A conference at Yale University honoring the influential writer and political philosopher Hannah Arendt will take place September 29 and 30 at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St.
Titled “Hannah Arendt at One Hundred: Crises of Our Republics,” the conference gathers international scholars and writers to commemorate the centenary of Arendt’s birth and celebrate her life and work.
One of the great political philosophers of the past century, Arendt was a source of inspiration as well as illumination, whose thought continues to resonate in the twenty-first century. Perhaps her most famous work was a report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann that originally appeared in The New Yorker. In that report, which was later published as the book “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” she made her often-quoted and much-disputed claim about “the banality of evil.” Her two major works, “The Human Condition” and “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” established Arendt as a leading authority on the nature of political life and made an important contribution to understanding the historical events of the 20th century.
As the new global economy and the rise of electronic media transform the political landscape, many of the fundamental issues raised by Arendt can be viewed from a different perspective. In addition to these major concerns, this conference will address recent Arendt scholarship emerging from the on-going editing and publication of the Arendt archives.
The conference program consists of sessions on “Political Violence and Terror: The Changing Face of the Political,” “Institutions, Constitutions and Civil Society,” “Reflections on ‘The Human Condition,’ ” “Judgment and Evil,” “Modernity, Totalitarianism and Jurisdictional Legacies” and “ ‘Provincializing Europe’: Hannah Arendt on Anti-Semitism and Imperialism.” The conference concludes with a roundtable discussion. The conference organizers are Seyla Benhabib, director, and Roy Tsao, lecturer, both of the Ethics, Politics and Economics program at Yale. Participants include Arendt biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research; Pulitzer-Prize winning author Samantha Power, Harvard; Dick Howard, SUNY at Stony Brook; Andrew Arato, Richard Bernstein and Jerome Kohn, New School for Social Research; Jeremy Waldron, New York University; Jeff Isaac, Indiana University; Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves, University of Cape Town; George Kateb, Susan Neiman and Sankar Muthu, Princeton; Patchen Markell, University of Chicago; Ronald Beiner, University of Toronto; Benjamin Barber, University of Maryland; Dana Villa, University of Notre Dame; Leora Bilsky, Tel-Aviv University; Paolo Flores d’Arcais, University of Rome; Richard King, University of Nottingham; Stathis Kalyvas, Jonathan Schell, Boris Kapustin, Roy Tsao, Tony Kronman, Steven Smith, Bryan Garsten, Norma Thompson, Ana Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Judith Resnik, Ute Frevert and Karuna Mantena, Yale; and Ursula Ludz, Munich, editor of Arendt’s works in German.
The conference is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the generous support of the John K. Castle Fund and co-organized by the Program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics and the Whitney Humanities Center.
For more information, call Manana Sikic at 203 432-0673 or e-mail manana.sikic@yale.edu or visit Hannah Arendt at One Hundred: Crises of Our Republics online.
Download a complete schedule of events.
