Hannah Arendt (Archive Episode)

Summary

In Our Time – Hannah Arendt (Archive Episode)

BBC Radio 4 | Original Air Date: October 23, 2025
Host: Melvyn Bragg
Guests:

• Lindsay Stonebridge (Professor of Modern Literature and History, University of East Anglia)
• Frisbee Sheffield (Lecturer in Philosophy, Girton College, Cambridge)
• Robert Eagleston (Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London)

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Overview of the Episode

This listener-favorite archive episode focuses on the life and thought of Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th century’s most influential political thinkers. Through lively discussion with academic experts, the episode explores Arendt’s philosophical development, her responses to totalitarianism and evil, her relationship with great thinkers like Heidegger, her experience as a refugee, and her enduring contemporary relevance.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Arendt's Life and Intellectual Background

• Early Life and Education:

  • Born in 1906, Hanover, Germany, to secular Jewish parents. Early exposure to anti-Semitism and academic excellence, developing a passion for classics and ancient Greek (03:09).
  • Studied philosophy and theology at Marburg, engaging with Martin Heidegger, and later wrote a doctoral dissertation on St. Augustine with Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg.

• Relationship with Heidegger:

  • Arendt’s romantic and intellectual connection with Heidegger influenced her lifelong thought, despite his later association with Nazism (04:19).
  • “She struggled to come to terms with that a lot. You can see that as a theme in some of her writings.” – Frisbee Sheffield [04:19]

2. Arendt’s Thought and Place in Philosophy

• Difficult to Categorize:

  • Arendt resisted the label of philosopher, preferring 'political thinker' but not fitting established traditions – not strictly liberal, republican, nor communitarian (05:20).
  • She saw an “inherent hostility towards politics in most philosophers.” – Frisbee Sheffield [05:20]

• Thinking as Existence:

  • Deeply influenced by Heidegger’s notion that “thinking was a way of being” and the Socratic idea of 'perplexity.'
  • “How you think is how you exist. You’re thinking about your existence.” – Lindsay Stonebridge [07:59]
  • The internal 'two-in-one' dialogue, as dramatized by Shakespeare’s Richard III, is central to Arendt's view of moral selfhood (09:47).

3. Experience as a Refugee

• Flight from Nazi Germany:
  • Detained by the Gestapo, escaped through Europe, arriving in America as a stateless refugee (11:20).
  • Writes about the tensions between assimilation and outsider status, notably in her essay “We Refugees”: “In the first place, we do not like to be called refugees.” – Lindsay Stonebridge [12:15]

4. The Origins of Totalitarianism

• Key Concepts:

  • Ideology:

    • Totalitarianism thrives by offering all-encompassing ideologies to atomized individuals, depriving them of independent thought and experience.
      • "They can't even experience their own experiences.” – Robert Eagleston [14:02]

  • Terror:

    • Totalitarian regimes separate people from their political/social identities, reducing them to 'bare life' and rendering them expendable.
      • “Once human beings are made superfluous, you can kill them the way you might kill a flea…” – Robert Eagleston [15:11]

• Structure of Totalitarianism:

  • A “perfect storm” of ideology, anti-Semitism, racism, imperialism, and crisis among elites creates fertile ground (16:18).

• Impact of the Book:

  • Established Arendt’s reputation, offering the first big theoretical account of the Nazis and continues to influence debates on totalitarianism (17:15).

5. Engagement with Ancient Greek Thought

• Active vs. Contemplative Life:
  • Arendt turns to Socratic and Aristotelian models of plural, civic engagement, critiquing Plato’s turn towards solitary contemplation (19:11–20:53).
  • “She was nostalgic for the marketplace of ideas… the idea that something else might happen, that something might change.” – Lindsay Stonebridge [22:42]
  • Emphasized isonomia (equal liberty), promising, and forgiveness as foundations for vibrant communities (23:14).

6. The Banality of Evil and the Eichmann Trial

• Eichmann in Jerusalem:

  • Coverage of Adolf Eichmann’s trial forms the basis for Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil."

  • “He spoke in cliches, he couldn’t follow a train of thought, he couldn’t understand other people’s point of view.” – Robert Eagleston [27:00]

  • Banality Not Commonplace:

    • Arendt distinguished between the monstrous nature of deeds and the bureaucratic, thoughtless nature of the doer (29:15).
    • “It was not rooted in some evil motivation, some satanic greatness. It was an absence… a thoughtlessness.” – Frisbee Sheffield [30:25]
    • The bureaucratization of evil, as in Kafka, enables “radical thoughtlessness” (31:52).

  • Controversy and Misunderstanding:

    • Arendt faced criticism for perceived insensitivity and downplaying the Holocaust, but she stressed the crucial difference between action and intention (32:41).

7. The Human Condition and Political Action

• Labour, Work, Action:

  • Arendt distinguishes between these forms of activity, with action (collective, unpredictable, communicative deeds) as the purest form of freedom (34:03).
  • Introduced natality – the principle of new beginnings and optimism through action (35:43).

• Republicanism and Dissent:

  • Valued the American republican tradition for enabling civic groups and plural discussion; emphasized the importance of civil disobedience and the risks of conformity and mass thinking (36:19–38:21).

• Limits and Tactlessness:

  • Acknowledged Arendt’s sometimes “tactless” style and missteps, especially in her ironic tone during emotionally fraught moments (38:21–39:51).

