← New Books Network
New Books Network
Lyndsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt's Lessons on Love and Disobedience (JP)
00:56:24
Loading summary
Transcript145 lines
- [00:00]
John Plotz
Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a 4 liter jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.
- [00:11]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Oh, come on.
- [00:12]
John Plotz
They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.
- [00:22]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Whatever.
- [00:23]
John Plotz
You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.
- [00:30]
Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk.
- [01:37]
John Plotz
Hello and welcome to Recall this book, where we invite scholars and writers from different disciplines to make sense of contemporary issues, problems and events. I'm John Plotz of the Brandeis English department and listeners will recall that Arendt has been on the podcast's mind a lot lately. If a podcast has a mind. Aside from ongoing tussles between me and Elizabeth Ferry and basically episodes one through 100, she was also all over our discussion of Israeli and Indian ethnonationalism with Ajanta Subramanian and Lori Allen, and also crucial for Sonali Thakkar's discussion of the founding of UN and UNESCO debates, the founding UN and UNESCO debates over conceptions of plasticity and race in her wonderful new book, the Reeducation of Race. And there was also my recent look at her lying in politics as a corrective to anticipatory Despair under Nixon or under Trump. But what we've never had is a certified dyed in the wool arent expert until today. So, Lindsay Stonebridge, welcome to recall this book.
- [02:40]
Lindsay Stonebridge
I'm delighted to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.
- [02:42]
John Plotz
Okay, thanks. So I want to, I want to add, of course, Lindsay is much more than just that. So just to give you a very compressed bio, she's also professor of English Literature and holds an interdisciplinary chair of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham and is the author of many scholarly, many, many scholarly articles, including one on the recent Film Zone of interest and such prize winning books as the Judicial Imagination, Writing After Nuremberg, Placeless People, Writing Rights that Nabbed the Modernist Studies Association Best book prize in 2018, and writing and Literature in the Age of Human Rights. However, we're here today to discuss her latest 2024. I hope it's your latest, Lindsay. You haven't published a book since then, have you? Okay, rapid you are, but you couldn't be that rapid.
- [03:32]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Okay.
- [03:34]
John Plotz
So from 2024 we are free to change the world. Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience, which Bonnie Honig called brilliant and wonderful. Samuel Moyn called a breathtaking triumph. And Philippe Sands, exhilarating, brilliant and utterly original. And had Arendt herself been around, although she was famously hard to please, of course, I think that she too would have nodded approvingly. So. So, Lindsay, yeah, really delighted to have you here. And if you, if you choose to take up the invitation, we like to get things rolling by just asking our guests to introduce their book to the listeners.
- [04:09]
Lindsay Stonebridge
I didn't want to write this book at all. No plan to write this book. I'd written two books, the Judicial Imagination, which was about women writing about war, crime, trials and placeless People, which was about the emergence of the category of statelessness in the world. Scholarly books, academic books, which had a rent at their center. She was the kind of guiding spirit and I used her understanding of judgment in the first book and her understanding of statelessness in the second to orient myself come 2016. I can remember walking with my friend, the historian Sarah Churchwell here in France and saying, I'm never going to write about Hannah Arendt again. And she turned around to me and she said, you're kidding me. You've got to write a book on right now. And this was the time when Trump for Trump's first presidency, Origins of Totalitarianism, was famously trending in the bestseller lists. And at the time of Brexit, it was a time When Europe was swinging. Right. So I reluctantly thought, okay, I'm gonna do a trade book that tries to tell Hannah Rand's story. And then I lost my reluctance and got terribly excited. And this wasn't supposed to be a biographical, theoretical book at all. What I really wanted to do was tell a rent story through the places that she'd been. Williamsburg, Hanover, Paris, Lisbon, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. But also take her to places where I knew she was important. So she was very important to the Outspring. I wanted to go back to North Africa, to Lebanon and places I've been before to talk about her relevance. I wanted to go to India, where she's important. I wanted to go to Brazil. So I wanted a global newer run. And then Covid happened, and I spent a lot of time sitting in England, not being able to go anywhere, just with a rent and Google Maps and zoom conversations. And that's why I wrote this book. And this book that wanted to be a kind of celebration of Arendt's strength and her capacity to help us resist totalitarian tendencies also turned into a book about the profound importance of fragility in political and existential life. So it ended up being a very different. It ended up as an unwanted child. Then the unwanted child ended up being totally different from the child that I had then convinced myself I did want. I think that's just something about the writing you do in the historical circumstances. You end up doing it, and that can be utterly, as a Rent would say and appreciate, totally unpredictable.
- [06:57]
John Plotz
Rent seems so wonderfully attuned to that question of the way that the present moment changes, you know, what we can see and make of the past. So you end, I think, by talking about a story that I didn't know at all, which is her relationship to the. Do I have this right? The Carnation Revolution, the Port. The Portuguese Revolution of 74. And. And obviously I love those later Rent essays, too, about, like, you know, the Nixon administration or the Pentagon Papers. So maybe I could. Could. Could we use that as a way to ask about the title, We Are Free to Change the World? That notion of. Yeah, the point is not to study the world. The point, however, is to change it like that.
- [07:40]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Change the world, except not. Not like Marx did. Exactly. Yeah. No, it was interesting because when the book was picked up, it came out with Jonathan Kate Penguin in the UK and Hogarth Penguin in the US and people really wanted a trade book that would sell. So what had happened is people had read about our end on Twitter with those gorgeous photos and those great One liners.
