The Transnational Circulation of Knowledge in the Work and the Reception of Hannah Arendts (Germany/USA)

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The research project is set up in-between the disciplinary areas of political philosophy and sociology of science. It examines processes of performative construction, translation and transformation of the idea of politics and of the intellectual figure Hannah Arendt between the USA and (West-) Germany, from the mid 1940s until the end of the 2000s. The analysis is structured along three main chapters: the history of the publication and early reception of Hannah Arendts The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the debate on the report Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and the latest Reception of Arendts political theory after the ruptures of 1989. The study targets at two different but connected goals: the empirical reflection on theoretical activities and the analysis of the transnational circulation of ideas. Based on the model of field- and praxis-analysis of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and other philosophical and ethnographical theories of praxis, philosophy is examined in its process-related and performative dimension. Theory is thus considered as a social practice, which takes place under different historical, social and material conditions. Theory involves a collectivity of actors. It mobilizes implicit and explicit forms of knowledge, and it has social and symbolic impacts. The research project examines secondly the transnational circulation of ideas, the activity of translating and transforming theory between different countries and languages. The transnational circulation is seen as a crucial aspect of a social practice of theory. By translating theories into different languages, we can observe not only shifts in the meaning of theories. Above all, translation is understood as a method of defining, contesting or trespassing cognitive and material borders. The translation of ideas can thus lead to the construction or the transformation of transnational spaces of thinking and of acting. The main research questions are: Which are the conditions and the impacts of a circulation of ideas on theory and its social contexts? Why and how differently constructed figures of Hannah Arendt are adopted, criticized, idealized? How do these figures relate to the theory of politics in Hannah Arendts work and in its reception? What can be learned from this example about the functioning of intellectual, theoretical practices?