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Nevertheless, there's much that's abortive and dispensable in her work—the suggestive but misleading formulation of "totalitarianism," to take a salient example, her indifference to the "social question," her incorrigibly exalted conception of political life—and these features do not derive, I think, from datedness or reportage. Our critical powers can be easily disarmed when faced with a resumé as illustrious as Arendt's, and we bestow the benefit of too many doubts if we're stunned into submission by her stature. An "éminence grise among éminence grises," as a fawning journalist once wrote of her, Arendt has become an idol of profundity, and a reflexive deference to all things "profound" can make our appropriation of her work all too timid and reverential.
We should read her more often in the spirit of Eric Hobsbawm, who once noted drolly that Arendt displayed "a certain lack of interest in mere fact." Some of Arendt's most renowned work is indeed empirically impaired, but a more serious problem, I think, is a certain lack of interest in consistency, and we should not be so overwhelmed by the shadow of her gravitas that we decline to point this out. Arendt's corpus exhibits an overall lack of architectural integrity, and its basic flaw is the notion that worldliness can survive without faith in divinity. Like many modern intellectuals, Arendt thought that religious insights could subsist without their roots in theology, and the result, in her case, was a panoramic oeuvre of portentous incoherence. Rather than continue to genuflect before the intimidating force of her mind, we should see in Arendt's career a scene in the drama of atheistic humanism, the conclusion of which, Henri de Lubac reminds us, is a morass of confusion and despair. So for all her invaluable and borrowed insight, Arendt cannot teach us how to love the world, for loving the world is not too much but rather not enough.
Like many an icon of crisis, Arendt has received the dubious honor of being more cited than read: one can now drop phrases like "banality of evil" without ever opening Eichmann in Jerusalem. The Origins of Totalitarianism is still assigned, even though many scholars now consider its central concept misleading or useless: even as sympathetic an interpreter as Hannah Pitkin criticizes Arendt for reifying "totalitarianism" into a "Blob" that metastasizes without any human agency. And like references to her Riverside neighbor Reinhold Niebuhr, those to Arendt are always good for a shimmer of moral authority.
That authority derives in part from the spell still cast by the principal settings she inhabited: Wilhemine and Weimar Germany and Cold War New York. Arendt grew up before World War I among the Jewish bourgeoisie of Konigsberg—where Kant had strolled the streets after musing on the ding an sich—and studied in the city's Gymnasium after being tossed out of one of its hochschulen for "insubordination." The friend of New Left radicals received a thorough classical education, proving that, as she later wrote, it is "exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child [that] education must be conservative." Exposed to little in the way of overt anti-Semitism, Arendt and her cohorts assumed that their assimilation into Hohenzollern Germany would continue unimpeded. But after the slaughter of the Great War and the disenchantment of Progress, they faced what the historian Detlev Peukert has called "the crisis of classical modernity." In the midst of cultural despair, worthless deutschmarks, and the earliest brays of fascism, Arendt and her generation invented kulturkritik, their makeshift armada of vessels for navigating the maelstrom of the modern: the neue Sachlichkeit, the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, and existentialism.
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