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

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

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

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

by Seyla Benhabib

Paperback(New Edition)

$27.95 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Choose Expedited Shipping at checkout for delivery by Thursday, April 4
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780691167251
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 09/11/2018
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 304
Sales rank: 1,135,827
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

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).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Chapter Acknowledgments xiii

Preface xv

1 Intertwined Lives and Themes among Jewish Exiles 1

2 Equality and Difference: Human Dignity and Popular Sovereignty in the Mirror of Political Modernity 9

3 The Elusiveness of the Particular: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno 34

4 Whose Trial? Adolf Eichmann's or Hannah Arendt's? The Eichmann Controversy Revisited 61

5 Ethics without Normativity and Politics without. Historicity: On Judith Butler's Parting Ways. Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism 80

6 From the "Right to Have Rights" to the "Critique of Humanitarian Reason" 101

7 Legalism and Its Paradoxes in Judith Shklar's Work 125

8 Exile and Social Science: On Albert Hirschman 145

9 Isaiah Berlin: A Judaism between Decisionism and Pluralism 164

Conclusion: The Universal and the Particular. Then and Now 185

Notes 197

References 249

Index 271

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“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

“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

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews