Politics in Dark Times

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University. She is the author of Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory; Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics; Feminism as Critique (coauthored with Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser); The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt; The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era; The Rights of Others: Aliens, Citizens and Residents; and Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations. Her work has been translated into 14 languages, and she was the recipient of the 2009 Ernst Bloch Prize.

“Dark times demand clear understanding, not false optimism. Few thinkers offer greater resources than Hannah Arendt for illuminating the darkness. The essays in this fine collection bring out both the clear foundations and the sometimes ambiguous nuances of Arendt’s thought. They help us think better in a troubled era that desperately needs careful, historically-informed, and hard-headed analysis.” —Craig Calhoun, Social Science Research Council and New York University

• 1. Introduction Seyla Benhabib; Part I. Freedom, Equality, and Responsibility: 2. Arendt on the foundations of equality Jeremy Waldron; 3. Arendt's Augustine Roy T. Tsao; 4. The rule of the people: Arendt, archê, and democracy Patchen Markell; 5. Genealogies of catastrophe: Arendt on the logic and legacy of imperialism Karuna Mantena; 6. On race and culture: Hannah Arendt and her contemporaries Richard H. King; Part II. Sovereignty, the Nation-State and the Rule of Law: 7. Banishing the sovereign? Internal and external sovereignty in Arendt Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen; 8. The decline of order: Hannah Arendt and the paradoxes of the nation-state Christian Volk; 9. The Eichmann trial and the legacy of jurisdiction Leora Bilsky; 10. International law and human plurality in the shadow of totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin Seyla Benhabib; Part III. Politics in Dark Times: 11. In search of a miracle: Hannah Arendt and the atomic bomb Jonathan Schell; 12. Hannah Arendt between Europe and America: optimism in dark times Benjamin R. Barber; 13. Keeping the republic: reading Arendt's On Revolution after the fall of the Berlin Wall Dick Howard; Part IV. Judging Evil: 14. Are Arendt's reflections on evil still relevant? Richard Bernstein; 15. Banality reconsidered Susan Neiman; 16. The elusiveness of Arendtian judgment Bryan Garsten; 17. Existential values in Arendt's treatment of evil and morality George Kateb.