Nationstate and the Stateless: Hannah Arendt on the End of Human Rights
Date: February 11, 2025 | 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Location: Pardee School of Global Studies, 154 Bay State Road, 2nd floor (Eilts Room)
Keynote Speaker: Prof. Michael Zank, Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies & Medieval Studies at BU
Respondent: Prof. Thomas Meyer, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
Event Description: Description: Part II of Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism ends with a haunting disquisition on the decline of the nation state and the end of human rights in the period leading up to the Great War that broke out in August, 1914. Along with Part I which contains Arendt’s history of anti-Semitism, we get what, in the German version, she calls the origins and elements of totalitarianism, a new and unprecedented form of government.
In light of the global crisis of migration and ever more urgent calls for closing borders and mass deportations, this talk reexamines Arendt’s thesis of a nexus between the demise of the European system of nation states, the phenomenon of stateless people, and the rise of totalitarian regimes, and asks whether we can learn something from Arendt for today.
About Michael Zank: Michael Zank (b. 1958) studied in Göttingen, Kiel, Heidelberg, and Jerusalem before he entered the PhD program in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. A member of the BU Religion Department since 1994, Zank teaches introductory classes on the Bible and the afterlife of biblical traditions (including “Holy City: Jerusalem in Time, Space, and the Imagination”) and advanced courses in philosophy of religion and Jewish thought (including “Maimonides”). Zank’s research on Bible and biblical reception, German-Jewish history, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of religion, Jewish thought, political Hebraism, political philosophy, and other subjects is driven by the tensions in his cultural background as a migrant between German culture and Jewish identity in a post-Holocaust world for whom philosophy and the symbolic worlds of religious literature provide key “texts” for our personal and collective struggles for orientation. Zank is grateful to have landed in a Religion department hospitable to his philosophical/theological bent and allowed him to develop classes he loves to teach.
About Thomas Meyer: Thomas Meyer studied philosophy, modern German literature, and Classics in Munich. He obtained his doctorate (2003) and completed his Habilitation (2009) both at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. Afterwards, he received several Fellowships, as well as Visiting- and Guest-Professorships. Since 2020, he has been a philosophy professor at LMU, Munich. Meyer’s numerous publications include a biography of Hannah Arendt (2024, 4th edition), which will be published in English this year by Penguin, New York. He is also the editor of the works of Hannah Arendt (eleven volumes since 2020).