Arpad Kadarkay

HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition

You are one of those people I count

among the great gifts of this world

-Karl Jaspers

There are a few moments in life when the height and depth of the significance of
the occasion become too great for utterance, when the thrill of electric sympathy touches
the whole generation at once, and brings us to our feet with a spiritual shock. Three of
these happened in my time- the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the assassination of John F.
Kennedy, and the life and work of Hannah Arendt.
If one were to write the intellectual history of the twentieth century, not in terms
of successive generations, where the historian must be faithful to the sequence of ideas
and attitudes, but as the biography of a single person, attempting no more than a
metaphorical approximation of what transpired in the minds of people, that person would
be Hannah Arendt.
To enter the haunted and haunting world of Arendt is to encounter, face to face,
the political and moral Inferno of the twentieth century. Her life spanned the blood
stained convulsions of two world wars, the rise of totalitarian regimes, the man-made
domain of terror, violence, and the deliberate massacre of some seventy million human
beings in Europe and Russia, between the start of the first World War and the end of the
second, and the annihilation of human communities- the suicidal impulse of Western
civilization.
Needing Hell, we have learned how to build and run on it on earth. In locating
Hell above ground, in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, we have reached a turning
point in Western civilization. As Arendt put it, 1

Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination. [This]
illumination... may well come less from theories and concepts than from
uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women in their
lives and works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time
span that was given them on earth.... Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly
be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of a blazing sun.
But such objective evaluation seems to me a matter of secondary importance
which can be safely left to posterity.

Even eyes so used to darkness as mine, who grew up in Communist Hungary, will
be able to tell that the light Hannah Arendt kindled, one of the foremost political
philosophers of the twentieth century, for me and my generation was more than the light
of a candle, and it was a blazing sun.
The circuit of Arendt’s life and creativity, the horizon in which her work moved,
was not actually a circle. Rather, it resembles a triangle whose sides can be accurately
labeled: Philosophy-Freedom-Action. Only this woman in her uniqueness could fill and

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did fill with brilliance the area of that triangle. Her Jewishness and the Jewish question
marked the terrible inner condition of her generation. No matter how insignificant or
remote this problem may appear to us in the face of what actually happened later, we
cannot disregard it here, for neither Kafka nor Arendt can be understood without it.
When Karl Jaspers asked her whether she is a German or a Jew, she replied:2

To be perfectly honest, it doesn’t matter to me in the least on a personal and

individual level.... I’d put it this way: Politically, I will always speak only in the
name of the Jews whenever circumstances force me to give my nationality. That is
easier for me than for your wife [a Jew], because I’m at a further remove from
this whole question and because I never felt myself, either spontaneously or at my
own insistence, to “be a German.” What remains is the language, and how
important that is one learns only when, more nolens than volens, one speaks and
writes other languages. Isn’t that enough?

Although Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers confronted directly the rise of Hitler
and the problem posed by Nazism, Arendt had no sympathy for Jaspers’s Germanism and
the great “intellectual tradition” of Germany with which he had felt connected from an
earlier age. When Jaspers cites her Max Weber as the ideal type of “the German
essence”, she minces no words about “German essence” and sharing the same intellectual
tradition: 3
But let me come back to the Jewish question. I recall our disagreement very well.
In the course of it, you once said (or wrote) to me that we were all in the same
boat. I can’t remember whether I answered you or only thought to myself that
with Hitler as captain (this was before ’33) we Jews would not be in the same
boat. That was wrong, too, because under the circumstances you weren’t in the
boat much longer either or, if you were, then only as a prisoner. In condition of
freedom every individual should be able to decide what he would like to be,
German or Jew or whatever. In an a-national republic like the United States, in
which nationality and state are not identical, this becomes more or less a question
with only social and cultural meaning but not political meaning.

As an émigré, Arendt belonged to two worlds: the world of her origin, Germany,
and the encounter with a new world, the United States. Jewish-German-American mind:
tripartite, plural, and expansive. Her search for the ideal definition of politics was
influenced by her confrontation with the inhuman, perverted politics under the guise of
National Socialist totalitarianism in her native country. The answer to the question of
what constitutes the authentically political, where human dignity and possibilities are
once again realized, she found in the great republic of her refuge.
The totalitarian regimes she dealt with, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, the
focus of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the magisterial study of those “hidden”
elements of modern European history that “crystallized” in the Final Solution and the
Gulag Archipelago. Totalitarianism did not kill truth, it discovered the absolute truth that
authorized killing and achieved the satanic greatness that arrogated to itself the right to
build crematoriums and factories to produce corpses.

