The Other Arendt: Mary McCarthy and a Friendship That Borders on Romance

Mary McCarthy is the only woman whose correspondence with Hannah Arendt appears in a standalone published volume. That fact, Roger Berkowitz argues in a newly excerpted passage from his book A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press, 2026), has skewed our picture of the philosopher — and left crucial voices out of our understanding of her political thought.

Arendt's published letters, Berkowitz notes, document her exchanges with men: Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Heinrich Blücher, Gershom Scholem, Kurt Blumenfeld and Joachim Fest. Yet she had other close women friends — Hilde Fränkel, Anne Weil, Charlotte Beradt, Rose Feitelson and Lotte Kohler — whose letters remain largely unavailable.

Why did women's letters vanish?

One reason is simple: letters among women have long been devalued in philosophy. But Berkowitz adds a second: Arendt cultivated with women a quieter mode of connection — "one less bound to the public world and more rooted in emotional resonance, bodily vitality, and care." These friendships reveal a side of Arendt too often ignored: not the philosopher of worldliness, but "a woman capable of intimate, even erotic, bonds."

In her speech "On Humanity in Dark Times," Arendt distinguished two kinds of friendship. "We are wont," she said, "to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy, in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world." Her Lessing speech instead stressed the "political relevance of friendship" — a bond based in respect that "is one of the fundamental requirements for the well-being of the City." That political model has dominated accounts of her thought.

The other side is intimate and unguarded, nurtured in "face-to-face encounters," where friends "speak about ourselves." In The Human Condition, Arendt excluded love from the public world: "love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public." Love, she wrote, "destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others," making it "not only apolitical but anti political."

How did the McCarthy friendship begin?

Badly. At a party, McCarthy made an offhand remark about Hitler's desire to be loved by his victims. Arendt — a stateless Jewish refugee — was incensed: "How can you say such a thing to me, a victim of Hitler, a person who has been in a concentration camp!"

They stayed cool toward each other until a chance meeting on a subway platform years later. Arendt approached McCarthy and said: "Let's end this nonsense. We think so much alike." So began a lifelong friendship.

Their correspondence, Berkowitz writes, often reads like a philosophy seminar conducted in a living room. McCarthy devoured The Origins of Totalitarianism "in the bathtub, in the car, in the grocery store," calling it "a truly extraordinary piece of work, an advance in human thought." Arendt praised McCarthy's Oasis as a "veritable little masterpiece."

Their topics ran wide:

• Domestic politics: "Watergate has eaten rather deeply and sharply into my time and my attention"
• Political philosophy: "the chief vice of every egalitarian society is Envy"
• Philosophy itself: "Truth, on the contrary, is always the beginning of thought, thinking is always result-less"

Michelle Dean writes that in an age when "women hunger for models of intellectual self-confidence," Arendt and McCarthy offer a paradigm of "ferocious friendship." Carol Brightman noted the correspondence has "the quality of a conte philosophique."

What lay beneath the intellectual fencing?

Tenderness. Brightman saw in the letters a quality that "bespeaks a friendship that borders on romance." "Dearest Hannah," McCarthy confided, "I'm writing you this note for purely selfish reasons: because my heart is full of emotion and I want to talk. As if we were in your apartment."

The tone switched quickly between the intimate and the political. In one letter, Arendt confided her fear for Heinrich Blücher after an illness — "We have been together for 28 years and life without him would be unthinkable" — and in the same letter described the intellectual "mob" mobilized against her over Eichmann in Jerusalem: "What a risky business to tell the truth on a factual level."

Romance also entered the letters directly, sometimes comically. McCarthy once enclosed a letter for Arendt to post to McCarthy's third husband, Bowden Broadwater, to conceal a London rendezvous with the journalist and former boxer John Davenport. When McCarthy fell in love with James Raymond West, a U.S. embassy official in Warsaw, she wrote: "Dear Hannah, I love him, more than before. He's the most wholly serious person I've ever known." Arendt answered: "I am frightened that you might get hurt and you know also that I am quite aware that this is nonsense."

McCarthy did get hurt, writing of a night lying "awake in a single bed while [she] wept slowly and steadily." Arendt's reply: "The story about the Clem-tragedy sounded very funny — how long some chickens take to come home to roost."

How did Arendt herself define the bond?

McCarthy called it a "workmanly" friendship — friends accompanying each other, in her phrase, "in the sense of" two "apprentices" walking a stretch of road together. Arendt was "touched" by the formulation. As Kathleen Jones has observed, the bond was intimate, but grounded in shared labor and intellectual companionship rather than romantic confession.

The excerpt suggests that the still-unpublished letters with Arendt's women friends — Fränkel, Weil, Beradt, Feitelson, Kohler — could reshape how readers understand the philosopher who insisted the common world, not intimacy, was the proper home of politics.