 1906, in, in, in Hanover, in Germany, as a Jew. Both her parents were Jews. Neither of them were observant. Her father died when she was six, which I think is a not irrelevant factor because she was deeply influenced by a number of very strong male figures in her life. But what she really was, uh, was a thinker. Um, she’s someone who started reading Plato and Aristotle and the Greek in high school. She worked with Martin Heidegger. She worked with Karl Jaspers. But then she was a- arrested doing some work for the Zionist organizations in Germany, in Berlin, in, in 1933. She was not a Zionist. She actually had a lot of problems with Zionism, but she realized someone had to resist, and the Zionists were the ones resisting. She, uh, was imprisoned for eight days. Afterwards, the prison guard, who she charmed and said… had an open face, and she tried to become friends with him, he let her out, and she escaped Germany. She was without a passport, without citizenship, lived stateless for 18 years in France, worked bringing Jews from Germany out to Palestine at the time, uh, and worked for other Jewish organizations. Finally was put into a, a, a concentration camp in Gurs in, in France. Walked out of that, you know, during some chaos, and then, uh, made it to Portugal and came to the United States, where she started to work, uh, for publications, press, started writing for German Jewish newspapers, called for Jewish armies to form to fight against the Nazis, and then wrote this book that she’d been working on for about 10 years called The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is one of those books that is on the list of the 100 great books of the 20th century, and it is the great book, uh, about totalitarianism. Uh, what I think people often forget is it’s about both totalitarianisms. It’s about both Nazism and Bolshevism. And what it argues is that the world had broken, and we had these lonely, mass, atomized individuals who were without meaning in their lives. And at that kind of point, people are super susceptible to movements, mass movements, coherent fictions, and the rise of totalitarianism. She wrote this book. It became widely, uh, read and, and acknowledged, and, and she became really
Roger Berkowitz
one of the most important, if not the most important political thinker of the 20th century. I mean, it’s, it’s hard to believe right now, but she is the most read political thinker, philosopher of the 20th century. There’s not even close. I mean, if you look at the number of books she has that are taught in philosophy departments, politics departments, religion departments, economics departments, I mean, her books sell better than any other political thinker of the 20th century. In the last 15 or 20 years, her popularity has skyrocketed, largely for a couple reasons. One is she wrote a lot about truth and politics, and, uh, the, the sort of crisis of truth, uh, has become, uh, one of the crises of our time, and, and she’s been stre- she’s been cited and, and discussed wildly on that, often incorrectly, but that’s okay. And then also around questions of tyranny and totalitarianism around the world and, and the failure of liberalism. I should note she also wrote a, another very famous book called Eichmann in Jerusalem, uh, based on the trial of the Nazi sort of organizer of the logistics around the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann. She went to the trial in, in, in Jerusalem, covered it for The New Yorker, wrote a, a, a five-part series for The New Yorker, and then turned it into a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem. She’s an extraordinary woman who’s a free thinker. She’s not a liberal. She’s not a conservative. She said she belongs to no people. She didn’t belong to the German people. She didn’t belong to the American people. You know, the people she belongs to are her friends. And she’s loved by liberals. She’s loved by conservatives.
Roger Berkowitz
Everybody claims her. A- and that’s what’s sort of amazing about her. She’s got this… I don’t think that’s because she doesn’t say things that are powerful or meaningful. I think it’s that she says things that are so powerful and meaningful that everyone wants them, wants her on their side. And, and she’s become, you know, I think one of the leading, if not the leading, political thinker of our time.
Jonah Goldberg
There’s a lot in there that’s very useful because it gives me a corridor with lots of doors to go through. I’ll saySo one of the things you said, she’s a political thinker, right? And as you kn- you know better than I do, there is a debate about just simply what the label is, right? There are some detractors who will say she’s a mere journalist. As a mere journalist, I take no great offense at that. I think the safest harbor is probably public intellectual, but then there’s political theorists, there’s not… There’s political scientists, there’s philosophers. She rejected a lot of these labels. She rejected the philosopher charge, I believe. In some ways, I think one of the reasons why she’s so,
Jonah Goldberg
uh, ubiquitous in the intellectual realm is she’s a lot like Orwell. First of all, she’s a great writer when she wants to be, and so was Orwell, obviously. And Orwell had this ability to be simultaneously highbrow but contemptuous of overintellectualization that gave you a certain kind of… I- it invited you in. And there’s something similar, it seems to me, about Arendt, that at minimum, she is wildly quotable, and that is always helpful, and something I- I’m amazed at how many academics do not want to be quotable. What do you think is the label that best describes her?
Roger Berkowitz
That’s a great question, and there’s a lot in it. Let me just say something. First of all, I, I love that you think she’s a great writer. I do, too. But let me also say
Roger Berkowitz
she’s often writing in three or four languages at once in her head, and some of her sentences can be excruciating.
Jonah Goldberg
That’s why I said when she wants to. [laughs]
Roger Berkowitz
When she wants… You actually… I, I heard that, and I got… You got that absolutely right. She is eminently quotable. And, and some of her quotes are all over the internet. I will just, as a word of caution, what I find astounding is that she’s so eminently quotable, and so many of the quotes floating around attributed to her on the internet are fake. Most of them.
Jonah Goldberg
Oh, sure.
Roger Berkowitz
And, and, and, and fake-
Roger Berkowitz
… but also, they, they change a word or two here or there, and people are like, “Oh, it doesn’t matter.” There was a documentary called The Vita Activa done by, uh, a, an Israeli, uh, director a couple years ago that I was an advisor on. And when it came out, there were 30 quotes that were put in block letters on the screen with a Canadian actress reading them. Every single one of them had been changed.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Roger Berkowitz
And I called up the director and said, “It’s a documentary. You can’t do this.” And she said, “Oh, well, I just changed them to make them a little easier to understand.” I was like, “First of all, you can’t do that. It’s a documentary.”
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. Yeah.
Roger Berkowitz
“She’s a public figure. Secondly, you didn’t just change…” She, she took a quote from a letter in 1930 and a quote from a book in 1960 and put them together. And I was like-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Roger Berkowitz
… “You can’t do this.” I mean, it just doesn’t work that way. I’m just amazed, given how quotable she is, how misquote- quoted she is. Um, but back to your, your question about what she is. I call her a political thinker. She’s not a philosopher. She, uh, studied with a philosopher, two philosophers, or, or Martin Heidegger and others, but also, um, an existential psychologist, Karl Jaspers. But she became incredibly suspicious of philosophy as a discipline. She thought it was too c- too conceptual, too caught up in, in, in trying to come up with some conceptual truth. Heidegger obviously was not in many ways, but even Heidegger, as she comes to understand it in her engagement with Heidegger through her life, was too caught up with the individual philosopher trying to understand the truth of being, the truth in the world. And for her, that was the great mistake of philosophy because we are not individuals trying to understand truth. We live in a community. We’re, we’re political beings. And, and that was, in the end, um, her critique of philosophy. And, and she thinks it starts with Plato, thinking that one philosopher gets out of the cave and sees the truth of the ideas and then brings them in, imposes them on everyone else. She goes, “That was the great mistake of philosophy,” A, to think that there’s a single philosopher, and B, to think that you could then take that single thought and impose it on everyone else, and that’s the root of technocratic tyranny that, that she is worried about in our age. So she’s not a philosopher. Some people would say political theorist. I mean, she… You know, again, this is a quibble on my part, but theoria is the Greek for, comes out of Theos or God. It’s God’s eye. She doesn’t like that singularity of idea. And so I avoid that word. I mean, I- I’m not gonna, you know, I’m not gonna go crazy if someone uses it. She’s really critical of the idea of, of any kind of unitary truth. And so politics brings out the polis, it brings out the plurality that for her is important, because she believes we live in a plural world. And thinker, well, for her, her… Much of her work is about thinking and the power of thinking, and what thinking ultimately is for her is the attempt to see the world from the perspective o- of other people. To think is to bring as many different perspectives from people all over the world in different situations into your head
Roger Berkowitz
and try and imagine what they would say about your thoughts and have a conversation with yourself until you come up with your new judgment about what you think is true. And so political thinking is to me the way I express that she is a political thinker and she’s a plural thinker.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, it’s so… We should back up. It’s, it’s, it’s something of an Aristot- Aristotelian view, right? Is that man is a political animal, and that, that the, the highest, best life is in, as you put it, in conversation with others. It’s funny, I get…
Jonah Goldberg
When I was preparing for this, I had not appreciated that aspect of her thinking. I associate that sort of observation with the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who was something of a contemporary. And so it, it’s, it’s very interesting because they definitely were very different people, but they sort of come to the same place. And so… A- and it’s also… What’s also interesting is I had not really focused on this Plato aspect of it, um, until fairly re- until fairly recently, and it tracks almost perfectly a line of argument I’ve been making forever about the problem with 20th century American pragmatism and John Dewey and Keynes versus the sort of more Hayekian point of view. The Hayekian point of view is that knowledge is dispersed-No one person can know everything. The whole tyranny of experts and a God’s eye view makes no sense, and the Dewian kind of thing is, which you can take back to Descartes. We can go, you know, y- i- i- it’s a long strain of sort of rationalism in politics which says, “No, you can have individual experts who have a full, complete grasp of all of the data and the details.” And I had just never taken it back to the Plato thing, which I like, and it kind of feels to me that the people who believe in conversation, th- the old myth of the elephant and the blind men, you know, where one guy feels the trunk and thinks it’s a snake, and everyone feels the leg and thinks it’s a tree, whatever. It’s like that’s what politics is, is all the blind men then talking to each other and figuring out their best guess as to what the elephant is.
