Readers of Seyla Benhabib’s review of my book Heidegger’s Children (“Taking Ideas Seriously,” December 2002/January 2003) might reasonably conclude that I wrote a book entirely on Hannah Arendt, on whom Benhabib almost exclusively focuses. In doing so she misrepresents the book, which also discusses lapsed Heidegger disciples such as Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and New Left prophet Herbert Marcuse, all of whom had a significant, at times dramatic, intellectual impact and influence on two continents. The book also contains the first sustained discussion of a 1934 lecture course in which Heidegger articulated his own views concerning the philosophical import and substance of the Nazi Revolution. But this chapter, too, is wholly left out of account.

Benhabib’s misrepresentation would be less troubling if she actually engaged the substantive historical and theoretical issues that occupy center stage in my treatment of Arendt’s legacy in Heidegger’s Children. But she does not, and so I propose here to revisit three of those central themes: democracy, assimilation, and Zionism.

I

The Arendt chapter in Heidegger’s Children was intended as a skeptical treatment of Hannah Arendt’s importance for contemporary democratic theory. During the mid-1990s Arendt’s star rose again as political philosophers in Germany and the United States sought to invoke her legacy in their search for a “Third Way” between liberal democracy and a defunct communism. The turn to Arendt seemed promising to some because of suggestive remarks—scattered throughout Arendt’s works, though never systematically elaborated—about the potential of worker’s councils and local democracy as vehicles of “political authenticity.”

What always struck me as odd about this Arendt renaissance was that Arendt had never staked a claim to be a person of the left. Indeed, as a Heidegger student, she had never made a secret of her hostility to Marx and the Frankfurt School. But she was suddenly being celebrated as a potential savior of a somewhat disoriented postmodern left, reeling from the events of 1989. Heidegger’s Children provides a cautionary response to this appropriation. I tried to show how deeply her political thought had been influenced by the aristocratic biases of the German mandarin tradition in which she was trained. Her classic work The Human Condition is organized around the triad of labor, work, and action. Action, a manifestation of political authenticity, seems to be reserved for a self-ascribed political elite. A similar political outlook is expressed in On Revolution (1963), which excoriates the democratic breakthroughs of the French Revolution insofar as such advances fostered the rise of “mass society,” which in Arendt’s view facilitated the triumph of Nazism. (Arendt follows a familiar, arch-conservative explanation for the rise of Nazism, conceiving it as an outgrowth of modern democracy). “The political way of life never has been and never will be the way of the many,” declares Arendt. And she concludes the book by recommending the abrogation of universal suffrage in order to ensure the privileges of the aforementioned political elite: “To be sure, such an ‘aristocratic’ form of government would spell the end of general suffrage as we understand it today; for only those who as voluntary members of an ‘elementary republic’ have demonstrated that they care for more than their private happiness and are concerned about the state of the world would have the right to be heard in the conduct of business of the republic.”

My criticisms of Arendt’s political theory in Heidegger’s Children were intended as a caveat to those seeking to appropriate her doctrines naively or unwittingly. Benhabib simply never engages with this basic point.

II

In Heidegger’s Children I express the view, espoused by many cultured German Jews, that by actively shedding their Jewishness, they had become 100 percent German or echt deutsch—a fallacious self-understanding that quickly unraveled with the Nazis’ electoral successes of 1930–33. Benhabib seizes upon these remarks, condemns me for making them, and bizarrely insinuates that because I discuss the “false consciousness” of assimilated German Jewry, I must be an unthinking Zionist.

In no way did I propose a blanket rejection of assimilationism—a claim that, given my own biography, would have been entirely hypocritical. Instead, my criticisms were directed against the ethos of total assimilation—at times bordering on Jewish self-hatred—that characterized the attitudes of a particular generation of assimilated German Jews.

Citing a long passage in which I speculate about Heidegger’s influence on Arendt’s understanding of German-Jewish relations, Benhabib slurs my interpretation as “psychobabble.” But the passage she cites never appeared in Heidegger’s Children. Instead, it was drawn from a review essay I had written seven years earlier on Elzbieta Ettinger’s book, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger. In the book Benhabib was supposed to be reviewing I make quite clear what I meant in adverting to Heidegger’s powerful influence on Arendt. For her, Heidegger and his philosophy represented a profound existential “choice” (Entscheidung) for German Geist. During the 1920s, this constituted Arendt’s own elective identity. In the ensuing years, it endured two harsh rebuffs: at Heidegger’s own hands, when he broke off their affair and sent her to study in Heidelberg with Jaspers; and then again in 1933, when the majority of her countrymen (and many of her fellow philosophers, including Heidegger himself) opted for Hitler. Thus, like Heidegger’s other Jewish “children” and almost all high-born, assimilated German Jews, Arendt found herself caught in a cultural no-man’s-land between her adoptive German identity and her own repressed Jewishness. I will not repeat all the intricate details here, because the general conclusion strikes me as hardly controversial .

