The Book
Arendt’s Solidarity: Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World
The Author(s)
David D. Kim
In the last pages of Arendt’s Solidarity: Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World, David D. Kim distills the concept of solidarity down to its most important aim: the widening of the horizon of togetherness.[1] However, this is very much Kim’s notion of solidarity, and not Arendt’s. Indeed, the central argument of the book is that while Arendt’s writings contain the resources for a more expansive understanding of solidarity, she opts to constrain the concept, ultimately limiting its potential.
Arendt’s first discussion of solidarity dates to her study of the salonnière Rahel Varnhagen, who struggled to find her place as a Jewish woman in high society. As Kim notes, the Varnhagen biography was a work of “scholarly activism, in which Arendt conceived of Jewish solidarity as a flawed coping mechanism against anti-Semitism.”[2] From there, Arendt progressed to call into question other forms of solidarity, chief among them Nazism and Zionism. Though the former belief system was built on a hatred of Jewish people and the latter purported to save the Jewish people from centuries of oppression, Arendt identified both as rigid ideologies that claimed to offer adherents the so-called ‘key to history.’ Finally, Arendt saw solidarity at play in the American and Hungarian revolutions, her favored paradigms for the very phenomenon of revolution itself.
In Arendt’s Solidarity, Kim brings to the fore the challenges for Arendt in her time—and for us, in ours—in untangling the complexities of solidarity. For Arendt, solidarity was far more than just an abstract ideal, it was the cornerstone of political organization and action. When Arendt spoke of solidarity, she intended for it to be the straightforward alternative to emotions like compassion and pity.
Kim’s greatest achievement with his book is to push the idea that Arendt’s solidarity was anything but straightforward. Though she was able to pick out what she thought were the key features of solidarity (its dispassionate nature and deliberative process), she applied these criteria selectively when assessing different political situations. For instance, Arendt admired the solidarity of the Founding Fathers, without considering who their political togetherness left out—Black slaves. Indeed, Arendt was guilty of harboring “insidious prejudices”[3] that were largely left unchecked. As a result of these prejudices, Arendt’s solidarity was far more exclusive than one might have gleaned from her general idea of the concept, which was meant to be the natural companion to another political concept she deeply admired: plurality.
Kim does an excellent job of examining the wide range of solidarities that Arendt does deem important enough to take on. His novel analysis of the ominous unity that arises out of the “atomic age” is, I think, especially helpful, in that it shows solidarity need not always be a positive phenomenon for Arendt (and this point is also borne out by a chapter that focuses on other ‘negative solidarities,’ such as Zionism). At the height of the Cold War, Arendt was able to discern the distinct terror that bonded the whole globe, a terror that could be attributed to the emergence of entirely new weapons of mass destruction.[4]
Kim gives his readers a window into his frame of mind while writing the book: he claims that Arendt’s Solidarity is akin to Ayten Gündo?du’s commitment to “reading Arendt against the grain.”[5] Yet, if anything, I see Arendt’s Solidarity as a successor to Kathryn Gines’ Hannah Arendt and the Negro Problem. Both Kim and Gines identify with pinpoint precision the sometimes-baffling undertones of racism and Eurocentrism that thread their way through Arendt’s work. Their books are incredible resources for those looking to work through Arendt’s implicit and explicit biases. However, both books suffer from a common issue, which is that they only add to the growing dossier of complaints against Arendt without offering recuperative readings of her politics.
One might ask why we should bother trying to give new life to Arendt’s political ideas and concepts at all, if her work is so problematic to begin with. Why not look to other theorists who hold more progressive views?
The response to this is that one can neither ignore nor deny Arendt’s relevance or importance for our contemporary context. In 2012, Margarethe von Trotta directed a biographical film about Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial, starring Barbara Sukowa. In the month after the 2016 election, The Origins of Totalitarianism was flying off the shelves at sixteen times its usual rate.[6] Arendt’s ideas became a staple in op-ed after op-ed analyzing the American political climate and in articles examining the rise of fascism across the globe.
It is no mere coincidence that Arendt is back in the graces of our collective consciousness. Her work offers a starkly realistic picture of politics: what it has been, what it is, and what it could be. As Margaret Canovan notes, she is “pre-eminently the theorist of beginnings,”[7] and helps us to think about a full renewal of our capabilities as actors who have the power to introduce new elements into the world.
In sharing Arendt’s Solidarity with the world, David Kim has effectively sown the seeds for a fresh conversation on the highlights and limitations of political solidarity—and all scholars are invited to weigh in. There is always space at the Arendtian table for those who dare to think about and imagine a better world.
[1] David D. Kim, Arendt’s Solidarity: Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024), 259.
[2] Kim, Arendt’s Solidarity, Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World, xiii.
[3] Kim, Arendt’s Solidarity, Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World, 13.
[4] Kim, Arendt’s Solidarity, Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World, 116.
[5] Kim, Arendt’s Solidarity, Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World, xvii.
[6] Sean Illing, “A 1951 book about totalitarianism is flying off the shelves. Here’s why.” Vox Magazine, June 28, 2017.https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/6/28/15829712/hannah-arendt-donald-trump-brexit-totalitarianism.
[7] Margaret Canovan, “Introduction” in The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018), xix.
About the Reviewer
Sanjana Rajagopal recently received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Fordham University. Her dissertation was focused on the role of appearance, emotion, and thought in Hannah Arendt’s work. In addition to specializing in Hannah Arendt, Sanjana is also interested in 20th century continental philosophy and philosophy of religion. In her most recent professional role, she was a marketing assistant with the U.S. Higher Education team at Oxford University Press.
You can find her on Instagram at @thinkingwithoutabanister, and her professional website can be found at the following link: https://www.sanjanarajagopal.com.
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