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The sociologist reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is bound to squint at the page in puzzlement when Arendt gives her definition of society. So would, I think, most readers of the text. Arendt’s fondness for assigning new meanings to commonly used words is most perfectly demonstrated in that moment when she nonchalantly declares that “society” is a distinctly modern phenomenon: the intrusion of the private sphere into the public, resulting in a massive emptying of the value of human association.

Contrary to the suggestion of my informal title, I did not study with Hannah Arendt, nor were we ever colleagues, although I missed both experiences only by a bit. I was a graduate student in the early 1970s in one of the universities where she last taught, the University of Chicago, and my first and only long term position, at the New School for Social Research, was her primary American academic home.

According to Arendt’s emphatic and paradoxical thesis, [Eichmann] was an enemy of humanity from “thoughtlessness.” “It was a sheer thoughtlessness — something by no means identical with stupidity — that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period” (285; G: 57).* This (and only this) is what the phrase regarding the “banality of evil” was meant to capture. 

I first thought of writing this post over a year ago as a follow up to my piece “Against the Educational Uncertainty Principle.” I was struck by the way that recent interventions to address the various dimensions of higher educational crisis have made matters worse. MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, are a particular case in point. As I wrote then:

“I worry about magical solutions: MOOCs, substituting television for face to face inquiry, even though using the web to strengthen educational practices makes sense to me. …

San Francisco’s Pride Parade will take place on 29 June and will bring together activists for LGBT rights under the rallying cry of “Color our world with pride.” As usual, various officially recognized groups will take part in the march. But this year, among the multicolored sections of the parade, curious onlookers will be able to make out some people carrying a banner bearing an image. Among those marching, some will be there to defend and represent the colors, the figure and the appearance of someone who will be notable by her absence: Chelsea Manning, who will not be able to walk with them.

Locked up in the military correctional facility of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Manning will have served the first months of a 35-year sentence by the time the San Francisco Pride comes around. Why was she imprisoned? …