- [08:07]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [08:08]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Seen her trending and then tried to read her work. And it was. And so the. The title, my publishers were wanted for ages, was thinking like Hannah Arendt. And I hated this with a deep passion because they kept on saying, the whole point is you're not supposed to think like anybody else. That's the exact point. And they said, no, we want to. How to negotiate. You know, how to negotiate, Tony. How to fight the new fashion system. And you know, I wish I could write a book like that because I'd love to know the answer to that. But Arendo doesn't teach us, you know, a kind of. These are the five things you need to know about freedom and fascism. Because it's all, you know, every. On every kind of new form of tyranny, every new political formation is always going to be different. So I have this bag on the back of my office door which was from a seminar we ran on a rent with Roger Berkovitz from the Hannah Laurent center in London during COVID And they had that we are free to change the world and put something new in it. And I really hated that saying from a rent for a long time because it's like, really, we're obviously not free to change the world. Even those of us who might have a kind of chance of changing the world, you know, are feeling kind of hemmed in and impossible and despairing. But the key is in the next bit, which is the lessons in love and disobedience. What she wanted was a responsiveness to the world as it was and a commitment to plurality and difference through which, when the moment was right, it's possible to affect change. And I think that's why the book's been picked up, because it doesn't say, you know, I'm the sage history professor. I've seen fascism before. Let me tell you, there are just three things you need to do because it doesn't work like that. Otherwise we'd be better at not appointing authoritarian idiots into position great power.
- [10:04]
John Plotz
If only they were just idiots, you know?
- [10:07]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yes, I know, I know, I know. That kind of idiot.
- [10:10]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [10:11]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Idiot cunningness.
- [10:12]
John Plotz
Idiot cunningness. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a point you make about the Eichmann stuff on the monality of evil, like the failure to realize, like. I mean, I'm not. Not to. Not to shortcut and equate our current authoritarian idiots with Eichmann. But there is this point that Arendt makes about what it means to not you. You can be very cunning and yet not realize the World around you.
- [10:35]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, yeah. She makes that point about philosophers as well as fascists. So you can actually be. I mean, people. People misread her saying, like, stupid. She didn't think he was stupid for a moment anymore, that she thought, you know, certain philosophers were stupid. What she thought they was, they were moral idiots because they could not hear or could not think about what they were doing, which is totally different kind of thing from being stupid or not clever. I mean, that's right. You know, she says, you know, the comment, the name that she calls them. But the kind of, you know, the people who think they've mastered thought are the most dangerous people.
- [11:16]
John Plotz
Right.
- [11:16]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Precisely because they're not listening to the echoes, they're not listening to the resonances, what they're doing. And that's what she saw in Icon.
- [11:26]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [11:27]
Lindsay Stonebridge
And we can see it today as well.
- [11:29]
John Plotz
Yeah, I'd love to talk about that, but. So I just wanted to pull your quote. This is sort of. Towards the end of the book, you say in response to, you know, there's the Eichmann line, I think from the postscript of Eichmann, he merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. And you gloss that. Of course Eichmann knew what he was doing, exclamation point. Arendt means that he never grasped morally or what amounts to the same thing for her imaginatively, the reality of what he was doing. That was the true horror. Yeah. Do. Do you want to say more about that? Maybe. Maybe more. That connects it to the present. I thought. I thought we wouldn't get to the present right away, but maybe we should.
- [12:05]
Lindsay Stonebridge
You know, it's difficult, isn't there? Because there is so much evil about as well. I think that's. Yeah. I mean, I think that's how she was misunderstood. People thought she was saying that Eisen was somehow innocent. She never, ever said that she thought he was a manipulative bastard, he wanted to kill Jewish people. But what she meant by the thoughtlessness in that is that he didn't actually stop to realize the moral horror of what he was doing. He couldn't see it. And we can see that again today. When you hear rationalizations for the starvation of the people of Gaza, most evidently. And you think if I play that slowly, what you have just said, I mean, you don't even have to think about the worst statements. You know, you need to kill all the children, blah, blah, blah. You don't need to think about the. We know who the really evil people are. Actually, I think there is a form of evil that's not banal, that is just evil. And I think that's around today. But it is, you know, when you listen to our politicians going, well, is this the right moment to recognize Palestinian sovereignty? I think I might do it like this. Instead you think, look, you're not planning a camping trip or something and hoping that everything goes. You are actually talking, do you realize? Or, or when you look at the statements made about migration, I mean those are particularly obscene at the moment. So what we've done, they say, is we've created this wonderful humane system of deterrence. I mean people literally, you literally get. I'm not just talking about kind of swivel eyed actual Nazis. I'm talking about people who would say they were quite reasonable. So this is the way to stop the small boats. Yeah, let you drown. This is the way. Or we'll put you in a camp in the middle of somewhere where you don't know this will really dissuade you. And people literally think they're doing a good thing. So you have got. She doesn't talk about this moment. There's a moment in the Eichmann trial, all the VHS videos are still available. Well, he says, look, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm a humanitarian. I thought there were too many people crammed into the cattle truck, so I cut down the number. And this is what she means. She said, you can't hear the echo of what you just said. They're still going to their mass deaths. So it's that kind of level of banality. So when I think about Gaza right now, I think there is a targeted radical evil at work. But I also think the banality evil is in the international community is in some of the justifications that people are talking to themselves and is the so called aid system outside of the UN and that I think should recognize profoundly as an example of analogy.
- [14:46]
John Plotz
Yeah. And actually, can I. One of the things I loved about that article I alluded to before that you wrote about the zone of interest and we'll put a link to it in the show notes is you sort of pointed to a double problem. You pointed to the, the banality of evil as being what happens, you know, in the, in the moment when people don't realize what they're doing. And then the horrific side of it is that in retrospect we can all, you know, look back at, you know, our numbness or our indifference or our inaction at the moment, you know, Roosevelt deciding not to bomb the, you Know, the concentration camp, say, or I was actually thinking also about, you know, while Rwanda and Burundi, when, when the genocides were happening there or in Yugoslavia, as you said.
