The Political Theology of Hannah Arendt

Augustine and the Invention of Modernity

Michael Weinman

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Challenges the consensus that depicts Hannah Arendt as a secular thinker

Suggests that we understand Arendt as advocating a heterodox liberal theology rather than a reluctant modernism in Seyla Benhabib’s sense
Situates Arendt as a central figure in political theology alongside Carl Schmitt and others, rather than a secular thinker
Advances the conversation on Arendt, race, and racism by pressing the limits of her view of judgment as representative thinking
Places Arendt in conversation with theologians struggling with the place of faith in the face of twentieth century cataclysms

The Political Theology of Hannah Arendt clarifies how to understand Arendt’s arguments about freedom, collective action, and the problem of evil as political theological, rather than political theoretical or philosophical. To achieve this, Weinman offers a comparative reading of Arendt’s engagement with Augustine, from her 1929 dissertation through to The Life of the Mind, which she was working on when she died in 1975. Weinman’s innovation is to not only read both works together, but to also read them in light of Arendt’s discussion of Augustine in key passages taken from all her works written in the decades between them. Arendt’s attempt to reconcile liberal commitments with the Augustinian tradition makes clear why Arendt—and not Carl Schmitt—ought to be read as offering the preeminent response to Max Weber’s theory of modernity as inescapably secular, the result of irreversible processes of disenchantment.

Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Refiguring Arendt’s Corpus as Interventions in Political Theology

1. Weimar Syndrome: Der Liebesbegriff and Weber’s Disenchantment Thesis

2. Paradoxes of Popular Sovereignty: The People’s Two Bodies after Max Weber’s Disenchantment Thesis

3. Three Antinomies of Liberalism as a Political Theology: Foundations in Willing

4. Constituting and Constituted Power: The Antinomy of Theocratic Faith and Secular Reason in On Revolution

5. The Eschaton of Liberalism as a Political Theology: Popular Sovereignty Without Exclusion

Epilogue: Arendtian Political Theology and Neighbor-love as Political Principle

Bibliography

Reviews

The book offers a careful consideration of the Augustinian roots of Arendt’s political theology of amor mundi as a trans-rational condition for citizenship in a post-liberal age. A must-read for students of Arendt and her place in political theory in the wake of “Weimar,” between Max Weber and Carl Schmitt.
– Michael Zank, Boston University

In this extraordinary book, Michael Weinman brilliantly charts Arendt's rightful place within the political theology debate, breathing new life into it. Seizing on Augustine's core insight into amor mundi and the cosmic and divine underwriting of human freedom, Weinman's reading of Arendt affirms the capacity to begin anew and love of the world as the basis for a renewed if "heterodox liberalism."
– Linda Zerilli, University of Chicago

About the Author

Michael D. Weinman is Senior Lecturer of Political Science and Jewish Studies at Indiana University