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 The plural identity of Hannah Arendt, German-Jew-American, the three strands in
her extraordinary life, enabled her to recognize the capacity for freedom as the source of
human plurality. The human condition is plurality based on labor, work, and action. For
Arendt, they are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions
under which life and pursuit of happiness has been given to man- freedom. The human
condition is that of plurality because it is men, not Man, who labor, who work, and who
act on the earth and inhabit the world.
In tracing and mapping the vast continent of Arendt’s thought that shows the
various stages on her itinerary as a political thinker, we are dealing with something which
may not be unique but is certainly extremely rare: the gift of thinking poetically. And this
thinking, inspired by the present, works with the thought fragments it can rescue from the
past and gather about itself.
She tells Jaspers that she borrowed an epigraph from his Philosophische Logic
(Munich, 1958). It reads, “Give yourself up neither to the past nor to the future. The
important thing is to remain wholly in the present.” That sentence, Arendt tells Jaspers,
“struck me right in the heart, so I’m entitled to have it.” 4
In The Human Condition (1958) Arendt challenges at every turn our received
ideas of what politics is and should be. She returns to her beloved Greeks, to Athens of
Socrates and Plato in particular, in order to show to the survivors of dark continent-
Europe’s twentieth century- how and why political action was the very opposite of its
totalitarian variance of violence, coercion, and domination. Unlike the violence and
coercion used by ordinary tyrants, Hitler and Stalin incarnate evil and exemplify total
domination which reaches its climax by crushing out all human individuality. The
omnipotent leader needs total power so that he can speed up the execution of death
sentences pronounced by the laws of nature or of history.
The birthmark of tyranny had always been lawlessness. Legitimate, constitutional
democracy is limited by laws, whereas tyranny of Stalin is nothing but the breach of these
boundaries so that he could unleash terror at his will over the country. Total terror is
designed to rage freely through society, unhindered by any spontaneous human action.
Human beings are there merely to serve these forces of terror, “either riding atop their
triumphant car or crushed under its wheels.” 5
When Arendt was confronted with the totalitarian perversion of the political,
philosophical, and cultural sphere, she was confronted with the inadequacy the traditional
concept of politics. She made it explicit; there was no place for the human, democratic
politics within specific German framework, where there existed a tradition- in Realpolitik
to legitimize unchecked power or domination as such. This led her to identify res publica,
the political thing, this new political realm, the consent of the governed, with her
conception of the American republic, and the paradigmatic role that the Constitution of
the United States played in her thinking.
One major consequence in the political theory of Arendt is the replacement of the
European relation of “to rule/to govern” and “to be ruled/to be governed” by the
American relation of “to found/to establish” and “to preserve/to continue” as the key to
understand the political in an authentic, human, and constitutional way. “To found”, the
American Revolution; “to establish”, the Constitution; “to preserve/to continue”, the
political thinking of Abraham Lincoln, which is focused on the problem of preserving the

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Union, the Republic- this is the new science of politics that Hannah Arendt celebrates,
this is the Americanization of Hannah Arendt.
It is in the American context that Arendt affirmed her newfound love of the world,
and, excited, tells Jaspers that she will name her book on political theory, On Revolution
(1963), Amor Mundi, love of the world, a phrase she borrowed from St. Augustine on
whose concept of love she had written her doctoral dissertation. On Revolution is
Arendt’s sign of gratitude to her host country, her gift of admiration for the Republic and
the American experience which is deeply colored by her study of the Founding Fathers-
John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, and her reading of the Federalist Papers,
authored by Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay. Here she met a kind of realism and of
thinking that was totally absent in the philosophy of her former lover, Martin Heidegger.
The Germans have no Hamilton, no Jefferson, no Madison, and no Federalist
Papers. For German thinkers, even for Max Weber, American constitutionalism has no
importance at all. For Arendt, the reflection on the German inability or unwillingness to
understand constitutionalism, that is, of the limits of power, the American experience is
all about. Passionately committed to constitutional limits on modern political power,
Arendt does not produce a state-centered political theory but rather an anti-state political
theory.
Her admiration of and love for America was the first thing that impressed me as
naturalized American citizen. Here is the voice, the spirit, the affection of Arendt:6

I’m eternally grateful that it was here I was washed ashore [United States]. For
my citizenship test, or, rather, in celebration of it, I’ve learned a little American
constitutional history. Truly wonderful, right down to every last formulation….
I’m immersed in American history and preparing my Princeton lectures on the
concept of revolution [On Revolution]. It’s breathtakingly exciting and wonderful,
the American Revolution, the Constitution. Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, John
Adams – what men. And when you look at what’s there now- what a comedown.

She attributes the stability, the endurance of the young American republic to the
secular holiness of the Constitution. The authority of the American republic derives, she
claims, not from some immortal, Platonic legislator, but rather from a secular founding
act. Her writing after The Human Condition (1958) and Between Past and Future (1961)
becomes a celebratory admiration of and fascination with American politics and history.
Like the Book of Genesis, Hannah Arendt is the preeminent political theorist of
beginning, founding, and the creation of the political world. Liberty said, let there be
Republic, and there was the United States of America; and Jefferson saw that the
Republic was good, and in the Declaration of Independence he separated Republic from
Monarchy. He called the Republic pursuit of happiness, and the Monarchy tyranny. So
evening came, and morning came on July 4, 1776, the first day of a new nation.
Here is Arendt’s moment of Genesis, her moment of illumination:7

There is an element of the world-building capacity of man in the human faculty of

making and keeping promises. Just as promises and agreements deal with the
future and provide stability in the ocean of future uncertainty where the
unpredictable may break in from all sides, so the constituting, founding, and

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 world-building capacities of man concern not so much ourselves and our own
time on earth as our “successor,” and “posterities.” The grammar of action: that
action is the only human faculty that demands a plurality of men; and the syntax
of power: that power is the only human attribute which applies solely to the
worldly in-between space by which men are mutually related, combine in the act
of foundation by virtue of the making and the keeping of promises, which, in the
realm of politics, may well be the highest human faculty.

This concise passage powerfully captures Arendt’s political thought: the creation
of a human world through the capacity of men to make and keep promises among a
plurality of humans- men, not Man- who mutually respects one another. Neither the
elementary grammar of political action nor its more complicated syntax, whose rules
determine the rise and fall of human power, is evident in totalitarianism. Its iron bond of
terror destroys the plurality of men and designates man the One, Stalin, who acts and
rules as though he himself incarnates History and executes its mandate. It is interesting to
quote Jaspers’s reaction to The Origins of Totalitarianism:8

When I think of you, I imagine you eagerly at work. On the “high road”: You will
make sudden discoveries, find connections, and take pleasure in working on this
intellectual level. For my part, I harbor the hope that you will in the end find Marx
intellectually responsible originator of what prepared the way for totalitarianism.
Intolerance, indeed terror are exemplified in his personal character. There is an
unbroken continuity from him to Lenin. The question is whether the gap between
Lenin and Stalin is as great as you perceive it to be. I think you are right about
that, but even here, where actual Marxism has disappeared , something remains of
what in Marx’s character was the mood and motivation prior to all of Marxism
and all Marx’s ideas. He was probably a figure of destiny, like Luther, not as
important for his ideas as for the character that carried those ideas. Demons don’t
exist, but there is something like them in people like that. We have to recognize
them, as far as that is possible, in order to rid ourselves of them. But, most
important, we have to oppose them as much as we can.