- [15:36]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah.
- [15:37]
John Plotz
The inter. The international community had this moment of realizing and not realizing it. And, and I. If I understood your article right, you made a really subtle point because you said that the banality of evil is horrific, but it's only horrific in retrospect because we can then, you know, we all are on the side of. Right. In retrospect. The tricky thing is how do you recognize in the present that this is actually.
- [16:00]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Exactly. Exactly. And that's why, I mean, two things about that a lot of people said about that film. You know, I could really see myself in the characters in their spooky surrealist garden outside the walls of Auschwitz. And I thought, no, you can't. You say that precisely because you know you can't. And that's what I didn't like about the film. It reminded me of a kind of Disneyfication of the aesthetics of banality. Yeah. What's much more difficult is. Means it's so obvious, you know, in the key character picks up, you know, fur coat and lipstick from dead women from Canada, from the warehouse. I mean, that's kind of. Yes, that's. It's kind of melodrama in English lit would say, well, that's how you do melodrama. You really overstate it. So everyone goes, that's terrible. But that's not. I mean, the banality of evil is, as you say something, you have to be much more hyper vigilant and thoughtful about responding to in the moment. And I do think that's. Why aren't you so good? Because she doesn't let herself off the hook, which doesn't let anyone else off the hook.
- [17:08]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [17:09]
Lindsay Stonebridge
On this either. When I reread Eichmann in Jerusalem for the book, actually, after the books, I was doing a radio program on War Cruncher. I thought, as much as she talks about Eichmann being banal, she's really interested in the people who said, oh, people who disobeyed and it turned out that you didn't necessarily get shot. There's a great quote from Mary McCarthy when she's trying to explain I. And she says, when someone holds a gun to your head and tells you to kill another human being, they're not giving you orders, they're tempting you.
- [17:40]
John Plotz
Yeah. Yeah.
- [17:42]
Lindsay Stonebridge
It's always a space for resistance. That's the space that Arendt really interested in. And there's only so far you can Train people to recognize that, yeah, what you can do is create context and scenarios and a responsive culture where they can think it through for themselves and then decide, you know, best of all will be those of us who know we have to live with ourselves. She says, yeah, for me, if lots of people did know and they did do stuff, and lots of people know now and they're doing stuff.
- [18:15]
John Plotz
Right, right. So. So. So then is your interpretation then, in terms of, like, Arendt's thinking about the present? And I mean, living in the present is the idea that most of us actually do know, but it's just too hard to kind of reckon with the implications of what we know. Or you're saying that only a few people really know this and the rest of us are only going to know it belatedly?
- [18:41]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, I think it's. I think it's much more. Unfortunately, I think it's much more haph in that and the kind of way that she. She borrows from Socrates, that we all have a demo on our shoulder, we can never see. We can never actually own that moment. It's coming out as, you know, from behind. Others can see it. The future might be able to see it might be answerable to our past, but it's never actually going to be a kind of staged moment unless you're kind of in the field of politics, which stages moments all the time. But I also think, and I think this is why people like us, by which I mean Nifery Close readers like a rental so much is she wrestles with those ambiguities. She wrestles. So she's never a straightforward theoretician. One of my favorite pieces of her writing, which is terribly poetic and great to sit down with a group of students and go through, is the introduction to her essays Between Past and Future. She's a really good essayist. She's a much better essayist than she is book writer, in my opinion. But she's really good essay. And she says that it goes back to your point, John, that, you know, we can't know the future, we can't know the past. And she uses a parable of Kafka. And all that's happening in this Kafka parabol is this man who's trying to wrestle from the past that's coming up behind him and the future and the future's bearing down in front of him, and he's stuck in this struggle between past and future. And she has this thing called the diagonal freedom. She says, what you need to know is it's not the kind of, you know, the bit in the middle. It's the fact that this is on a diagonal. The whole thing is taking place on the diagonal. Freedom. And the man is in the middle. He's not going to know, but he's still having the struggle. He's still there. And it's so beautifully put together. And she kind of then does a series of essays which kind of demonstrate this on different themes. Culture, education, science. It's so beautiful. But I think that's where we are. There is always a bit. And this is why she's anti fascist and also why she won't change the world according to economics or labor theory or according to any other big theory. It has to be based on this contingency. Freedom is based on contingency. You do not know. And it's embracing that contingency which allows us to struggle for something we do not know. But we know that it is not this. This particular situation.
- [21:02]
John Plotz
That relates to the somewhat startling parallel that you made earlier that, you know, that her indictment of the monstrosity of Eichmann is akin to her indictment of philosophers who are simply rule followers. Because I pulled out, I was thinking about those examples as well, where Arendt talks about, you know, the few people who didn't act the way everybody else did. So, you know, like she has a line from Eichmann. Those few who were still able to tell right from wrong went really by their own judgment and did so freely. There were no rules to be abided by. And it's such an interesting concept. I had forgotten about that notion of the diagonal. That's wonderful. But that. The notion that you can't rely on rules, but you can rely on judgment. You know, the confluence of the particular and the universal.
- [21:48]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And judgment. Judgment's where she started moving. She read Kent very young in Kuningsburg, but then she was in her last day. She was working through the series of lectures on judgment. And they do come back to aesthetics. They come back to the imagination. She believes it can be. You know, the only thing you can train your mind to do is to go visit him.
- [22:11]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [22:11]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Is to have imagination. And it's in that space that judgment happens. And then we can talk about why the humanities are necessary to any plurality.
