| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In his essay on Arendt's "antiprimitivism," Jimmy Casas Klausen partly agrees
with scholars such as Anne Norton and Norma Claire Moruzzi who suggest
that especially the discussion of "Hottentots" in The Origins of Totalitarianism
is replete with racial prejudice.
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Yet, to the extent that racial explanations cannot fully account for why and how Arendt also targets "Boers," Klausen argues,
these criticisms are lacking. He contends that what is ultimately the problem is
Arendt's antiprimitivist notion of culture that chastises Boers for their indolence and turns Hottentots into barely human primitives without history. In
what follows, I take issue with this characterization of Arendt as an antiprimitivist situated in the German tradition of culture as Bildung. Arendt's essays
on culture, which Klausen cites to support his argument, actually include several criticisms of this tradition. More importantly, it is hard to maintain this
charge of antiprimitivism given that these essays, in line with the arguments in
The Human Condition, raise serious concerns about using the realm of cultural
production as a yardstick of humanity.
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