Roger Berkowitz
Absolutely. Uh, one of my favorite lines of Arendt, um, you know, which, which really reflects this idea of talking that you’re bringing up is that we become more just and more pious by thinking and talking about justice and piety. Her view is, look, all unitary religious traditional authorities have broken, right? And this is, I mean… I think this is, it’s one of the most important things to orient ourselves in a world but also to orient ourselves in reading Hannah Arendt. This is a woman
Roger Berkowitz
who was arrested in ’33, was in a concentration camp, lived through the Holocaust, right, had her world destroyed.
Jonah Goldberg
How many people did she lose in her extended family? Do we know?
Roger Berkowitz
Well, I mean, her mother, her, her mother and her both escaped, and that was her family.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Roger Berkowitz
Her stepsisters escaped to Israel, so in her immediate family, actually, she didn’t lose so many. But obviously, she lost other people and probably even more profoundly difficult for her was how many of her intellectual friends collaborated with the Nazis.
Jonah Goldberg
Right. We’re gonna get to some of that. But yeah, I, I didn’t mean to derail you. You were about to make a different point. I apologize.
Roger Berkowitz
No, but the, the point is that for her, the Western world of tradition and authority and religion is broken, and it’s never coming back. She thinks it was already breaking. It was already in, you know, whatever, but the Holocaust and Bolshevism
Roger Berkowitz
just shattered the pil- what she calls the pillars of tradition. And I think this is where, you know, she differs from some conservative, uh, thinkers, right? She just doesn’t think that world is coming back, and she has no nostalgia for it. But she also, and this is where she doesn’t get along so well with the, with the liberals, right? Is she doesn’t believe that the rational attempt to build a new world through reason can ever work.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Roger Berkowitz
And, and she’s, um, very suspicious of, of, of any attempt to come up with a science of politics from, from Marx or, or, or anyone else, right? The idea that you can sort of scientifically find a truth that’s going to, to hold us together, uh, is for her another form of, of tyranny. What she really is seeking in her work
Roger Berkowitz
is a new form of transcendence that will replace the old transcendence of religion or tradition. And she, she goes back to the basics and says, “Okay, what is transcendence?” Transcendence is
Roger Berkowitz
stepping out over into the world, right? Transcendere, to step out over. Stepping over myself into the world. And she says, “So what we need to do is come up with a non-religious, non-universal, right, non-rational idea of transcendence.” And she says, “The way we build a public world is we talk to each other. We go out in the world, and we build things. We build buildings, and that we all share.” I say there’s a building. You say there’s a building. Suddenly, we have a shared world. She has this great exam metaphor that she uses. She says, “If you have a table, and you have eight people sitting around it, right, and we’re talking, we’re connected as a community by that table. But if you remove the table, we’re just individuals talking into the air.” And so the public world is like the table, and politics for her is a non-universal transform of transcendence. It’s how we, um, build a common world together.
Roger Berkowitz
Now, that means you have to build things that people share, and that means you have to sometimes take risks, and that’s why, for her, courage is the first virtue of politics, because the only people who are gonna build things, whether it’s, you know, the Parthenon or the White House, that people are gonna recognize as common are people who take risks and risk their lives in order to build something for a vision. And so, um, you know, what I love about Arendt, and you’re right, it is, there’s a lot of Arist- Aristotle here. There’s virtue. There’s, there’s the idea that for Aristotle, friendship is the bond of the polis, right?
Roger Berkowitz
We have to talk to each other, and we have to talk to each other over and against our disagreements. You may think it’s a leg and a, a tree, the leg, and I think it’s a snake of the elephant. But we have to figure out and talk to each other and say, “Okay, here’s what we agree. We both think it’s something, and, and here’s what we disagree,” and, and build a m- build a common world on a much low and common deni- denominator than most other people want. And that’s her, her view of politics. She calls it an earthly transcendence because it’s earthly. It’s, it’s based on chance and based on plurality, and there’s no common world.
Roger Berkowitz
And, and there’s no given common world. We have to create it from above. And, and so she’s very much an imminent thinker in that way. You know, the book you, you kindly mentioned, which is about, um, friendship, is about how we’ve made an effort in the last two hundred years in this country and around the Western world to build a common world based on truth, on reason, and she thinks that’s a mistake. She thinks there is no common world ever to be created out of truth because we’re fundamentally different plural people. We don’t share the same truths.
Roger Berkowitz
She takes that with utter seriousness, and there is no truth in politics. That’s one of her most important insights. So the only way to build a common world, absent God and absent tradition-Is through friendship, being friends with people you disagree with, and that’s her idea of, of politics.
Jonah Goldberg
I, I wanna get to a bunch of other stuff, but just to clarify on this point so I understand it better,
Jonah Goldberg
she’s not an advocate of what some- uh, they used to call polylogos, right? Which is this idea that different people literally… A lot of racists, eugenicist types get into this stuff, right? That people ju- There’s some people just reason differently, have different… They think, literally think differently, either because they’re dumber or they just see the world differently. Hers is not a biological point in any way, right? It is more a contextual, different, different strokes for different folks, everyone’s got a… More like life is Rashomon kind of thing. Is that sort of more what it is?
Roger Berkowitz
Yeah. I mean, I think that’s right. I mean, she’s certainly not a biological thinker in any shape or form. In fact, she, she’s wildly opposed to, to it. But I know you had Harvey Mansfield on recently, and, and, you know, he, he, he still has this idea that we have to talk about human nature, right? Arendt thinks there’s no human nature. She talks about what she calls the human condition, so she has a famous book called The Human Condition. And she says, you know, the difference is that human nature is like a biological thing, that there’s actually something, you know, to who we are. She says if, if, if some of us were to s- shoot ourselves into space on a spaceship, and we had generations of people born into a spaceship in which everything around us was artificial, we would be fundamentally different people.
Roger Berkowitz
And it’s not because we’re biologically different, it’s because we, uh, live in a different world and we would change who we are. And she says ancient Greeks are fundamentally different from modern Americans, who are fundamentally different from, you know, people who grow up in, in, in, in, in the Brazilian rainforest. It’s not biological, it’s that we live in different worlds. And, a- and, and she says, look, even in the United States, right, people who live in, you know, maybe Alabama and people who live in New York City, they’re both human beings, but they live under a different condition, a different worldly condition, and they’re gonna have fundamentally different worldviews.
Roger Berkowitz
And but that doesn’t mean they can’t be friends. That doesn’t mean that they can’t talk to each other and still share a world. It just mean maybe a world with lower common denominators than s- than the people in New York want or the people in Alabama want. And what we have to do… And, and, and really that was her vision of America. America was a federalist country that allowed people with… who are Jews, who are Blacks, who are whites, who are, you know, Russians, who are whatever, to each live their own way in a different wa- in a different world, and yet still be part of this crazy project called the United States of America. And that’s why she thought it was so unique and so different. Um, she thinks it failed in certain ways. But that was her vision.
Jonah Goldberg
I just wanna… ’cause I will get grief from people if I don’t lay down a marker. I disagree with that. [laughs] And just insofar as I think there is something called human nature. I think sort of the essence, the, the, one of the… perhaps the key conservative insight is that, is the idea that human nature has no history. We can call me an Isaiah Berlin
Jonah Goldberg
liberal or a Kantian, you know, enlightenment guy or whatever, but I think there is a crooked timber of humanity. Doesn’t mean all people are, have the, are the same, but… And I also don’t think that human nature is necessarily a fully biological concept. Like, it’s also a theological concept in terms of man’s fallenness in the Christian tradition. And I don’t want to be unfair to Arendt, that’s not why I’m here today, but when I hear some of your descriptions of it, it feels a little too blank slate-y and Skinner-ian for my tastes. I, I take the point that, uh, if you want to root things in the human condition instead of the, in- instead of human nature, that’s fine. But I see Arendt as a fundamentally anti-utopian figure, and I find the idea that in most thinkers when they say there is no such thing as human nature,
Jonah Goldberg
that’s a utopian project.
