The excommunication of Hannah Arendt.(Biography) From: World Policy Journal | Date: December 22, 2006| Author: Elon, Amos | COPYRIGHT 2006 World Policy Institute. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

In December 1966, Isaiah Berlin, the prominent philosopher and historian of ideas, was the guest of his friend, Edmund Wilson, the well-known American man of letters. An entry in Wilson's diary mentions an argument between the two men. Berlin "gets violent, sometimes irrational prejudice against people," Wilson noted, "for example [against] Hannah Arendt, although he has never read her book about Eichmann." In a memoir in the Yale Review in 1987, Berlin made exactly the same charge...