8. Relevance and Legacy

• Arendt’s reputation has fluctuated, yet her influence is resurgent, especially in discussions of totalitarianism, rights, and the fragility of civic life (43:01).
  • “Origins of Totalitarianism is selling very well. A lot of us are teaching Arendt in our classrooms… that’s a new thing.” – Lindsay Stonebridge [43:32]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Heidegger’s Influence:

  • “She once said we met in the German language.” – Lindsay Stonebridge [07:58]

• On Thinking as Dialogue:

  • “We’re having a conversation in our heads all the time. And that… is a way of being in the world.” – Lindsay Stonebridge [09:12]

• Arendt on Being a Refugee:

  • “In the first place, we do not like to be called refugees.” – Lindsay Stonebridge quoting Arendt [12:15]

• On Totalitarianism:

  • “Once human beings are made superfluous, you can kill them the way you might kill, kill a flea. They’re just, you know, they’re nothing.” – Robert Eagleston [15:11]

• Banality of Evil:

  • “It was not rooted in some evil motivation, some satanic greatness. It was an absence… a thoughtlessness.” – Frisbee Sheffield [30:25]
  • “One of the reasons that evil was allowed to thrive, albeit in a banal form… was the bureaucratization of modern life.” – Lindsay Stonebridge [30:51]

• On Natality and Possibility:

  • “The principle of initiative, the possibility of starting something new, as long as we preserve those public spaces in which that can happen. That is one of the strands of optimism in the work.” – Frisbee Sheffield [41:03]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

| Segment | Discussion Focus | Timestamps | |---------|-----------------------------|------------| | Early Life & Heidegger | Arendt’s upbringing, education, Heidegger | 03:09–06:59 | | Arendt’s Intellectual Identity | Her reluctance to be pinned to one tradition | 05:20–06:37 | | Her Life as a Refugee | Experience fleeing Europe, America | 07:15–12:48 | | The Origins of Totalitarianism | Ideology, terror, and impact | 12:48–17:45 | | Greek Political Thought | The active life, Plato vs Socrates | 17:45–24:20 | | Banality of Evil | Eichmann, evil as thoughtlessness, controversy | 26:03–32:41 | | The Human Condition | Labour, work, action, and natality | 33:44–36:19 | | Relevance & Legacy | Modern impact, critical reception | 43:01–44:14 |

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Additional Insights from Bonus Material

• Labour, Work, Action distinctions:
  • Labour binds us to necessity; work creates lasting objects; only action reveals 'who' we are to others (45:20–45:52).
• Storytelling & Plurality:
  • Arendt saw storytelling as essential to revealing identity and sustaining plurality (46:11).
• Refugee Experience & Rights:
  • Arendt’s experience led to a critique of the “rights of man,” emphasizing only political (nation-state given) rights have practical force (46:50–48:31).
• Social vs. Political:
  • Arendt worried that rampant individual rights claims, without civic responsibility and conversation, lead to the breakdown of meaningful politics (48:44–49:29).

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Conclusion

This episode provides a rich exploration of Hannah Arendt as a thinker of morality, politics, and the dangers of modern society’s thoughtlessness and atomization. By weaving together her biography, philosophical influences, responses to catastrophe, and ongoing relevance, the panel offers a vivid sense of why Arendt matters, not just as a historical figure but as an urgent voice for our own times.

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For further learning, listeners are encouraged to explore:

• The Origins of Totalitarianism
• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
• The Human Condition

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[End of summary]

Transcript

[Melvyn Bragg]

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[Ray Winstone]

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[Simon Tillotson]

Hello, I'm Simon, producer of In Our Time. Following Melvin's announcement that he's stepped down from In Our time after almost 27 years. We're taking the time to celebrate his outstanding work with some favourite episodes from our archive and thanks to everyone who's been in touch more and more every day. And we're passing all of those messages on to Melvin.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Thank you.

[Simon Tillotson]

In due course we'll return with new programmes and a new presenter. But now we have this listener favourite to offer from 2017. Here's Melvin.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Hello. Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 near Hanover in Germany, where her family rarely mentioned their Jewishness. She said she first encountered the word Jew in the anti Semitic remarks of children as she played in the streets. She escaped to America in 1941 and spent much of her time trying to understand why why totalitarianism had dominated Europe so murderously in the 20th century. To prevent its return, she argued, everyone should engage in political life as in an idealized ancient Greek state. She also wanted to know what motivated so many to act so atrociously in the Second World War. And it was at the trial of Eichmann, one of the main organizers of the Holocaust, that she described what she called the banality of evil. With me to discuss Hannah Arendt, R. Lindsay Stonebridge, professor of Modern Literature and History at the University of East Anglia. Frisbee Sheffield, Lecturer in Philosophy at Girton College, Cambridge, and Robert Eagleston professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at the Royal Holloway University of London, Frisbee, Sheffield. Can we briskly talk about the early stages in her life?

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Yes. So, as you mentioned, she was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany to secular Jewish parents. She excelled at school, studied Ancient Greek from a young age, which gave her a lifelong interest, the Classics. She then went on to the University of Marburg to study philosophy and theology, where she met the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Then she wrote a doctoral dissertation on the concept of love in St. Augustine with another philosopher, Karl Jaspers, at the University of Heidelberg. After that she moved to Berlin and came face to face with the growing Nazi movement. She was gathering information about anti Semitism and was detained by the Gestapo.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Can we spill back to Heidegger? Because she had a big affair with Heidegger which marked her one way and another for the rest of her life.

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Yes.

[Melvyn Bragg]

What was that? He was. His wife was anti Semitic. He then switched or whatever. He became a Nazi and an admirer of Hitler. She was obviously devastated by this. Can you say rather more than I've said about that?

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Yes. Well, she had a long standing romantic attachment to Heidegger and I think that's why she moved to do her doctoral dissertation to Heidelberg to work under the direction of Karl Jaspers rather than staying at Marburg. And yes, there was a rupture in their relationship, of course, when he joined the Nazi Party and proclaimed support for their views when he was rector, I think, at the University of Freiburg. And she was really. She struggled to come to terms with that a lot. And you can see that as a theme in some of her writings. And I think we'll be talking about that in a bit more detail later.

[Melvyn Bragg]

I'd rather keep talking about it now and we'll see because if we forget to talk about it later, it'll be a pity, won't it? What was the impact that he had on her? Can you briefly tell us in political, philosophical terms? You're looking around. We'll go on with the other thing. How easily can her work be classified? She's a philosopher, she's a classicist. She's a political commentator. How would you place her?

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Yes, I mean, there's a great range to her writings. I mean, if we think about where she started with the concept of Love and St. Augustine, her work on totalitarianism, her philosopher, most philosophical work, perhaps the human condition, and then her thinking through the faculties of the mind and the life of the mind. So she wrote on a great range of topics, although there is a consistent interest in politics and political themes throughout her works. But even there she's rather hard to place. I mean, she resisted being called a political philosopher because of what she saw as an inherent hostility towards politics in most philosophers. So one might call her a political thinker or theorist, but even there she's quite hard to pin down. She doesn't seem to fit into established categories of political thinking. She's not a liberal in any straightforward forward sense. Some people put her in the tradition of civic republicanism in its emphasis on democratic politics as a space to promote individual flourishing and happiness. Some people align her with the communitarian tradition insofar as she thought that civic participation was very important. But she didn't aim at any shared conception of the common good. So she's very hard to categorize and pin down.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Had you not had the rupture with Heidegger, do you think she gone on to study in more detail, more existentialism and become more part of that group?