The image of demon proved irresistible to Arendt when she spoke of Hitler. I can
just hear her chuckle with delight as she tells Jaspers:9

The high schools in New York gave all the students of the senior classes the
assignment of thinking up an appropriate punishment for Hitler. A Negro girl
wrote: He should have a black skin put on him and be forced to live in the United
States. The girl won the first prize a four-year scholarship to college!

Arendt loved to share this story with her friends, including the sociologist David
Riesman of Yale who read the final version of The Origins of Totalitarianism in its
manuscript version. When he finished reading the manuscript, Riesman wrote to Arendt:10

I feel you have accomplished a great work of the human spirit in making sense of
the world- a task for which so many shrunk in despair or escaped into mystery. It

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 is also a tribute to the power of the human spirit that the account is engrossing,
even when at the same time it is as frightening and so sad. To read anything of
such great magnitude as your work, one must go back to Tocqueville or to Marx’s
historical critic for this….You must be sick of hearing or thinking about your
manuscript. The trouble is that your work haunts me and I think of it all the time.

The works of Arendt haunted not only David Riesman. Her life and work also
haunts me. It is no hyperbole to say that Hannah Arendt stands at the pivot of our
twentieth century civilization. It is virtually impossible to grasp the motions of western
intellect from Socrates to Schopenhauer, from Machiavelli to Marx, and from
Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, without the informing, luminous presence of Arendt. I was an
undergraduate at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, when I first met
Arendt on the printed page.
I was already free of the “iron bond of terror” in Communist Hungary when I read
her essay “Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution.”11 Her
paragraphs put me in trance:

As I write this, one year has passed since the flames of the Hungarian revolution
illuminated the immense landscape of post-war totalitarianism for twelve days.
This was a true event whose stature will not depend upon victory or defeat; its
greatness is secure in the tragedy it enacted. For who can forget the silent
procession of black-clad women in the streets of Russian occupied Budapest,
mourning their dead in public, the last political gesture of the revolution?....In
Hungary in 1956, not the underprivileged, but the over privileged- of communist
society- intellectuals and university students took the initiative, and their motive
was neither their own nor their fellow citizens’ material misery, but exclusively
Freedom and Truth.

Arendt was visiting Karl Jaspers in Basel, when we, young and old, university
students and soldiers, made our bid for freedom in Hungary- 23 October 1956. The revolt
of the mind of the oppressed under the iron heel of the moon-faced dwarf called Matyas
Rakosi electrified Arendt. In near ecstasy she exclaimed to her husband Heinrich
Blucher, “Finally, finally, they had to show how things really are” behind the Iron
Curtain.12 Arendt’s euphoric state of mind was confirmed by Jaspers:13

I read your essay [“Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution”] with great

interest….That it is brilliant from a literary point of view goes without saying.
What you said about the “events” in Hungary and how you said it was
excellent….Our basic views are similar. You were with us back then when it
[Hungarian Revolution] began. How we reacted at the time was characteristic of
each of us. You shouted out with joy…. And I: I was startled because something
that was considered impossible was actually happening. I had some hope it could
succeed, though I was without that “emotional warmth” that took opposite though
“complementary” direction in both of us.

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 For weeks Arendt is glued to the radio and reads news reports about the unfolding
events in Hungary. But then there is the Machiavellian Moment. That moment when the
homines novi in the Kremlin, who, rising from low conditions into splendor of the Soviet
realm and from insignificance to total power to which they previously had been
subjected, were confronted with the question Machiavelli asked. Whether it is better to
be loved or feared, and whether a ruler should caress or crush his subjects united yet
disloyal. The Machiavellian Moment came at dawn on 4 November 1956 when the Soviet
Army intervened and crushed the revolution.
As a conscript I served in the Hungarian Army. At that infamous dawn our
military unit was guarding an ammunition depot on the outskirts of Rakospalota. Our unit
comprised of some twenty five soldiers and a decrepit old tank without fuel. At dawn, ten
Soviet tanks appeared on the horizon, a curtain of ominous screen against the sparkling
winterscape. A loud speaker, in fluent Hungarian, summoned the commending officer for
truce. Since our commanding officer, a mindless drunkard was on leave, I, scribe of the
unit, was in charge. I and two of my fellow soldiers approached the Russians. We were
given two choices. Fight and die, surrender and live.
We surrendered. Later, some of us fought and died; some of us fought, lost, and
survived. I survived and left my native land because, under communism, the pursuit of
happiness and freedom were blank pages in it. For Arendt, the voices from Hungary,
speaking so plainly and simply of freedom and truth, were the ultimate affirmation that
human nature is unchanged, that terror and total power are futile, that yearning for
freedom and human dignity will rise out of man’s heart and mind forever.
The humanity of the insulted and the injured is always ready for the hour of
liberation, for insult and injury, though invisible and mute produce history- revolution. I
know the meaning of revolution. I experienced it; I was young; I was insulted and
injured; I rebelled in 1956. I was part of the generation that Hannah Arendt celebrated
and captured so poignantly: 14

The Hungarian people, young and old, knew that they were “living amidst lies”
and asked, unanimously and in all manifestos, for something the Russian
intelligentsia apparently has even forgotten how to dream off, namely, for
freedom of thought…. The development and expansion of post-war Soviet
totalitarianism must be seen in the flaming light of the Hungarian Revolution.
This light- who would deny it? - is not steady, it flares and flickers, yet it is the
only authentic light we have. If the dramatic events of the Hungarian Revolution
demonstrate anything, it is at best the danger which may grow out of the
lawlessness of this [Bolshevik] regime…. Such a catastrophic development , as
we learned from the Hungarian Revolution [is that], after forty years of tyranny
and thirty years of totalitarianism, the same spirit and the same political
productivity which the Hungarian people shared in their most glorious hour.

