Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin

Seyla Benhabib

Published by Princeton University Press 2018

Exile, Statelessness, and Migration

Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin

Seyla Benhabib

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691184234

Overview
Contents

About this book

An examination of the intertwined lives and writings of a group of prominent twentieth-century Jewish thinkers who experienced exile and migration

Exile, Statelessness, and Migration explores the intertwined lives, careers, and writings of a group of prominent Jewish intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century—in particular, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Hirschman, and Judith Shklar, as well as Hans Kelsen, Emmanuel Levinas, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss. Informed by their Jewish identity and experiences of being outsiders, these thinkers produced one of the most brilliant and effervescent intellectual movements of modernity.

Political philosopher Seyla Benhabib’s starting point is that these thinkers faced migration, statelessness, and exile because of their Jewish origins, even if they did not take positions on specifically Jewish issues personally. The sense of belonging and not belonging, of being “eternally half-other,” led them to confront essential questions: What does it mean for the individual to be an equal citizen and to wish to retain one’s ethnic, cultural, and religious differences, or perhaps even to rid oneself of these differences altogether in modernity? Benhabib isolates four themes in their works: dilemmas of belonging and difference; exile, political voice, and loyalty; legality and legitimacy; and pluralism and the problem of judgment.

Surveying the work of influential intellectuals, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration recovers the valuable plurality of their Jewish voices and develops their universal insights in the face of the crises of this new century.

Author / Editor information

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University. Her many books have been translated into more than fourteen languages, and include Dignity in Adversity, The Rights of Others, and The Claims of Culture (Princeton).

Reviews

“This impressive book focuses on a group of important twentieth-century Jewish refugees and exiles and makes a powerful case that they continue to speak eloquently to some timely political and philosophical issues. Benhabib, one of the world’s preeminent scholars of twentieth-century political thought, offers insightful readings of these figures as well as sympathetic but critical engagements with contemporary authors.”—William E. Scheuerman, Indiana University

“Examining key aspects of German-Jewish thought in the twentieth century, this incisive and lucid book traces affinities and difference in the lives and work of intellectuals confronting the pressures of exile, statelessness, and migration. I learned a great deal about this generation of thinkers and about ways we need to consider the political challenges of our time. A pleasure to read.”—Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Chapter Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xiii
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xv
Intertwined Lives and Themes among Jewish Exiles Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Equality and Difference: Human Dignity and Popular Sovereignty in the Mirror of Political Modernity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	9
The Elusiveness of the Particular: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	34
Whose Trial? Adolf Eichmann’s or Hannah Arendt’s? The Eichmann Controversy Revisited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	61
Ethics Without Normativity and Politics without Historicity: On Judith Butler’s Parting ways. Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	80
From the “Right to Have Rights” to the “Critique of Humanitarian Reason” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	101
Legalism and Its Paradoxes in Judith Shklar’s Work Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	125
Exile and Social Science on Albert Hirschman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
Isaiah Berlin: A Judaism between Decisionism and Pluralism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	164
Conclusion: The Universal and the Particular. Then and Now Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	185
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	249
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	271