- [22:21]
John Plotz
So I would love to pursue that point, but actually, I just wanted to ask, do you have a thought about the. The word plurality and distinctiveness and sort of originality have come up already, but we haven't talked about natality specifically. And I feel like that's a Charged word for Arendt. Do you have thoughts about whether natality means something other than simply just we have to embrace the plurality of, of human existence in the world?
- [22:45]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, I think it does. I think, I think, I mean remembering that she was like in her early 20s when she first read Augustine. Yeah, Augustine teaches her two things and one is about love. And that's why we're here. And that's what makes us different. But it also makes us the same. And out of love also come people. I mean, and she has that, you know, she loves that line in Augustine which is like. And it's totally anti Heideg. Heidegg says the only certainty is we know we're going to die. She said actually no, it's the other way around. The only certainty we know is we don't know where the hell we came wrong. But it was love or some version or love or some version of natality. And this is how time works, how love works. So I think that is crucial to her. But it is also the capacity for responsiveness to the new. Which is why you can't have a how to be arranging anti fascist book. Even though you'll notice all my chapters of how to, how to, how to, that decision of my editors is not one I approve. Because what you're going to be doing is responding to the new with the new. So that's why, you know, she liked the Hungarian revolution because it wasn't planned. It was a response to a set of circumstances which came from the ground. This is why her work on revolution was so key to the Arab Spring. Because the Arab Spring broke ideological blocks. Whether it was Muslim Brotherhood or, you know, or pro Western. It broke those for a different sense of the new. Why she liked Portugal. Portugal was supposed to be an old fashioned coup. Wasn't supposed to be a revolution at all. It's supposed to be. Didn't always end up the way it wanted, it should have been, but it's supposed to be a coup. But something else happened on the street and it turned in, to the end of fascism in, in Portugal. And you can, you know, so that, that those things are new things responding to new things. And that's why she always, she didn't like universities as an institutions at all in the least. But she did like her students. She really liked the new people, as she called them. Always, always, always. And that's why even though she never had a faculty except at the end at the New School, she was quite happy to be a bad tempered adjunct who didn't turn in her admin.
- [25:08]
John Plotz
Well, she was buried at university. That wasn't. Did she get buried at Bard? Isn't that.
- [25:13]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, but that was. Her husband taught there. I really love about that story. Now, as you go up there, they're very sweetly together, then you look over the way Philip Roth said that he's buried opposite them. And he said he wanted to be buried near because he didn't think anyone would come and visit him. They come and visit her. Oh, look, there's Philip. Which I think is a very Philip Ross story. But Arendt would have found. And he did have brief correspondence. Would have. But. Yes. So neutrality is. And it also goes back to judgment because, you know, you might have certain rules of judgment and, you know those moments when you have to break those rules. Yeah, it's called learning. Yeah, it's called experience. You have to. You know. And for her also, it comes from a long history of being a refugee in a stateless person. And there's like a lot of migrants understand that, you know, whatever tradition they have based is based on their capacity to respond always to the new, because that's your life.
- [26:20]
John Plotz
So I think one thing I really like about your book, but I don't know if it might make us outliers, and maybe it's because we're English professors or something, but the way that you end, or students of literature, you end with isonomia as an ideal for her like that. And I. I really like that, and I see it as well. But I wonder how you think she balances that with, I don't know, the fact of solidarity or something like the notion like isonomia. I guess the vision of it is that we each are capable of using judgment to rule ourselves. Right. But then we have to live together with one another. So living together requires. It might not require unity, but it requires some sort of cooperation.
- [27:04]
Lindsay Stonebridge
But also, I mean, arranges. I mean, I think this is why she drives proper mainstream political theorists bonkers, because she gets hold of these concepts and then you try and chase their genealogy and you think that is not. The other thing she said about Isomia is that it is about responsiveness. So it's. The rule of law is you have to step up when that law is not working for everybody.
- [27:28]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [27:29]
Lindsay Stonebridge
So there is a kind of solidarity. It is not a solidarity that's based on us, their identity. It's a solidarity based on the fact that you will step in. This is why she's so good. Civil disobedience. You will step in when you see that the law of Egality is being broken. The other thing is when you look up the history of isonomy, I think it's very interesting that it was pre Greek democratic, not that and ideas of Greek democracy have that much to do with our common states of democracy. But it was developed in migrant and diverse communities and Greek colonies because it wasn't. Because there wasn't a kind of way, because people had just arrived. So you had to have the minimum that would get people to work together. Right. And the minimum was a kind of responsiveness to this question of being equal before the, before the law. And so there's a kind of other history of non nation state based politics that she's trying to get us to kind of think about and sort of think about what might be useful for now. If you're talking about migrant nations such as your own.
- [28:42]
John Plotz
Yeah, yeah. Well that's. There's a couple of different ways we could connect that. But I was just recently reading that wonderful essay, we Refugees. For some reason I'd never read it before and I was really struck both by what you're talking about, the notion of the kind of, you know, the potentiality of just a minimum cooperative basis. But she's also really. I hadn't remembered how hypercritical she is of the idea of the parvenu. Like that is the person who comes to a new country and says, no problem, here I am now, I fit in here. And I was wondering if you had thoughts about this because in an odd way, I mean, as I think she says in her exchange with Sholem late in her life, she's not interested in denying categories of identity. You know, she's not interested in denying the fact that we might come from somewhere and have something that makes us who we are. You know, she doesn't want people to be, to be, be hypocritically able to just switch over into a new identity.
- [29:47]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Well, that's partly hard fact. I mean, you know, you could have said all you liked in 1930 that you, you, you'd married out or married in, you were assimilated and you didn't think of yourself as particularly Jewish and you hadn't been synagogue since you were five years old.
