Status Updates From Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Be...

Of particular importance is our protagonists’ shared determination to face up squarely to the most urgent challenges of their times and think them through, unhindered by intellectual cowardice and its twin ‘disciplinary boundaries.’

,Wohl dem, der keine Heimat hat; er sieht sie noch im Traum.‘…she found in the 1960s American republic a cure for the trauma that the Weimar Republic had inflicted on her in the 1930s. It is telling that the term Arendt often uses to describe the sense one has when experiencing political freedom is ‘public happiness.’ Happy she did become then, finding a home in America; she saw it before her eyes.

Among those who have seen a resemblance between the two were dissidents in the communist East in the 1980s. Imagining a better future, some of them drew inspiration from the anti-totalitarian writings of both Arendt and Berlin.

Berlin did not focus on totalitarian ideas because he was a historian of ideas; rather, his study of totalitarianism gradually turned him into a historian of ideas…That is why he studies ideas in order to understand the catastrophic destruction of civilisations in the twentieth century.

…‘value pluralism’…the number of ultimate and objective values that human beings pursue and live by is neither one or infinite, but plural; and that those values are not always harmonisable or commensurate with each other, so that conflict between good and good (apart from the conflict between good and evil) often necessarily takes place and loss is sometime inevitable.