Roger Berkowitz
Oh.
Jonah Goldberg
Because if, if, if the individual is perfectible, then society is perfectible and vice versa, and that’s the path towards new Soviet man and whatnot. And I know that’s not what she’s in favor of.
Roger Berkowitz
No. She, she’s certainly not a utopian, and she certainly doesn’t think humans… She, she doesn’t believe in progress.
Jonah Goldberg
See, I also believe in some definition of progress, but anyway, I-
Roger Berkowitz
Yeah
Jonah Goldberg
… we’re not, I’m not here to debate your, Arendt. I’m just-
Roger Berkowitz
Yeah
Jonah Goldberg
… I, I, I get grief from people when I let certain ideas go flying by without… So but anyway, g- please go on. Respond.
Roger Berkowitz
I’m sorry. We can use words like human nature and human condition, and there’s always the question of to what extent we’re talking with each other or past each other. She thinks that humans are both rational and sensible in a Kantian sense, right? She thinks that humans have the capacity to, to reason. Uh, she, you know, there are things of human nature I think that, that she would accept. When she says there’s human- no human nature, she doesn’t mean that… She doesn’t believe that we’re fundamentally Christian or fundamentally Muslim or fundamentally Jewish.
Jonah Goldberg
Sure, that’s fine. Yeah, yeah.
Roger Berkowitz
And what she means is that what makes us fundamentally human, right, is that, uh, we are born into a world somewhat out of our control, um, that we have the capacity to try and influence and change and build a world in, and the world that we build will then influence us. That’s what she means by the human condition. We become conditioned beings. She doesn’t think it will perfect us. She’s not, she’s not a, she’s not a perfectionist, right? She doesn’t think we’re gonna build a world where, you know, suddenly everyone will grow up perfect or something like that. In fact, those kind of projects terrify her. She, Skin- Skinner would, you know, is [laughs] would terrify her and, and certainly Marx terrified her for those reasons. I, you know, I, I’m not sure what aspect
Roger Berkowitz
of human nature y- you are valuing that you think she doesn’t have.
Jonah Goldberg
Well, uh, just, I, I, you know, that’s my point, is that when I hear this idea that there’s no such thing as human nature,
Jonah Goldberg
m- I start, my spider sense goes off, right? ‘Cause I’m used to arguments with-
Roger Berkowitz
She, she, you have to remember, she’s, she’s writing post-Nazism, right? She’s-
Jonah Goldberg
Sure
Roger Berkowitz
… she’s, she’s saying that there’s no biology. She’s saying if you were, if, if the human beings were moved to the moon, they would create a different worldAnd we would be different because we would grow up in that world and, and, and we would change. I mean, obviously we would still be humans, and there would be aspects of it that would be the same, but, but we would be different.
Jonah Goldberg
So to- e- th- this is a really ironic point to, to get snagged on because I’ve been quoting Hannah Arendt,
Jonah Goldberg
possibly apocryphally, given your stuff about how she’s misquoted or [laughs] quotes are changed, um, for a very long time. ‘Cause my gateway drug to Arendt was actually Irving Kristol, who was a big influence on me when I was a, a, a youngin’. And he loved Hannah Arendt and would quote her all the time, and one of the things… I got this quote from him, and I’m, I was so scared of finding out he got it wrong or misquoted that I, I’ve never really tracked it down, so I’m, I, I say this with great trepidation that you’re gonna, you’re gonna dispel one of my favorite lines, but I use it on here all the time. Hannah Arendt, according to Irving, used to say, “Western civilization is invaded by barbarians every generation. We call them children.”
Jonah Goldberg
And this insight is sort of the idea, whether it’s an accurate quote or not, is central to my own view. ‘Cause I kind of disagree with your characterization. If you put humans,
Jonah Goldberg
strip them of their consciousness, right, their memories, their, their technic- technical expertise, and you put them on an island, sort of like in Lord of the Flies-
Roger Berkowitz
Mm-hmm
Jonah Goldberg
… we revert to the factory preset of human nature, as happens in almost every apocalyptic scenario in fiction. Um, we become semi-hairless apes forging and fighting for food, and we turn into tribes and bands of tribes. That is how humans lived in their evolutionary environment for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years. And I think of Western civilization or liberalism or whatever labels we wanna put on it as a project that pulls us out of our nature,
Jonah Goldberg
and that democracy, human rights, all of these things, this is the point of my last book, are fundamentally unnatural.
Roger Berkowitz
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
Because if they were natural, they would have appeared in the re- evolutionary record a lot earlier. And instead, you only get the a- you know, it’s only with the agricultural revolution that you get city-states. That’s a very recent time. Our wiring is for, is, is for a certain amount of
Jonah Goldberg
tribal coalition building, that kind of thing, and
Jonah Goldberg
the project of civilization is to build on the accumulated hard-learned lessons of previous generations. And that’s why the every generation is invaded by barbarians thing speaks to me because I think if… This sort of confirms Hana- uh, Arendt’s point, is like, the joke I always tell is if you took a kid from New Rochelle and sent them back to o- to tenth century England or tenth century Scandinavia to be raised by Vikings, the kid would grow up to rape and pillage the English countryside. If you took a Viking baby and you put him in a time machine that sent him to New Rochelle, he’d grow up to be an orthodontist, right? The, the things that create our real-life personalities are… This is where I agree with the condition point, and maybe that’s her point. I just think there is some base-level human nature that makes the human condition point true, insofar as we are built by the institutions that we are born into, starting with the family and then moving in concentric circles out of that to community, church, faith, politics, all the rest. But there is a base nat- human nature that you cannot get rid of. You can only try to improve it or build upon it.
Roger Berkowitz
Yeah, I mean, I don’t think, I don’t think she would disagree with that. I mean, she… I think what you said about the, the Viking kid and the kid from New Rochelle is exactly what she meant by the human condition.
Roger Berkowitz
Okay. I’m reassured. [laughs]
Roger Berkowitz
And I, and I, and I, and I do, and I, and I think one of her problems with Marxism is that there’s an attempt to remake the human condition, the human nature-
Jonah Goldberg
Right
Roger Berkowitz
… uh, which is what she thinks is, is problematic. Uh, so I think there, you know, I mean, she does think we are, you know, these complicated bundles of instincts and reason, right? Kant’s, you know, Kant’s view that, you know, that most sound human beings hate reason because it takes us away from happiness and our instincts, I think she would share as well. So yeah, I, I’m, I’m, I’m okay with that. As for your Irving Kristol quote, the spirit is right. I, I don’t know the quote. In her essay, uh, The Crisis in Education, which is probably what he’s taking it from, which is a brilliant essay, uh, what she says is that education, uh, has two opposing ideas. On the one hand, it has to take children
Roger Berkowitz
and form them, condition them
Roger Berkowitz
to be people in our world, right? And in that sense, it’s conservative. It has to teach the history and the authority and the tradition of our world and tells children that they’re part of it. On the other hand, education is radical, and revo- what she calls it, not radical, I’m sorry, revolutionary, insofar as the children break into our world, and they are new. And part of our world is that our world changes, and it is, uh, changed by new people who come into it. And children are like these new… She calls them newcomers. Mr. Kristol calls them barbarians. I actually don’t think it’s a bad, you know, reading of Arendt. I think it’s totally fair. It’s, it, I don’t think she uses the word barbarian. She calls them newcomers. And, and as newcomers, they’re going to change the world, and we as teachers have to give them the freedom to change the world without imposing our world fully on them because our world includes the possibility of being changed.
Jonah Goldberg
I know already that I’m, I’m just grossly pandering to the public by doing an episode on Hannah Arendt in the first place, but-
Jonah Goldberg
… I, I, I have to double down. We cannot yada yada overHer relationship with, with Martin Heidegger, and then we got to get to Eichmann in Jerusalem and a couple other things. So what was her relationship with Heidegger? How did it play out? How did it shape her going forward? What did it do to her reputation? Didn’t she also have… She had correspondences with Leo Strauss at some point, um, towards the-
Roger Berkowitz
Well, they were students together in Heidegger’s seminars, and-
Jonah Goldberg
That’s right. Okay. I knew there was a relationship there. So why, why don’t you tell the story sort of to the, to the lay… Someone on the… You sit down at a cocktail party and someone say, “What was the deal with Heidegger and, and Hannah Arendt?” What’s, what’s the answer to that question?