- [29:59]
John Plotz
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [30:00]
Lindsay Stonebridge
But didn't make it. You still end up in a death camp. So that she's a realist. Right. You know, the reality is.
- [30:05]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [30:05]
Lindsay Stonebridge
So it's not based on a kind of spongy notion identity. It's just this is the world as it is. But she's also.
- [30:12]
John Plotz
That's the pariah ness of Jewishness. Isn't it as well, like.
- [30:16]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Exactly, exactly. It's the. And she really, you know, believed in that. But what she didn't think is you could create nation states out of one national, ethnic or religious identity because that would prove disastrous and necessarily exclusionary and would only be able to be implemented by violence. So that's where she was. She was going with that. I mean, I love that essay, too. I mean, for. It's. She's such a good writer.
- [30:47]
John Plotz
Yes.
- [30:49]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Her control.
- [30:50]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [30:50]
Lindsay Stonebridge
And she's writing in her fourth, fifth language.
- [30:54]
John Plotz
Oh, that was written in English.
- [30:55]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah.
- [30:57]
John Plotz
No kidding.
- [30:57]
Lindsay Stonebridge
First. First one.
- [30:58]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [30:58]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah. It wasn't written. It was written for the Menorah Journal.
- [31:02]
John Plotz
Yeah. Right.
- [31:04]
Lindsay Stonebridge
And you can hear the German, because there are bits of syntax, and you can hear the irony. And you can hear the kind of doubling. So the doubling of the refugee being both in and out, which is the version of irony. Irony was always echoing a context which you were critical of. Right. She does it on every sentence. But she did actually. She says, you know, you have to tell the truth. When you realize that, you know, the Jews are in the vanguard of Europe insofar as they're the first to be persecuted. And if you think Nazism is going to stop there.
- [31:37]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [31:37]
Lindsay Stonebridge
And you haven't realized what Marxism has done to our concepts of plurality or democracy or even kind of liberal nation state. You haven't appreciated what's coming. She was damn right about that, too.
- [31:51]
John Plotz
Yeah. Yeah.
- [31:53]
Lindsay Stonebridge
No, it's incredible, that saying.
- [31:55]
John Plotz
Yeah. So maybe could we connect that to. I really love the discussion at the end of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Sorry, I have it on the brain. I just reread it. But there's a discussion of what it means for things to be crimes against humanity. She makes this correction, you know, she says that the German translation makes it sound like it's simply a crime against civility. Like you're being impolite, you're not being mentally. But she says, no, it's much deeper than that. It's a crime against our. Our shared humanness. But there is this trick, and this goes back to, you know, if they come for the Jews, then they could come for anyone. That the crimes have to be, you know, what's her line? If I'm accused as a Jew, then I have to answer as a Jew or something like that. Like, in other words, that the constituency is that we have a shared humanity. But if we're called out or interpolated as having an identity, it's not enough to just Run away from the identity. You have to somehow.
- [32:50]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Exactly. That's why she. She would. I mean, she was totally critical of. Not critical of a Jewish homeland at all, but totally critical of the nation state that became Israel. But she campaigned fearlessly, continually for a Jewish army during the Second World War. Because if you're being persecuted as a group, it doesn't go to say we're all the same, we're all human. Because that. Guess what, that doesn't work. You know, we can see it now and we could see it then. And she says, and I think in a phrase which I've never forgotten, she says, you know, the Holocaust was a crime against humanity committed on the body of the Jewish people.
- [33:25]
John Plotz
Okay, that's beautiful that I forgot that. That's wonderful. Yeah. Okay. Can you say more about that?
- [33:29]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, it's just.
- [33:30]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [33:30]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Well, what she means is it's a crime against plurality, which is the human condition. I mean, this is the whole thing. We're never going to be the same. We're always going to argue. People are always going to dislike each other. This is. Plurality is not easy. That's why we have politics to deal with it. Not in her view, social life. But, you know, this is what Nazism and versions of fascism do. They're not just crimes against one group, they're crimes against reality because the reality is the world is plural. Right. And that's what makes it so. I don't think what's. What makes genocide such an utterly obscene crime. It's a crime against everybody. Of course. It's actually a crime against most defenseless, vulnerable people because it's. The other bit of genocide is its absolute disregard for the rules of law and history and all those other things. Interestingly, she doesn't time against burrow.
- [34:28]
John Plotz
Yeah, I'm so sorry. I was just gonna say I thought this is where you're going. She doesn't really talk much about the genocide against homosexual. Is the genocide against the Roma as well. But I mean, I think she might mention. But. Right. I mean, it isn't just one category.
- [34:41]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, she does mention there are other groups, but I think the job she was sent to do was clearly a job on behalf of. For a Jewish perspective. She said, you know, I can't, I can't. She said to Carly, asterisk. I can't not go and look this walking disaster face in the face to face. I mean, remember. And I say in the book, they're only six months apart. Adolf Eichmann and Arendt, they come from Kind of weirdly similar middle class backgrounds. They're often kind of literally miles away from each other. Their fates are entangled, you know, for a long, long time. Narendra was one of the first, I think, to clock who he was and what he was doing. Yeah, the earliest 43, I think she knew what. Knew who he was and what he was.
- [35:29]
John Plotz
Yeah. To that point about her suspicion of Zionism, I feel like that's another thing that we just can't help seeing through the lens of 2025 and the lens of Gaza. But you know, like one of her most extreme formulations for that. And again, this is from the end of Eichmann that Jews have, quote, condemned the wave of coordination which passed over the German people in 33 and from one day to the next turned the Jews into pariahs. But is it conceivable that none of them ever asked himself how many of his own group would have done the same if only they had been allowed to. And, and then she goes on to say, but nonetheless, is their condemnation any less correct? And she's like, so her point is we're all susceptible to it. If I, if I understand her. I mean like once you have a crime against humanity that involves singling people out for their group identity, any group could then take up that charge.