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Yes, that's an interesting question. I think, you know, the war and the events of the war had politicized her and got her very heavily involved in politics. And also her husband, Heinrich Blue, a revolutionary socialist.

[Melvyn Bragg]

This is after Heidegger?

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Yes, she met in Paris. She met him in Paris and she said that he. From. From him she learned how to think politically. So I think her work was moving more in that direction anyway.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Lindsay Sternbridge, can we talk a bit more about the influences? I've mentioned Heidegger twice, sort of slightly floating around, and we've talked about the ancient Greek connection, learning it and that accompanying her all her life and her precocious yours as a scholar from a very early age. Can we just say what person we have? When she gets to start, when she starts to write her own work, what was in her mind, what had formed her mind?

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Well, I think going back to Frisbee's remarks about Heidegger, what drew Arendt to Heidegger was he taught her how to think, and not just how to think in how to think about things or how to think in order to do things. He taught her that Thinking was a way of being a person of being.

[Melvyn Bragg]

What does that mean?

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

It means that how you think is how you exist. You're thinking about your existence. She loved the word perplexity that she borrowed from Socrates. But you've established yourself in the world through thinking and through language. So she went to Margberg specifically to work with Heidegger. And she describes being entranced by his lectures. There were performances of a man talking and thinking. So that's one thing that's really important. And also she was driven by language. She thought in language. She was very much a kind of existentialist in that way. She thinks. We think through words, we think in language. And what she found in Heidegger was a passion language. She once said we met in the German language. She always adored the German language. I mean, some critics will say she's too poetic, she's too esoteric. And that really comes from her sense of it's possible to be someone in language. So that was very important to her. But as you said.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Can we just clarify? It's brilliant. I'm enjoying it a lot. But what does to be someone in language mean?

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

That's brilliant.

[Frisbee Sheffield]

You see why I resisted answering the question about Heidegger?

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

I mean, in some sense the answer is, well, how else can we be? Because we're always. As soon as you think about being, you're in a word, you're using words. I mean, Arendt will always come back to the thing she borrows from Socrates and from Heidegger, which is the two in one dialogue we always have in our heads when we're thinking. We're having a conversation in our heads all the time. And that, she says, is a way of being in the world. So rather than looking for big abstract concepts, rather than looking for a ground, she's saying we're constantly working out what it means to be a person in words, in thought, in thinking.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Is the conversation I had between two parts of ourselves or several parts of ourselves.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Well, usually she's bound to be.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Really, when you come to think of it, anybody else inside there is a father.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Well, she really loves that great speech from the beginning of Richard iii, that great still in the Queen where Richard says he's talking to himself. You know, am I a villain to prove myself a villain? And she loves that because that's exactly a kind of model for the thinking moral self. I mean, Richard's really evil thinking moral self.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Where does morality come into it?

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Well, for Richard, who is, of course, evil, he talks himself into doing evil. And I know we can talk about this later, but the non thinking self won't even have that conversation. Won't even, you know, she says you have to. If you're having a dialogue with yourself, your actions in the world must reckon with the fact you're going to have to come home to yourself, to that voice inside your head. Richard had that voice. It didn't mean he wasn't evil, but he at least had that voice to prove myself a villain. Someone like Eichmann didn't have that voice. Didn't have that conversation.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Yeah, that's exactly, that's just the distinction we were looking for. She, she was hounded. She worked, she found, she worked on anti Semitic, Semitic literature. She did all the things that you would expect a brave, intelligent woman to do at that time, which she did. All of them. The Gestapo got hold of her, she got away from them. She escaped to Czechoslovakia, she went to South France. She ended up in America, she ended up in America and she was a refugee there. Stateless refugee. Can you just give us a little vignette of her in America at the beginning?

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Well, there's a lovely story. After she'd come through Europe, she was detained in a detention camp. She was one of the lucky who got an American visa. And when she arrived in America, the first thing she did was learn English. She wrote in her third language. And she went off to Massachusetts to work to stay with the family for a crash course in English. And what she soon discovered one is she had to smoke outside. Which for a European intellectual was to smoke. Like the worst thing could possibly happen there. These great letters. And she says, I can't believe this. But the other thing she liked about Marika and disliked is one hand, it was very socially conformist. So you have to smoke outside, you have to behave yourself. But the other thing that she liked about it was its political structures. There was a political freedom in America which she really felt wasn't there in Europe. But she was very conscious of her status as a refugee. She wrote, I mean earlier in her work she'd written about the distinction between the Jew as pariah, the Jew as other, the Jew as the troublemaker, the other and the Jew as parvenu, the refugee. He wants to assimilate the refugee who just doesn't want any trouble. And it become very clear to Arendt and a lot of other people by the early 20th century that the assimilation parvenu option was not working. So in her thinking and her being, she adopted the position of the pariah. There's a Great essay. A furious essay she wrote called We Refugees. And the first sentence of that reads, in the first place, we do not like to be called refugees. It's absolutely defiant.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Thank you very much, Robert. Robert Eagleson. The origins of totalitarianism brought her some pain. Can you tell us about that work? What was its aim to start with?

[Robert Eagleston]

Well, the. The aim of the origins is really, is to describe the essence of totalitarianism. It's got lots of history in it, but it's really about sort of philosophical inquiries to what. What really is at the core of totalitarianism. And she finds really two essential things. One we'll call roughly ideology and one about terror. And they're both quite complex kinds of ideas.

[Melvyn Bragg]

We could take complex. Let's start with ideology.

[Robert Eagleston]

Well, she says that totalism arises out of a. When people are disconnected from each other, when they're sort of atomized, and when social bonds aren't as strong as they had been. And a movement or a strongman arises. And he offers a story, an ideology which claims to explain everything, why people are unhappy to its adherents. And this story becomes more and more powerful. It means that you can't argue with people who have become Nazis or Stalinists.

