This essay examines Hannah Arendt’s treatment of science and technology in her work during the 1950s and early 1960s. As scientific research acquired prominence in the United States and Germany after the Second World War, its public meaning was shaped by geopolitics and fears about nuclear weapons and the uncontrollable nature of technological development. A detailed exploration of the development of Arendt’s thought in this context has not been undertaken before. This essay refines our understanding of Arendt’s relationship with familiar interlocutors such as Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, and challenges readings that concentrate narrowly on her analysis of totalitarianism as a reference point for understanding her thought.
ArendtH (2005a) Approaches to the ‘German problem. In: KohnJ (ed.) Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 106–20.
22.
ArendtH (2005b) Concern with politics in recent European philosophical thought. In: KohnJ (ed.) Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 428–47.
23.
ArendtH (2005c) Dream and nightmare. In: KohnJ (ed.) Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 409–17.
24.
ArendtH (2005d) Europe and the atom bomb. In: KohnJ (ed.) Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, New York: Schocken Books, pp. 418–22.
25.
ArendtH (2005e) Philosophy and sociology. In: KohnJ (ed.) Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 28–43.
26.
ArendtH (2005f) Religion and politics. In: KohnJ (ed.) Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 368–90.
27.
ArendtH (2005g) The eggs speak up. In: KohnJ (ed.) Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 270–84.
28.
ArendtH (2005h) The ex-Communists. In: KohnJ (ed.) Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 391–400.
29.
ArendtH (2005i) The ivory tower of common sense. In: KohnJ (ed.), Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 194–6.
30.
ArendtH (2005j) The threat of conformism. In: KohnJ (ed.) Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 423–7.
31.
ArendtH (2005k) What is existential philosophy?’ In: KohnJ (ed.) Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, 163–87.
32.
ArendtH (2006a) Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin.
33.
ArendtH (2006b) The concept of history: ancient and modern. In: ArendtH, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin.
34.
ArendtH (2006c) The conquest of space and the stature of man. In: ArendtH, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin.
35.
ArendtH (2006d) Tradition and the modern age. In: ArendtH, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin.
36.
ArendtHBlücherH (2000). Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, 1936–1968. Harcourt: London.
37.
ArendtHJaspersK (1992) Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers: Correspondence: 1926–1969. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
38.
BaehrP (2001) The ‘iron cage’ and the ‘shell as hard as steel’: Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse metaphor in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. History and Theory40(2): 153–69.
39.
BaehrP (2007) The ‘masses’ in Hannah Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism. The Good Society16(2): 12–18.
40.
BaehrP (2010) Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
41.
BeylerR (2003) The demon of technology, mass society, and atomic physics in West Germany, 1945–1957. History and Technology19(3): 227–39.
42.
BreuerS (2009) The nihilism of speed: on the work of Paul Virilio. In: RosaHScheuermanWE (eds) High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, pp. 215–41.
43.
BrickH (1998) Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s. New York: Twayne Publishers.
44.
BrientE (2000) Hans Blumenberg and Hannah Arendt on the ‘unworldly worldliness’ of the modern age. Journal of the History of Ideas61(3): 513–30.
45.
BurttEA (1932) The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. New York: Anchor.
46.
CanovanM (1994) Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
47.
CarsonC (2010a) Heisenberg in the Atomic Age: Science and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
CassirerE (1953) Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. New York: Dover Publications.
50.
ChevalleyC (1992) Heidegger and the physical sciences. In: MacannC (ed.) Martin Heidegger: Critical Assessments, vol. 4. London: Routledge, pp. 342–64.
51.
CooperB (1988) Action into nature: Hannah Arendt’s reflections on technology. In: DayRBBeinerRMasciulliJ (eds) Democratic Theory and Technological Society. New York: ME Sharpe, pp. 316–35.
52.
DijkP van (2000) Anthropology in the Age of Technology: The Philosophical Contribution of Günther Anders. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
53.
DittbernerJL (1979) The End of Ideology and American Social Thought, 1930–1960. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.
54.
EngermanD (2003) Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
55.
FrommE (1942) The Fear of Freedom. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
56.
GaddisJL (2005) Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
57.
GalisonP (1997) Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
58.
GeroulanosS (2010) An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
59.
GilmanN (2007) Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
60.
GordonP (2008) Neo-Kantianism and the politics of Enlightenment. Philosophical Forum39(2): 223–38.
61.