- [36:22]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [36:29]
John Plotz
So how do we unpack that? How do we unpack the ethno nationalism of Israel today? Like how do we, you know, she has this, you know, she, it sounds as if Arendt says to Sholem when she's condemning him for using this phrase, the love of the Jewish people. She thinks love is a problem there. Right? Love in, in that sense, like love extending.
- [36:48]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, you should always say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean she's kind of joined a long liberal tradition here, but she's saying it's always love of the particular debate she had about bought with the debate she didn't have with Baldwin because he didn't write back there. Yeah. He later agreed with her when he, she read that letter to my nephew the far next time in yeah. 1962. And I think it was and is totally bowled over by this. I mean she's never read James Baldwin before and anyone who's never read James Baldwin before and then reads James Baldwin is going to go and go. What? Yeah, she's just, you know, I teach.
- [37:29]
John Plotz
That, I teach that in a, A class for returning citizens. So people just coming out of the prison system and it is, it is such an amazing discussion every time, you know, though he, Baldwin is Very pro. Love. I mean, he. He lands on. On love there.
- [37:43]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, he does. But she says to him, and the book is about love and about how white people can't love, and so they project all their vileness on. Onto. Onto black people. So she writes to us and just rather breathlessly, and they hadn't met, I think through Mary McCarthy, I think they'd met in Paris. And she said, well, I disagree though. I think once people get in power, whether they're black or Jewish or whoever, once love becomes, you know, a politics, then it's not the same thing. Pariah love is its own status. For her, pariah love is the love you want. What you don't want is the kind of the Robespierre love that says, you know, for the sake of pity, sake of love, we're going to murder them all. So this is what she's saying and Baldwin doesn't. She has a bit of a history of writing to really prominent African American writers who then don't write back to her.
- [38:39]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [38:42]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Ralph Ellison did the same. But he does say much later when he's in an interview, someone's saying, well, doesn't it. Doesn't your oppression sort of make you a better able person to see the world? And Baldwin in his kind of dawn of Attic, well, no, I don't actually need to go through this in order to. And then he quotes Hannah Wrange, who says, Hannah Rent says, I think she's absolutely, absolutely right. Once you get into power, all those pariah qualities go. So she does. She. He does agree with her in the end. And I can kind of see, I kind of go two ways with that. But certainly a love of a people was anathema to her. Yeah, World is something else. The love of her lovers, her friends. My God, she was a good friend. Yeah, something else. And never the particular. But.
- [39:29]
John Plotz
But it's an odd. I mean, it's the same oddity that runs through human condition, right, with the question of the. The personal, the social and the political. Like it's that. That love can exist on that larger scale and it can exist on the smaller scale. What you were saying, the friendships, the loyalty, even the poetry that she wrote, you know, that, that, that. But. But it's the in between space that she had a problem. I mean, or so she did.
- [39:56]
Lindsay Stonebridge
I mean, that's why, you know, she. The. The essay on Little Rock where she got things falling late. Yeah, totally. Truly, I meant to say actually wrong, because she was. She said, I saw myself and those rat children and children should have nothing to do with politics. Children should not be putting that kind of social space where they're major representing says, you have no idea.
- [40:24]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [40:24]
Lindsay Stonebridge
That, you know, black children are already in that space. They don't get the option. It's not like, you know, there's another space which is already protected. That that's why these kids are putting themselves and continue to put themselves on the line. And she actually wrote back to him and said, actually, I think you're. I think you're actually right and you are getting something.
- [40:41]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [40:42]
Lindsay Stonebridge
But I, I mean, I do disagree with her profoundly on that. I also think it's a kind of. I think it needs to be called for racism because that's what it is. Because there's a profound lack of curiosity about finding out about Little Rock. Lack of curiosity in Elizabeth. I think Fred Moten, who's one of the best readers of Kant and the notion of common sense going. When he says, you know, Arendt simply didn't see Elizabeth Eckford. And that's quite strong when you think about what Arendt is for, which is about visibility and particularity and being. And she didn't. She just saw another black girl and decided to project whatever she wanted onto that girl.
- [41:20]
John Plotz
Yeah. And I think, Lindsay, I feel like I haven't been praising your book enough as we go, but I really hope folks read that the race chapter, which is really wonderful and one of the. It opens up by saying to think about race alongside Hannah Arendt often, often also means thinking against her. And I think you just, you sort of played that out here. But it's just want to make sure I get the number of the. Oh, yeah, one page. Yeah. Chapter. Chapter five. But so I hope, I hope people will turn to that. And I really appreciated you're also bringing up her vociferousness about miscegenation laws like that. She was that there. She landed on the right side of history there. She could recognize the problem because it's about love on the personal level.
- [42:00]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, you know, the fact that she. White liberals from New York were fussy, were, you know, complaining for degrees, segregated schools, were saying nothing about the missing nation laws in the south. And she does it again at the beginning of Eichmann in Jerusalem. One of the most shocking passages when she says it was a bit rich. Listen to the prosecution talk about the Nuremberg laws when the present day Israeli laws.
- [42:25]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [42:28]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Explicitly discriminate against the children of mixed marriages.
