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Hannah Arendt Encounters Friedrich von Gentz: On Revolution, Preservation, and European Unity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2021
Abstract
This article contextualizes Hannah Arendt's complex and sometimes contradictory views on the Prussian statesman and balance-of-power theorist Friedrich von Gentz. A narration of Arendt's encounter with Gentz, to whom she devoted considerable space in her biography of Rahel Varnhagen and about whom she wrote two additional early essays, can illuminate the elusive contours of her international political thought as they developed from her early career to mature works like The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and On Revolution (1963). I argue that a better grasp of Arendt's encounter with Gentz will shed light on the following: Arendt's complex relationship with conservatism, the early influences on her commitment to European unity and federation, and the early development of her conviction that the pathologies of the nation-state system require a revolutionary, cosmopolitan answer. Moreover, understanding this early encounter and its lasting traces will clarify why Gentz, who himself was active at the height of the “Age of Revolution,” once again became an important interlocutor for Arendt as she explored the possibility of a new age of revolutions in On Revolution.
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1 Arendt's early essays on Gentz draw on his letters with Rahel Varnhagen and Paul R. Sweet's 1941 biography Friedrich von Gentz, Defender of the Old Order. An annotated copy of the latter is housed in her library at Bard College, at http://blogs.bard.edu/arendtcollection/sweet-paul-robinson-friedrich-von-gentz-defender-of-the-old-order.
2 Hannah Arendt, “A Believer in European Unity. Book Review of Friedrich von Gentz: Defender of the Old Order by Paul R. Sweet,” Review of Politics 4/2 (1942), 245–7; Arendt, “Friedrich von Gentz: On the 100th Anniversary of His Death, June 9, 1932,” in Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb (Stanford, 2007; first published 1932), 31–7; Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. First Complete Edition, ed. Liliane Weissberg, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Baltimore and London, 1997; first published 1959).
3 See Marlis Gerhardt, “Einleitung: Rahel Levin, Friederike Robert, Madame Varnhagen,” in Gerhardt, ed., Rahel Varnhagen: Jeder Wunsch und Frivolität Genannt: Briefe und Tagebücher (Darmstadt, 1983), 7–30, at 22–5; Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham, 2000), 31; Tassin, Etienne and Melancon, Jerome, “… Sed Victa Catoni: The Defeated Cause of Revolutions,” Social Research 74/4 (2007), 1109–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Sybille Bedford, “Emancipation and Destiny,” The Reconstructionist, 12 Dec. 1958, 22–6, at 23.
5 Arendt first calls for a “new law on earth” in Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, 1976; first published 1951), ix.
6 Garsten, Bryan, “The Elusiveness of Arendtian Judgment,” Social Research 74/4 (2007), 1071–1108CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 1074; Richard Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, 1996), 123.
7 See Seyla Benhabib, “The Elusiveness of the Particular: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno,” in Benhabib, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (Princeton, 2018), 34–60.
8 For a faithful reading of Gentz I rely on Jonathan Green's nuanced reassessment of his thought in Green, Jonathan, “Fiat Justitia, Pereat Mundus: Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Gentz, and the Possibility of Prudential Enlightenment,” Modern Intellectual History 14/1 (2017), 35–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Of these encounters, the most attention has been paid to Arendt's critical engagement with Schmitt, including Jurkevics, Anna, “Hannah Arendt Reads Carl Schmitt's The Nomos of the Earth: A Dialogue on Law and Geopolitics from the Margins,” European Journal of Political Theory 16/3 (2017), 345–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sluga, Hans, “The Pluralism of the Political: From Carl Schmitt to Hannah Arendt,” Telos 142 (2008), 91–109Google Scholar; and Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt (Cambridge, 2009). On Arendt and Morgenthau see Douglas Klusmeyer, “Hannah Arendt's Critical Realism: Power, Justice, and Responsibility,” in John Williams and Anthony F. Lang, eds., Hannah Arendt and International Relations (New York, 2005), 113–78; Alison McQueen, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge, 2018), 147–91; Arendt's geopolitical thought is also the topic of Patricia Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford, 2007).
