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Jean Elshtain: Why Augustine and Arendt?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2015

Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott
Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott*
Affiliation:
Eastern Michigan University
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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
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 578 - 586
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2015 

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References

REFERENCES

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