- [42:31]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [42:33]
Lindsay Stonebridge
You could just sort of, you see people. So. Yeah. I mean, because that's an attack on the human condition. It's an attack on love. And I kind of think it goes back to your point about her division between private, social and the political and the human condition. I struggled with that for years and I think, and certainly in Little Rock, she's wrong. But on the other hand, the more we go on, the more I have a kind of. I think, think the time for a radical defensive privacy is now. Because social media has meant that the only people, everyone has to pull their heart. No one has no privacy. We don't have any privacy. We're expected from our sociality endlessly. Whether it's identity politics or social media or in our thinking, there's limited space. The only people who have any bloody privacy are the, you know, the big guys and the politicians and the tech kings.
- [43:26]
John Plotz
Right.
- [43:27]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Who don't have to share their tax receipts, who don't have a total private life. And also most of us are kind of like, you know, most of our private lives are being harvested and weapon and monetized for their profit. It's extraordinary. Yeah, about that.
- [43:42]
John Plotz
Yeah. And I was thinking about the debate that goes on now about the masking of ICE agents. You know, because we hit on university campuses, we have these fights about whether students are allowed to wear masks or not because they're basically trying to protect their privacy because they know that their rights are not being respected. Respected. But there is a huge precedent in the US and I would assume it's true in most other countries as well, about the masking of officers, which is being blown through now. So they're like. In other words, the very specific carve out for privacy there is simply so that agents of the government can be treated as nothing more than extensions of the government. Like they can be treated as faceless minions. Like, that is the privacy that we can be accorded now is the right to be a faceless minion. And that is. That's a terrifying turn.
- [44:30]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, exactly. And not nearly so cute as the real minions we would love to be in charge of.
- [44:35]
John Plotz
I would take them.
- [44:36]
Lindsay Stonebridge
I would take anyone at this point.
- [44:38]
John Plotz
But yeah, it's certainly true.
- [44:40]
Lindsay Stonebridge
And I don't think it would be tolerated in France or Britain. I mean, it's so. I mean, God, I hope I'm right. And it. And the way it is tolerated is sort of, from where we are, more than chilling.
- [44:59]
John Plotz
Yeah. And, you know, I complete the point just to pick up your point about the sanctioned degradation of privacy. Like, I think maybe it's a slightly more optimistic take of it, but I Actually, see, even in. I don't know how much you teach, like, very contemporary literature, but I teach Sally Rooney sometimes. And Sally Rooney is seen as like the queen of the text and the email or, you know, the inhabitant of that social mediation. But I don't think that's what Rooney is doing at all. She's actually really interested in how you have to carve out spaces of intimacy even within that flow. Like, in other words, it's not like the old have their privacy and then we young realize we don't need it anymore. We're permanently televised. You know, that's not what the horror in Rooney or in A Black Mirror episode is about. That's about people trying to take steps to reclaim that. Do you know what I mean? Like it.
- [45:49]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah. The other. The other book I'd really recommend because it was one of the few books that to first use reuse the word totalitarianism in the 20th century, is Anna Burns is the Milk Room, which is another book set in Ireland. And it's a book about reading during the Troubles.
- [46:04]
John Plotz
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [46:06]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Book about the power of walking, the crime of walking by reading.
- [46:11]
John Plotz
Yeah. We literally talk about that in almost every episode, by the way.
- [46:17]
Lindsay Stonebridge
So you have to get Anna Burns.
- [46:20]
John Plotz
I have asked her. I have asked her, but she's. She's a private person to her credit.
- [46:25]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [46:26]
John Plotz
Can I just follow down this rabbit hole one further step to think about the argument that Arendt makes in On Revolution where she sort of puts the American Revolution on the side of the good guys because they don't go for love as the basis of their politics. And I won't say she throws the French Revolution under the bus, but, like, that's the basis of her suspicion of the French Revolution is not so much that it's about hate, because you can easily imagine a critique of the French Revolution which is just about hatred and murder. But it's not that. It's a critique of, you know, an excess of sociability. Like that they are that. That once you are. Once you open yourself up to love as the basis for politics, you might as well have hate as well.
- [47:12]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think she still saw, although she thought it was rapidly going, that the thing that she liked about the Founding Fathers, who she did. Mythologized. Crazy.
- [47:22]
John Plotz
Yes.
- [47:23]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Was the recognition of reality. So you needed. So if I. Something comes into my voice, I say this. You needed checks and balances. You needed to distinguish the executive and other things which have, you know, are proving as she is suspected, as you Know, at times, Nixon, Watergate, and then the Pentagon Papers were already proven to be, shall we say, fragile because she said that the big lie. The big lie wasn't just, you know, a lie. The big lie was America was America itself. It was the idea that America was the greatest democracy. That was Vietnam going on with. With race rights going on at the time, that America was just wonderful. We just needed to course correct, which is. That was the big. The big lie. America's like having a fantasy of itself. Then it believed it and then it forgot all these sort of things you really need to battle down because actually it's a very violent country, was founded on violence.
- [48:18]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [48:19]
Lindsay Stonebridge
And so what you really need is a kind of a politics which is not based on emotion, which is going to be slightly tedious in order to check that. And she did. At the end of her life, she's America. You always would have made the chickens come home to roost. And we remember, don't we, that Biden votes her for Oscar. A copy of her speech.
- [48:39]
John Plotz
Yeah. That is an amazing detail. I'm so glad you brought that out in the book. Yeah. I did not know that.
- [48:46]
Lindsay Stonebridge
She said something that Samantha Rose Hill found out when she was doing her archive work. And you kind of think, I don't think he read it attentively enough, or maybe he should have gone back to. To it.
- [48:57]
John Plotz
But I do. I also really like your point that. I mean, it's been years since I read Origins of Totalitarianism. But, you know, following your account, that, you know, the legacy, it's not that we can blame the British Empire for Nazism directly, but the legacy of the racism that runs through Nazism and leads to genocide is already there in the imperial practice of the European nations. And that Arendt had a bit of a blind spot about how much that was in American practice as well, which is. Which is odd in a way, because America seems so much an extension of the logic, you know, the settler colonial logic of the French and British.
