These present circumstances make The Human Condition a formative text for this seminar Critique 13/13 and its relation to praxis, or for that matter its relation to last year’s seminar, Praxis 13/13. Different, because the threat of nuclear annihilation, which was so present during the Cold War and so fundamentally shaped our consciousness then, has been replaced today by the looming catastrophe of global climate change. But for all the similarities and differences, the overarching crises we face today are not so unlike the ones Arendt faced in 1958: “Foremost in our minds at this moment,” she wrote, “is of course the enormously increased human power of destruction, that we are able to destroy all organic life on earth and shall probably be able one day to destroy even the earth itself.” (268-269) The dual admixture of rising political chaos and authoritarianism on the one hand, and of the threat of global climate change on the other hand, strike me as present instantiations of Arendt’s dilemma from 1958. Similar, because the threat of authoritarianism and new forms of totalitarianism in this country and in Arendt’s country of origin, Germany, have never been of greater salience than when she was writing her book-not only the immediate aftermath of Fascism and Stalinism, but also, in the United States, at the tail end of McCarthyism (which was in decline by the mid- to late-1950s). We live today in both similar and in different times. Each of those historical dimensions shaped the writing of The Human Condition.

As she emphasized, “politically, the modern world, in which we live today, was born with the first atomic explosions.” Third, they came on the heels as well of the first launch of an outer-space satellite that orbited around Earth-the first man-made object to be propelled into space to explore beyond our Earth, a technological development and instrument as unique and historically important as the invention of the telescope. Second, they followed also the human invention and use of the atomic bomb-a historical marker that Arendt referenced on several occasions in her work.

They were of course, first, in the immediate aftermath of the Third Reich and of the Holocaust, and of the publication in 1951 of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. Those times in particular, the mid- to late-1950s, represented a unique historical conjuncture. To think in crisis times: that is the heart of Arendt’s work and life, and of her magnum opus, The Human Condition, published in 1958. Harcourt read and discuss The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt at the Maison Française, Columbia University Janu~~~

Arendt hannah the human condition