Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T09:33:39.135Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Jean Elshtain: Why Augustine and Arendt?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2015

Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott*
Affiliation:
Eastern Michigan University

Extract

Jean Elshtain appeared in my life at a fortuitous moment in the early 1980s as I ventured into unexplored academic terrain—the vexed question of what Hannah Arendt intended by engaging with Christian political thought, particularly the work of the fifth-century bishop and theologian Aurelius Augustine. She was already a notoriously maverick Jewish writer on the Holocaust. What could be made of Arendt's regard for her “old friend” Augustine? A previous discovery—the fact that she had written her dissertation on the theme of love (caritas) as the binding agent in civil society—had led me to the Library of Congress in 1983 where the original 1929 German manuscript is housed, together with the English translation Arendt had begun in New York in 1958. Neither had been published. I proposed a paper on the subject for the APSA meeting in Washington in 1984, fully expecting a negative response, given the deviation from the norm of Arendt scholarship it entailed. Instead I was contacted directly by Elshtain who let me know that she found this new aspect of Arendt's writing very significant and wanted to hear more about it on the Arendt-themed panel that she was organizing and chairing. I knew her work but had never met or corresponded with her. I was, needless to say, surprised and grateful.

Type
Critical Perspectives on Gender and Politics
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1998. Love and Saint Augustine. Ed. Scott, Joanna V. and Stark, Judith C.. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Elshtain, Jean B. Public Man, Private Woman. 1981. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elshtain, Jean B. 1986. Meditations on Modern Political Thought: Masculine and Feminine Themes From Luther to Arendt. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Elshtain, Jean B. 1995. Augustine and the Limits of Politics. 1995. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Elshtain, Jean B. 2002. Jane Addams and the Dream of American Politics. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Elshtain, Jean B. 2004. Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Galston, William, “In Memoriam: Jean B. Elshtain,” The New Republic, August 16, 2013.Google Scholar
Judt, Tony. 2006. “Bush's Useful Idiots.” London Review of Books 28 (18): 35.Google Scholar
Vitello, Paul, “Jean Bethke Elshtain, a Guiding Light for Policy Makers after 9/11 Dies at 72. The New York Times, August 15, 2013.Google Scholar