- [49:36]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Well, Du Bois made this point, you know, brilliantly, eloquently. And she read him, she didn't read him carefully. He said, it's absolute rubbish to say that America is not tainted by colonialism and imperialism. Yeah, like this. And then just focus on the slave trade, which she says, what is America's original crime, as is the genocide of. Of Native Americans. But, you know, and, but she won't put the two together. She's determined to have them in sort of like slightly different buckets because she, you know, if one answer to Colonialism, imperialism was the French Revolution and then made things work. The other answer to slavery might still be in America. So she actually can't put them close enough together to see how, as Du Bois said, utterly intermeshed those two things which would have, you know, implications for American so called innocence.
- [50:35]
John Plotz
Yeah, it's interesting, like, yeah, so early on she's willing to describe, doesn't she drive America as like something you're politically free but socially a slave. So like from the beginning she's aware of this one dark side, but she's not aware of that, that other implication.
- [50:54]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But she's always one quote I like as well because she's a real big believer in associations and community politics and small politics and actually the European, when I first came to America, blew my mind how people line up to have their word. I just love this because it doesn't happen. Hierarchies for like everything and class is very, very, very deep. But I, but I do think she also found, you know, the conformity would be. The conformity, in a way, was the thing that kept everything in checks. You've got so much freedom.
- [51:26]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [51:27]
Lindsay Stonebridge
But the conformative would be the thing that would actually, you know, because you look at the queue of people, you think, why they all look. Why have they all got the same haircut? So she could see that.
- [51:41]
John Plotz
But I think speaking as somebody, speaking of somebody, a child of immigrants named John married to a woman named Lisa. If you were born in 1967, your son was named John, your daughter was named Lisa. She has the same middle name as her sister. They're, you know, Iranian immigrants.
- [51:56]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah. Lisa Ann and Lillian Lindsay with the Stein hidden in the surname.
- [52:03]
John Plotz
Yeah. No, she says, and Arendt has this line, I think this is around the freedom of becoming a citizen without having to pay the price of assimilation. I hope I'm right. That's her.
- [52:12]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [52:13]
John Plotz
Not but. Or is it you paraphrasing her? But it's in any case like that, that.
- [52:19]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Yeah, but isn't that such a great idea?
- [52:21]
John Plotz
I mean, it's such a night. It is, yeah. It's a great idea. Isn't it lovely to think so. Exactly. Well, you've already mentioned Milkman Lindsay, so maybe we should give you a pass on this. But as we near the end of the show, we always like to close with a recallable book, which means another book that didn't really come up today that might appeal to readers if they liked this. And obviously on some level, you know, you've mentioned a Dozen wonderful Arendt books and essays for us. But is there any other book that comes to mind that you want to. That you want to plug to. To listeners?
- [52:58]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Actually, there's a book that's coming out. I've been privileged enough to read the Proofs by Leah E. P. Which is YPI Oh, I loved her memoir. Exactly. And it's called Indignity. And the reason I mention this book is that Leah is a Kantian as much as Arendt is. Yeah, she's a Kantian with a deep politics as much as aren't. So I always think of in a kind of conversation. But she's also such a good writer. This is, this is a book which is about her Albanian family set in mid century Europe just as the European nation state is. The bit that Arendt talks about in the middle of Origins of Totalitarianism is imploding. And what Lee EPI does is. She's a writer. She's a philosopher, political philosopher who thinks by writing. I haven't read anyone is good at doing this since like.
- [53:56]
John Plotz
Yeah.
- [53:57]
Lindsay Stonebridge
Putting philosophy into writing. Baldwin does it beautifully. George Eliot does it beautifully. Yeah, Check out Indignity. It's a. It's a book about the last century, but it's very much a book for our times.
- [54:09]
John Plotz
Oh, that sounds great. All right, well I'm going to make an improbable counterpoint to that. Not, not refutation, counterpoint, compliment, which is that I recently reread Howards End and I. I'm not holding up E.M. forster as a great philosopher, but I do think he is philosophizing. That is, he's thinking about this problem of how to go on being an individual in this rapidly modernizing and changing imperial London. And he does. Yeah, he puts his ideas into characters in ways that, you know, that Elliot does as well. And I love that about him. So. Yeah, it was just.
- [54:50]
Lindsay Stonebridge
He's talking about a similar moment. Yeah, I mean it's what happens when individualism crushes everything as it did at the end of the 19th century and turned into fascism. What neoliberalism has done is a repetition of that with kind of like drones and the Internet attitude.
- [55:05]
John Plotz
Yeah, no, that's exactly, exactly. I mean like Mr. Wilcox being like the. Not exactly the cutting edge of the Imperial and India Rubber Company Company, but like the Imperial and Africa Rubber Company. Excuse me. But he's like the, he's the hidden edge and then the cutting edge is somewhere out of sight. But you're, you're reckoning with its costs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Well, Lindsay, thank you so much for the time and thanks for the book. Wonderful book. I hope everybody reads it. And yeah, from all of us, recall this book. Thank you and and thanks for listening. Recall this book is the creation of John Plotz and Elizabeth Ferry. Sound editing is by Kamiyah Bagla, and music comes from a song by Eric Chaslow and Barbara Cassidy. We gratefully acknowledge support from Brandeis University and its Mandel center for the Humanities. We always want to hear from you with your comments, criticisms, or suggestions for future episodes. Finally, if you enjoyed today's show, please forward it to five people or write a review and rate us wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.