By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications

After becoming a U.S. citizen, “[Hannah] Arendt idealized the U.S. as a consent-based revival of Rome. She missed the rethinking of the civil rights moment in the U.S. during the 1950s and 60s, as well as anticolonial thought after the Second World War,” said David Kim.

UCLA International Institute, July 25, 2025 — David Kim, professor of European languages and transcultural studies and associate vice provost of the International Institute, gave a brief overview of “Arendt’s Solidarity: Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World” (Stanford 2024) at a book talk hosted by the Center for European and Russian Studies and co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies in late spring of this year.

Remarks by discussants Samuel Moyn, Kent Professor of Law and History, Yale University, and Yogita Goyal, professor of African American studies and English, UCLA, led to an engaging discussion that gave way to a question-and-answer session.

Hannah Arendt was a celebrated German-Jewish political theorist whose works include “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951), “Rachel Varnhagen” (1957), “The Human Condition” (1958), “Eichmann in Jerusalem” (1963) and “Crises of the Republic” (1972). The posthumously published “Life of the Mind” (1978) remained unfinished. She fled Nazi Germany for Paris in 1933 and, after a decade in exile, managed to immigrate to the U.S., where she lived and taught from 1941 until her death in 1975.

Kim’s extensive research drew on her publications, unpublished documents, private letters, radio and television interviews, newspaper clippings and archival marginalia. “Arendt’s Solidarity” is a sophisticated intellectual examination of how the political theorist wrote about the vexing concept of solidarity over the course of her career.

Arendt began writing about solidarity in her dissertation on Augustine’s conception of Christian neighborly love, which had replaced the public space of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. She did not believe that this idea was applicable to politics because it excluded Jews and Muslims as genuinely equal neighbors in Christian society.

Kim’s book is notable in that it brings Arendt’s thinking into conversation with many contemporaries whose work she had read or with whom she had corresponded, but who disagreed with her, including James Baldwin, Franz Fanon, James Forman, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Mann, Gershom Scholem, Jean-Paul Sartre and Conor Cruise O’Brien. Through this interplay of ideas, Kim relates her work to contemporary intellectual debates on, among other ideas, imperialism, postcolonialism, race, identity and indigeneity.

Although Arendt criticized both Zionism and National Socialism for their “conformist solidarity,” the book finds that she was unable to relate the need for solidarity to the injustices suffered by Black and Indigenous peoples in the U.S. or the rights-claiming peoples of collapsing colonial empires.

After becoming an American citizen in 1951, observed Kim, “Arendt idealized the U.S. as a consent-based revival of Rome. She missed the rethinking of the civil rights moment in the U.S. during the 1950s and 60s, as well as anticolonial thought after the Second World War.” Her thinking, Kim said, remained limited by the framework of classical Greek and Roman philosophy and Euro-American thought.

Kim warned against selective citation of the political theorist’s work because such an approach risked monumentalizing her without identifying what should be honored and what should be criticized in her oeuvre.

Samuel Moyn, David Kim and Yogita Goyal speak at the event. (Photos: Peggy McInerny)

The author’s two discussants agreed that “Arendt’s Solidarity” achieves exactly that goal: it illuminates Arendt’s contributions while honestly examining her blind spots.

Samuel Moyn lauded Kim for “the incredible intellectual craftsmanship of the book,” the depth of his research and his ability to put Arendt’s work in conversation with others. Kim, he said, has made Arendt relevant for our times.

Moyn called the “Jewish Solidarity” chapter and its consideration of her 1944 essay “The Jew as Pariah” a gem because it plausibly speculates about what Arendt’s incomplete conversation with Thomas Mann — and the potential for German-Jewish solidarity during World War II — could have been if it had continued. The legal scholar also drew attention to the final three chapters of the book, which illuminate global themes but explore quintessentially American topics (anti-Black racism, Black Power and American Indigeneity).

“Solidarity has meant all things to all people,” he commented. “David refuses to define solidarity; rather, he uses it as a good concept to think with. In the end, David is a harsh critic of Arendt, especially late Arendt.”

Moyn himself challenged Arendt’s distinction between Jewish solidarity and Christian love. “In truth, she was secular and didn’t know much about Judaism. Arendt was always at risk of secularizing and saw solidarity as the secular version of love. Perhaps a proper politics of love is more viable than she imagined,” he said, noting that James Baldwin insisted that love was political in the African-American tradition.

“David’s book shows that the politics of solidarity ended at the color line for Arendt,” said Yogita Goyal. She described the work as “a feat of academic writing and a work of discipline and erudition” and praised the discoveries that Kim’s research had unearthed from multiple archives. Describing the book as “aggressively anti-polemical,” she said it posed questions that invited contemplation.

Goyal defined the conflict between xenophobic tribalism and privileged cosmopolitanism as the problem of our times and suggested that solidarity was the answer to race-based thinking. Arendt, however, was unable to recognize legitimacy of such concepts.

“Why does this brilliant theorist claim the U.S. has no imperial history at the same time that Black thinkers are discussing internal imperialism within the U.S.?” she asked. Goyal observed that Aimé Césaire (author of “Discourse on Colonialism,” published in 1950, and originator of the idea of “imperial boomerang”) addressed the same issues that Arendt examined in the 1950s. Another voice she found missing in the volume was that of Eduard Said, whose essay on exile she believed could be meaningfully put in dialogue with Arendt.

Noting that Pankaj Mishra’s “The World After Gaza” (Penguin, 2025) quotes both Arendt and Karl Jaspers on solidarity, Goyal said in light of Kim’s book: “I will never think uncritically again about the word ‘solidarity.’”

Published: Friday, July 25, 2025