Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975

511 Pages·2018·3.45 MB·English

by  Hannah Arendt

ALSO BY HANNAH ARENDT
Nonfiction
Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought Crises of the Republic
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954
The Human Condition
The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age The Jewish Writings
Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy The Life of the Mind, Vol. I Thinking, Vol. II Willing Love and Saint
Augustine
Men in Dark Times
On Revolution
On Violence
The Origins of Totalitarianism The Promise of Politics
Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman Responsibility and Judgment
Correspondence
Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975
Correspondence, 1926–1969 (with Karl Jaspers) Letters,1925–1975 (with Martin Heidegger) Within Four
Walls: The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, 1936–1968

Contents
Cover
Also by Hannah Arendt
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction by Jerome Kohn
Acknowledgments
Publication History
Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought
The Great Tradition
Authority in the Twentieth Century
Letter to Robert M. Hutchins
The Hungarian Revolution and Totalitarian Imperialism
Totalitarianism
Culture and Politics
Challenges to Traditional Ethics: A Response to Michael Polanyi
Reflections on the 1960 National Conventions: Kennedy vs. Nixon
Action and the “Pursuit of Happiness”
Freedom and Politics, a Lecture
The Cold War and the West
Nation-State and Democracy
Kennedy and After
Nathalie Sarraute
“As If Speaking to a Brick Wall”: A Conversation with Joachim Fest
Labor, Work, Action
Politics and Crime: An Exchange of Letters
Introduction to The Warriors by J. Glenn Gray
On the Human Condition
The Crisis Character of Modern Society
Revolution and Freedom, a Lecture
Is America by Nature a Violent Society?
The Possessed
“The Freedom to Be Free”: The Conditions and Meaning of Revolution
Imagination
He’s All Dwight
Emerson-Thoreau Medal Address
The Archimedean Point
Heidegger at Eighty
For Martin Heidegger
War Crimes and the American Conscience
Letter to the Editor of The New York Review of Books
Values in Contemporary Society
Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt
Remarks
Address to the Advisory Council on Philosophy at Princeton University
Interview with Roger Errera
Public Rights and Private Interests: A Response to Charles Frankel
Preliminary Remarks About the Life of the Mind
Transition
Remembering Wystan H. Auden, Who Died in the Night of the Twenty-eighth
of September, 1973
There’s this other thing, which Draenos brought up…“groundless
thinking.” I have a metaphor which is not quite that cruel, and which
I have never published but kept for myself. I call it thinking without
a banister—in German, Denken ohne Geländer. That is, as you go up
and down the stairs you can always hold on to the banister so that
you don’t fall down, but we have lost this banister. That is the way I
tell it to myself. And this is indeed what I try to do.
—Hannah Arendt
INTRODUCTION
Jerome Kohn
The Republic of the United States of America has been in a state of decline for
more than fifty years, that is, if the decline is dated from the debacle of the
invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. More than a century before that,
John Quincy Adams already despaired of what he called the “noble experiment,”
chiefly due to the mordant division of public opinion over the issue of human
slavery.
Today, the apathy of public opinion is denounced by politicians of all parties
and pundits of all political stripes, for the sake of their own power. But for the
people, what does an addiction to polls, however cockeyed their results, signify
other than an obsession with public opinion? It will come as no surprise to those
familiar with Hannah Arendt’s way of thinking that she believed polls, like
senseless calls for donations, signify either having lost or been swindled out of
one’s own opinion. Speaking with a group of students in Chicago in 1963, Arendt
said that every one of us “is forced to make up his mind and then exchange his
opinion with others. You may remember,” she said, “the great mistrust the
founders had in public opinion, which stands opposed to public spirit. Where
public spirit is lacking, public opinion comes in its stead.” To Arendt this is a
“perversion,” and a danger to all republics, perhaps especially those that consider
themselves democracies. For (now quoting Madison, Federalist, 50) “when men
exert their reason cooly and freely on a variety of distinct questions, they
inevitably fall into different opinions….When they are governed by a common
passion, their opinions, if they are so to be called, will be the same.”*1
Thomas Jefferson was a “party of one,” though not in the sense of The Loners’
Manifesto,*2 which would transmogrify loners, political and otherwise, into a
group identity! In a letter to Francis Hopkinson written from Paris in March of
1789, Jefferson wrote: “I am not a federalist, because I never submitted the whole
system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in
philosophy, in politics, or in any thing else where I was capable of thinking for
myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I
could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all. Therefore I
protest to you I am not of the party of federalists. But I am much farther from
that of the Antifederalists.”
If the American Republic has failed, who bears the responsibility? That
question can be construed economically or—in various forms—psychologically,
which, to Arendt, would bring forth social rather than political answers. To
respond politically would require an observer standing at a distance from the
certain but ambiguous sociability of men and women. A political response would
be to a somewhat different and more precise question: How have citizens of the
United States dissipated the power of their Republic? Her last public address,
delivered in the last year of her life, 1975, in celebration of the approaching two
hundredth anniversary of the birth of the American Republic, contains
indications of what she might say today. There she emphasized “the erosion of
power in this country, the nadir of self-confidence when victory over one of the
tiniest and most helpless countries could cheer the inhabitants of what only a few
decades ago really was the ‘mightiest power on earth’ ”*3 (referring to the United
States in the mid-to late 1940s, after the Allied victory in World War II). She
next mentions something that, by 1975, seemed to her the “mini-crisis triggered
by Joe McCarthy” in the 1950s, which heralded “the destruction of a reliable and
devoted civil service…probably the most important achievement of the long
