Kei Hiruta, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity

Excerpt

Isaiah Berlin hated Hannah Arendt. He nurtured a fierce dislike for her that Kei Hiruta calls “a lifelong hatred” (p. 2).¹ They only met on three or four occasions—all of them in the United States—but those meetings were enough for Berlin to say “my allergy vis-à-vis Miss Arendt is absolute and her mere presence in a room gives me goose-flesh” (p. 161). They were together at a conference just once—on the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution at Harvard in 1967—but that was enough for Berlin to say subsequently that he could not “conceive of any issue that could bring me to the same platform as Miss Hannah Arendt” (p. 159). They were writers on similar topics, but Berlin resented being on the same page as her: Hiruta records a letter that Berlin wrote to an American philosopher in 1991 saying that he (Berlin) was deeply offended by “the linking of my name with that of Miss Arendt” in a discussion of totalitarianism. Hiruta notes too an earlier incident in 1983 in which Berlin refused to contribute to a collection on conceptions of liberty on the grounds that he “hated” one of the thinkers—Hannah Arendt—who was discussed by some of the other contributors (p. 46).² And these incidents took place years after her death in 1975. …