When she wrote “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Hannah Arendt used a method of analysis that we may characterize as anti-historical: She refused to understand the present with analogies drawn from the past; she rejected used and worn philosophical categories to make sense of something entirely new. The book was a prelude to an inquiry whose basic question continued to occupy her until the end of her life: How should we judge the present? Her thought led her to agree with Tocqueville’s claim that in a time of crisis the mind “errs in darkness.”
The coronavirus crisis is unprecedented in many ways, but we can already draw a few simple lessons in the “darkness.”
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