GusejnovaD (2006) Concepts of culture and technology in Germany, 1916–1933: Ernst Cassirer and Oswald Spengler. Journal of European Studies36(1): 5–30.
62.
HabermasJ (1985) Karl Löwith: stoic retreat from historical consciousness. In: McCarthyT (ed.) Philosophical-Political Profiles, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 79–88.
63.
HabermasJ (1969) Erkenntnis und Interesse. In: HabermasJ, Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’, Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt, pp. 146–68.
64.
HaydenP (2009) Political Evil in a Global Age: Hannah Arendt and International Theory. New York: Routledge.
65.
HeideggerM (1953) Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
66.
HeideggerM (1954) Die Frage nach der Technik. In: Vortrage und Aufsatze, Pfullingen: Neske.
67.
HeideggerM (1977) The question concerning technology. In: The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. New York: Garland Publishing, pp. 3–35.
68.
HeideggerM (2000) Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
69.
HeisenbergW (1955) Das Naturbild der heutigen Physik. Hamburg: Rowohlt.
70.
HerfJ (1984) Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
71.
HorkheimerM (1947) Eclipse of Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
72.
IsaacJ (2005) W.V. Quine and the origins of analytic philosophy in the United States. Modern Intellectual History2(2): 205–34.
73.
JaspersK (1946) Die Schuldfrage: ein Beitrag zur deutschen Frage. Zürich: Artemis-Verlag.
74.
JaspersK (1951) Rechenschaft und Ausblick. Munich: Piper.
75.
JaspersK (1957) Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen: ein Radiovortag. Munich: Piper.
76.
JaspersK (1958) Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen: politisches Bewusstsein in unserer Zeit. Munich: Piper.
77.
JaspersK (1961) The Future of Mankind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
78.
KoyréA (1957) From the Closed World to Infinite Universe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
79.
KuhnTS (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
80.
LeslieSW (1993) The Cold War and American Science: The Military–Industrial–Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. New York: Columbia University Press.
81.
LöwithK (1949) Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
82.
LüstR (2004) Heisenberg and the scientist’s responsibility. In: BuschhornGWWessJ (eds) Fundamental Physics: Heisenberg and Beyond. London: Springer, pp. 15–23.
83.
MacauleyD (1996) Hannah Arendt and the politics of place: from earth alienation to oikos. In: Minding Nature: Philosophers of Ecology. New York: Guilford Publications, 102–33.
84.
MarinerRBPiehlerGK (2009) The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
85.
MoratD (2012) No inner remigration: Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, and the early Federal Republic of Germany. Modern Intellectual History9(3): 661–79.
86.
MoynS (2008) Hannah Arendt on the secular. New German Critique35(3): 71–96.
87.
NehringH (2004) Cold War, apocalypse and peaceful atoms: interpretations of nuclear energy in the British and West German anti-nuclear weapons movements, 1955–1964. Historical Social Research29(3): 150–70.
88.
PitkinHF (1998) The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
89.
PöggelerO (1993) The hermeneutics of the technological world: The Heidegger–Heisenberg dispute. International Journal of Philosophical Studies1(1): 21–48.
90.
RabinbachA (2000a) In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment. Berkeley: University of California Press.
91.
RabinbachA (2000b) The German as pariah: Karl Jaspers’s The Question of German Guilt. In: In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 129–65.
92.
RockmoreT (1995) Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism, and Being. London: Routledge.
93.
SamburskyS (1956) The Physical World of the Greeks. London: Routledge and Paul.
94.
SchelerM (1926) Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft. Leipzig: Der neue Geist Verlag.
95.
SchmittC (1950) Der Nomos der Erde: im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum. Cologne: Greven.
96.
ThornhillC (2002) Karl Jaspers: Politics and Metaphysics. London: Routledge.
97.
TsaoR (2002) The three phases of Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism. Social Research69(1): 604–12.
98.
TijmesP (1992) The Archimedean point and eccentricity: Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of science and technology. Inquiry35(3): 389–406.
99.
VillaDR (1996) Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
100.
VillaDR (1999) Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
101.
WaxmanCI (1969) The End of Ideology Debate. New York: Funk and Wagnalls.
102.
WeberM (1904) Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik1.
103.
WhiteheadAN (1920) The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
104.
WolinR (2003) Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
105.
Young-BruehlE (1983) Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
106.
ZimmermanME (1990) Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