Roger Berkowitz
So, uh, Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, grew up in Königsberg, uh, where Kant had lived. And, uh, she went to study with Heidegger in Marburg originally because she knew Heidegger was there. Heidegger in the 1920s in Germany had gained a reputation. This was before Being and Time had even been published, he was still working on it, that, as she said, the, the, “The news rang out across Germany that a new king of thinking had emerged in Marburg, and his name was Martin Heidegger.” And so she went to Hei- to Marburg to study with him. And, uh, she sat at one point in his seminar on Plato’s Symposium. Uh, Statesman, I’m sorry. He called her to his office one day,
Roger Berkowitz
and, uh, he dropped down on his knees and confessed his love for her or infatuation to her.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Roger Berkowitz
And they started an affair.
Jonah Goldberg
He was married. She was not yet, right?
Roger Berkowitz
He was married. She was not. His wife had also had affairs. I’m not sure he knew that or not. But, uh, yes, she was young. She was 21, uh, or so.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Roger Berkowitz
The affair, affair lasted, uh, a, a year or two, at which point, um, she, uh, needed to write what’s called in German a Habilitation, which is like a second dissertation, and he didn’t feel he could advise her on it because of their relationship. And so he sent her to Heidelberg to work with Karl Jaspers, who was at that point one of his closest friends and a Jew. And Hei- and Arendt worked and, and, and was writing her Habilitation, uh, with, with Karl Jaspers. She and Heidegger kept their relationship for a little bit, but it, it fizzled out, but they were still close. But as the, uh, ’20s went into the late ’20s and early ’30s, Heidegger came to, um, believe that the Nazi Party could help revitalize education in Germany. Uh, he was a radical or a revolutionary. He believed that liberalism and German liberalism had failed, and that the way to resurrect it was going back to the Greeks and teaching a kind of classic Greek, uh, education, which would elevate the Germans to be the great, you know, inheritors of this Greek tradition. Uh, he joined the Nazi Party. He was made the rector of Freiburg. His mentor had been a man named Edmund Husserl, who was a, a great phenomenologist. Heidegger also was. And Husserl was becoming emeritus, which means he was retiring, and the Nazis decided to fire him and take away his privileges, and Heidegger signed the order allowing that to happen. Probably would’ve happened anyway, but he signed it. Arendt-
Jonah Goldberg
Because Husserl was Jewish.
Roger Berkowitz
Because Husserl was Jewish. And he gave a speech called the, the, the Rector’s Address a- at the university, and, uh, in it, he presented himself as someone who thought that the, the Nazi world could re-elevate German education.
Roger Berkowitz
Arendt, as this is happening, is, is in, first in H- in Heidelberg with Jaspers and then in Berlin, and, and she distances herself from, from Heidegger. He continues to write to her. She doesn’t. She gets arrested. She goes to France. And she basically doesn’t have any contact with him through the war. Heidegger abandons Jaspers, who’s, uh, not Jewish, but his wife is Jewish. And, um, Jaspers and his Jewish wife lived together in Berlin the entire war. There’s one street in Berlin where what they call mixed marriages are allowed to live, and he and his wife, uh, live the entire war. And after the war, uh, Arendt gets back in touch with Jaspers. He becomes the best friend of her life. And Jaspers hates Heidegger at this point because he feels completely betrayed by him.
Jonah Goldberg
Joining the Nazi Party will do that. I mean, like you… It, it does hurt some friendships.
Jonah Goldberg
But anyway. [laughs]
Roger Berkowitz
And we should say that, uh, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in ’32, became rector in ’32. By ’33, he’d basically been fired. He resigned, but he was fired. Uh, he was considered a non-reliable Nazi by the Nazis. He, he didn’t believe in biological racism. And, uh, he wouldn’t engage in the kind of activities the Nazis wanted, and he was under house arrest for, from ’34 through the rest of the war. He was not, uh, he was not allowed to teach, um, courses at the university. So after the war, Arendt becomes friends with Jaspers again, but she also ends up reconnecting with Heidegger. And, um, she, she writes to Heideg- It’s actually a funny story. She’s, she’s in Europe in 1950, um, with someone named Gershom Scholem, who’s another, uh, uh, friend of hers through Walter Benjamin, who’s in Isr- who was in Israel, and they were both tasked by the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Committee to go to Europe as the representative of, of world Jewry. So Arendt’s in Europe as the representative of world Jewry to try and locate all the old Jewish Torah memorabilia, things that have been survived. Locate them, document them, and then recommend where they should be distributed. And so she’s, you know, she’s there on a Jewish project, and she’s traveling all through Europe, and at the very end of the project, she ends up in Freiburg, which is near where Heidegger is. And, um, she actually calls her friend Mary McCarthy, the, the American novelist who’s in Paris, and says, “I don’t know. Should I see him? Should I not see him? I don’t know.” And Mary McCarthy describes this. She goes, “It sounded like a teenager in love.” And so Mary McCarthy says, “Look, you’re still in love with him.”Call him. He doesn’t have a telephone, so she writes to him, and that night he shows up in her hot- at her hotel where she’s having dinner.
Roger Berkowitz
And the next morning they go on a walk in the woods,
Roger Berkowitz
and he invites her to his house to meet his wife, who doesn’t f- who has learned about the affair and is furious at her. But they build a, a connection and a friendship for the rest of their lives. It’s not a deeply close friendship, but it’s a, it’s a friendship. And, um, Arendt also writes letters to people to try and get Heidegger’s books translated, and in a sense, um, helps bring him back into the world from being canceled, if you will, um, in that way. Why does she do it, right? I mean, there are different answers. One is that she just still was in love with him, right? And I mean, this is, um, Leon Botstein, the president of Bard, who was a friend of Arendt, and I think, you know, he’s made this case. Look, Heidegger was a Nazi. She still loved him, and she did this thing. Look, he was one of the two loves of her life, uh, maybe three, a-along with, uh, her second husband, Heinrich Blücher, and, uh, a, a- potentially a woman named Hilde Franco, but that’s another story. And, and Jaspers tries to prevent Arendt from helping Heidegger, and she says to Jaspers, “You’re my friend. We can disagree, but don’t tell me what to do.” Right? And this is actually something she has with a number of her male friends. She has it with Jaspers. She has it with Gershom Scholem. She has it with Hans Jonas. And what she says is, “Look, you men,” right, “you think you know the truth, and you’re telling me what to do. That’s not the way friendship works. You tell me your opinion. I tell you my opinion, and we see if we can a- we can, we can build a common agreement.” And, and what she said is, “Look, I had friends who joined the Nazis and worked for the Nazis the entire war. I’ll never talk to them again.” She goes, “I have friends who joined the Nazis and collaborated with the Nazis up until ’38, ’39. I don’t really want to talk to them either. But Heidegger,
Roger Berkowitz
he joined the Nazis in ’32, and he was out by ’33 or ’34.”
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Roger Berkowitz
Yeah. She goes,
Roger Berkowitz
“He made a mistake.
Roger Berkowitz
I don’t forg…” And she says, “I don’t forgive him. I’ll never forgive him.” Well, her letters are lost, but we have Heidegger’s letters. And Heidegger says, “In that walk in the woods in 1950, and then we met you, we talked about revenge, forgiveness, and reconciliation.” And what she does is she makes a distinction in her work between forgiveness and reconciliation. She goes, “I don’t forgive Heidegger
Roger Berkowitz
because I don’t… It’s not in my power to forgive. That’s God’s power, A. And B, I’m not saying, you know, I would have done the same thing, but for the grace of God, there go I. I wouldn’t have done the same thing. In fact, I didn’t. I got out of Germany. I resisted.” But she says, “I can reconcile with Heidegger. What I can say is,
Roger Berkowitz
I can judge that the world is better in it, both the world and my world is better in it with Heidegger,
Roger Berkowitz
and I love the world.” This is her idea of amor mundi. “I can love the world with someone like Heidegger in it, whereas I can’t love the world with someone who collaborated through 44 in it, and I can’t-”
Jonah Goldberg
She was not gonna be friends with Carl Schmitt.
Roger Berkowitz
She was not gonna be friends with Carl Schmitt.
Jonah Goldberg
Right. [laughs]
Roger Berkowitz
She was not gonna be friends with someone like Adolf Eichmann, right? I mean, that’s the difference. So pe- and we’ll get to Eichmann in a second, but she makes a distinction. She says, “I can’t forgive Heidegger, but I can reconcile with him, and my world is better in it. It’s richer in it, but also the world is better with him and his thoughts in it because he was so brilliant.” And, and that’s, and that’s how she comes to judge, um, Heidegger.