[Melvyn Bragg]

And because there's only one way to think.

[Robert Eagleston]

There's only one way to think. And even more bizarrely, they can't. The adherents can't even experience their own experiences.

[Melvyn Bragg]

What does that mean?

[Robert Eagleston]

Well, she has this fantastic example from the 30s, from the Stalinist trials, where, you know, a man is arrested and accused of being a saboteur, a factory saboteur. And he says, well, the party is always right. I don't think I was a saboteur, but the party is always right. And if the party says, I was a saboteur, I must be a saboteur. So it even takes other people's own experience of their own lives. And she calls this the rule from within. And this sense that totalitarianism colonizes the inside people's minds, their beliefs, and it makes them unable to argue or even to say, to experience their own experiences outside of that sense.

[Melvyn Bragg]

That's terrific, isn't it?

[Robert Eagleston]

And the second thing, the ideology, now the terror, is terror. And again, this ties up with some things we talk about Heidegger and Aristotle. So Aristotle. So emerging out of Aristotle and out of Heidegger is the idea that there are, in a sense, two bits to what it is to be a human being. Part of that is your sort of animal bit, the sort of meat that we all are. And part of that is your sort of social and political and legal life. When I talk to my students, I say that's your name. You know, when you go to the doctor, you're a body, but here you're a name, you're a person. So there's two bits of what it is to be a human being. And what totalitarian terror does is to split those two bits. So totalitarian regimes take away your name, your identity, your rights, your bios. Aristotle calls it your social political world and reduces you just to your body. And once you're made just to be a body, Arendt says you're superfluous. And she says once human beings are made superfluous, you can kill them the way you might kill, kill a flea. They're just, you know, they're nothing. They're just bare life. And that's the, the logic inherent in totalitarianism. So those are the two crucial ideas from that book.

[Melvyn Bragg]

And she proved, she showed those, proved those in that book. That's terrific. She proves that in that book, does she?

[Robert Eagleston]

Yeah, I mean, the book is, is a, it's a. I first read it on holiday. It's like a thriller, you know, it's 500 pages, but it's really gripping. It's full of historical detail, aspect of it being challenged and, and you know, try to be refined. But those are the crucial ideas about it that come out.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Any comments on this book? Lindsay?

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

You want to talk about it is like a thriller. But also I think the really important thing as well is the way she tells that story. You know, there are several things that will allow totalitarianism to happen. The terranly ideology, anti Semitism, racism, uncontrolled imperial expansion. What happens when the elite get together with the mobile. But not any one of those things can cause totalitarianism. You need a kind of perfect storm of different elements working at the same time. So within a historical imagination. It's fascinating because she actually, she said, I'm trying to. It's like trying to put together a crystal and trying to see all the different elements rather than do that narrative which says this happened because this happened.

[Robert Eagleston]

That's right. Lots of people read it as a history book, but it's not really a history book, although there's plenty of history in it. It's really trying to pull out what the, what the essence of these things are. What's really going on with imperialism.

[Melvyn Bragg]

What impact did it have at the time?

[Robert Eagleston]

Well, that's. It made her reputation as a thinker. It was widely discussed 1950. 50, when it came out. It made reputation as a thinker in a way. Of course, there are accounts about the Nazis just after the war. In a way, it's the first big sort of theoretical account of what had happened. But in fact, one of the things about it is that it's so full of ideas that it's still sort of unrolling in academic circles now.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Frisbee, Sheffield, Amrenda. You talked about beginning of her early knowledge of Greek. She held to it the rest of her life is extremely important to her, particularly Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. How did she. What was it about the Greek philosophy in terms of the modern breakdown? As I said, it's quite a big jump. But somebody, one philosopher said all Western philosophy was a footnote to Plato. So it's maybe not a lot bigger jump. What's happening there?

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Well, the connection for her is that she held that there had been a rupture in political thought after the Second World War. The established categories of political thinking needed to be fundamentally rethought. And so the ancient Greek philosophers are part of that project for her. She puts them in this vital and urgent context of rethinking politics. After the war. We inherited many of our concepts from them. They have shaped the way in which we see ourselves as political actors in the world.

[Melvyn Bragg]

You've said that. It's terrific. Can you give us an example of we shape the way in which we see ourselves? Can you illustrate that?

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Yes. So central to her reading of the Greek philosophers is a contrast between the active and the contemplative life. Aristotle and Socrates had a very positive conception. She thought of the active life and that came to be degraded by Plato.

[Melvyn Bragg]

That's a big thing to say. Could we. Yeah, so we got the active.

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Should we start with Socrates and Aristotle? So Socrates, for arrant, was the last great philosopher citizen. He moved amongst plural human beings in the world. He was interested in talking to his fellow men and interested in their doxa, their opinions. He wanted to know what they thought, to ask them to take account of themselves and to help them negotiate between the plural perspectives of others. So in its critical aspect, Socratic conversation for her was about adjusting to the plural perspectives of other people in a communal space like the agora, the marketplace where Socrates taught. So he moved among men and was concerned with what people thought.

[Melvyn Bragg]

And so you're therefore a political and full person. In that speech by Pericles saying this, if you don't do that, you're not a full man.

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Yes, she. She connects Aristotle more to that. That passage in Thucydides and Pericles, funeral oration. She was interested, too, in some of Aristotle's thoughts. For example, his idea that man is by nature a political animal. And she held there that. That what was important for Aristotle is he thought that we realize a distinct human freedom by acting together, talking together with others in a communal space.

[Melvyn Bragg]

And in a way, this is for simplification, but you must make it complicated in a way that was the best thing. And then Plato bombed that.

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Yes.

[Melvyn Bragg]

How did he bomb it?

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Yes, so that's exactly right. There was a particular historical moment she locates this to, which is the trial and death of Socrates. And 399, she says that Plato's despair at the death of Socrates motivated an inward turn and a flight from the political realm.

[Melvyn Bragg]

What did that mean?

