We who stand to differ: Hannah Arendt on maintaining otherness

This essay examines the story of Hannah Arendt's emigration to America in the midst of World War II and its implications on Arendt's thought and development as a central figure in the American political arena. At times her ideas were controversial, leading her to clash with the American liberal elite of her time and also with central Jewish Israeli and non-Israeli figures, sometimes over Zionism. After her arrival in New York on May 1941, Arendt sought to situate herself as a Continental cultural agent with a unique German phenomenological position, operating within the heart of the elite of the East Coast liberal thinkers during the second half of the twentieth century. Arendt considered herself to be an important participant in the process of reshaping American political discourse and even in the remolding of American citizenship and social conscience, certainly more as a philosopher in the strictly academic sense. Arendt's vita activa and vita contemplativa are stretched between two poles: Bertolt Brecht's poem "The Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao Te Ching on Lao-Tse's Way into Exile," as well as Walter Benjamin's commentary on the poem (1939), and the 1958 events surrounding the desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, in light of Hannah Arendt's "Reflections on Little-Rock," published more than a year later in Dissent, the loud criticism it provoked, and the seminal discourse it stimulated.