The free voice from Hungary, our “most glorious hour” in that springtime in
October 1956 was also my voice and my glorious hour. I was already a graduate student
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, when I first met Hannah Arendt at the
University of California, Berkeley. When she learned about my past, a rebel in dark

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times, and now a refugee in the New World, her face lit up in smile and, cigarette in her
right hand, embraced me with her left hand.
She had a warm, spontaneous affection for people who are passionate of what
their hearts imagine to be, that they sacrifice themselves to keep the little freedom there is
from dying. Like her admiring students and faithful “tribe” that surrounded her, I too
came under her spell from 1958 until her death in 1975. It was fascinating to see her in
the act of thinking, to go through, fearless and determined, the naked ‘thisness’ of reality.
That reality, that world in which Arendt lived and left, and which she loved, came to an
end in 1945. She knew it.
A new wonders, a new voice, a new mystery is singing in her bones in the United
States: develop, enlarge, and humanize your legitimate strangeness. Living and working
the Unites States- Vita Nuova- Arendt, honest, avid, sensitive, and bold, will not
sympathize with those undertakings that alienate the miracle of freedom in the human
realm, that is, of intelligence in life.
Surrounded by admiring students and friends, her tribe, Arendt rode like a solitary
passenger on her train of thought. If you could be a passenger, as I was and still am, on
her train of thought, it was and still is an unforgettable journey. If you had the good
fortune and privilege, as I did, to watch Arendt think, to talk to an audience or students
was like seeing the swift flight of the mind made visible in action and gesture.
She possessed a kinetic relation to ideas, she applied thought to the variegated
characteristic of her time- alienation, terror, concentration camps, revolutions, the
Pentagon Papers, Pope John, the Founding Fathers, Watergate, the Vietnam War, civil
disobedience, dialogues with classical philosophers-dead white men, a multiculturalist
might call them- intellectual tradition in a pluralistic universe- in all this, Arendt directed
thought inward, upon itself, and its own characteristic process.
This was no existential conceit, for her readings in European and American
history and philosophy, her lust for knowledge, an ache for understanding, scattered
throughout her works, are timely today precisely because they challenge us to think for
ourselves. Arendt spoke and speaks to those whose life and work had pierced the curtain
of failed revolutions, war, terror, and genocide that hung like a shroud over her
generation, and my generation.
To be born, to begin, to be: that is what guarantees, for Arendt, spontaneous
uniqueness of thinking and life in freedom. She longed for the free air of philosophy, of
poetry and politics, free like a leaf in the wind. She had what the Renaissance called
humanitas, the humanness which, once acquired never leaves us, even though all other
gifts of body and mind may yield to the scythe of time. The breadth of humanity, the
sovereignty of mind, the high spirited independence, the cheerful unconcern for what
people say or think- that is Arendt, who, teaching by existing, directs us to the dignitas in
the human person, to its homecoming to its better self.
What I admired in Arendt was her mastery of the history of ideas which was
encyclopedic in depth and scope and she gave and shared it gracefully. Within the general
history of political theory, which is my field, Arendt was constantly thinking about what
the relation between philosophy and politics should and could be in the modern world.
The thinkers she praised and returned to again and again- Socrates, Plato,
Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Montesquieu, Locke, Tocqueville and Marx- were
seminal figures who had asked her probing questions for their own times. What drew me

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close to Arendt was that like her, I was survivor of the Flood, Noah, floating about on the
sea of the world, who could only find solace and solidarity by trying to steer my ark as
close to the safe shores of humanity as Arendt did.
The goddess Arendt often invoked, Fortune, smiled on her twice: she not only
studied with the two great philosophers of her generation- Martin Heidegger and Karl
Jaspers- she was privileged to participate with both in the classes and discourses that
influenced her work. The goddess Fortune smiled on me when, because of Arendt, I met
and knew some of her close friends.
Let me start with Jaspers. The Rencontres Internationales de Geneva (RIG)
scheduled a conference for September 1946 that was to define and discuss L’Esprit
European. In Geneva, for the first time since World War II, a cultural conference of
Europe’s remnants of Europe’s brilliant intellectuals met. They were to try to relight those
lamps of civilization which were extinguished by Hitler and Stalin.
In addition to European luminaries like Bertrand Russell, Ortega y Gasset,
Benedetto Croce, Stephen Spender, and Karl Jaspers, the Swiss hosts also invited
Nicholas Berdyaev, Boris Pasternak, and Ilya Ehrenburg. From Soviet ideological
perspective, Berdyaev was to represent “authentic” Marxist thought, and Pasternak and
Ehrenburg the “Soviet view point.” For unknown reason, neither Berdyaev nor Pasternak
or Ehrenburg could attend and Moscow sent its “regrets”-the first waft of the Cold War.
At this point, Gyorgy Lukacs’s name came up. It was no other than the conductor
Ernest Ansermet who recommended that Lukacs be invited as “one of the most
distinguished representatives of Soviet thought.” It is something of a mystery why
Ansermet, who was known for his authoritative interpretation of Stravinsky, should have
sponsored Lukacs, who disliked Stravinsky and the rest of modern music, as a
representative of the European spirit.
Ironically, Lukacs, who was known as the leading “Western Marxist”, appeared in
the RIG’s final program as a “leading representative of Soviet thought.” It must have
mortified him; in private, Lukacs held the Soviets in contempt. He later referred in mock
horror to how “others” viewed him at Geneva: “I was received there not unlike the
character Usbek in The Persian Letter. ‘Monsieur est Persan? Comment peut-on etra
Persan?’ In sum, how can anyone who speaks several languages is educated and cultured,
be a Marxist?”
The comparison is illuminating, Montesquieu’s alter ego, Usbek, is both an
enlightened philosopher and a despot. At first, he sees only the folly of the “profane”
Europeans, but than later recognizes his own Persian irrationalities, which he can neither
control nor overcome. Lukacs’s clever and searing vignettes of the “decadent” West,
however, were not succeeded by a clear view of the East, and indeed served to deflect
attention from the “unfreedom” in the East.
Already at Geneva the Cold War made its appearance. It casts its shadow even on
the friendly exchanges between Stephen Spender and Lukacs. During a luncheon with
Spender, who was representing UNESCO at the conference, Lukacs and his wife Gertrud,
who accompanied him to Geneva, enquired why Spender was no longer a communist.
“Because I object to the concentration camps”, replied the poet. Gertrud, whose son had
just returned from the Gulag with frost-bitten fingers acclaimed, “Oh, we were always so
grateful when our friends were sent to the re-education centers.”15