Jonah Goldberg
She was not the kind of
Jonah Goldberg
existentialist, right? Heidegger’s whole thing is sort of de- contemplating death is the beginning of philosophy. You know, there you get to being or whatever. I don’t wanna do Heidegger too mu- too detailed because I am not a Heidegger guy. But she sort of looks at it. She turns the telescope around, right? I mean, she’s sort of like, no, the beginning of philosophy is life, and, and that’s why we should, you know, love the world kind of thing. So I mean, h- what is the… What do you think if you had to say, ah,
Jonah Goldberg
this is the in-hei-influence of Heidegger on, on Arendt? Where would that manifest itself?
Roger Berkowitz
She’s without a doubt influenced by Heidegger and yet also differs from him, right? I run the Hannah Arendt Center. Every month, I get another, you know, “I’ve proven that Heideg- Arendt is a Heideggerian. I’ve proven Arendt is a Platonist. I’ve proven…”
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Roger Berkowitz
Everyone wants to prove Hei- Arendt is someone. I mean, the point is she takes from all of them, and she’s an original thinker, and people better, you know, come to it. And I think that’s part of the misogyny of, of, of a lot of the philosophy world. But what she takes from Heidegger
Roger Berkowitz
deeply is an engagement with the world, what, what, what, what Husserl and Heidegger called phenomenology, right? This idea that there’s not a truth out there in concepts. The truth is in the world. And the second thing she takes from Heidegger is this belief that existence, the way we exist, which means to stand out in the world, is an activity that is central to being human, so that, you know, most philosophy puts essence above existence, or the essence of a person is above the existence. Heidegger and S-Sartre and Arendt are existentialists in that they invert that, and they say it’s the way we act and appear in the world, and that the world is a world of appearances, not a world of essences, and the appearances matter. And so she takes that deeply from Heidegger. You’re right that Heidegger has this idea of being towards death,
Roger Berkowitz
whereas Arendt says that everything… That the, what, what, what she takes from Augustine is that man is a beginner,
Roger Berkowitz
and that’s the fundamental freedom that Arendt attributes to humanity. We are a beginner. We have… Even though we’re born into a world,
Roger Berkowitz
and we are conditioned by that world, whether by nature or condition, we can get back to that. We don’t have to, you know. We are free to change that world. That’s where the, the children, the child is a barbarian. The child is a newcomer. She fundamentally believes that each human birth is a chance for a new-Person to act in the world in such a way that that world could change. Now, ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent won’t, right? Most people don’t act in a way that changes the world. But every once in a while, people come around who do, and, and that possibility is, for her, deeply important. Whereas Heidegger thinks that man’s fundamental goal is to think being
Roger Berkowitz
in the world and have this existential thought with being, Arendt thinks that’s man’s fundamental role is to think in such a way that one frees oneself and then act in the world to build a world with other people. Hers is a political project, his was a philosophical project, and that’s their difference. But she could not have done hers without him, which is why when she wrote The Human Condition, she sent him a copy
Roger Berkowitz
and said, “There’s no dedication. If circumstances had been different, this would be dedicated to you. I couldn’t have written it without you, but you understand why I can’t dedicate it to you.” And, and, and so she understands how important he was to her as a thinker, but she
Roger Berkowitz
won’t give him that recognition in public.
Jonah Goldberg
All right, so we gotta, we gotta move on to Eichmann in Jerusalem begins as a series of reports for The New Yorker of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who was this bureaucratic cog and manager within the, the machinery of the Final Solution. Why don’t you sort of take it from there? Um, I have, I have questions.
Roger Berkowitz
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
But why don’t you…
Roger Berkowitz
Yeah. So Adolf Eichmann had been a lower middle class, you know, salesman, uh, in, in Austria. He was trying to join something because he feel, felt like he needed to join something to give his life meaning. He could have joined the, like a, a, a fraternal order. He almost did. And then a friend of his said, “Why don’t you come and join this new thing that’s happening called the National Socialist Party?” And he did.
Roger Berkowitz
He originally was put in charge of, um, of, of Freemasons and other things, and then became the head of the Jewish, uh, section. And from ’32, when the Nazis took power, until like ’34, ’35, his main job was emigration. Forced emigration, but also
Roger Berkowitz
pushing people to emigrate and, and taking away, uh, their, their, their property while they did so. Then from, uh, after the war started, his job became, uh, transporting people to concentration camps, and then eventually to death camps. I don’t want to make the comparison exact because it’s not, but, you know, from ’32 to ’35, ’36, he was working with Jewish leaders and Jews to get them to emigrate. Many of them wanted emig– wanted, wanted to emigrate. It was not an equal relationship, right? But he was largely… Most of the Jews he talked to treated him very nicely because they wanted his help, and he didn’t run into resistance. And then, uh, after 1940 and the Final Solution, again,
Roger Berkowitz
his job was to transport Jews to concentration camps. He worked with Jewish leaders. And again, they didn’t ever yell at him. They didn’t ever say, “What are you doing?” Because they wanted his help, because they wanted to get some Jews out, and they bartered with him and things like that. He was one of the true architects of the Final Solution. Uh, he is, in part, responsible for the millions of, the murder of six million Jews. When he’s arrested in, in Argentina in, in, in 1960, Arendt immediately writes to, to Walleh Shawn at the, at The New Yorker and says, “Look, I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t go to this trial. You know, I left Germany in 1933,
Roger Berkowitz
really before there were any dyed-in-the-wool Nazis. I need to go and see what this guy is like. I need to understand him.” And so he, he sends her to, to, uh, Jerusalem, uh, for the trial in, in 1961. She, she doesn’t attend the whole trial. She attends the first, um, part of it where the opening statements on, on both sides, and then she comes back for the final judgments at the end. In between, she travels around Europe and goes and sees her friend Karl Jaspers and others. And she writes this series of essays in The New Yorker, as you said, uh, in which she says that we have to understand who Heidegger was.
Jonah Goldberg
Heidegger. Eich-
Music
I’m sorry. That’s a really bad… We have to-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughing]
Roger Berkowitz
Oh, boy. Yeah. We have to-
Jonah Goldberg
It’s all right
Roger Berkowitz
… understand who Eichmann was. She goes, “He’s not just a murderer,” right? He’s not some guy who gets mad at his friend and shoots him, right? He actually never killed anybody. You know, the, the prosecution, uh, in, in Israel, uh, made a, a strong effort to show that he had once killed somebody, but they were unable to prove it. He denied it, and Arendt doesn’t believe it. He, she thinks he didn’t. He’s, he’s not a typical murderer. He’s what we call a desk murderer, right? And yet he’s still a murderer. And so she says, “The problem we had, and the criminal law had, was that here’s this guy who’s responsible for the murder of six million people,
Roger Berkowitz
and yet what law are you gonna prosecute him under?” Right? It doesn’t really fit. And the, and the court in Jerusalem actually recognized this problem.
Roger Berkowitz
What it actually says that Eichmann was guilty of
Roger Berkowitz
was the law for aiding and abetting murder.
Roger Berkowitz
He never murdered anybody. So they found him, the, the law he broke, according to the, the trial court in, in Israel, was aiding and abetting. And Arendt’s response to this is, “Come on,
Roger Berkowitz
this is the, one of the greatest mass murderers in history, and you’re gonna-Get him on aiding and abetting? It makes no sense. Now, what the court said is, and what Arendt agrees with is, that in, in, in these kind of situations, responsibility actually increases the farther you are from the one who actually pulls the trigger or, or, or push, you know, gasses the people.
Roger Berkowitz
And, and so she says, we have to be honest with the fact that this was not your typical murderer. This was not someone who was raving or mad. This was not someone who was a monster. Um, it’s not someone who necessarily even
Roger Berkowitz
wanted to kill Jews. She never says he’s not an antisemite, right? Of course, he was an antisemite. I mean, everyone in Germany at this point was an antisemite. But what she says is, there are lots of antisemites in the world who don’t believe in killing Jews. To, to think that Heidegger was a kind of monstrous as- Eichmann. [laughing] I am in a really bad position today. To think that Eichmann was, uh, like this crazy man who wanted to kill Jews is crazy. She goes, “Look at him. You know, he’s a bureaucrat. He’s, he’s sitting there speaking in cliches. He’s sitting there offering justifications based on ord- you know, order number three two two says I do this, and order number three two…”
Roger Berkowitz
And so she says,
Roger Berkowitz
“We, we want to call some… We want to think
Roger Berkowitz
that someone who killed six million Jews or responsible for killing six million Jews is a monster. We want to say that they are this monstrous evil. But if you look at who he was, and you look at him on trial, and you listen to him, you realize that there’s another kind of evil at play here. It’s not an evil that’s monstrous. It’s not what we typically think of as evil. It’s evil in which
Roger Berkowitz
he goes along with these orders and comes to embrace his job as doing his duty, as doing what he’s required to do
Roger Berkowitz
without ever even thinking about what it sounds like or what it would be experienced to Jews.” She’s very influenced by the interview he did
Roger Berkowitz
with a young German, now in Israel, so Israeli, former German Jew, who was the police interrogator who interrogated Eichmann before the trial.
