Since 1982, when Elizabeth Young-Bruehl published 

, it has been widely known that Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger had an affair. He was Germany’s leading philosopher of existentialism; she was a German Jew and one of his most promising students at the University of Marburg during the 1920s. But the winds of history blew their lives in different directions. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Arendt fled to France, then the United States. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and became the rector of Freiburg University, where he dismissed Jewish faculty. Though he resigned after one year, he remained a member of the Nazi Party and supporter of National Socialism.

, and quickly came to be viewed as one of the most brilliant political philosophers of her era. A year earlier, during her first trip to Germany since she had fled, Heidegger had visited her hotel. Afterward, she wrote, in her characteristically visionary style, that it was “the confirmation of an entire life.” Whether they resumed their sexual relationship remains unclear, but until her death in 1975, they corresponded and sometimes saw each other when she was in Germany. She assiduously helped translate and promote his work in the United States.

Scholars have struggled to make sense of the intimacy between these two titans of 20th-century thought. In 

 (1995), Elzbietta Ettinger took a critical view and accused Arendt of whitewashing Heidegger’s Nazi past. Now, in 

, Daniel Maier-Katkin, a professor of criminology at Florida State University with a particular interest in crimes against humanity, presents a more sympathetic interpretation of the relationship, and explores its influence on Arendt’s philosophy.

How could Arendt have resumed her friendship with Heidegger? Maier-Katkin proposes an interesting answer, suggested by a radio address she wrote for Heidegger’s 80th birthday in 1971: Arendt believed that Heidegger had taught her how to think. She contended that he instructed students in a style of “passionate thinking,” in which thought is pursued for its own sake, and not to achieve some result. In the address, she excused Heidegger’s Nazism as the momentary error of an intellectual who later recognized his mistake and broke with the regime.

But a wing of Heidegger scholars in France and Germany have long contended that Heidegger’s Nazism was not fleeting but rather essential to his philosophical endeavor. As French scholar Emmanuel Faye argues in

 Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy

, published in English last year, “Heidegger devoted himself to putting philosophy at the service of legitimizing and diffusing the very bases of Nazism and Hitlerism.” How is it that Arendt, who trenchantly analyzed racist thought in her own work, failed to take seriously the racist categories in Heidegger’s philosophy, and even promoted his work?

An important point of Maier-Katkin’s book is that Arendt’s reconciliation with her mentor shaped her ideas on political evil. As he notes, Arendt’s political consciousness was transformed in 1943, when she learned of Hitler’s gas chambers. For the rest of her life, she struggled to understand the meaning and causes of Nazi evil. In

, she argued that the perpetrators of Nazi genocide were in the grip of a mad theory of history that required the elimination of the Jews from the earth. But in 

 (1963) she held that many perpetrators, including the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, had more banal motives, such as keeping their jobs. Katkin suggests that her reconciliation with Heidegger led Arendt to develop the notion of the “banality of evil,” a concept that downplayed the anti-Semitic motives of Nazi perpetrators.

This explanation is based on a misapprehension of Arendt’s “banality of evil” concept, which she first introduced in an often-overlooked 1945 essay, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” years before her reconciliation with Heidegger. She used the idea to explain the actions of thoughtless functionaries of the Nazi regime. It was not intended to explain Heidegger, who was a thinker, a philosopher, and ultimately a fanatical supporter of Nazi doctrines.

Maier-Katkin’s effort to link Arendt’s erotic attachments to her work is provocative, but it ultimately leads him to flawed interpretations of her political philosophy. This is a shame. With the emergence of radical Islamist movements, which in many ways resemble the totalitarian movements Arendt analyzed, her ideas are as relevant and necessary today as they were half a century ago.

 is a research fellow at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism. She is writing a book on the ideology of the modern human rights movement.

Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness

 by Daniel Maier-Katkin, W.W. Norton, 384 pp, 2010.

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The long quest to make sense of the intimacy between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger.