[Frisbee Sheffield]

What it meant particularly she's thinking here about the image of the cave in the Republic, where Plato describes ordinary men trapped in a cave of experiences. And he describes that in terms of darkness, deception and illusion, and encourages a turning around to the realm of ideas, outside the plural realm, to the light of ideas. And she says here we can see a rejection of what Plato thinks of as the senseless doings of men in their plurality in favor of the solitary reflection of the isolated philosopher. So we have a turn away from the plural world of politics to thinking about man in the singular.

[Melvyn Bragg]

And in a way, a turn away from action with everybody else to solitude and contemplation. Can we take that along? Lindsay Sternbridge and did this make, in her view, if one could re. Realize that for a vibrant community. And is it that falling away that was the cause of the terrible things in the 20th century?

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

It was that falling away, but also the growth of what she called the social, or the blob, as she called it. And she said the real distinction there is between the life of the mind, thinking, doing, but also the idea that instead of having a political space where ideas are discussed, the social moved into that space. People became job holders, functions. You didn't have that marketplace of ideas. So the social, she thought, was a real threat in that way.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Just one second. Is there any. Do you have any. Did she have any philosophical reason why having a marketplace of ideas was essentially and necessarily better than thinking by yourself and coming up with your own idea? How did she prove that?

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

I'm not sure how. I wouldn't say she proved it. I thought what she wanted at the heart of any vibrant political community was the notion of consent and dissent. There had to be a conversation. There has to be something new. So when she's looking back to the Greeks, as Frigsby was saying, she's not trying. A lot of people say she was nostalgic for the Greek polis. I don't think that's quite right. What she was nostalgic for was the marketplace of idea. The idea that something else might happen, that something might change. That's what she was nostalgic for. So in the Human Condition, she borrows.

[Melvyn Bragg]

That's another book.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

The Human Condition. Yes. Yeah, she borrows the concept. It's from Herodotus of Isonomia. And that's basically the principle of equal liberty. She says any vibrant community needs. Which is the point at which you just say, that's not fair. Why can my child have an education not yours? Why can I travel freely and you can't? And there are these moments of that's not fair. And so you need a vibrant political community that can change, that can produce change without risk. So the other two things you need to keep that political community in place is a community that is okay with promising, because that's the way if you promise to do things, you make things less dangerous, you stabilize things. Sometimes you have to break promises, but you have to have a kind of good trust promised community. And you need a culture of forgiveness because things go wrong. So a grown up political community will be one that says, yes, we can take risks, yes, we can have this marketplace of ideas and this rather difficult moments of potential violence, but in the end, we need to be able to promise one another and forgive one another.

[Ray Winstone]

Hello, it's Ray Winstone. I'm here to tell you about my podcast on BBC Radio 4, History's Toughest Heroes. I got stories about the pioneers, the rebels, the outcasts who define tough.

[History's Toughest Heroes Clip Voice]

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[Ray Winstone]

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[Melvyn Bragg]

Is she finally saying. She is in a sense saying, Robert Nicholson, that if you have a plurality of ideas, if people are contradicting each and has just been said, I want that. If he's got that, that will necessarily prevent the rise of tyrannies and totalitarianism.

[Robert Eagleston]

Which she certainly thinks if you have civic engagement and bonds and articulate a disagreement with things that Lindsay was talking about, that is the sort of thing that prevents totalitarianism. It's a strong civic culture and respect for others is exactly what she thinks will stop totalitarianism. But she's also where, you know, the plurality arises just because people are different and she's very aware that people are different. And her critique of Plato is that Plato thinks that he's like the lone philosopher contemplating by himself. But in fact we should be thinking about ourselves together. All different philosophy should begin not with the I, I think therefore I am, or the lone philosopher, but with, with the us, with the we thinking and arguing and talking together and recognizing our differences.

[Melvyn Bragg]

And once we lose, which Plato did, we're on a path to losing all individuality.

[Robert Eagleston]

That's exactly right.

[Melvyn Bragg]

I'm coming quite quickly. Zipping from totalitarianism, human condition, to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. She was there in 1961, 62 when he was tried. He was one of the main managers of the Holocaust. And she had this phrase, which was wrong down the decades and I think we'll run down many more decades, the banality of evil. What's the context for that phrase?

[Robert Eagleston]

Well, as you say, Eichmann was a high level death killer in the Holocaust. He was taken, seized by the Israeli Secret Service in 1960 and tried in Jerusalem. And Arendt had been thinking a lot about the question of evil right from 1945. So it was the question of the future, question of what is evil. And so she took the idea, the opportunity to see Eichmann, the trial, as you say. And she saw him in the, in the. Behind his glass box. He was kept in a glass box on trial.

[Melvyn Bragg]

She wrote a.5 long articles which became a book.

[Robert Eagleston]

That's right, paying a book. And you know, he, he spoke in cliches, he couldn't follow a train of thought, he couldn't understand other people's point of view. He was sort of vulgar. And she said, well, how can you know this, this man is this evil mass killer? How can this be? And so she's always been, she's always opposed to giving the Nazis sort of satanic greatness. The Nazis loved that with their SS uniforms and death head skulls. And she was very opposed to that. It's not. These are just people, men, okay? How can they be evil? And so she thinks about this phrase, the banana people.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Maybe you know much more than I do, but I didn't. Did she say how can they be evil? They were evil. She said, how can they explain in what way they were evil?

[Robert Eagleston]

Exactly, that's. So she comes up to the concept of the banality of evil. We might think of that as being the normalisation of evil. The way in which something as evil as mass murder can be turned into routine. Something happens every day. And she talks about this is the crucial thing, Eichmann's thoughtlessness. And it's not carelessness or it's his inability to think. And she says he's hedged around by these linguistic cliches, by this. His refusal to question, by his lack of sense of the past. And that makes him thoughtless.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Is that back to what Lindsay was saying earlier?

[Robert Eagleston]

Very much. It absolutely ties in not being Richard iii. That's right. It's like a living example of exactly that. Eichmann has no. Is unable to talk to himself about what he's doing. So he's unable to question or think it through.

[Melvyn Bragg]

But we have to dig into why this. What sort of evil it was and what. What words are used, what concept has been to be reintroduced. Because the idea of evil is the goering figure, a great monstrous person. Rebecca west he looked like a brothel keeper, but basically he looked like a terrible chapel, a film that's going to murder his children, that sort of thing. And he. And she was saying, no, he looks like a civil servant, which he was not able to answer questions properly, thinking he'd done a good deed by reducing the number of people in a carriage that he sent to house, which is what he needed a little bit of commendation for that. I mean, what. How. That's the interesting madness, isn't it? And how did she dig into that of Risby? What did she say more than that? I mean, Robert's given us a terrific start. Can you develop it?