Benhabib also accuses me of a “willingness to settle for half-truths” for claiming that “Arendt is ‘spiteful and insensitive’ in raising the Kastner issue” in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Once again, however, I’m not sure what book Benhabib is reviewing, since nowhere in Heidegger’s Children is the Kastner affair mentioned! Moreover, in the passage in question, I criticize Arendt not for raising the issue of “Jewish collaboration,” as Benhabib misleadingly insinuates, but for the trademark, aristocratic condescension with which she views Jewish suffering at the time of the Holocaust:

At times, Arendt’s insensitivity to the dimensions of the Jewish tragedy was striking. In a spirit of German-Jewish arrogance, she would describe Eichmann’s Israeli prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, as “a Galician Jew [who] . . . speaks without periods or commas . . . like a diligent schoolboy who wants to show off everything he knows . . . ghetto mentality”— the ultimate slight from a high-born Jew. She imprudently referred to the Berlin Jewish leader Leo Baeck (the head of the Reichsvereinigung der deutschen Juden) as the “Jewish Führer,” characterized Eichmann as a “convert to Judaism,” claimed that Jewish cooperation “was of course the cornerstone of everything he [Eichmann] did,” and, on countless occasions, stooped to compare the nationalist aspirations of Zionism and National Socialism —thereby suggesting a macabre equation of victims and perpetrators. Her suggestion that in the 1930s the Zionists and Nazis shared a common vision and worked hand-in-hand—at one point, she went so far as to describe the 1930s as Nazism’s “pro-Zionist period”—seemed spiteful and insensitive.

Benhabib also raises the issue of Arendt’s vehement rejection of the 1942 Biltmore declaration, which, as news concerning the Final Solution came to light, argued for a Jewish state. Arendt, of course, strongly favored a binational Arab-Jewish federation. In light of the current tragic impasse in the Middle East, a binational solution clearly has a Utopian desirability for left-leaning Jews everywhere, myself included. Benhabib believes that Arendt was preternaturally clairvoyant in this regard, claiming that the philosopher “saw very early that the price of the declaration of a Jewish state in Palestine would be the disenfranchisement of Palestinian Arabs.”

As an argument from principle, Arendt’s position—albeit, articulated from the safe haven of New York while Eastern European Jews were dying by the millions—appears flawless. If one considers the sordid realities of Arab-Jewish relations of the day, however, the situation looks slightly different. For while Jews were wringing their hands at the Biltmore Hotel, the Palestinians’ spiritual and political leader, mufti of Jerusalem and president of the Supreme Muslim Council Haj-Amin al-Husseini, was colluding with Hitler in Berlin and cheering the Nazis on to victory. In 1941, with German support, he and his associates successfully engineered a coup in Iraq, the first stage of an intended pro-Axis, pan-Arab political movement that aimed at a worldwide “final solution” to the Jewish question. Later that year, when the mufti and his allies were expelled from Iraq by a British expeditionary force, his followers took revenge by initiating a pogrom in which six hundred Baghdad Jews were murdered. Returning to Europe, the mufti successfully lobbied Nazi allies that had demonstrated a certain receptiveness to the idea of Jewish emigration (including Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Italy) to prevent their Jews from leaving. In this way, he made his own far from inconsiderable contribution to the Nazi Endlösung.

Like Benhabib, then, I find Arendt’s idea of a binational solution to the Arab-Israeli dispute philosophically attractive. Whether or not in 1942, amid the furor and tumult of genocide and world war, it was remotely feasible is another question entirely.

IV

Seyla Benhabib’s declared intention in writing her review was to defend the “integrity of philosophy.” But what she really offers is an inflexible defense of her own “investment” in Hannah Arendt. Through a combination of misinterpretation and dismissiveness she aims to fend off any criticism of Arendt. Benhabib says—in that same peremptory tone that she adopts throughout the review—that “Wolin evades the hard issues and demonstrates how not to use context in judging the validity of ideas.” But one suspects that she takes issue with my use of “context” merely because it risks portraying her philosophical idol in a less than flattering light.

