'Arendt Corrections: Judith Shklar’s Critique of Hannah Arendt' by Hannes Bajohr in (2021) 5 Arendt Studies 87–119 comments
Judith Shklar wrote about Hannah Arendt throughout her career. However, her nuanced readings are often ignored by schol- ars who prefer to depict both philosophers as stark counter-images. In this paper, I offer a more complex comparison on the basis of all of Shklar’s writings about Arendt. Shklar’s critique is grounded in what she sees as the Romantic strand in Arendt’s thought, which she identifies with a metaphysical, elitist, and aestheticizing stance towards politics, a distaste for modernity, and a nostalgia for Greek antiquity. For Shklar, this position comes to the fore both in what she believes to be Arendt’s purely therapeutic notion of revolution as well as the rejection of her own Jewish identity. Nevertheless, Shklar also admired Arendt’s insights about exile and her appreciation of Kant. Through her sustained critique of Arendt, Shklar developed her own conception of a realist, rights-affirming, and anti-metaphysical liberalism.
Seyla Benhabib once wrote that Judith Shklar read Hannah Arendt “against the grain on so many issues” that the former’s relationship to the latter warrants its own study. This essay is not such a study, which may require a whole book, but it tries to provide a lay of the land. It is mo- tivated not only by Benhabib’s observation but also by my own impression that most any text dealing with Shklar will inevitably turn to a comparison with Arendt. Yet this is rarely to develop Shklar’s reading of Arendt, but rather to construct both thinkers either as biographical twins or as philosophical counter-images. In this essay, I will first demonstrate this tendency by example of Dana Villa’s pitting Shklar against Arendt in the two philosophers’ assessments of a highest evil. Against what I believe is a reductionist reading, I suggest that Shklar was not simply Arendt’s counter-image, but that similarities persist, and that she made alterations and corrections to some of what appeared to her the more egregious of Arendt’s shortcomings. In the second section, I turn to Shklar’s intellectual socialization in the shadow of one of Arendt’s most important concepts, totalitarianism, which Shklar soon began to reject. I discuss Shklar’s first and already fundamental attack on Arendt in her debut After Utopia, where Arendt is grouped with her teachers Heidegger and Jaspers as belonging to an apolitical, snobbish, and aestheticizing “romanticism of defeat.” That Arendt was not very fussy when it came to historical facts but more interested in heroizing the past, Shklar noted more than once; in the fourth section, I look at her critique of Arendt’s moral taste for classical antiquity, and in the fifth at her incomplete and, in Shklar’s eyes, in the end purely therapeutic, but not political, view of revolution. The sixth section is devoted to Shklar’s strong, and at times excessive, reaction to Eichmann in Jerusalem that saw in it a self-renunciation of Jewish identity. I conclude with a look at the last text Shklar wrote on Arendt, a short but relatively conciliatory review of Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy.
