Hannah Arendt, Michael Denneny, and the Politics of Protest

Beginning in 1963, Hannah Arendt was briefly a member of the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. After four years of regular teaching (during which she made sure to be in Hyde Park as little as possible), ending in 1967, she remained involved with the department until her death eight years later. She returned more or less annually to teach courses and give talks, and continued to serve on dissertation committees, most notably supervising her student Michael Denneny’s thesis on the history of the concept of “taste” in early modern Europe. Denneny, who would abandon academia, went on to a pioneering career as a publisher of gay fiction and nonfiction, including the work of writers such as Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Larry Kramer. In a memoir published just before his death in 2023, Denneny argued that this career was a way of putting Arendt’s ideas of politics into practice. Arendt’s relationship with the university, and particularly with Denneny (whose correspondence with her is held in the Committee on Social Thought’s archives), casts light on several aspects of her life and thinking and her unique role in an unusual institution.

As he told it in a lecture promoting his memoir, Denneny was drawn to the life of the mind by Arendt’s personal example outside the classroom. He met her while he was working as a busboy at the faculty dining club to pay for his bachelor’s degree; as he was wiping down her table, she struck up a conversation. These conversations in the dining club became regular events, and eventually Denneny, on her urging, decided to stay for a Ph.D. under her direction at the idiosyncratic Committee on Social Thought. Founded in 1941, by the ‘60s the Committee had already taken on what has become its enduring atmosphere as a place where interdisciplinary scholars, and some intellectually charismatic nonscholars, impart to graduate students both their own preoccupations and a frozen-in-amber combination of ancient Greek literature with modern German philosophy. Arendt’s colleagues included her close friend, the art critic Harold Rosenberg (whose highly influential notion of art as “action” emerged in dialogue with Arendt’s own developing interest in aesthetics), and her longtime foe, the political theorist Leo Strauss.

While she was drawn to the Committee’s commitment to thinking across traditional academic boundaries, Arendt does not seem to have been particularly excited about classroom teaching. In essays on her own teacher (and sometimes lover) Martin Heidegger, she analyzed with great finesse how his performance of philosophical charisma awakened thinking in his students. Arendt invited favorite students for discussion groups at her apartment, but also used them to minimize time in the classroom. In the winter quarter of 1971, for example, she arranged to “co-teach” a class with Denneny on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Judgment — leaving most of the sessions exclusively to him while she remained in New York. An expression of confidence in the abilities of her student, perhaps, but also a convenient way to keep a distance from Chicago undergraduates (and work).

Even when not in Chicago, however, she was intimately involved in department politics, as her papers, now housed at the Library of Congress, attest. She expressed strong views about how the Committee should be run and to what ideals its members should aspire. She tried to defend, for example, the Plato scholar Herman Sinaiko, a member of (and graduate from) the Committee, against colleagues whose criticized his lack of scholarly productivity and eventually removed him from the department. In an age of academic overproduction, she argued, “the time has come to be grateful for everyone who doesn’t write.” Sinaiko’s not writing, moreover, was part of what had made him available to be a “most useful member” of the departmental community. Social Thought, she averred, should be a congenial environment for slow-paced thinking and dialogue — leaving its members plenty of time for conversations with, for example, intelligent-looking waitstaff.

She urged, too, that the Committee hire Paul Ricoeur, calling him perhaps “one of the best, if not the best, among the continental philosophers now.” Hiring him, she insisted, would help the Committee become what it ought properly to be: a haven for students “who are refugees from ordinary American philosophy departments” dominated by analytic philosophy. Students who might benefit from Ricoeur, she continued, included “the Indian fellow,” future anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, “who is gifted.” The Committee on Social Thought, in Arendt’s eyes, ought to preserve its members both from the pressures of academic productivity and from the influence of predominating methodologies, offering a site for unrushed, unfashionable thinking.

