In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, we have an excerpt from a two day symposium--“Hannah Arendt Right Now”--which explored the philosopher’s impact on the 21st Century. The 2006 event was held on the hundredth anniversary of Arendt’s birth. In the opening session, Jonathan Schell and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl discuss Arendt’s thoughts on the nuclear question. Schell, who died in 2014, was a writer for The New Yorker and The Nation. His 1982 book, The Fate of the Earth, is a meditation on the consequences of nuclear war. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a longtime member of the Institute, died in 2011. She was a doctoral student of Arendt’s, and author of Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, the first biography of Arendt.

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