[Frisbee Sheffield]

I think. I mean, one of the things that it important to be clear about, especially in light of the vitriolic criticism she received by her use from her use of that phrase, is that she makes a very sharp and robust distinction between the doer and the deeds. As Robert's point, there's nothing banal about the deeds. They were monstrous and wicked.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Why was the criticism so. No, say it first. Don't come to criticism.

[Frisbee Sheffield]

One of the reasons why the criticism was so vitriolic was people didn't distinguish clearly enough, as she did, between the doer and the deeds. So some of her reviewers said she's claiming that the Holocaust was banal, which, I mean, you have to have a serious amount of ill will to read it. She neither says nor implies that. And also she did mean something quite specific by banality. She didn't mean commonplace. She was responding once to a reviewer who said that she was claiming that there was a little Eichmann in everybody. She denied that and said, no, I do not mean by banal commonplace. She meant specifically, as Robert's already suggested, that it wasn't rooted, rooted in some evil motivation, some satanic greatness. It was an absence. In a sense.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

She.

[Frisbee Sheffield]

She can be seen as part of a Platonic tradition of thinking about evil as a privation, as an absence of goodness. It was entirely negative phenomenon for her, a thoughtlessness.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Lindsay, come back again to what you said a couple of answers ago. How important was it to her that Eichmann was thoughtless, that he did not think, could not think, would not think? What was that word? Why was that so important to her? And linking it with banality?

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to that two in one conversation. But the other term I think would be helpful to have in the conversation is he was a bureaucrat. One of the reasons that evil was allowed to thrive, albeit in a banal form, in her view, was the bureaucratization of modern life. And we become alienated from the way we relate to one another, and we start relating to each other through systems. And so one of the first things she did when she was a refugee in the States is write two very good essays on Franz Kafka. And it's that world that she. And she said Kafka could already see when people have been reduced to job holders, to identities, to names, allows you to function without having that two in one conversation. So it's not quite, you know, he's an idiot. He's just obeying orders. She's not saying that at all. She's saying there's a context for radical thoughtlessness. And that context has everything to do with how we organize our social life together.

[Melvyn Bragg]

She uses an analogy which suggests it becomes deep in. She says it's like a fungus. In other words, it is a growth, isn't it? It's something that gets inside you like. Like a malaria cell and won't be stopped.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Yeah.

[Melvyn Bragg]

And. And she uses that advisory, obviously.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Yeah. I mean, it. You mentioned.

[Melvyn Bragg]

So you're turned into something else. You look like you're bureaucrat sitting at your desk, but there's this fungus inside you that's taken over your brain.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Yeah. And it spreads. Actually. Rebecca west, who you mentioned earlier, also talked about a yeasty darkness in that period. And this idea of yeast and fungus because they don't have roots. This isn't deep evil. This isn't Richard iii. This is, you know, this is evil without roots. It's on the surface, it's sticky. It gets everywhere. You can't get rid of it, you.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Know, I don't have. We nailed it yet. Robert, is there anything.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Why did.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Why did she. We've talked about the criticisms. Did she do her case any good the way she presented it at the time? Because she came in for a great hammering and she was making a very fine point, I think.

[Robert Eagleston]

Well, absolutely not. It was terribly controversial. The book was controversial. This idea of the bananaity of evil, which at surface looks, if it's downplaying what had happened, came for a great deal of criticism. And she spent a lot of her time in the 60s after that book trying to explain what she meant. What she meant. She talks about, as Lizzie says, that the two in one, she talks about evil as a fungus, but she's trying to articulate a new sense of evil with totalitarianism and with the Holocaust. She says a new sort of evil has emerged in the world and she's the first person to try and analyze it exactly as a fungus that isn't deep, that isn't rooted, that comes out of a sort of atomized society. She says that our society is like a desert and totalitarianism is like a sandstorm that's whipped up in that desert.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Can we move to human condition? Is that a continuation in some way?

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Yes, it's related to her concerns in the Origins of Totalitarianism because she held that political thought had been ruptured and the human condition is where she takes on the task of rethinking our established categories of political thought.

[Melvyn Bragg]

And she goes back to the Greeks.

[Frisbee Sheffield]

She goes back to the Greeks, indeed. So she. One of the central strands of that work is trying to clarify the active life, which as we've said earlier, was dethroned at this particular historical moment for her by Plato. So she tries to analyze the three fundamental activities of the active life in the human condition and to think about how they've been conceived differently in different periods. So those three fundamental activities in the human condition are labour work and action. And she assesses each of those activities in terms of the contribution they make to human self realization and freedom and how they're able to meet certain conditions of our human life. For example, the fact that we're mortal, the fact that we live on the earth and inhabit the world, and the fact that we live amongst plural beings in the world.

[Robert Eagleston]

ROBERT One example of it is she talks in the very famous action chapter about natality. So Heidegger, yeah, Heidegger's thought says that philosophy begins in our being towards death, our awareness that we're going to die. And that makes us think about ourselves. And she, as it were, takes that idea, but turns it the other way around. And she says it begins precisely in our birth, both our first birth, when we're born, but also when we're born into society, says it's a second birth. So natalities being born into society, where we take our role in the marketplace, where we devote to. To discuss things and sort of talk about. Talk about ourselves and talk and argue with people. That's an example of how she takes the Heideggerian concept and turns it around to talk about action that Frisbee was talking about.

[Melvyn Bragg]

It is a curiosity of her life that although she was a great distance from her and ruptured him, she was prepared to defend him intellectually later or some of his ideas anyway. But let's stay with her, Lindsay. She. How is she? How does she try to say, look, we are where we are now? Everything, not everything, a massive society has been destroyed by these two great totalitarianisms and these two wars. If we go back to the Greek, we can maybe just about haul it two and a half millennia across, across time and reset it for now. How did she go about that?