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 Right across the table, Spender felt the first chill of the Cold War. Indeed, the
conference convened in wake of Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech. On 5 March 1946,
Churchill had drawn attention to alarming portents in Eastern Europe:16

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended
across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of
central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, and Budapest….all
these famous cities and the population around them lie in the Soviet sphere and all
are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high
and increasing measure of control from Moscow.

In his RIG address, on 9 September, Lukacs defended the political passion of

intellectuals. His own life having been bound up with the public-spirited soul- “he who
lives not at all unto the collective, hardly lives unto himself”- Lukacs condemned his
former friend and mentor Max Weber’s “fear” of the masses and lack of political
conviction. In Lukacs’s view :17

Europe today struggles for its new face; formally, this struggle is between
different types of democracy. The real issue revolves around the question of
whether democracy remains legal and political in form, or becomes the real life-
form of the people…. In my view, only an ideological and political identity with
the masses can create the new Europe.

Right after Lukacs’s evening lecture at the RIG conference, there was a gala
performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio in Geneva’s Grand Theater. Beethoven captures the
oppressed soul’s appeal to liberty. Since the Red Army still occupied Budapest and
Vienna, the historical parallels were not lost on the audience.
Once close friends of Max Weber, Jaspers and Lukacs now met as deadly
adversaries at Geneva. Their wide ranging exchange was heated and acerbic. Each spoke
of man’s need to rise from servitude to mastery, yet they differed on what constitutes
servitude and mastery.
Lukacs endorsed political action and commitment to a cause. Just like Arendt,
Jaspers rejected both:18

Politics relate, so to speak, to a lower plane of humanity, to existence; therefore,

although everything else depends upon them- hence the responsibility and the
fervor of their intervention- they have no direct contact with the high goods of
inner liberty, of faith and of the spirit. For these they only create the
preconditions.

In his polemical Stalinist work The Destruction of Reason (1954), Lukacs wrote,
“Since Jaspers was an existentialist, irrationalist, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean,
nobody in Hitler’s time could raise a concrete objection to him. Now, after Hitler’s
downfall, Jaspers discovers… reason. This is natural: today ‘reason’ is dedicated to
refuting Marxism as irrationalism was previously.” 19

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 It is interesting to note that when Arendt taught a tutorial seminar at the
University of Chicago in 1967, her required reading list include two works of Lukacs,
History and Class Consciousness and The Young Hegel. And yet in the Jaspers-Lukacs
controversy she sides with Jaspers. Euphoric, she writes to Jaspers:20

I’m reading a lot of Goethe letters, and I’ve read a great deal of Max Weber in
recent weeks. I wanted you to know that! Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism is one of incredible genius. I knew it already, but only now
am I able to grasp everything he perceived. There’s nothing in the literature after
it that begins to approach it.

Although Arendt was not at Geneva, she was intensely involved with the RIG
conference. Jaspers writes to her:21

You are constantly with us in spirit as one of our orientation points in this chaotic
world, but that sounds false, for it is yourself, your existence that is such a
blessing. I felt that all the more strongly in Geneva, where I, along with others in
a gathering of Europeans, gave a talk and took part in discussions. It was like a
dream to be in bodily contact with the intellectual world again…. I received
applause amounting to an ovation.

In her response, she compliments Jaspers:22

I know that the trip [to Geneva] was indeed a good one. The Time magazine
reported the conference [Time 48, no,13 (September 23, 1946):28-29] and quoted
Jaspers….I wanted to write to you at length about your Geneva speech, which
I’ve been able to see only briefly and which, I think, I like the best of everything
political you have said since 1945. I was particularly happy with what you said
about the tradition and the transcending of the purely European framework.

Let it be said, Arendt had little use for Lukacs’s idea that the level of civic virtue
in socialism can or should be measured by how closely it approached unanimity of
opinion, an opinion manipulated and controlled by the Party-state. Her experience of
totalitarianism’ crazed attempt to create “one Man of gigantic dimensions” out of plural
and unique individuals made her rightly skeptical of any attempts to enforce-
“dictatorship of the proletariat”- a univocal sense of the public good.
Arendt was the exact opposite of Lukacs. He took himself seriously as a Marxist
thinker. He thought he needed to be perfect and dominate others. Arendt did not. No one
knew better than Arendt that Europe gave birth to twins in the twentieth century:
communism and fascism. It also gave birth to a new human type, the philotyrannical
intellectual. The two most infamous philotyrannical intellectuals, Martin Heidegger in
Nazi Germany, Lukacs in Communist Hungary, showed her that there is a connection
between tyranny in the mind and tyranny in political life. Heidegger and Lukacs betrayed
the human ideals of freedom and independent inquiry and closed their eyes to brutality,
coercion, and state terror.