Roger Berkowitz
And he kept trying to explain to this young man that, you know, he was in a ter- that Eichmann was in a terrible position. He, he, he knew, you know, he didn’t wanna kill Jews, but he had to, and, you know, and, and, and, and you have to understand that, you know, I had to do my duty, and it took a lot of courage and effort to do it. She says, “Can you just imagine talking to a survivor who’s got, you know, the tattoo on his arm and saying, ‘Look, you, you should feel sorry for me. I had to do this.'” She goes, “That’s not monstrosity. That’s banality. That’s thoughtlessness.” And what she means by thoughtlessness is an inability to think from the perspective of the other. Eichmann couldn’t imagine what this German Jewish, German Israeli Jewish, you know, interrogator
Roger Berkowitz
would be thinking about what he’s saying because he only thought from within his sort of siloed vision of, of who he was and, and the hard life he had. And, and, and, and so she says, “Look,
Roger Berkowitz
what really, what, what this trial teaches us
Roger Berkowitz
is that people who are generally family, you know, good family people and, and, and in other circumstances would just have been a regular old family person of doing their lives
Roger Berkowitz
can in other circumstances, because of thoughtlessness, be led to do the greatest crimes in human history.”
Roger Berkowitz
It’s still evil, but the evil doesn’t come from monstrosity, it comes from this thoughtlessness, which on the… She only uses the word banality once in the book, in, in at least in the main part of the book, and she uses it in the very last line. And she doesn’t actually say the word, it’s not just banality of evil. The line at the end of the book is, with this exercise, this trial
Roger Berkowitz
makes us see is what she calls the, the word and thought-defying banality of evil.
Roger Berkowitz
Now, nobody cites the whole phrase. Mm-hmm. They just call it the banality of evil. But she didn’t say that. She said the word and thought-defying. And what she means by that is the banality of evil is a kind of thoughtlessness
Roger Berkowitz
that doesn’t go deep, that doesn’t try and understand other people, doesn’t understand who you are, but simply works on the level of the surface, cliches. And it makes words banal. It makes thoughts banal. And, and that’s what she meant by the banality of evil. And so she wrote this book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, by the way, which is a spectacular book, and has incredible chapters on the final solution in different areas of Europe, making real distinctions and showing how it worked in different places that I think is, you know, should be read by everybody. What she does is says, “Look,
Roger Berkowitz
in the end, if it’s too easy to say, you know, he’s guilty of murder or aiding and abetting murder, we have to do something. We have to understand that this is a new kind of crime and a new kind of criminal.” And so what she says is,
Roger Berkowitz
and this goes back to, um, her distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation.
Roger Berkowitz
She says, “Not only can we not forgive what Eichmann did,
Roger Berkowitz
but we have to understand that we can’t reconcile ourselves to it either.” To… If we were to say that we are allowing Eichmann to live in our world, we would say that we can love a world
Roger Berkowitz
in which what Eichmann did happened, six million Jews being killed because they’re Jews.
Roger Berkowitz
She says, to go back to Heidegger, right? She says, “I can love a world in which Heidegger made a mistake and thought he could use the Nazis to change education, failed, and then reserve, and then pulled into a kind of house arrest and lived through the war.”She goes, “I not like it, but I can live in it. I can still love that world. But I can’t live in a world with, where what Eichmann did
Roger Berkowitz
is lovable.” And so we have to expel Eichmann from the world. And she says that’s the reason, and the only reason, why he must be killed. And she, uh, against people like her friend Carly Osbers, who were against the death penalty, she says he has to be killed. He has to be expelled from the world, not because he broke a law, right? Aiding and abetting murder. But because his actions are irreconcilable with a world that we love, and in order to repair the world and rebuild the world as one we can love in, we have to expel him from it. And so she says the, what she says what the judges should have said at the end is not, “We convict you, we, we condemn you to mur- to die because you broke a law.” They should have said, “We condemn you to die because you did something… You, you violated a fundamental human idea, which is that of plurality. And you sought to expel certain people, Jews, gays, you know, gypsies, others, from the world. And in doing so, you acted in such a way that is irreconcilable with a world that we love, and therefore you must hang and must be expelled from the world.” And so she says instead of a legal judgment, they should have made what she calls a political judgment. This is her politics. And they should have acted in that way. And so, so that’s, that’s her argument. There’s another thing she does in the book,
Roger Berkowitz
which is to say that while Eichmann was on trial, the prosecution brought hundreds of witnesses, many of them, uh, were people who interacted with Eichmann during the war. Every single one of them, when they were asked, “Did Eichmann treat you badly? Did he yell at you? Did he hit you or anything like that?” They all said, “No, he was very g- he acted like a gentleman. He was very nice.” And then one of the judges interrupted and s- to one of them and said, “Did you ever say to Eichmann, ‘How can you do this?'” And he says, “No, I was trying to get him to get people out. I was, I was, you know, I was buttering him up.”
Roger Berkowitz
And she says two things about this. One,
Roger Berkowitz
that this is the real lesson here, which is that if nobody resists
Roger Berkowitz
and nobody says to Eichmann, you know, “You’re wrong,” it’s very easy for him to go on and, and, and, and, and, and make this calculation. ‘Cause, you know, he was this uneducated salesman. What he said is, “All the people who were better than me came and talked to me and worked with me. No one said, ‘Stop doing this,’ they said, ‘Do this.'” And she said, this teaches us that the most important way to resist these kind of bureaucratic systems of evil is not by working within the system and being silent, but by shouting and resisting and screaming. You have to confront people. And she says one of the reasons Eichmann was able to do this is no one ever confronted him.
Roger Berkowitz
And the second thing that she says is that these Jewish leaders who worked with Eichmann, she, she says, “I’m not gonna judge them because I wasn’t there,
Roger Berkowitz
but we have to accept the fact that it couldn’t have happened without them.”
Roger Berkowitz
They worked with him to put people on the trains, to give them lists, to bring people there. And then she says this one line, which is probably the line that got her into most trouble, f- she says, “For me as a Jew,
Roger Berkowitz
the darkest
Roger Berkowitz
part of this whole dark story was the way in which Jewish leaders
Roger Berkowitz
worked with Eichmann and collaborated.”
Roger Berkowitz
And that was seen by many Jews as a bridge too far, as a kind of blaming the victim. She doesn’t blame them. She says as a Jew, it’s what bothered her the most. But between the banality, people saying that Eichmann was, was not a monster, but he was banal, and then saying that, you know, in a sense that the Jewish, for her, the Jewish working with Eichmann, um, was a dark- was, was the darkest part of the whole dark story, got her into a lot of trouble. She was basically… You know, this is a woman who had been, uh, profoundly involved in, in, in, in Jewish politics, both in Europe and in the United States, and she was basically excommunicated from the Jewish world. I mean, and to this day, uh, that continues.
Jonah Goldberg
So it’s, it’s funny, when I listened to you in the very beginning,
Jonah Goldberg
um, highlight the fact that she was
Jonah Goldberg
arrested for doing Zionist work, it felt a little bit like Chekhov’s gun, that you were laying down the groundwork for the blowback against her for Eichmann in Jerusalem. And it’s funny, the… I’ve never had a problem with the banality of evil point. Uh, it ju- I, I can understand
Jonah Goldberg
when the Holocaust was still so large in living memory for so many people. But the banality of evil argument
Jonah Goldberg
observation
Jonah Goldberg
feels very much to me like, you know,
Jonah Goldberg
s- uh, uh, Max Weber talks about the bureaucratiz- the bureaucratization of, of charisma, right? Where you take, you have a charismatic leader, and then when he goes or whatever, or the a- when you’re implementing the vision beyond the leader,
Jonah Goldberg
you create bureaucracies and systems and rules to try to capture the spirit of what the leader was. And that’s not exactly this, but it is this, is that, you know, w- at the end of the day, H- Hitler was a leader of mobs, you know, of populist mobs, and the machinery of the Holocaust was done with German efficiency, where they bureaucratized that evil, and that’s another… And, and so bure- bureaucracies attract banal people. And so I’ve never r- I’ve never had a profound problem with all that.And it always seemed to me that the confusing thing for me, it took me a really long time to realize that most people didn’t either, it seems to me. It’s that the banality of evil line became the shorthand for that larger con– that other controversy about the Jewish victim blaming. Why didn’t they fight back? And, and I wonder, like when you were s– you said earlier that A-Arendt thinks that courage is the most important virtue, that sort of informs
Jonah Goldberg
th-that line of argument, right? This idea that Jews who, particularly urban Jews, right? I mean, like, like this is one of these things that I think a lot of people don’t understand about
Jonah Goldberg
European Jewry, is that
Jonah Goldberg
the survival strategy for Jews was to make deals with centralized power because the local powers
Jonah Goldberg
were the source of most of the pogroms and that kind of thing. [chuckles] And, and so this idea of you’re trying to get your kids out of a country, you have no weapons, you have this country, this military machine that is just rolling over Europe,
Jonah Goldberg
well, of course, you’re gonna try and bribe and sweet talk somebody instead of like mounting a division. But like that mindset, I think she finds a little embarrassing.
