Global Perspectives: Gender and Emigré Political Thought. Hannah Arendt and Judith Shklar

Is gender a useful category of historical analysis, even when the women thinkers involved neither show an interest in it nor use it as a category when they invoke related dimensions, such as sexuality and the family, in their works? This is the formidable challenge posed to feminist scholars by Hannah Arendt and Judith Shklar.
 
For the next event in the Global Perspectives series, Professor Seyla Benhabib joins Simon Goldhill to discuss the work of these two major female political theorists and examine their interrelationship. Both escaped Europe as persecuted Jews and both reflected on exile and migration in their work. As the younger of the two, Shklar greatly admired Arendt but after Arendt’s death in 1975 and public disclosures of the Arendt-Heidegger affair, Shklar expressed her deep disappointment in a bitter essay in 1983 called “Hannah Arendt as Pariah.” What prompted Shklar’s change of heart? The talk will examine the interweaving of the personal and the political, of the affective and collective in the lives of these remarkable thinkers.
 
Professor Benhabib’s talk is based on an essay that appeared in the volume Why Gender? edited by Jude Browne, Cambridge University Press, pp.267-289, October 2021.
 
This event is made possible due to generous support from the S T Lee Fund.