Politics for Everybody: Reading Hannah Arendt in Uncertain Times

by Ned O'Gorman

In this age of nearly unprecedented partisan rancor, you’d be forgiven for thinking we could all do with a smaller daily dose of politics. In his provocative and sharp book, however, Ned O’Gorman argues just the opposite: Politics for Everybody contends that what we really need to do is engage more deeply with politics, rather than chuck the whole thing out the window. In calling for a purer, more humanistic relationship with politics—one that does justice to the virtues of open, honest exchange—O’Gorman draws on the work of Hannah Arendt (1906–75). As a German-born Jewish thinker who fled the Nazis for the United States, Arendt set out to defend politics from its many detractors along several key lines: the challenge of separating genuine politics from distorted forms; the difficulty of appreciating politics for what it is; the problems of truth and judgment in politics; and the role of persuasion in politics. O’Gorman’s book offers an insightful introduction to Arendt’s ideas  for anyone who wants to think more carefully

Genres: Politics

192 pages, Paperback

Published March 16, 2020

About the author

Edward Charles O'Gorman was born on September 26, 1929 in New York City. He spent most of his early life in Southport, Connecticut, and Bradford, Vermont. In 1950, he graduated from St. Michael's College in Vermont and later received an M.A. from Columbia University.

His poetry earned him Guggenheim Fellowships in 1956 and 1962 and in 1958 he won the Lamont Poetry Award for his collection of poems, The Night of the Hammer.

He was the literary editor of the Catholic magazine Jubilee from 1962 to 1965. He was appointed by the U.S. State Department to be the American studies specialist in Chile, Argentina and Brazil in 1965. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. He later received the Rothko Chapel Award for Commitment to Truth and Freedom.

In July 1966, he arrived in Harlem and worked that summer as a volunteer teacher in a Head Start program. The children's library he started two months later gradually became a tuition-free school known as The Children's Storefront, welcoming all children living in the area.

After losing a dispute over succession at the Storefront, he founded the Ricardo O'Gorman Garden and Center for Resources in the Humanities which opened in 1998 with the collaboration of two teachers from the original school. The Center, which O'Gorman continued to direct, is located on West 129th Street in New York City.

O'Gorman also taught at Brooklyn College, the New School, and Manhattan College. He wrote six books of poetry, five books of prose, and numerous articles and poetry published in various magazines.

He died of pancreatic cancer at his Manhattan home on March 7, 2014, at the age of eighty-four.

Reviews

[Joni Meenagh]

I teach a political theory course where we use Hannah Arendt and I’ve ended up setting this book as a textbook for the course because it does a great job of introducing Arendt and her relevance to contemporary politics for people new to her. I think if you’re already familiar with Arendt the book is going to come across as more basic, but I think my students will appreciate that it gives a broader overview of her work and provides some gentle handholding to get into her writing.

[Kay Saxon]

Politics is life.

This is the type of discourse that our children and the next generation need to appreciate and absorb. Politics is not some vague, distant phenomenon which we can ignore; politics affects all of us, all the time and thinking, discussing, debating, persuasion and imagination are intrinsic to our freedoms. Politics is of the people, by the people and for the people...every one of us.

[Abigail]

I picked up this book after reading some portions of Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and wanting to learn more about how her theories speak to the present. I enjoyed the introduction of this book, which laid out the central tenets of Arendt's reconception of politics. After that, the book lost its luster for me; maybe it is intended for a different reader, but I found it tediously overexplained. The author presents ideas that are quite easy to understand—and fewer nuggets than I'd hoped—then offers example after example after example. I am sorry to report that I didn't make it to the end. After feeling my senses dulled in chapters 1-3, I skipped ahead to the chapter on lies, which is the one I felt most invested in from the start. I distilled my two morsels' worth and returned it to the library. I think most readers who want to learn about Hannah Arendt are more intelligent readers than O'Gorman suspects. I did come away with even more admiration for Arendt than I had before, though, so that's something.