Roger Berkowitz
Yeah. Ex-exactly.
Jonah Goldberg
And I, and I get it, but like it’s, it’s, that’s a human thing. Anyway, I’m sorry.
Roger Berkowitz
She also founds it counterproductive. I mean, you know, when I said that she has these chapters in the middle of the book about the, the Holocaust and how it played out in different countries, she’s so interested in that because what she finds is that the countries in which people resisted the Nazis, primarily Denmark and Bulgaria,
Roger Berkowitz
most Jews survived.
Roger Berkowitz
And, and what she says is,
Roger Berkowitz
if the local non-Jewish population in Denmark and Bulgaria,
Roger Berkowitz
when they res-refused to comply with the Nazis,
Roger Berkowitz
the Nazis gave in.
Roger Berkowitz
A-And then what she says also is,
Roger Berkowitz
in the few instances where the Jews fought back,
Roger Berkowitz
there was chaos, and a lot of Jews were killed, but in the end, fewer were killed than in the countries where they cooperated and tried to work with the Nazis. And she says simply from a pract… She goes, “Look, obviously they couldn’t know that at the time, right? We know that.” And that’s why she doesn’t blame… She’s not saying, I’m not, she’s not saying we should prosecute people who cooperate with the Nazis. She never says that. But she’s saying,
Roger Berkowitz
A, it was counterproductive, and B, yes, I think you’re absolutely right. She was embarrassed by it. She’s like, “As a Jew, right, it embarrasses me that instead of fighting for our dignity, we cooperated with them.” She makes this… I mean, this is a very interesting and very controversial part of her work, which she also talks about in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Roger Berkowitz
What she says is, during the war, there were people going around talking about human rights. And she goes, “No one in my world cared a whit about human rights.” She goes, “Human rights is the human right to be kept alive in a camp. I don’t wanna be kept alive in a camp. I wanna fight,
Roger Berkowitz
and if I need to, die, but at least have dignity.” And so she becomes this enormous critic of human rights. I mean, I teach human rights in a human rights program at Bard, and we teach Arendt in almost all of our courses because she really is against human rights. She thinks that the way we’ve understood human rights today, which is that it’s m-more important to keep people alive
Roger Berkowitz
in camps than it is to give them arms and let them fight for their dignity, is inhuman. Um, she says it’s treating people like animals, like the Society for Protection Against Cruelty to Animals, rather than treating them as humans who have the right and the ability to fight for what they believe in. Which is why her argument when she got to the United States was
Roger Berkowitz
to form a Jewish army that would fight. And so, you know, she, she really is, uh, embarrassed by and disturbed by what she considers this sort of desire to sort of keep people alive at all costs and work with the enemy, and she’s against that.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay, I could go on forever, but I don’t want to abuse your time. Um, I just,
Jonah Goldberg
uh, w-we didn’t really get into Origins of Totalitarianism too much. I should, I, I should have said this at the outset. I kinda have this view of Arendt as sometimes brilliant, obviously, um, always useful,
Jonah Goldberg
but sometimes in error, right? I, I think that like some of her explanations for things, and I, I, let me put it this way. Sometimes I th- I just think she’s, she’s, she’s more certain of her theory of the case than the facts would necessarily demonstrate. And I think part of her problem, which we get at, we got at a little bit with how to label her, is one of the nice things about being a philosopher is you get to park yourself at forty thousand feet in this very abstract system way above the ground, where you get to speak in broad generalities without reference to the grubby facts of history and whatnot. And the closer you get to the ground, the more the details matter, the more things become contingent, right? Um, and because she wrote
Jonah Goldberg
in this weird way where she would at times get really high altitude, but then at other times just get really close [chuckles] to the ground, that I think sometimes she struggled to reconcile the, the f-facts on the ground with the grand theme stuff. I, I generally agree with her broad thesis in On Revolution, that the American Revolution was successful and that, you know, the French Revolution wasn’t because of a-… things from necessity rather than from freedom, and all. I, I, we can– We don’t need to get in the weeds at, at an hour and fifteen minutes in. But she has this line in there where she just says it is… No one disputes that, um,
Jonah Goldberg
the impact of the American Revolution on the European revolutionary tradition was nonexistent. It’s just not true. Like, the American Revolution actually had a pretty profound impact, first on the early parts of the French Revolution. It was a real inspiration for the, a lot of the revolutionaries of eighteen forty-eight. The Revolut-the French Revolution narrative
Jonah Goldberg
ended up swamping and was beloved by intellectuals, but I just don’t think as, as, as, as popular history she’s, she’s right about that. Some of the stuff about the sort of a horseshoe theory adjacent stuff about the similarities between communism or Bolshevism and Nazism, which I’m very sympathetic to in broad brush strokes, but it feels like sometimes she cared more about… She knew the Nazi stuff at a granular level, and then there’s this kind of like horseshoeing in the Stalinism stuff to fit the schema a little bit. Anyway, is that fair? Is it unfair? Do you think that, like, the problems of being in this gray area between journalist and philosopher gets her sort of on the wrong side? Uh, it makes her falsifiable in a way that a Heidegger who’s talking about Dasein and being and all, and the metaphors about candles, he’s safe from easy criticism.
Roger Berkowitz
Well, it’s a great question. I, I actually was giving a lecture at a high school in Montana last month, and, uh, one of the students said, “Well, when is Hannah Arendt ever wrong?” And I actually came home and wrote a column on that. I, I forget what it’s called, but I wrote a column up a couple weeks ago about, you know, what does it mean when Hannah Arendt is wrong. A few things. One is she never claims she’s right, right? She… As she says, “What I write is opinion, not truth.” She’s trying to think things through because she doesn’t believe there are truths in politics, right? So what I was trying to say in this column is, the question of whether she’s right or wrong is sort of the wrong question. The question is, has she made you rethink it in certain ways that are helpful? That’s what she’s trying to do. She does say things that people think are wrong, and, and they may be. You know, as you said, she says that, um, that the f-
Roger Berkowitz
American Revolution didn’t have much of an effect on, on European revolutions. Well, she didn’t say the American Revolution didn’t have an effect. She said the Founding Fathers didn’t have an effect. And I think that’s true. Maybe you can tell me I’m wrong. I mean, Rousseau and Sieyès and others are cited in Europe. I don’t know how much Federalist Ten and Federalist Fifty-One are cited in the Russian Revolution. I, I don’t think those folks were read. And, and what she really means by the fact that it didn’t have the influence are two things. One is that she thought the greatest innovation in the American Revolution was the abolition of sovereignty. Um, and, uh, and in fact she says almost all the European revolutions took place in the name of the nation and sovereignty, and she thought that the American Revolution didn’t. So it’s that part of it, A, the first part that wasn’t influential. And the second part is that the American Revolution, she thought was not fought, uh, about getting rid of poverty or the social question, whereas all the European revolutions were fought around the social question.
Jonah Goldberg
No, I agree with that. I agree with that. That stuff I think is fair.
Roger Berkowitz
So that’s… So, you know, again, that’s what she’s saying. She’s not saying… The effect of the revolution obviously had a huge impact, right? The revolutionary act had an impact, but the ideas that she thought made it special and different, she thinks were largely ignored, and the nation and the social question dominated. Um, again,
Roger Berkowitz
I, I, I… To me, it’s not about is she right or wrong,
Roger Berkowitz
which, you know, and i-is she right that the American Revolution was not about the social question? It’s a fascinating question, and so many people would disagree with her on it.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. A-and she’s right about that, I would say. Yeah.