11
 Unlike Lukacs, whether as a “professor” or a political theorist, Arendt rejected
both the desire to influence others as a teacher and the desire to act. As she once put it, 23

I don’t believe we [political theorists] have, or can have, such an influence. I think
that commitment can easily carry you into a point where you do not longer think.
There are certain extreme situations where you have to act. But these situations
are extreme…. And I think… the theoretician who tells his student what to think
and how to act is….my God! These are adults! We are not in a nursery.

Knowing Arendt and being familiar with her works, I understand what she meant
when she tells Jaspers: “Yes, I would like to bring the wide world to you this time. I’ve
begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world that I shall be able to do
that now. Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theory “Amor Mundi.”24
Not surprisingly, the book appeared as The Human Condition, the human world,
which begins with the creation of man, which, for Arendt, is only another way of saying
that the principle of freedom was created when man was created but not before. In the
coexistence of creation of man and freedom, certain individuals, like Albert Camus, Eric
Hoffer, and Hans Morgenthau, receive Arendt’s accolade.
She praised Camus for being “absolutely honest and has great political insight.
Now, all of a sudden, there is a new type of person cropping up in all the European
countries, a type that is simply European without any ‘European nationalism’…. And
Camus is that type too. They are at home everywhere.” 25
Arendt’s close friend Hans Morgenthau, a distinguished visiting professor at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, was my colleague in the Political Science
Department. Morgenthau was one of the five giants who shaped the study of international
relations as a discrete discipline; the others were Henry Kissinger, Samuel P. Huntington
and Zbigniew Brezinski. Morgenthau and I had many lengthy discussions on the Vietnam
War, which he opposed as did Arendt. She had a long standing friendship with the
American writer Mary McCarthy, who, as literary executor, prepared Arendt’s last work,
The Life of the Mind, for publication.
Mary McCarthy was fascinated by Arendt’s acerbic, skeptical wit, and ferocious
mind. At the same time, German was Arendt’s Heimat- “Home”- until the end of her life.
When McCarthy, editing Arendt’s manuscripts, pointed out that her high flown, complex,
German style sentences were hard on the readers, she snapped, “English-them.” The
twenty-five year epistolary dialogue of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, two eminent
intellectual presences of the twentieth century, sheds great light on politics, literature,
morality, and, yes, Eros.
Arendt writes to Mary McCarthy:26

Viet Nam: I wish you had seen Morgenthau’s article in the New York Times
Magazine on April 18th [“We Are Deluding Ourselves in Vietnam,” The New York
Times Magazine, April 18, 1965] and I enclose some columns of [Walter]
Lippmann in case you did not see them. The Morgenthau article made a certain
stir and received a furious reply from [syndicated columnist Joseph] Alsop
(pompous ignorance- really). I am worried about the whole situation and I have

12
 no confidence Johnson [President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963-1969]. He thinks in
terms of prestige only, does not know how else to think. He is terribly ambitious
and very impatient with disagreement of any kind. Also, quite primitive.

Whenever I asked Morgenthau about Arendt, he emphasized her exceptional

intellectual vitality, her literary, dramatic, and moral qualities that stand out boldly on
pages of her works. I certainly agreed with Morgenthau as I agreed with Arendt when she
wrote from Berkley to Jaspers: 27

The campus [University of California] is incredibly wealthy, marble in the library,

and so forth….My quarters in the faculty club are pleasant, and they take good
care of you here. Everything is very comfortable but not luxurious. Luxury is for
the students and the Board of Trustees…. On the subject of oases: the first real
oasis I found appear in the form of a longshoreman from San Francisco who had
read my book and was in the process of reading everything of your that is
available in English. He writes himself- and publishes, too- in the manner of the
French moralists. He wanted to know everything about you, and I mean
everything, and we were friends right off. He showed me San Francisco the way a
king shows his kingdom to an honored guest. He works only three or four hours a
week. That’s all he needs. With the rest of his time he reads, thinks, writes, and
goes for walks. His name is Eric Hoffer, of German background but born here and
without any knowledge of German. I’m telling you about him because his kind of
person is simply the best thing this country has to offer.

Eric Hoffer (1901-1983) - the “best thing this country has to offer” and continues
to offer. Meeting Hoffer at Berkeley, I, like Arendt, felt the overwhelming power of a
mind which, lit in passion, fascinates by its Icarian flights and creation of new worlds.
Hoffer was a unique- and uniquely American- essayist, thinker, a philosopher who earned
his living as a longshoreman; who was blind as a child and never attended school. He
educated himself by reading, thinking and writing nonstop after his sight returned. As a
young man, Hoffer spent a decade on skid row, panned for gold in depleted streams, and
worked as migrant farm laborer in California.
Eric Hoffer was called the “American Odysseus.” The title is misleading.
Odysseus was wily, manipulative, loved power and thrived on glory. Hoffer led a
reclusive, Spartan life, and was deeply ambivalent about power and fears to use his
charismatic and demonstrated ability to sway crowds by oratory. If Hoffer’s life be no
Odyssey, it is unmistakably American. The phrase “only in America” is as applicable to
his life as to Emerson’s or Mark Twain’s. It is uniquely American as the rise to fame of a
poor, uneducated man to fame and national influence.
I will never forget the pleasant shock of discovery when I bought Hoffer’s first
book, The True Believer (1951), which I read nonstop. Gripping and dazzling, Hoffer
showcases his extraordinary talent for making history riveting and revelatory, and for
making ideas and historical figures spring to life.
The marvel, the mystery of it: moving cargo from a ship’s hold would seem to
rule out any passionate life of the mind. Yet there he was, a born genius against
insuperable odds, offering brilliant insights into history and gifted with a talent, like

