Thinking Without a Banister

IS AMERICA BY NATURE A VIOLENT SOCIETY?
 
 
It is highly doubtful that we know anything about the natural virtues and vices of societies, but it seems evident that a country inhabited by a multi­tude of ethnic groups cannot even be said to possess the nearest equivalent to natural qualities, namely, a national character. If like attracts like is as natural for human society as birds of a feather flock together, one could even say that American society is artificial by nature. Still, it seems true that America, for historical, social, and political reasons, is more likely to erupt into violence than most other civilized countries. And yet there are very few countries where respect for law is so deeply rooted and where citizens are so law-abiding. This was already evident at the time of the American Revolution, and since this central event is not remembered for violence, violence has not the same revolutionary overtones in this country as elsewhere and, precisely for this reason, is more easily condoned.
 
The reason for this seeming paradox must probably be looked for in the American past, in the experience of establishing law against lawlessness in a colonial country an experience which culminated, but did not end, with the foundation of a new body politic and the establishment of a new law of the land following the revolution of 1776. For it was a similar experience that came into play in the colonization of the American continent, as well as in the integration of the many waves of immigrants during the last cen­tury. Each time the law had to be confirmed anew against the lawlessness inherent in all uprooted people. Americans know some things about the enormous equalizing power of the law, and they know more than enough about the initial stages of criminal violence which always precede not, of course, the relatively easy assimilation of single individuals but the integration of a new and alien group.
 
I think that second peculiarity of

Introduction by Jerome Kohn ix
Acknowledgments xxxi
Publication History xxxiii
 
Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought 3
   I. The Broken Thread of Tradition
   II. The Modern Challenge to Tradition
The Great Tradition 43
   I. Law and Power
   II. Ruling and Being Ruled
Authority in the Twentieth Century 69
Letter to Robert M. Hutchins 92
The Hungarian Revolution and Totalitarian Imperialism 105
Totalitarianism 157
Culture and Politics 160
Challenges to Traditional Ethics: A Response to Michael Polanyi 185
Reflections on the 1960 National Conventions: Kennedy vs. Nixon 192
Action and the Pursuit of Happiness 201
Freedom and Politics, a Lecture 220
The Cold War and the West 245
Nation-State and Democracy 255
Kennedy and After 262
Nathalie Sarraute 265
As If Speaking to a Brick Wall : A Conversation with Joachim Fest 274
Labor, Work, Action 291
Politics and Crime: An Exchange of Letters 308
Introduction to The Warriors by J. Glenn Gray 316
On the Human Condition 322
The Crisis Character of Modern Society 328
Revolution and Freedom, a Lecture 332
Is America by Nature a Violent Society? 355
The Possessed 360
The Freedom to Be Free : The Conditions and Meaning of Revolution 368
Imagination 387
He s All Dwight 395
Emerson-Thoreau Medal Address 403
The Archimedean Point 406
Heidegger at Eighty 419
For Martin Heidegger 432
War Crimes and the American Conscience 433
Letter to the Editor of The New York Review of Books 434
Values in Contemporary Society 438
Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt 443
Remarks 476
Address to the Advisory Council on Philosophy at Princeton University 485
Interview with Roger Errera 489
Public Rights and Private Interests: A Response to Charles Frankel 506
Preliminary Remarks About the Life of the Mind 513
Transition 517
Remembering Wystan H. Auden, Who Died in the Night of the Twenty- eighth

HANNAH ARENDT was raised in Königsberg, in East Prussia, the city of Immanuel Kant. To Arendt, Lant was the clearest of all the great thinkers; she said she sensed him looking over her shoulder while she wrote. In 1933, as a Jew in Hitler s Germany, Arendt was briefly arrested happily not by the Gestapo for working with the Berlin Zionist organization. She escaped Germany and settled in Paris, where she worked with Youth Aliyah, an organization that enabled Jewish children, mainly from Eastern Europe, to go to Palestine. In Paris she became a friend to Walter Benjamin and married Heinrich Bluecher, who had also fled Germany, for political rather than racial or religious reasons.
 
After the German invasion of France in May 1940, Arendt was imprisoned in the Gurs Internment Camp as an enemy alien. She escaped when it was possible to do so; those who did not ended up in Auschwitz, shipped there under the direction of Adolf Eichmann. With visas provided by Hiram Bingham and funds from Carian Fry, Arendt and Bluecher traveled from France to Spain to Portugal and from there to New York City in 1941. After eighteen years of statelessness, she became an American citizen in 1951. Arendt taught at Notre Dame, Berkeley, Princeton, and Chicago, and, for the last seven years of her life, at the New School for Social Research. She died suddenly on December 4, 1975, at the age of sixty-nine. None of her books has ever gone out of print.

Almost every essay in this book contains pearls of Arendt s tonically subversive thinking, and many of her observations push readers to think harder about the language in which political activity is conducted. The New York Times Book Review

This second volume of some 40 essays, interviews, conference presentations, acceptance speeches, letters and reviews, edited and introduced by Arendt scholar Kohn, reveals a wide focus, including the relationship of theory to practice, American elections, the Cold War, freedom, civic responsibility, and happiness .[Arendt] emerges as startlingly prescient: in an interview in 1973, for example, she emphasized that a free press is crucial in a democracy .A challenging, densely argued, provocative collection. Kirkus Reviews

These essays, letters, and other short and complete pieces are cause to celebrate . . . Insightful and plain-spoken . . . Reading some of these essays here and now, the shock of how well they relate to current U.S. political realities may strike a chord with many academic readers but also engage informed general readers as well . . . Highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries. Library Journal
 
Thinking Without a Banister is an intellectually exhilarating read in its entirety, exploring the intersection of politics and human life from angles as varied as the imagination, war crimes, Emerson s legacy, the meaning of revolution, and the relationship between private rights and public good. Brain Pickings 
 
The texts brought together here offer a sound introduction to key ideas in Arendt s writing, while adding nuance to her already published work for more familiar readers. Kohn s sharp footnotes provide valuable contextual and biographical information, and should be read by anyone interested in Arendt s life and writing. The incisive framing of the volume draws Arendt into our contemporary political moment . . .