Hacker News Books

I first thought that the book itself was titled The Opportunists, but that's just the title of the book review; the book is called The Free World. Although it sounds like the book is fairly critical of many of its subjects, I doubt either Louis Menand or Mark Greif specifically meant to sum up Hannah Arendt's work as opportunism.

The closest to this that the review comes is

> One sentiment repeated with variations throughout the book is “The timing was good” (for the appearance of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, when Stalin seemed to have taken the place of Hitler).

In context I think the idea is that some people like Arendt may have engaged in sincere journalism and philosophy, which the culture and/or the CIA may then have deployed as part of the Cold War, not that Arendt (at least) was thinking "what could I write that would make me famous and influential right now?".

To modernize this a bit, Ta-nehisi Coates and Jordan Peterson were both developing and expressing their ideas for a long time (decades, I think) in relative obscurity. Then they suddenly became best-sellers in the 2010s, I imagine to a great extent because of cultural and political developments outside of themselves and their work. Both are presumably profiting quite a bit from their success, but I doubt either primarily thought tactically or consciously opportunistically about that.