Roger Berkowitz
I think she’s, I think she s-sees something essential about it. I don’t think it’s a hundred percent factually right. There are parts of it that were fought around the social question. But I think she’s right to see it’s different here than it was there, and that’s what she’s trying to point out. You know, when she says that, that while it was right for the Supreme Court to say segregation should not be legally allo- legally required, it was wrong to legally require desegregation, a lot of people think she’s wrong. Maybe she is, but she’s saying it because she thinks something deeper is at issue, which is the invasion of people’s privacy, and she thinks privacy is part of freedom, and we should be more worried about that. So yeah, I mean, I, I think you’re right that, um, she, she, she works on a high level and she works on a very visceral low level. Uh, to me,
Roger Berkowitz
on a lot of these questions, I don’t like… I don’t really think it matters so much if she’s right or wrong. It’s, has she helped you rethink and reun- and, and understand deep, more deeply these questions? And I think almost in every instance, that’s the case, if you read her carefully.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. Well, last question, and I promise I’ll let you go, uh, ’cause I love this stuff. What is your th- basic theory of the case about why she’s had this massive sort of revival in the last decade or so? Um, is it
Jonah Goldberg
all Trump-related? Full disclosure, like, I’m not a Trump guy, but I’ve also spent the last ten years telling the joke, Donald Trump isn’t Hitler, Hitler could have repealed Obamacare. [laughs] And, um, the… my point is, is that I think the lying from the, the, from Trump world, if they had better state control over the media, could be compared to the propaganda of a totalitarian country. That’s certainly where their instincts lie, I think, and the in… so the motivations, I think, in some ways are similar, and certainly the, the appetites in the public. But at the same time, we’re not Nazi Germany. We are not Stalinist Russia. And so I guess the question is, first of all, is it all Trump-related, do you think, or is it the rising tide of nationalism generally related in, you know, Orbán and, and things in Europe? And second of all-What do you think Arendt has to tell us about our current politics, and where do you think she just doesn’t apply?
Roger Berkowitz
There’s no doubt that Trump has helped reignite some interest in Hannah Arendt. I tell the story that on the night of the election in twenty sixteen, I turned to my rest of my family who was crying and said,
Roger Berkowitz
“For better or worse, this is gonna be very, very good for me.” And, um, you know-
Jonah Goldberg
That was not how I responded, but go on. [laughs]
Roger Berkowitz
But I, I, I agree with you that Trump is, is not… We’re not living in a totalitarian country, and I’ve, you know, I’ve written ad nauseam over the last ten years about stop calling this totalitarianism. I don’t even… I don’t think we’re… I don’t think it’s the… I don’t think there’s any argument that we could be living in a fascist country right now. I do think Trump has certain fascist tendencies. Certainly, Stephen Miller, I think, does. And, um, uh, and I think that if we’re not careful, we could be, but we’re not. And, you know, as I keep telling people, don’t, you know,
Roger Berkowitz
don’t cry wolf, right? I mean, uh, you know, go and fight and go and argue and go and organize. Um, so why… First of all, so Trump has helped Hannah Arendt, um, but the revival in Hannah Arendt started before Trump. It, it, it’s happened for a lot of reasons. Um, you know, one, let’s just start, her biography is compelling to people. Two, a lot of conservatives and a lot of critics of liberalism like her because,
Roger Berkowitz
uh, she’s a cr- she’s a critic of social totalitarianism as well as political totalitarianism. And so the whole woke movement, the whole cancel culture, the whole i-i-idea that, um, uh, that there’s a kind of conformity of intellec- of liberal intellectual thought is something that she would have found, I think, horrific and, um, has provided strong arguments against. Um, third, she’s a huge critic of bureaucracy. I mean, she calls bureaucracy the rule of nobody and says that it may be the most dangerous of all forms of totalitarianism and tyranny. And so in a world in which we’ve increasingly bureaucratized our, our, our, our self-government, um, she’s a very important and valuable critic of, of bureaucracy. But above all, um, what she is, is a thinker of, of, of politics, politics as action, politics as self-empowerment. And I think for a lot of people who feel despair,
Roger Berkowitz
Arendt offers hope. And one of the things that I love about her, but I find also fascinating about all, almost every single one of her essays and books, you read it, and you’re coming up to the end, and you’re thinking, “It can’t get worse. It’s just the world is falling.” And then the last page or the last three pages, the last paragraph is, “And yet, here’s how it could all get better.” And she has this amazing hope because she really does believe in the spontaneity and the newness and the beginning aspect of human freedom. And she has this idea that, uh, that we can act courageously in the world and change the world. And so, um, I think one of the things that people love about her is she’s one of the most clear-eyed… I mean, I call her a realist. She’s a realist. You know, her friend, Han Morgen- Hans Morgenthau, she, she and he disagreed on certain things, but she saw herself as a realist. She wanted to look at the world, right, without blinders on. As she said, “Understanding and comprehension is the unpremeditated and attentive facing up to and resisting of reality, whatever it may be.”
Roger Berkowitz
It’s one of her favorite lines. She repeats it three times in The Origins of Con- of Totalitarianism. And, and that willingness to confront reality in, in its, in its, in its horror and in its danger, but also her belief in the possibility of resistance and building a new world is, I think, one of the reasons she’s so popular today.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay, so I, I lied. Let’s, just for clarification’s sake, several times you’ve talked about how she’s popular with conservatives for this, she’s popular with liberals for that. You’re using conservative and liberal in the sort of conventional partisan kind of left and right in American politics thing. Do you think that she wasn’t a liberal, small l liberal, in the liberal tradition, more broadly speaking?
Jonah Goldberg
Um, because I, I see her, the whole emphasis on pluralism and conversation, it, and constructive reform and anti-totalitarianism, that feels awfully within the liberal tradition more broadly.
Roger Berkowitz
Well, you raised an important question about what the liberal tradition is, right? Um, I mean, she certainly believed that the fundamental value of human life as opposed to animal life was freedom. And if you’re a liberal who believes that freedom is, liberty is the central idea of, of human life, then she’s a liberal. She’s suspicious of certain ways that liberalism has become institutionalized, uh, through things like, um,
Roger Berkowitz
civil rights or the Bill of Rights or women’s rights or things like that because she’s not a Lockean, she’s a Montesquieuian in that sense, um, in that she believes that what, the only way to achieve human freedom is by achieving human power. And, um, power and freedom, as Montesquieu says, go together. And Arendt takes that extremely seriously and says, therefore, that what liberalism has to do is avoid creating elite institutions that will protect liberties and instead create vibrant political institutions that will aim to create freedom and power, and that we protect ourselves against one of them becoming too powerful by creating separation of powers and diversity of powers so that they all contest each other and no one power cancan, can overturn the others. That’s her vision of the sort of federalist constitutionalist vision of American republicanism. And so she’s a, she’s a republican in the small R republican sense more than she is a liberal. But she’s a liberal in the sense that she sees freedom as the core fundamental, uh, aspect of what it means to be human.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. I, I, I could take that and run for another twenty minutes, but we– I gotta let you go. I apologize for keeping you so long.
Roger Berkowitz
No, I appreciate it. I enjoyed it very much.
Jonah Goldberg
Thank you so much for doing this. I hope you’ll come back. Let us know when the book comes out, and, um, we’ll, uh, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll dive back in and, and deal with all of the things that people are gonna yell at me for having not asked you about or having misunderstood. So thank you again.
Roger Berkowitz
I’d love to do that. Thank you very much, Jonah.
Jonah Goldberg
All right, Roger Berkowitz has left the studio. Um, I think I will have him back for his, for his book when it comes out. I really enjoyed that. I don’t know how many of you will. I think some of you will for sure. Uh, I apologize for going so long. We won’t break it into two episodes, I don’t think. And there’s all sorts of other stuff we coulda talked about. He wanted to… A-after he left, he said we should really talk more about the On Revolution stuff, so I don’t wanna… And he, he obviously knows more about
Jonah Goldberg
Hannah Arendt than I ever will. But, um, it’s not just the Founding Fathers that
Jonah Goldberg
he, she, he, he made it sound like the thought of the Founding Fathers did not resonate, and the actual line is, uh, “Neither the spirit of the American Revolution nor the thoughtful and erudite political theories of the Founding Fathers had much noticeable impact upon the European continent, is a fact beyond dispute.” I dispute that fact. I just think she overstated the case, and we can leave it at that for now, but we’ll come back to it. I also didn’t want to get into a lengthy philosophical debate. I find Arendt’s advice about rendering a political judgment to execute somebody is a lot to ask of a court, um, even though I think the Israeli court system is kind of bananas. Um, and so saying that we think you can’t be on, alive anymore,
Jonah Goldberg
um, because of a grand political philosophical principle, uh, is, is problematic. But, um, I’m sure Roger would have answers to all of that. And I’m sorry we didn’t get into Arendt on the civil rights stuff, which maybe we can return to. Um, in the United States, she did get herself in some trouble and all that. Anyway, I think… I hope this was helpful for people. I get… And if people want a who is so-and-so other podcast, you should send us suggestions. I’ve gotten a bunch over the years. But I think there are a lot of people who feel like they know a little bit about these figures but are uncomfortable in, in speaking too confidently, and I think the Strauss episode was very useful, and I think this was very useful. And, um, I wanna do more of them ’cause I hate talking about the news. So with that, thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
Roger Berkowitz
No, you won’t. [upbeat music] This is a podcast.