Richard Wolin
Distinguished Professor of History
and Comparative Literature
The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Seyla Benhabib replies:

Richard Wolin says that readers of my review of Heidegger’s Children “might reasonably conclude” that the book is “entirely on Hannah Arendt.” Only careless readers. I not only list all the other thinkers he wrote about but comment explicitly on his chapters about Karl Löwith and Herbert Marcuse. I focused on Arendt, because she is the perfect test case for Wolin’s theses. Wolin argues that Arendt, Löwith, Marcuse, and Hans Jonas were “non-Jewish Jews who thought of themselves as proverbial ‘Germans of Jewish origin.’” Furthermore, under Heidegger’s influence “ all accepted, willy nilly, a series of deep-seated prejudices concerning the nature of political modernity—democracy, liberalism, individual rights, and so forth—that made it very difficult to accept a meaningful theoretical standpoint in the postwar world.” (Emphasis added.)

Focusing on Arendt I showed that Wolin’s theses were too broad to be useful and self-contradictory. Wolin on the one hand defends modern liberal democracies; but by blaming these thinkers for “inauthentic Jewish existence” he refuses to see that modernity permits varieties of Jewishness. He concedes as much in his reply by suggesting that he does not reject assimilation but rather “the ethos of total assimilation.” But while that phrase plausibly applies to Löwith, who converted to Christianity, it does not apply to Arendt and Jonas, who were sympathetic to Zionism after meeting the Zionist leader Kurt Blumenthal in Heidelberg in the mid-1920s. And obviously not to Marcuse, who found a home on the left in the 1930s and for whom the Jewish question, rightly or wrongly, became identical with the question of socialist emancipation. Indeed, only Arendt reflects in a sustained way on Jewish identity and politics, yet it is for her that Wolin reserves such venomous phrases as “Jewish self-hatred.” Wolin complains that I quote from his earlier reviews of Arendt’s correspondence with Martin Heidegger and Heinrich Blücher. But he has never retracted his words, so I do not understand the objection. Moreover, he is unrepentant and writes in his reply that “Arendt found herself caught in a cultural no-man’s-land between her adoptive German identity and her own repressed Jewishness.”

Following his habit of attacking a thinker’s motives rather than addressing the merits of arguments, Wolin accuses me of criticizing his views because they “risk portraying her philosophical idol in a less flattering light.” Readers may judge for themselves whether there is any such idolatry in my book on The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. I criticize Wolin, rather, for his careless reading of texts, sweeping psychological generalizations, and superficial views on political philosophy.

For example, Wolin cites Arendt’s concluding reflections in On Revolution as proof that Arendt is an antidemocract who advocates the abolition of universal suffrage. Here Arendt is discussing the transformation of politics into a media-driven business; she juxtaposes the true political elite of the lost revolutionary tradition to party bosses and Madison-Avenue style-word and image spinners. “The trouble . . . is that politics has become a profession and a career, and the elite therefore is being chosen according to standards and criteria which are themselves profoundly unpolitical. . . . With respect to the elementary councils that sprang up wherever people lived or worked together, one is tempted to say that they had selected themselves; those who organized themselves were those who cared and those who took the initiative . . .” (On Revolution.) She concludes by remarking,“It would be tempting to spin out further the potentialities of the councils . . .”

Wolin interprets this meditation on the lost treasure of revolutions not as a hypothetical about missed political opportunities but as a prescription for abolishing universal suffrage. He does not mention the council tradition and its significance for democratic theory. I disagree with Arendt’s stark juxtaposition of participatory to representative democratic institutions, but Wolin’s simplistic reading of her views as expressing Heideggerian antimodernism is misguided.

According to Wolin, Arendt’s views on Zionism and the binational state were “articulated from the safe haven of New York while Eastern European Jews were dying by the millions.” Wolin fails to mention that Arendt and her husband had barely made it to New York in 1940, after she had been interned in the south of France. Nor does he add that Arendt was not naïve enough to trust either the British or the Palestinian Arabs and believed that it was necessary for the Yishuv to defend itself. She hoped, against hope, that the Kibbutz movement could spark a reconciliation with the Palestinian Arabs within the framework of a Mediterranean peace plan in which a Jewish-Arab federation in Palestine would take its place (“Zionism Reconsidered,” 1945). Was this vision Utopian? Certainly. Was it irresponsible? Hardly.

Finally, the claim that Arendt explained totalitarianism as an outgrowth of modern democracy is utterly wrong. For Arendt mass society, which created the “superfluous man,” was one of the elements of totalitarianism, but mass society and modern democracy are not identical. But this distinction may be too fine for Wolin who always judges the merits of arguments in the light of some undisclosed ulterior motive of the author.