13
Emerson and Nietzsche, for aphorism perhaps grater than any other in our day and rare in
any age. Since the appearance of The True Believer, a deeply provocative inquiry into the
nature of mass movements- Fascism and Communism- Hoffer has published eight more
books: six collections of glittering, diamond hard essays and aphorisms and two diaries.
These books line my bookshelves next to Hanna Arendt’s complete works.
The American journey, Abraham Lincoln: from log cabin to the White House.
Eric Hoffer: from the docks of San Francisco to the White House. Three presidents read
and admired Hoffer. President Dwight D. Eisenhower liked so much The True Believer
that he gave copies of it to White House visitors. President Johnson was so impressed
with Hoffer that he invited him to the White House.28

The two men spent more than half an hour on the South Lawn laughing and
talking while the President’s beagles nipped at their heals. The President and the
Philosopher discussed dogs, children, Presidents, and intellectuals. Hoffer
delighted the President with his observation on intellectuals- “pet them, but don’t
give them power” and common men. “The wonderful thing about America,” he
said after they were introduced in the President’s office, “is that a Truman can be
President, that a Johnson can be President.” He begged Mr. Johnson’s pardon and
said he meant no offense. The President roared with laughter and led him into the
Rose Garden. Hoffer wore a sport shirt with no tie, a lumber jacket and high-
topped work shoes. He apologized to the President for having refused an
invitation to a state dinner for Prime Minister Wilson of Britain on June 2 [1967].
He said the invitation had specified that he wear a black tie. He never wears a tie,
he said. “Next time,” Mr. Johnson said, “you just come as you’re and I’ll take the
damned thing off.”

When President Reagan honored Hoffer in 1982 by awarding him the Presidential
Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, he recalled a visit from Hoffer
when he was Governor of California. “I got some pretty good, sound and salty advice,”
Reagan said.
I speak with experience. As one reads Hoffer, it is essential to raise Nietzsche’s
famous question, “How one becomes what one is” (Wie man wird, was man ist), which
constitutes the subtitle of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche’s intellectual autobiography and, with
ironic appropriateness, the last book he ever was to write.
How did Hoffer become what he is: essayist, philosopher, and writer? How did he
begin to write? Here is his answer:29

In my case the right accident happened in the 1930s. I had the habit of reading
from childhood, but very little schooling. I spent half of my adult life as a migrant
worker and the other half as a longshoreman. I had to acquire a taste for a good
sentence- taste it the way a child tastes candy- before I stumbled into writing.
Here is how it happened. Late in 1936 I was on my way to do some placer
mining near Nevada City, and I had a hunch I would get snowbound. I had to get
me something to read, something that would last me for a long time.
30
So I stopped in San Francisco to get a thick book. I did not really care what the
book was about- history, theology, mathematics, farming, anything, as long as it

14
 was thick, had small print and no pictures. There was at that time a large
secondhand bookstore on Market Street called Lieberman’s and I went there to
buy a book. I soon found one. The price was one dollar. The title page said these
were The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. I knew what essays were but I did not
know Montaigne from Adam. I put the book in my knapsack and caught the ferry
to Sausalito.
Sure enough, I got snowbound. I read the book three times until I knew it almost
by heart. When I got back to the San Yoaquin Valley I could not open my mouth
without quoting Montaigne, and the fellows liked it. It got so whenever there was
an argument about anything- women, money, animals, food, death- they would
ask: “What does Montaigne say?” Out came the book and I would find the right
passage. I am quite sure that even now there must be a number of migratory
workers and up and down the San Yoaquin Valley still quoting Montaigne.

Hannah Arendt noted that every day Hoffer went for a walk. On many occasions I
saw Hoffer taking his regular three-mile walk in Golden Gate Park toward the Pacific
Ocean. When something caught his attention, he took his notebook out of his pocket, sat
on a bench, and wrote down fragments of thoughts. “The words, the ideas, come to me in
the park,” he said in an interview. “I shape them in my head there, and I write them in my
notebook.”
Here are some excerpts from Hoffer’s notebooks.

April 11, 1959

“How I rage against Khrushchev in my reveries. It is almost as it was in the 1930s
when I raged against Hitler. Does my heart need an enemy to vent its fury on?
And I can’t separate Russia from Khrushchev. Russia: founded on cesspool of
bondage and gore…. Martin Luther found that the rage against his enemies helped
him to pray well. I ought to drain my rage against Khrushchev into thinking and
writing.”
February 12, 1974
“I happened to be in Berkeley in 1964 when the first wave of the new generation
[of students] hit the campus of the University of California. President Clark Kerr
hade made me a professor- it was my first taste of getting paid for doing nothing-
and I had a room on the eight floor of Barrow Hall, where I held open house one
afternoon a week. So I was right in the midst of the mess when the Free Speech
Movement exploded in 1964.”

April 21, 1975

“Lenin sprang a leak in the cesspool of Russian history and the stench has
poisoned the civilized world.”

May 26, 1975

“In 1917 the Germans brought a plague-carrying rat [Lenin] in a sealed train to
the edge of Russia and let it loose. The rat set off a ravaging pestilence that killed
sixty million Russian men, women, and children. No on knows whether the
pestilence has burned itself out or is merely dormant.

15
 When the rat died its body was embalmed and placed in a glass case. It is
worshipped as a god in a temple in Moscow. There are many people in other
countries who have been converted to rat worship.”

February 20, 1975

“The twentieth century is a Jewish century- Marx, Freud, Einstein-, yet this
century has seen the most fearful slaughter of Jews….I have learned more from
the ancient Hebrews than from the ancient Greeks.