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Well, I'm not sure she did. I don't think she does that straight from forwardly. What she liked, what she affirmed about America, was the Republic tradition. So she thought you could recreate voluntary associations, which were sort of small groups of people making new things happen. And she liked America. She liked the notion of republicanism, with a small R, the historic notion of republicanism, because that was possible. But she also understood that it was under threat. I mean, there could be no going back to the, you know, the Greek idea of the polis. Not in 1960s. It would look like Star Trek. You'd have people on the deck having these great philosophical discussions while they visited people in time and space who were doing all the work. I mean, that's the only way you could have the Greek polis in the 1960s. But what you could have, and she did see this as under threat all the time, and she wrote very persuasively about Nixon and Watergate. And lying in politics is what constantly needed protecting, was the idea of there should be places where dissent and creation of the new are possible. So I was rereading her essay on civil disobedience, American civil disobedience, this week, which is fascinating. She says disobedience isn't just breaking the law. Sometimes you need civil disobedience to make the law be the thing it can be. So it's a Kind of way of restoring the republic, putting. Acknowledging the republic's in crisis, but that will take smaller groups of active citizens. So she was very supportive of the student movement in the 1960s. She didn't like it when they got involved in big ideology. She didn't really like the violence. But the idea that you could form, you know, she said, you know, to all societies are based on the notion of consent. So when you. Even when you're consenting, you know, there's a possibility of dissenting. That's your responsibility. So that's where she saw possibility. And she really did think that the American model held out the opportunity for something greater than it already was. And she was very, very protective of it as well.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Was there a sense that now and then from which she put her foot in it and was rather careless of the consequences?

[Robert Eagleston]

Yes, she was. She was often.

[Melvyn Bragg]

I mean, that's an understatement, isn't it? Yeah, for you to say. Me to suggest.

[Robert Eagleston]

Yeah, she was often tactless. She often made mistakes. There's a very famous case about integration, an article, essay on Little Rock, where she is on the wrong side of history. But I think these come out of her, you know, from her deep engagement in her thought and in civic society. And these often made her very unpopular. And it's also true that she was. She became seen as a great sort of cold warrior as well, because she was so opposed to totalitarianism. And that also put her on certain sides of debates that she might not naturally have been on.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Yes. Going back to the tactlessness, I would also like to say. I mean, she wrote very beautifully. I mean, you read Hannah Arendt and these difficult ideas, but you come away with clarity. But she also writes ironically and that two in one. We've been talking about having two voices in your head. The kind of way you write that is through irony. Irony's always got two voices in it. You're doubling. And when she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem, she wrote it in the ironic mode. This did not go down very well with the Jewish community. This is the first time some survivors got to speak of their trauma. It was an extraordinary emotional outpouring of grief in Susan Sontag's words. And to miss this and to be ironic was seen as deeply wounding. So it was that kind of.

[Melvyn Bragg]

She thought it got in the way of the argument.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

She did. Well, also, she really thought that the testimonial culture was getting away. The thing that we really need to do is how do you invent a new law that can cope with crimes against humanity. And if we distract ourselves from that, these crimes are going to keep on happening. And I think she was quite right to do that. But to dismiss everything else was going on was a tactical error. I mean, she won't be the first woman academic who thought she was being ironic and people just thought she was.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Being sensitive, but very ironic about that, I'm sure. Look, you know, 25 times more than I did. But it seems to me to say there's a trial going on. It's about an. As far as I am concerned, Hannah, it's about an idea. Let's talk about personal experiences at another time. I want to stick with the idea. I mean, wasn't that what you were saying? I don't think it was ironic. I think she was commenting on what was going on and she may have been completely wrong then. A lot of people thought she was totally wrong there. But the survivor, the tales of the stories of the survivors were more important than any anything else.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.

[Melvyn Bragg]

And she was up to something else.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

She was. Yeah, you're absolutely right, Brisbane.

[Melvyn Bragg]

In the Human Condition, is she thinking that change is possible?

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Yes, it's quite optimistic. And she thought of calling the book Amor Mundi, Love of the World. And I think that brings out this sense that she was rethroning the political space in contrast to the rejection of it that she saw in the Platonic and Christian tradition after him. And I think it's the principle of natality here that is the principle of optimism in the work. And she describes that once with a quote from Augustine, that a beginning be made man was created. The principle of initiative, the possibility of starting something new, as long as we preserve those public spaces in which that can happen. That is one of the strands of optimism in the work.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Did she feel that totalitarianism might recur?

[Robert Eagleston]

Yeah, absolutely she did. In Origin of Totalitarianism, she talks about how, although Nazism had been defeated and by the time the third edition came out, Stalinism had gone, that all the conditions were continually moving around, continuing about. And we should be constantly, constantly sort of aware of the dangers of totalitarianism, particularly when she says, whenever human beings are made superfluous, so whenever, you know, our identities and so on are taken away from us, that's a really warning.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Sign that identity is taken away from us. Treated as numbers rather than individuals.

[Robert Eagleston]

Exactly. Having our social and cultural and legal lives separated from our.

[Frisbee Sheffield]

And being a stateless person.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

I think it's very important. She talked about elements of totalitarianism and she said that, you know, elements of totalitarianism linger in the political culture. So the idea of organized lying. She was very concerned about Pentagon, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate and so you can't just think totalitarianism is this big dark cloud that descends on other histories and other places. It's always that potentially elements of it are always there.

[Melvyn Bragg]

She's had a roller coaster reputation. What is it today? They don't seem to really take us for this question.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

It's quite simple, we haven't got much time.

[Robert Eagleston]

It's very hard. I mean she writes very beautifully but she's quite hard to read as supposed to be said. It's not quite clear she's a philosopher or a political scientist or. I mean she described herself as a storyteller. She's quite popular in the States, she's less popular in the UK. I mean it's quite an engagement, the.

[Melvyn Bragg]

UK's intrusion about analytical philosophy. She doesn't fit into that.

[Robert Eagleston]

No, she really doesn't.

[Melvyn Bragg]

So they weren't regarded as a philosopher from scratch.

[Robert Eagleston]

She's quite rude about them too. In the life of the mind.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Oh, I see.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

I think she's having, I mean British philosophy thinks she's a journalist, but I think at the moment she's having a renaissance. Origins of Totalitarianism is selling very well. A lot of us are teaching arent in our classrooms. The students are responding very well and that's. I think that's a new thing. It's too cool, too close to call. But she's.

