![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Notes
1. Page references to Arendt, Thinking Without a Banister, are cited parenthetically in the text, with or without the short title Banister. Parenthetical page references to her other works follow an abbreviated or short title as specified in the list of Abbreviations.
2. Arendt frequently revised her published texts and republished them in different outlets. It would therefore have been beneficial for the reader of the Schocken volumes to be provided with unambiguous bibliographical details for the published pieces. This appears to this reader not to be the case in a number of instances. For “Authority in the 20th Century,” the editor might have referred the reader to its publication in Review of Politics 18 (1956): 403–17; and “The Hungarian Revolution and Totalitarian Imperialism” has also been published in Journal of Politics 20 (1958): 5–43. “Politics and Crime: An Exchange of Letters” (with the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger) has been published (in German) in Merkur 19 (1965): 380–85. “Action and the ‘Pursuit’ of Happiness” was published in Alois Dempf et al., eds., Politische Ordnung und Existenz, Munich: Beck, 1962 (and not, as stated, in Commentary, Fall 1960). And “Is America by Nature a Violent Society?” was published in The New York Times Magazine in 1968, not in 1965. The text “Freedom and Politics. A Lecture” seems to be a translation of Arendt’s chapter (based on a lecture in Zurich in May 1958) in Erziehung zur Freiheit, published in Sozialwissenschaftliche Studien für das Schweizerische Institut für Auslandforschung (Erlenbach, Zurich und Stuttgart: E. Rentsch Verlag, 1959). The editor gives as place of original publication of this lecture the Chicago Review (vol. 14, no. 1 [Spring 1961 (sic)]). This text, published in 1960 in the Review, was based on a lecture that Arendt gave at Bryn Mawr College in February 1959 and was republished with revisions in BPF. The piece on “Revolution and Freedom” has been published before in H. Tramer, ed., In zwei Welten: Siegfried Moses zum fuenfundsiebzigsten Geburtstag (Tel Aviv: Bitaon, 1962).
3. Thinking Without a Banister is an excellent companion to The Portable Hannah Arendt, which remains indispensable for teaching purposes.
4. In Banister, Arendt’s arguments concerning the tradition of Western political thought are presented in three pieces of writing that have previously been published in Social Research. They focus, primarily, on Plato (and Aristotle), Montesquieu, and Marx (3–68).
5. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 4, 33. Plato, in The Republic, 6.484, argues that the philosophers, who, after all, can reach what always stays the same in every respect and who can thus grasp absolute truth, should rule the city, not the non-philosophers who cannot and who wander among the many things that go in every direction.
6. Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters, 180.
7. Kant, Groundwork, 37 and 58.
8. Rawls, Theory of Justice, viii.
9. Rawls, Theory of Justice, 587. As he asserts in Political Liberalism, “we must find some point of view, removed from and not distorted by the particular features and circumstances” of our everyday life (23).
10. Arendt formulates her conceptualisation of politics on the basis of the emblematic significance that she bestows on the Greek polis. However, she was not mired in a nostalgic longing for the Athenian city-state but acknowledged that it was a ‘sunken city’. As a matter of fact, for Arendt it is partly the assertion of the political and legal legacy of the Roman Republic in the founding of the American republic that bestows an exemplary world-historical significance on the American Revolution (Revolution, 196–214).
11. Fenichel Pitkin, Attack of the Blob, 245.
12. Arendt, “Freedom and Politics,” 1, 30.
13. Ibid., 31. Also Banister, 221–22.
14. Arendt, “Freedom and Politics,” 29 note 1.
15. Ibid., 31–32.
16. Ibid., 29. “People can only be free in relation to one another, and so only in the realm of politics and action can they experience freedom positively, which is more than not being forced” (Banister, 220). See also MDT, 9.
17. Arendt, “Freedom and Politics,” 30. “Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance” (Banister, 221).
18. Arendt: “If it were true that sovereignty and freedom are the same, then indeed no man could be free, because sovereignty, the ideal of uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership, is contradictory to the very condition of plurality. No man can be sovereign because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth… [This plurality leads us to accept] the simultaneous presence of freedom and non-sovereignty” (HC, 234–35).
19. Arendt, HC, 30 and 29 note 1.
20. This distinction does, of course, underpin Arendt’s conceptual distinction between “the political” and “the social.” In her analyses in On Revolution, Arendt engages with “the social question” and essentially charges Karl Marx as being the theorist of “the transformation of the Rights of Man into the rights of the Sans-Culottes” and thus “in theory” surrendering (political) freedom to necessity (OR, 61, 65). According to Arendt, for Marx “the role of revolution was no longer to liberate men from the oppression of their fellow men, let alone found freedom, but to liberate the life process of society from the fetters of scarcity so that it could swell into a stream of abundance. Not freedom but abundance became now the aim of revolution” (ibid., 64). A critical reading of Arendt’s argument about Marx’s political theory (Banister, 3–43) would permit to problematize her conceptualisation of (political) freedom as tied to the idea of political emancipation that, not only in a Marxist reading could arguably be designated as insufficiently emancipatory. A consideration of Marx’s political theory raises the issue of whether a notion of “freedom” needs to be grounded in an analysis of the material practices and relations of power in capitalist society. Despite her criticism of the French Revolution as remaining arrested at the “negative stage” of liberation, Arendt credits both the French and American Revolutions with the rediscovery of action (after the many centuries in which contemplation overshadowed action) and the rebirth and resurgence of an authentically political realm (Banister, 218–19; Revolution, 234–35, 255, 319). Arendt analyses and celebrates the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 as a prime example of the rediscovery of action and the endeavour to constitute freedom in the twentieth century (Banister, 105–55).
21. “If someone wants to see and experience the world as it ‘really’ is, he can do so only by understanding it as something that is shared by many people, lies between them, separates and links them, showing itself differently to each and comprehensible only to the extent that many people talk about it and exchange their opinions and perspectives with one another, over against one another. Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides. Living in a real world and speaking with one another about it are basically one and the same” (Promise, 128–29).
22. Arendt continues: “The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion” (BPF, 237).
23. In On Revolution, Arendt, in the context of her critique of representative democracy and her positive appraisal of council democracy, points to “the average citizen’s capacity to act and form his own opinion” as a result of which it is feasible for “every member of the egalitarian society to become a ‘participator’ in public affairs” (264–65). See also EU, 321.
24. In a review of a book by Leon Poliakov in 1952, Arendt praises the author’s “integrity and objectivity” in his account of the ghettos and the role of their Judenräte, or Jewish councils: “He neither accuses nor excuses, but reports fully and faithfully what the sources tell him—the growing apathy of the victims as well as their occasional heroism, the terrible dilemma of the Judenräte, their despair as well as their confusion, their complicity and their sometimes pathetically ludicrous ambitions” (JW, 458–59). Evidently, these remarks foreshadow Arendt’s controversial discussion of the Jewish councils in her book on the Eichmann trial. In a letter to Mary McCarthy in October 1963, Arendt, remarking on her Eichmann book, stressed its character as a ‘report’: “[It] leaves all questions of why things happened as they happened out of account.” Quoted in King, Arendt and America, 198.
25. Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question. It would merit a sustained discussion how Arendt’s notion of “representative” thinking could be articulated with recent debates of “representation” and “the politics of presence.”