Book review: Exile, Statelessness and Migration. Playing Chess with History - The Jewish Chronicle

Exile, Statelessness and Migration. Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin
By Seyla Benhabib
Princeton University Press, £15.99-£52.68

As a Philosophy undergraduate fresher, I scrutinised the university booklist with dismay. Its primary concern was with Oxford Linguistics (of the “what is the meaning of meaning?” variety) and Logic (resembling an amalgam of the algebra and geometry I had happily believed I’d left behind with school). Two bright shafts of light were shed by the only “foreign” names on the list: Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin.

Their most topical and readable books — respectively Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Hedgehog and the Fox —were the only ones I’d encountered. But I’d grown up with stories of the Shoah, and Arendt’s was particularly resonant to the daughter of a survivor. Here, Benhabib forensically investigates the “Eichmann affair”, scrupulously differentiating “retrospective” and “moral judgment”, alongside Eichmann’s own “lack of faculty of judgment”.

Benhabib analyses the historical relationship of the Eichmann trial to Kant’s Critique of Judgment in Arendt’s own “unusual and somewhat idiosyncratic reading”. Readers of Berlin will also remember his reference to Archilocus’s observation that: “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing”, in his light description of his own work as “a kind of enjoyable intellectual game”.

It is among this book’s many assets that it contextualises its subjects within wider traditions. Themes of judgment and knowledge, like the metaphysical quest for the particular in the universal, are as old as philosophy itself. However, it is the unique experience of a generation of European Jewish intellectuals that brings their confrontation with exile, statelessness and migration into the critiques analysed here.

Many knew one another, at least through their writing, and they overlap in both their generations and interests. Yet they also came from a number of different European countries and cultures where the question of “Jewish identity” is more closely defined by the common experience of “being transplanted” than that of religious observance. Only two of the philosophers under consideration write from a religious standpoint, and they are the lesser known. Yet all share, to a greater or lesser degree, a deep-seated sense of galut (“the Jewish conception of the conditions and feelings of a nation uprooted from its homeland and subject to alien rule”). To which Benhabib herself adds that of the “Weimar syndrome”, reflective as much of time as place, for it includes not only Berlin but also Kelsen, Schmitt, Strauss and Shklar.

Arendt and Berlin bookend chapters on more recent work, including Judith Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism; Legalism and its Paradoxes in Judith Shklar; and Exile and Social Science: on Albert Hirschman. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, with Arendt and Berlin, senior luminaries of persistent influence appearing repeatedly throughout the text. ]

By bringing together two generations of one century characterised by exile and migration, Benhabib successfully demonstrates continuity in context, philosophical as well as actual. Her conclusion brings it into the present with a warning:

“The global refugee crisis reveals not only Europe’s clay feet but also the withdrawal of the United States into an isolationist posture… The refugee becomes the enemy, the other, and the criminal”.

Yes, we recognise this imposed identity, “in our own flesh”. And, no, there seems to be no learning the lessons of history.

Amanda Hopkinson is a writer and translator