Arendt and the weeks news

We will say goodbye to Hannah Arendt for now, but I hope as a recurring thread through the weeks news she provided an interesting and thought provoking link between very different items. Before we consign her to last weeks news it is worth reflecting on what she was all about.

This week’s events, from the Huntingdon stabbings, to David Lammy’s silence at PMQs, to debates on education and work, all return us to one of Hannah Arendt’s most urgent ideas: the need for thinking and acting in a shared world.

For Arendt, the Huntingdon incident was not just an act of violence but a test of what she called the capacity to act. When commuters intervened to stop the attack, they restored something fragile: the trust that binds strangers together in public life. Violence destroys the space where human action and speech can occur. The courage of ordinary people restored it.

At PMQs, when David Lammy was unable to answer a direct question, even with a prepared statement, Arendt would see more than a political failure. She would see the danger of thoughtlessness — the inability to pause, reflect, and take responsibility for one’s words. In politics, truth-telling is not simply moral virtue; it is what makes the public realm real. To speak evasively is to weaken the shared world where citizens can trust one another.

In the ongoing crises within the justice system, Arendt would see bureaucracy at its most dangerous; a machinery that functions without judgment. When people are wrongly released, or when officials hide behind procedure, the system ceases to be human. For Arendt, the moral collapse of bureaucracy lies in its indifference to thought: everyone follows rules, yet no one truly acts.

In education, Arendt believed that teaching is an act of introducing the young to the world as it is, not a tool for ideology or politics. When governments repeatedly reshape education to reflect their own agendas, they risk severing the link between past and future. True education, she wrote, must preserve the world so that each generation can renew it.

When Rachel Reeves insisted that “those who can work, must,” Arendt would have heard the echo of an older confusion, the belief that human worth lies in productivity. For her, work was essential, but it was not freedom. Freedom begins when we act and speak together, not merely when we labour. A society that values only usefulness risks turning citizens into cogs rather than participants in public life.

Even in the spectacle of The Traitors, where deception is rewarded as entertainment, Arendt would find something telling. The game plays with trust, truth, and betrayal, the very elements that hold a community together. When deceit becomes celebrated, it mirrors the erosion of shared reality that she warned against in political life.

Across all these stories, Arendt’s lesson is the same: the strength of a society lies not in efficiency or control, but in its ability to sustain truth, judgment, and action among equals. The failure to think, whether in violence, politics, bureaucracy, or entertainment, is what truly endangers the world we share.