If she was clear what ought not to be welcome in Social Thought (overwork and analytic philosophy), Arendt was more ambivalent about the place on campus for politics. In her books The Human Condition (1958) and On Revolution (1963) she had bemoaned the way in which the modern state, in hand with institutions like universities, had reduced genuine political action, founded on the exchange of opinions, to bureaucratic routine. The only alternative to the latter, she feared, seemed to too many people to be wild, chaotic attacks on the whole political order and even rationality itself. Only a return to politics as courageous self-display, and the public sphere as a domain for the exchange of perspectives with the aim of generating collective power, could stave off the threat of a descent into the political nightmare she had traced in her first great work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

Inspired by her ideas and horrified by the Vietnam War, Denneny threw himself into student and national politics. Indeed, Arendt had taken Denneny in 1966 to visit, in a gesture of solidarity, student protestors occupying a building at Columbia University. Two years later, Denneny organized protest campaigns and helped mobilize support for the antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy in Illinois. And he gave a public lecture on “Reason and Emotion in Politics,” in which he argued — drawing heavily on Arendt’s work — that “emotions are intimately connected with politics,” that they can be “appropriate and even noble” responses, and that “outrage” in particular has a legitimate place in political life. Arendt outlined excerpts of a copy of this speech sent to her by Denneny, perhaps in approval, perhaps in alarm, as she was beginning to express increasing concern about the tenor of student activism.

A leader in campus protests and antiwar politics in previous years, Denneny was appointed at the beginning of 1969 as a nonvoting student representative to the university’s disciplinary committee, which was then in the midst of expelling and otherwise sanctioning dozens of students for their role in a two-week-long sit-in. From this position, Denneny tried unsuccessfully to mediate between the administration and protestors. He resigned after less than a month, issuing a statement in the student newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, attacking the administration for its “lack of communication that has rendered meaningless our task as observers.”

Drawing again on his adviser’s characteristic ideas, Denneny now turned to a line of thought that Arendt was still developing and that would become her principal concern in the following years. Judgment, as she was coming to define it, is the faculty by which human beings evaluate situations, objects, and persons in the absence of authoritative traditional standards or universally valid rational rules. Her first major public discussion of judgment, a series of lectures given in 1970, was routed through an interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Judgment rather than through her own original examples. When she died in 1975, she had just started work on a book to be called Judging, which would presumably have clarified her ideas further (Denneny organized a 1979 volume on Arendt’s legacy, Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of a Public World, that includes an illuminating account of the origins and trajectory of her thinking about the topic.)

Judgment, Arendt argued, is a necessarily social process, which to be authentic must take the opinions of others into account. Linking her evolving ideas about judgment to her theory of politics, Denneny insisted that the protests sweeping campus were phenomena for which the traditional rules and bureaucratic protocols of the university were inadequate. They called for judgment, and thus for the exchange of multiple potentially legitimate perspectives. As long as students were represented merely by nonvoting observers on the disciplinary committee, and not members with full voting rights, their perspectives would not be taken into account by other members of the university community. Truly sharing perspectives meant sharing the power to make decisions on the basis of those exchanges — thus connecting judgment to politics. Otherwise there was no point in talking.

Surely recognizing her own influence at work, Arendt wrote to Denneny noting that she “liked” his statement, even as she scrambled to protect him from irate conservatives in the Committee. Most aggrieved was Saul Bellow, who when not trying to get Denneny’s funding for the coming year revoked, was busy transforming his grievances with student radicals into the novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970). James Redfield, who taught Denneny Greek (and who was still teaching Greek at the University of Chicago when Denneny died in 2023!), wrote to Arendt that he was so furious with his former student that “I could scarcely speak to him.”

Arendt urged her colleagues to be calm, and lauded Denneny’s dissertation, which, she falsely assured them (knowing better), was on the verge of completion. (Eventually, Denneny finished three chapters of his dissertation before quitting the Committee in 1973.) Meanwhile she told Denneny in scolding terms that the student radicals were no longer the idealists of the early ‘60s, but “criminal” elements. Their protests, she warned, would drift more and more to the model of the 1969 armed takeover of Cornell by Black militants. “So get out,” she ordered.

