Irving Louis Horowitz, Hannah Arendt: Radical Conservative

Excerpt

It is coincidental but most fitting that the last work written by the great and unique Irving Louis Horowitz (henceforth referred to as ILH), sociologist, political scientist and publisher par excellence, should be on Hannah Arendt –the person after whom his chair at Rutgers also happened to be named. ILH was almost the last survivor of a great generation of prodigiously gifted Jewish intellectuals who were born in the US and grew up before the creation of the state of Israel. The value of the gifts they bestowed on their homeland is inestimable, all the more because the full measure of their bounty has yet to be realized by our polity. I say fitting because Arendt herself belonged to the last generation of European Jewish thinkers; they were the salt that long civilized and enriched the soil of their adopted continent before all was washed away by the deluge of thoughtless, tasteless terror that climaxed in the cultural and racial genocide of the Second World War. These unprecedented events left behind for us, as their toxic legacy, a choice between tribalism and techno-totalitarianism. Still, though good deeds rarely go unpunished today, this reviewer remains hopeful that our tottering republic can yet profit from what Arendt and ILH tried to teach us. …