Hannah Arendt - Between Past and Future

PENGUIN CLASSICS

BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE

HANNAH ARENDT was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906. She studied at the Universities of Marburg and Freiburg and received her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, where she studied under Karl Jaspers. In 1933 she fled from Germany and went to France, where she worked for the immigration of Jewish refugee children into Palestine. In 1941 she went to the United States and became an American citizen ten years later.

She was a research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations, chief editor of Schocken Books, executive director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction in New York City, a visiting professor at the universities of California (Berkeley), Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, and Chicago, and university professor at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952, and won the annual Arts and Letters Grant of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1954. She gave the Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen in 1973 and received Denmarks Sonning Prize in 1975.

Among Hannah Arendts most important works are The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, On Revolution, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Men in Dark Times, Crises of the Republic, and The Life of the Mind. Hannah Arendt died in December 1975.

JEROME KOHN , who was Hannah Arendts last teaching and research assistant, is the Trustee of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust and Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at the New School for Social Research. His editions of Hannah Arendts unpublished and uncollected writings include Essays in Understanding 19301954, Responsibility and Judgment, The Promise of Politics, and, with Ron Feldman, The Jewish Writings of Hannah Arendt.

HANNAH ARENDT

Between Past and Future

EIGHT EXERCISES IN
POLITICAL THOUGHT

Introduction by JEROME KOHN

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,
Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany,
Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1961

Expanded volume published in a Viking Compass edition 1968

Published in Penguin Books 1977

This edition with an introduction by Jerome Kohn published 2006

Copyright Hannah Arendt, 1954, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1963, 1967, 1968

Introduction copyright Jerome Kohn, 2006

All rights reserved

The selections in this book are revised and expanded versions of essays first published in magazines, some under different titles. Tradition and the Modern Age, a portion of The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern, and The Crisis in Education appeared in The Partisan Review; a portion of The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern and a portion of What is Authority? in The Review of Politics; What is Freedom? in Chicago Review; a portion of The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance in Daedalus (Copyright 1960 by by American Academy of Arts and Sciences); Truth and Politics in The New Yorker; and The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man in American Scholar.

A portion of What is Authority? was first published in Nomos I: Authority, edited by Carl J. Friedrich for the American Society of Political and Legal Philosophy, copyright 1958 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, published by The Liberal Arts Press, a division of The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.

The Crisis in Education was translated from the German by Denver Lindley.

ISBN: 978-1-101-66265-6

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

Jerome Kohn

... the undeniable loss of tradition in the world does not at all entail a loss of the past, for tradition and past are not the same, as the believers in tradition on one side and the believers in progress on the other would have us believe....

(Between Past and Future, )

I

Between Past and Future may be the most evocative title of any of Hannah Arendts books. For many readers it will evoke Janus, the high Roman god who guards the order of the universe. He is the god of beginningsthe first hour of every day, the first day of every month, the first month (January) of every yearand he is also the god of gateways. Januss anthropomorphized image has two sets of eyes, one looking into the past and the other into the future. By seeing simultaneously what mortals do not see at all, Janus connects the past to the future and the future to the past. He inspired or perhaps reflected the meaning of the letters SPQR, Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Roman senate and the Roman people. The authority (auctoritas) of the senate enabled the people to set deeds in motion which at once augmented Romes power and bound back (religio) their actors to Romes sacred foundations. Roman legions marched out of the Forum through Januss gates to assure wars proper beginning, and marched back through his gates when peace, wars proper ending, was won. This departing and returning through the same gates is an image of tradition (traditio), the archetypical Roman imperative that enjoined fathers to hand down to their sons, from one generation to the next, the mores encoded in the legends of Romes founding, their own original beginning. As long as Rome flourished she was her living legacy.

And flourish she did. As the worlds first republic, and later as a tremendously expanded empire, Rome was the longest-lived of any political body in Occidental history. The pax Romana, moreover, marked a period of unparalleled stability throughout the then known world, lasting until the empires foreseen and forewarned disintegration brought the collapse of Roman power, devastation, and the Dark Ages in its wake. But prior to that, the inviolability of Romes founding rather than of her emperors explains why Arendt recognized the citizens of Rome, who as Aeneass descendants resolved to forge an eternal city, an everlasting public thing (