[Robert Eagleston]

I mean she's a gay.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Thank you. Sorry about that Robert. Thanks very much. Robert Eagleston, Frisby Sheffield. Lindsay Stonebridge. Next week we were talking about John Clare who according to one of our guests was quote, the greatest laboring class poet that England has ever produced and is one of the great poets of the 19th century. So that next week. Thank you for listening.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

And the in our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

[Melvyn Bragg]

What did we miss out?

[Robert Eagleston]

I think one of the things that she's. She that I'm very struck with her, she's very keen on making distinctions between things. So there's the, there's the work, Labour work and action and those, those are quite interesting but also a bit unstable sometimes. So Labour is just sort of feeding ourselves and doing the washing up. Work is, is more important. Work is where we create and build something. And she says that people who write laws are sort of work and work lives on. Poets do work that lives on. Whereas action, which is really important when we do things together, is somehow very effervescent. We do something together and it's sort of gone. We don't know what's going to happen to our action. And indeed, she talks about. In On Revolution, she talks about the lost treasure of the American Revolution, which is that sense of people doing something together, which is a wonderful feeling, and then it sort of evaporates. So action, although it's really important for her, doesn't have a sort of. Doesn't have a legacy. In a strange way, I think the.

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Other thing about that's interesting about her conception of action and how she differentiates it from labour and work is one of the reasons it's so important is because in labor, she thinks that in our activity of laboring, we're trapped and bound by natural necessities, so we can never really be free in those activities. Women Work is prompted by the principle of utility, so it has some source of value outside of itself. Whereas only in action can we really reveal who we are as opposed to what we are as human beings. So that's central to her characterization of action.

[Robert Eagleston]

And I also think that the storytelling thing, that who and the what, is a really interesting thing. So storytelling, you know, reveals who. Who we are, but it's always through a. What? It's always through telling of a story. And I mean, she always says, I'm a storyteller, which is a way of getting out of difficult questions about, you know, what is your discipline exactly? And how do you do that?

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Well, there's a wonderful. Sorry, there's a wonderful passage in the Human Condition where she talks about the great storybook of mankind. There's a sense that even though we're all authors of our own stories, we don't know what's going to happen to the meaning of those stories. You disclose something, you don't know what's going to happen in the future or how it relates to the past. It's that network or web of storytelling that she wants to. Wants to affirm. And also the chanciness of that, that you don't quite know exactly where you are.

[Frisbee Sheffield]

And that's how plurality seems to be so intimately connected to action. Because we need the presence of others to acknowledge our fine deeds and.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Exactly.

[Frisbee Sheffield]

And living words and to tell our stories. As Hercules.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Hercules had his home.

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Exactly.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Exactly. Yeah. But going back to that point of plurality, I just want to track back a little bit to her experience of being a refugee and origins of totalitarianism, because she Made a very important point there, which was born out of being a refugee, being on the refugee rat runs, being in camps, that what the stateless people, as she called them of the late 1930s revealed to her was that 18th century enlightenment idea of the rights of man had gone, had completely gone. And what it revealed to her is the only rights that protect you are the rights of the nation state, political rights, the rights that you're given. Once you don't have a state, you're rightless. And she said, not long after, I think this was 1944, the world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. Once you were just human, you had no rights. You were bare life. And I think we're still coming to terms with what that means. I mean, she said, yes, we need a new legal system, but she also said the only people who give each other rights rights are other people. We give rights and we take them away. And that's why you need plurality. Rights can't be given through big.

[Melvyn Bragg]

The idea of natural rights and my rights is that they're not.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

They're made, she says in Origins of Totalitarianism. She said, I ironically and reluctantly have come around to Burke's thinking that the only thing that, you know, protects you and rights are really gives you rights are national culture. But that means that we need to read. So she actually thought the natural rights tradition was basically dissolving in the mud of the camps. It was gone, it was dead. And we're still coming to terms with that. I think her critique of rights is so important.

[Melvyn Bragg]

But we hear the word rights all over the place now, and there's always a little bell at the back of your head saying, hold on, by what do you claim these rights? It's all over the place. I have the right. You take me in my right house. And it starts at the age of five. It seems to me it intensifies.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Well, that's what she thought was wrong with the social. If everyone's just saying, my rights, my rights, you've got no kind of conversation or legislation.

[Melvyn Bragg]

The word responsibility, Larry, pops up.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, and responsibility is a big word for Arendt.

[Robert Eagleston]

And she's also very. I mean, this thing about the social also as its mirror in the political. So for her, politics isn't just about administering things and sorting out the economy. Politics is a sort of vocation that we ought to be involved in, in which is a sort of important thing in itself, is what it is to be a human being. So, you know, when you have a. You have a. You have a meeting. Of course, the meeting has to decide to do various things, but part of the point of the meeting is just the meeting where you encounter others and. And talk about things. And that's a really important bit of her thought. Yeah.

[Melvyn Bragg]

Well, thank you all very much.

[Simon Tillotson]

You look like you deserve a cup of tea.

[Robert Eagleston]

Please.

[Simon Tillotson]

In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg is produced by me, Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios production.

[Lindsay Stonebridge]

From BBC Radio 4. The Fort Royal Marines and Army pilots speaking for the first time.

[Robert Eagleston]

We felt there were Taliban fighters coming through this complex called Juggernaufort. It was the most intense firefight I've ever been involved in. The word gets around that that 40 is missing. The Apache pilot said to me, you just need four volunteers. We secure them to the Apache wings and we'll go back and get Lance Corporal forward.

[Ray Winstone]

Get me four marines and I will take them in and we'll get that boy home.

[Frisbee Sheffield]

Listen to the fort on BBC. Sounds foreign.

[Ray Winstone]

Stone, I'm here to tell you about my podcast on BBC Radio 4, History's Toughest Heroes. I've got stories about the pioneers, the rebels, the outcasts who define tough.

[History's Toughest Heroes Clip Voice]

And that was the first time that anybody ever ran a car up that fast with no tires on. It almost feels like your eyeballs are going to come out of your head.

[Ray Winstone]

Tough enough for you? Subscribe to History's Toughest Heroes. Wherever you get your podcast.