Background: On November 6-9, 2003, the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts at Mount Holyoke College sponsored a conference called Artists, Intellectuals and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942-1944. The conference celebrated both a pre-war meeting that took place in Pontigny, France, and the series of wartime meetings at Mount Holyoke that brought together Americans and émigrés from Europe to talk about the future of human civilization in a precarious world. The lives and work of Hannah Arendt, Rachel Bespaloff, Marc Chagall, Jacques Hadamard, Roman Jacobson, Claude Levi-Strauss, , Marianne Moore, Robert Motherwell, Wallace Stevens, Jean Wahl, and others who had gathered at Mt. Holyoke in 1942-44 were invoked by the conference participants. This text (slightly revised) and others were published in Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II (U. of Massachusetts Press, 2006)
Background: The exchange below is a revised version of a conversation that took place at a conference “On Truth, Lies, Politics, and Media in Dialogue with Hannah Arendt,” Goethe-Institut, Washington, D.C., November 28-29, 2006. It was published in the journal Social Research in 2007.
A CONVERSATION ON HANNAH ARENDT’S CONCEPTION OF SOVEREIGNTY
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Jerome Kohn
Background: What follow is a revised version of a dialogue Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Jerome Kohn conducted at a conference on Hannah Arendt: Crises de l’Etat-nation, convened at l’Université Paris VII–Denis-Diderot, November 16-18, 2006. The original dialogue was published in French in a volume entitled Hannah Arendt: Crises de l’Etat-nation (Sens&Tonka, 2007).
