#14 Helgard Mahrdt | Hannah Arendt and the Double Responsibility of Educators
TRANSCRIPT SUMMARY
(This transcript summary was AI-generated and then edited by the podcast hosts for quality assurance)
#14 HELGARD MAHRDT | HANNAH ARENDT AND THE DOUBLE RESPONSIBILITY OF EDUCATORS
- a podcast dialogue with Michael Noah Weiss and Guro Hansen Helskog
INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
Dr. Helgard Mahrdt’s engagement with Hannah Arendt’s work began serendipitously through a connection with the German author Ingeborg Bachmann. While researching Bachmann, Mahrdt encountered her correspondence with Arendt and was intrigued by the latter’s thought. This initial curiosity, combined with a personal and academic interest in questions of guilt, responsibility, and history—especially in relation to the atrocities of Nazi Germany—sparked a deeper intellectual journey. Mahrdt was drawn to Arendt’s capacity to address political responsibility without defaulting to collective guilt, offering instead a nuanced framework for engaging with the past and shaping the future.
Mahrdt emphasizes that Arendt was never interested in theoretical system-building. Rather, she was committed to understanding. Arendt’s work—especially The Origins of Totalitarianism—sought to comprehend how radical evil emerged from within the so-called civilized world. Mahrdt’s own research at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., focused on the first ten years of Arendt’s exile in the United States, which was critical in shaping Arendt’s thinking.
THE DOUBLE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE EDUCATOR
One of the core themes in the conversation is Arendt’s concept of the double responsibility of the educator—toward the student and toward the world. Mahrdt unpacks this notion through Arendt’s essays “The Crisis in Education” and “What Is Authority?” Arendt articulates that modern education must be understood against the backdrop of a breakdown in tradition, authority, and continuity.
For Arendt, tradition had historically been upheld by a trinity: tradition itself, authority, and religion (understood in its Roman meaning as “binding back” to the founding values). Totalitarianism disrupted this framework. The educational crisis, then, emerges from the collapse of authority—the last of the trinity to break down.
According to Arendt, education concerns everyone, not just professional educators. All adults share responsibility for the world that is being handed down. The world, as Arendt distinguishes from nature or the earth, is the artificial realm created by humans: institutions, cultures, and political structures that provide a framework for human plurality. Since human beings are mortal, the world must be continually renewed by new generations, who in turn need guidance to inherit and sustain this shared space.
Mahrdt explains that the educator’s dual role is both conservative and progressive: to preserve the world against potentially destabilizing forces introduced by the young, while also protecting the newness and potential inherent in every child. This “love for the world” is, for Arendt, a prerequisite for meaningful education. Without such love, adults may find it difficult to invest in the future of a world that seems morally and politically fractured, especially in the wake of historical atrocities like the Holocaust.
WORLDLINESS, ALIENATION, AND THE HUMAN CONDITION
The discussion turns to the theme of worldliness versus worldlessness, key ideas in Arendt’s The Human Condition. Mahrdt highlights Arendt’s reaction to the 1957 launch of Sputnik as an emblematic event. Arendt saw this technological triumph as a symbolic—and literal—alienation from the earth, one of the core conditions of human existence.
This form of earth alienation was, for Arendt, not merely about space exploration but symptomatic of a deeper expropriation: the displacement of people, the erosion of communal life, and the prioritization of economic accumulation over human connection. Mahrdt notes that Arendt remarkably foresaw contemporary trends like space privatization and capital-driven technologies, observing that they threaten to unmoor humanity from its worldly responsibilities.
In education, such alienation manifests when students are trained merely to adapt to market forces or technological change without being grounded in ethical, historical, or political thought. The result is a generation that may be skilled but not rooted, informed but not wise.
MORAL VERSUS POLITICAL RESPONSIBILITY
The hosts ask Mahrdt to clarify Arendt’s distinction between political and moral (or personal) responsibility. Mahrdt reframes this as the difference between personal and political responsibility. Personally, individuals are accountable for their actions—what they say and do. Politically, however, citizens are responsible for the actions of their governments, regardless of direct participation, particularly in democratic societies where voting implies consent.
Arendt observed a troubling reluctance to judge political events, rooted in the Christian-inflected sentiment that no one is morally superior enough to judge others. Against this, Arendt asserts that judgment is not about moral superiority but about the health of public life. Citizens must exercise the faculty of judgment—to evaluate actions and make distinctions between right and wrong—not only in moral but in political terms.
This, in turn, requires thinking. Drawing on Socrates as we know him from the dialogues of Plato, Arendt sees thinking as a dialogue with oneself—a two-in-one conversation that fosters personal integrity. Mahrdt underscores the importance of remembrance in this process. If one cannot remember one’s actions, one cannot reflect on them, and thus one cannot judge or grow. This failure to think and remember is what Arendt identified in Adolf Eichmann. According to her, he was not a monstrous mastermind, but a bureaucrat who never reflected on his deeds and thus became capable of great evil.
For education, then, the task is not just to convey information, but to cultivate habits of thinking, remembering, and judging. These are the building blocks of moral and political responsibility.
THE PUBLIC REALM AND DEMOCRATIC DISCOURSE
In discussing the contemporary rise of radical political movements and authoritarian tendencies, Mahrdt emphasizes Arendt’s insistence on the public realm—a space where diverse opinions coexist and are tested through dialogue. Although thinking begins in solitude, its fruit must be shared in public to be meaningful. Public discourse allows individuals to be corrected, challenged, and enriched by others’ perspectives.
One danger today, Mahrdt warns, is the siloing of discourse. Digital echo chambers, such as Facebook communities or politically aligned media, erode the common world by preventing exposure to differing opinions. For Arendt, pluralism is not just tolerable—it is necessary. Politics is only possible when multiple perspectives on a shared world are brought into relation. Opinions, though subjective, are rooted in real experience and thus deserve expression and examination.
This leads Mahrdt to stress the importance of passion in education. Teachers must be passionate about the world and its future, and this passion must be transmitted to students. Yet, political action, unlike authoritarian decrees, is slow and collective. The impatience of youth, especially in times of crisis like the climate emergency, must be met with both urgency and realism. Real change requires cooperation, dialogue, and time.
Autocratic systems may appear more efficient, but they suppress freedom—particularly the freedom to act together in public. Arendt understood freedom not as individual license but as the shared power of people acting in concert to initiate change. Education, therefore, must prepare young people to be political actors, not just professionals or workers.
UNIVERSITIES AND THE BURDEN OF POLITICAL RESPONSIBILITY
The conversation also addresses the role of universities in the face of ideological pressure. With reference to attempts by the Trump administration to influence elite academic institutions like Harvard, Mahrdt affirms that universities do have political responsibilities. As bastions of independent thought and public discourse, universities must resist authoritarian encroachments and defend academic freedom.
Mahrdt praises those institutions and scholars who publicly resist political overreach and warns that these are not merely American issues. What happens in one part of the world—particularly in a cultural and political power like the U.S.—has ripple effects globally.
CONCLUSION: EDUCATION AS WORLD-BUILDING
Throughout the conversation, Mahrdt, channeling Arendt, portrays education not as a technical process or neutral service, but as a deeply political and moral act. To educate is to introduce the next generation to a shared world—and that means caring for the world enough to want it to endure. It requires courage, judgment, memory, and love.
Above all, Mahrdt and Arendt remind us that education and politics are about action—not abstractly, but as real, embodied participation in public life. In an age of polarization, distraction, and alienation, the cultivation of judgment and the care for a common world are urgent responsibilities—shared by educators, students, and citizens alike.
