Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship - by Jon Nixon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

For Hannah Arendt, friendship had political relevance and importance. The essence of friendship, she believed, consisted in discourse, and it is only through discourse, she argued, that the world is rendered humane.

This book explores some of the key ideas in Hannah Arendt's work through a study of four lifelong friendships -- with Heinrich Blücher, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Mary McCarthy. The book draws on correspondence from both sides, illuminating our understanding of the social contexts within which Arendt's thinking developed and was clarified. It offers a cultural history of ideas: shedding light on two core ideas in Arendt - of 'plurality' and 'promise', and on how those particular ideas emerged through a particular set of relationships, at a significant moment in the history of the West.

This book offers an original and accessible 'way in' to Arendt's work for students and scholars of politics, philosophy, intellectual history and literature.

Review Quotes

"In this rich and thoroughly compelling book, Jon Nixon presents a fascinating, eloquent and inspiring account of the centrality of friendship and politics to Arendt's life as well as her thought. This book is a pure pleasure to read." --Patrick Hayden, Professor of Political Theory and International Relations, University of St. Andrews, UK

"In his newest book Jon Nixon provides a profound analysis of Hannah Arendt's notion of friendship as it relates to her conception of politics. Uniting Arendt's life and work, the author presents an engaging defence of participatory democracy and its building blocks, deliberation and reciprocity." --Niilo Kauppi, Research Professor at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France

"Jon Nixon's forensic examination of friendship through the life and work of Hannah Arendt demonstrates the importance of historical context in understanding ideas and actions. The combination of a fascinating subject and elegant, profound writing makes this book a joy to read." --Bob Adamson, Professor and Head of the Department of International Education and Lifelong Learning, Hong Kong Institute of Education, China

"Though friendship as a condition for human existence seems to gain increasing attention both in the mass and social media, and by scholars from the humanities, our modern notion of friendship as a private or intimate relation still dominates. Jon Nixon's insightful study of the friendships of Hannah Arendt and her political thinking is a long needed correction to this view. Nixon demonstrates how and why Arendt developed not a 'philosophy of friendship' but a practical and reflexive politics of friendship. She lived and was sustained by the friendships she maintained throughout her life with a plurality of individuals, the closest whom we come to know through Nixon's careful analysis of Arendt's close relationships with Heidegger 'the fox' as she called him, with philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, author and critic Mary McCarthy, and with her second husband Heinrich Blucher, an activist and educator. Arendt's political thinking was tightly connected, Nixon shows, to her idea of the essential role of friendship in non-totalitarian societies to bridge the public and the private: Friendship, recognising both equality and differences, is allied to politics, not as a way of doing it, but as a condition necessary for the survival of a politics that Arendt envisions as a mutual dialogical understanding that exists between friends and that forms the moral bases of political action. Nixon timely combines historical context, political thinking, and a discerning understanding of Arendt the person to come up with a captivating story about the life of one of the great minds of the twentieth century, and new beginning for thinking about the politics of friendship." --Claus Emmeche, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for the Philosophy of Nature and Science Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

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