Meeting of the Minds

Columbia University historian Samuel Moyn has written the first sober history of the doctrine of human rights. His book 

 (2005)—is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the origins of our modern foreign-policy vocabulary.

Though many historians have traced human rights to the Enlightenment notion of the “rights of man,” Moyn draws a useful conceptual distinction. The “rights of man” described a “politics of citizenship at home,” in which the nation-state was seen as the ultimate locus of rights. But human rights activism implies a “politics of suffering abroad,” in which states are generally viewed as the problem. In this sense, the historical struggles of Jews, women, and blacks for the rights of citizenship—protections afforded by the state—were different from modern human rights struggles.

“Human rights” entered wide English parlance in the 1940s. In his 1941 Four Freedoms speech justifying America’s possible entry into World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed that freedom meant “the supremacy of human rights everywhere.” The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights codified and defined the concept of human rights in international law.

Moyn emphasizes that the human rights slogan failed for many years to percolate into the wider political discourse. Postwar anticolonialists invoked the principle of self-determination, not individual human rights. They were more interested in creating states than restraining them. Western sympathizers of anticolonial movements draped their idealism in the more militant doctrines of Marxist “Third Worldism.”

Activism based on the human rights idea only triumphed in the 1970s. Moyn synthesizes an impressive array of sources to describe its rise in different regions. In the West, Amnesty International—founded by British lawyer Peter Benenson in the early 1960s—pioneered the public “naming and shaming” strategy of human rights advocacy. Dissidents in the Soviet Union and its satellites, such as Václav Havel, adopted the human rights vocabulary after the violent crackdown that ended the Prague Spring of 1968. The 1975 Helsinki accords, intended to improve Cold War relations between the communist bloc and the West, included human rights provisions. The treaty spurred the creation of several groups—such as Helsinki Watch, later renamed Human Rights Watch—that demanded enforcement of the human rights clauses. President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 inaugural speech invoked human rights as the guiding principle of American foreign policy. In Latin America, activists fighting brutal military dictatorships appealed to human rights. And in France, a group of “New Philosophers” such as André Glucksmann and Bernard Henri-Lévy invented a new political vocabulary, which included a version of human rights activism.

The human rights idea finally triumphed as a basis for activism because, Moyn contends, other utopian political ideologies collapsed. It offered a pragmatic alternative to bankrupt, grandiose visions, such as communism. The claim that human rights transcended politics helped cement coalitions among diverse voices.

But Moyn is muddled about whether early human rights activism was philosophically—or just strategically—apolitical. Some of the Soviet bloc dissidents whom Moyn quotes suggest that their adoption of legalistic human rights rhetoric was tactical. Perhaps they understood that their goal was political—democratic transition—but publicly framed their struggle in the language of human rights to widen its appeal. Havel himself, in his landmark 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” warned against fetishizing the law. “Even in the most ideal of cases,” he wrote, “the law is only one of several imperfect and more-or-less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better.”

In the book’s epilogue, Moyn reveals his own motive for narrating the history of the human rights idea: to bury it. He believes that the doctrine has mutated into the beast it was intended to slay: a utopian form of politics. In his view, the Reagan administration corrupted human rights by embedding it within a democracy promotion agenda. And Moyn lambastes the George W. Bush administration for hijacking human rights rhetoric to justify the Iraq war.

But if the birth of human rights activism was part of the struggle for democracy, then it is wrong to view democracy promotion as a perversion. Moreover, perhaps human rights activism was most successful in the 1980s—as a weapon against Soviet totalitarianism—precisely because dissidents were clear in their own minds about the liberal democratic preconditions of human rights. Moyn is right to assert that the human rights idea has gone wrong, but it’s not for the reasons he thinks.

 is a research fellow at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism. She is writing a book on the ideology of the human rights movement.

 by Samuel Moyn, Bellknap/Harvard, 337 pp, 2012.

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Samuel Moyn's latest is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the origins of our modern foreign-policy vocabulary.

Michelle Sieff