Whatever the merits of her analysis of the student protestors or American politics, or of her perhaps typically professional combination of enthusiasm for political protest and horror at violent confrontation, Arendt showed herself to be more adept than her student at mediating contending factions and communicating prudently to diverse audiences. Denneny’s quixotic efforts to promote dialogue between the university and student protestors while issuing Arendtian condemnations of bureaucracy only earned him general ire. His adviser, meanwhile, was able to diffuse some of the Committee’s hostility towards him. Likewise, alternately praising and chiding her student, she was able to lure him temporarily out of radical politics (but not able to make him finish his dissertation).

She demonstrated a similar combination of tact and sharpness when writing confidentially to a professor about a student on whose dissertation committee she had been asked to sit. First, she gave her honest opinion about the student’s work — and then wondered whether it might be better to provide an additional “conventionally laudatory” opinion for general circulation among the faculty. Less gently, she wrote in another letter of a student whose “fundamentals” exam (the Committee’s equivalent of qualifying exams in other graduate departments) she had evaluated: “I would let her pass … she’s simpleminded but that’s better than being oversophisticated.”

Arendt was unreservedly and undiplomatically negative about only one particular student: Werner Dannhauser, a protégé of Leo Strauss writing a dissertation on Friedrich Nietzsche. She criticized Dannhauser, who already had a reputation as a right-winger for his defenses of the Vietnam War in Commentary, for his “tone-deafness” to Nietzsche’s ambiguities and ironies, his systematic reduction of all the German philosophers’ queries into one-dimensional declarations. This was one of the few direct points of conflict between Arendt and Strauss, whom she had despised as a quasi-fascist ever since their acquaintance decades before in Germany. Arendt’s biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, reports that in 1932 Strauss had asked Arendt on a date, to be met with rejection on the grounds of his “conservative political views” (which is really saying something, considering Arendt’s paramour Martin Heidegger had been an actual Nazi).

These are, in one sense, fairly trivial examples (except for the students concerned); similar dramas take place every day in countless academic departments. But they shed light on Arendt’s concern during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s — the last years of her life — with the exercise of judgment. When we evaluate the characters of individual people, or consider what the “right” thing to do in a novel and confusing situation might be, we are relying on a faculty, judgment, which we have trained over the course of our life through exemplary models, without ever acquiring fixed rules, clear concepts, or any of the other usual indices of rationality. The reason at work in judgment is of a particular kind, Arendt argued, distinct from reasons reducible to logic.

Thanks to scholars like the University of Chicago’s own Linda Zerilli and D.N. Rodowick, along with others like Martin Blumenthal-Barby, Arendt’s ideas about judgment have in recent years become increasingly understood as central to her political thinking, which is itself increasingly recognized as a summit of modern thought. And yet, these scholars (although they are all, like Arendt, immersed in academic life’s everyday cases requiring the use of judgment) tend to fall into patterns of theoretical abstraction that remove themselves and her from precisely the concrete, embodied practices of making evaluative choices in the absence of universally accepted criteria to which Arendt had meant “judgment” to call attention.

D.N. Rodowick, for example, makes the case that Arendt’s thinking about judgment powerfully links the small-scale practices of teaching and discussion in the university to the larger-scale patterns by which we preserve our political capacities for acting responsibly together on the basis of truths revealed through public discourse. This would be encouraging and urgent news both for the humanities and for our democracy. Yet Rodowick eschews giving concrete examples of judgment in action — even though, per Arendt’s own thinking, it is only in such cases (and not in theory) that judgment can be trained.

Arendt’s time in Chicago, and her subsequent treatment at the hands of Chicago’s interpreters of her work, pose the challenge of understanding “judgment” as something that can only be exercised, or understood, in specific instantiations that call for our own evaluations. In that sense, the apparently minor matters of departmental conflict in which she involved herself are not just old gossip. Nor are their political dimensions reducible to the categories of right and left (such that it would be progressive to protect Denneny, but conservative to advise him to leave student radicalism). They are episodes in the exercise of judgment, and whetstones on which our judgment can sharpen itself. In particular, Arendt’s scholarly, and sometimes almost motherly, concern for Denneny, as he built on her ideas in his dissertation and applied those ideas (sometimes to her chagrin) in his campus activism, might inspire new reflection. How could we understand Socrates, after all, if we didn’t take Alcibiades into account?