Roosevelt administration.” From that point on there had been a “cataclysm of
events, tumbling over one another,” and, in words frequently quoted, “cascading
like a Niagara Falls of history whose sweeping force leaves everybody, spectators
who try to reflect on it and actors who try to slow it down, equally numbed and
paralyzed.” Now, more than forty years after Arendt delivered that speech, how
often do we still hear this country hailed as the world’s greatest power, or sole
superpower, with even less justification than in 1975? Even more confusing,
today this swagger is accompanied by the politically empty economic caveat that
somehow America must return to her former “wealth” and “greatness.”
The ground beneath Arendt’s political thought and speech, the soil that
nourished it, was unusually fertile, for better and worse. One matter she almost
certainly would be inclined to address today concerns the seemingly relentless
political lies at the highest levels of the executive branch—but not only there—of
the U.S. government. This lying does not threaten the truth, as the grammatically
inept and self-contradictory description of our times as “post-truth” implies, but
rather undercuts our ability to believe in the reality of political goings-on as such.
If the consequence of the loss of a sense of reality also spells the loss of political
power, on the one hand, there is the more crucial matter of how citizens’ exercise
of freedom generates power, on the other. This is why the “freedom to be free,”
as she states forcefully in this volume, is for Arendt the end or telos of political
revolution. Of course, none of this is to deny that self-driven financial
imbalances, death-ridden racial inequalities, along with other diverse forms of
brutality, bureaucratic corruption, and social injustice, deprive us of freedom in
ways that are becoming ever more apparent. These are the signs of an
encroaching social totalism, the more or less complete repression of political
freedom in, for example, a republic that has become a bureaucracy. Such totalism
need not arrive or result in the terror Arendt perceived as the essence of
twentieth-century totalitarianism, but its signs are, I believe, what she cautions us
to beware of as “the true predicaments of our time [in] their authentic form.”*4
Of what does political freedom consist? To cast a secret ballot while alone in a
voting booth, is that to be free? Is to teach, to write, or to read to be free? For
Arendt, the simplest answer appears to be that the capacities to act and to speak
—speech as distinct from mere talk—are the conditions sine qua non of political
freedom. The question that then falls upon us is where and how do acting and
speaking together generate power? Unlike military force—including the massed
armies and novel weapons of World War II, which still endure—political power
for Arendt, at least negatively, is not engendered by men and women talking to
their peers about themselves, their families, or their careers. What does relate to
power is the speaking out of citizens, their arguing with eloquence in public to
persuade other citizens of their opinions. That is the opposite of obedience.
Citizens fit words to events that by definition are not their own: no one says “my
event,” because an event is objective, it stands over against many people, and its
consequences affect a plurality of different people. The power contained within
an event is the potentiality of citizens who recognize their faculty to render it, to a
greater or lesser extent, tractable. The condition of that tractability is political
commonalty, from which the stamp or mold of human inequality is effaced.
Political commonalty is actualized public space, which Arendt calls “an island of
freedom.” Such an island has only rarely appeared in a world that for the greater
part of its history may be likened to a sea of distrust, malfeasance, and iniquity.
Arendt’s letter to Robert Hutchins, included in this volume, is rich with
examples of what she recognizes as common political concerns. To some readers,
this may suggest the possibility of a common world. How that might develop, and
what form of government would best suit it, are fundamental issues raised by
attempting to understand such a world. Arendt’s view of realizing a common
world was never optimistic, and she was reticent to discuss a form of government
that had hardly yet, and then only briefly, appeared in the world. Still, on one
occasion, when asked about the prospects of a council system of government, she
replied: “Very slight, if at all. And yet perhaps, after all—in the wake of the next
revolution.”*5
Her conception of council systems of governance is not detailed, for they
would be new beginnings that cannot be fully grasped in advance. Nevertheless,
her vision of them is immense. Arendt saw totalitarianism as “a novel form of
government,” one of total destruction, and it had no positive counterpart in the
sense that monarchy is the counterpart of tyranny, aristocracy of oligarchy, and
democracy of ochlocracy. These pairings had remained virtually unchanged since
antiquity, until Arendt added the council system as the positive counterpart to
totalitarianism and, by extension, to all forms of totalism. Her most extensive
account of this system of governance is in her essay on the Hungarian Revolution,
which is published here in its entirety for the first time. At the basic level (which
is also the basis of power) councils are composed of men and women who have
common interests in issues such as fair wages and adequate housing, primary and
secondary education, personal safety, and public security. These basic local levels
would then elect higher and smaller regional levels of councils whose members
would have researched and studied the specifics of resolving these issues. At the
top of the pyramid, a governmental or steering council, also elected from below,
would direct and organize the conglomerate of common interests within its
jurisdiction.
It may be worth mentioning here that Arendt strenuously opposed any notion
of “world government,” as potentially the greatest tyranny imaginable. In council
systems of government the freedom to move, to think, and to act would be
present at each level, but power would be actualized only in the basic levels’
responsibility for the fulfillment of the duties and commitments of the levels
above it. Council governments would result in a common world, one literally
overflowing with interests that lie between (inter esse) the world’s plurality of men
and women, relating them as acting and speaking individuals while maintaining
sufficient space between them for each to address others from his or her unique
point of view. This in-between space would exist in any one council system and in