May 14, 1975

“I love ideas as much as I love women. I derive a sensuous pleasure from playing
with ideas. Genuine ideas dance and sing. They sparkle and twinkle with mirth
and mischief. They titillate the mind, kindle the imagination, and warm the heart.
They have grace and promise.”

Hannah Arendt- Eric Hoffer: two paths meet; two minds interact and find
greatness in the American republic. Both saw there is a tragic comedy in the spectacle of
those Old Bolsheviks, friends of Lenin, whose courage was beyond the shadow of doubt,
submitting, humbly and without so much as a cry of outrage to Stalin’s judgment of
historical necessity- death. For Arendt, in the Pantheon of the history of Freedom, there
are no portraits of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and their ideology crazed epigones.
The American Revolution has been won with ideas; the Bolshevik Revolution
shed rivers of blood and gutted the post revolutionary generation. The Founding Fathers
declared in ink and print what the 1917 Revolution had written in blood.
Arendt proudest moment was when she received the Emerson-Thoreau Medal in
1969. Addressing the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, April 9, 1969, she said: 31

Hermann Grimm once wrote to Emerson: “When I think of America I think of

you, and America appears to me as the first country of the world.” Not only in the
last century, but still in the first third of our century Emerson was one of the very
few American authors with whom we, who grew up and were educated in Europe,
were intimately acquainted before we came to this country. I always read him as a
kind of American Montaigne, and I discovered with great joy, only recently, how
close Emerson himself felt to Montaigne. When he first read him in translation, it
seemed to him “as if [he] had written the book [himself] in some former life, so
sincerely it spoke of my thought and experience.”

Arendt saw grandeur in the Declaration of Independence not so much for its
ideals and philosophy, but in that it was intended to be an expression of the American
mind. She is especially impressed with John Adams –Thomas Jefferson correspondence
at the end of their life.
Half jokingly and half in earnest, Adams and Jefferson, the leading actors on the
Revolutionary stage who died on the same day, 4 July 1826, discuss the possibility of an
afterlife. Jefferson concludes one of his letters (April 11, 1823) as follows:32

16
 May we meet there again, in Congress, with our antient [ancient] Colleagues, and
receive with them the real appropriation “Well done, good and faithful servants.”

How extraordinary, how revealing, how American is Jefferson’s heartfelt

admission that life in Congress, the pleasure of discourse and friendship, of legislation
and politics, of transacting business for the public good, of persuading and being
persuaded, w ere to Jefferson the pursuit of happiness beyond the grave a foretaste of an
eternal bliss.
The Socratic Moment in Jefferson! He could envision of an improvement on the
most memorable and happiest moments of his life by expanding the circle of his friends
so that he could be “in Congress” with the closest of his “Colleagues”. I can find only on
similar image of human happiness immortalized by Socrates’s playful anticipation of an
afterlife.
In Apology, Socrates cheerfully confessed that all he could wish for was, so to
speak, more of the same- namely, no island of the blessed and no life of an immortal soul
utterly unlike the life of mortal man, but the enlargement of the circle of Socrates’s
friends in Hades by those illustrious men of the Greek past.
But I am fully of the opinion, as was Arendt that the enlarged happiness of
Jefferson is at a higher level because it is on human level than that of Socrates.
The genius of Jefferson and the meaning of the American Revolution still cry out
for an American Shakespeare. But short of that we had Hanna Arendt.
It was my privilege and high honor to meet and know her. In our beautiful and
often savage world there are many worlds, and Hannah Arendt lived in not a few of them.

17
1
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), p.ix
2
Arendt to Karl Jaspers, December 17, 1946, Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926-1969 (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p.70
3
Arndt to Jaspers, June 30, 1947, Correspondence, p.90
4
Arendt to Jaspers, July 11, 1950, Correspondence, p.153
5
Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-54, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), p.341
6
Arendt to Jaspers, November 16, 1958, Correspondence. p.357
7
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), p. 175
8
Jaspers to Arendt, December 29, 1952, Correspondence, p.205
9
Arendt to Jaspers, January 3, 1960, Correspondence, p.386
10
David Riesman to Hannah Arendt, September 5, 1949,The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress
11
Journal of Politics 20/1 (February 1958), pp.5-43
12
Arendt to Blucher, 24 October 1956, Library of Congress
13
Jaspers to Arendt, Basel, November 23, 1957, Correspondence, p.333
14
Arendt, “Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution”, Journal of Politics, pp.33-34, 43
15
Stephen Spender to Arpad Kadarkay, 8 November 1988, privately held.
16
Quoted in Fraser J. Harbutz, The Iron Curtain (New York: Oxford University Press), p.186
17
L’Esprit Europeen (Editions de la Bsconniere, Neuchatel, 1946), p. 193
18
Karl Jaspers, The Origins and Goal of History (University of Chicago Press, 1967), p.164
19
Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason (Humanities Press, 1981), p.829
20
Arendt to Jaspers, February 17, 1956, Correspondence, p.282
21
Jaspers to Arendt, September 18, 1946, Correspondence, pp.56-57
22
Arendt to Jaspers, March 1, 1947, Correspondence, p.74
23
Melvyn Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), pp.333-34
24
Arendt to Jaspers, August 6, 1955, Correspondence, p.263
25
Arendt to Jaspers, November 11, 1946, Correspondence, p.66
26
Arendt to Mary McCarthy, April 28, 1965, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy
1949-1975 (Harcourt Brace, 1995). p.181
27
Arendt to Jaspers, March 26, 1955, Correspondence, pp.257-58
28
The New York Times, October 8, 1967
29
Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp.28-29
30
31
The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress- Essays and lectures- Emerson-Thoreau medal lecture.
32
The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon (Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press, 1959), p.594