10 E.g. Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford, 2006); James Bohman, Democracy across Borders: From Demos to Demoi (Cambridge, MA, 2007).
11 George Canning to Earl Bathurst (1809), cited by Travis Eakin, “Between the Old and the New: Friedrich Gentz, 1764–1832” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Missouri–Columbia, 2019), 252, emphasis mine.
12 Arendt, “Friedrich von Gentz,” 32.
13 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 149.
14 In their correspondence, Gentz repeatedly enjoins Rahel to consummate their union. See ibid., 150.
15 Rahel Varnhagen, Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1834).
16 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven and London, 1982), 56.
17 Liliane Weissberg, “Introduction: Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, and the Writing of (Auto)Biography,” in Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 3–70 at 5.
18 For a scathing indictment of social climbing see an unpublished, untitled document written by Arendt, likely as a speech, in 1941–2, later titled “German Emigres,” Library of Congress, Hannah Arendt papers, Speeches and Writings File, at https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/mharendtFolderP05.html.
19 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 147.
20 On experience (Erlebnis) as Romantic see Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Leipzig and Berlin, 1913; first published 1905).
21 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 146.
22 Ibid.
23 Green, “Fiat Justitia, Pereat Mundus.”
24 Ibid., 41, citing Friedrich von Gentz, Betrachtungen über die franzözische Revolution nach dem Englischen des Herrn Burke, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1793), 89–90, 95.
25 Eakin, “Between the Old and the New,” 254.
26 Arendt, “Friedrich von Gentz,” 33.
27 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 147. The translation of große alte Welt differs across translations.
28 Arendt, “Friedrich von Gentz,” 33.
29 Arendt came to the belief that the Nazis would seize power before the Machtergreifung (1933). By 1932, she was already of the opinion that the “way to power had really been opened in 1929, when he [Hitler] received support from the financier Alfred Hugenberg.” Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 98.
30 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 82.
31 Arendt, “A Believer in European Unity,” 247.
32 Eakin, “Between the Old and the New,” 137-52. Gentz's position was ambiguous at first. He shared with the nationalists a sense of pride about Prussian culture, but did not support political unification.
33 Friedrich von Gentz, Staatsschriften und Briefe: Auswahl in zwei Baenden, vol. 2 (Mannheim, 1838–9), 53. Cited by Eakin, “Between the Old and the New,” 214–15. See also Jonathan Green, “Edmund Burke's German Readers at the End of Enlightenment” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018), 162.
34 Arendt, “A Believer in European Unity,” 246.
35 Ibid., 247.
36 Ibid.
37 While Arendt is critical of both nationalism and sovereignty, she also praises the legal structures of the modern state. For a detailed account of Arendt on the state see Christian Volk, Arendtian Constitutionalism: Law, Politics and the Order of Freedom (Oxford, 2015).
38 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 230
39 Arendt features the notion of “the national principle” in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Later she refers to it as the “nation-state principle,” in Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York, 2006; first published 1963), 157.
40 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 15, 147, 161, 184, 267, 278, 391, 414.
41 Arendt, “A Believer in European Unity,” 246. Arendt's gloss on Gentz here is somewhat superficial. Gentz did not change his mind about balance of power, but came to believe that federation and balance of power can and should work in tandem. On this point I am indebted to Christopher Meckstroth.
42 Arendt, “Friedrich von Gentz,” 32.
43 Ibid., 33.
44 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 123–57.
45 Ibid., 156.
46 Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 388.
47 On this opposition see Green, “Fiat Justitia, Pereat Mundus.” Arendt later exhibits knowledge of Gentz's debate with Kant regarding morality and politics. In “The Concept of History,” which was first published in the Partisan Review in 1957, she cites Gentz's critique of Kant (Friedrich von Gentz, “Nachtrag zu dem Räsonnement des Herrn Prof. Kant über das Verhältnis zwischen Theorie und Praxis,” Berliner Monatsschrift, Dec. 1793), and refers to Gentz as “the first to see Kant as a theorist of the French Revolution.” Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York, 1993; first published 1961), 82 n. 34.
48 Arendt, “Friedrich von Gentz,” 36.
49 Ibid., 37. Arendt learned the phrase from Gentz's correspondence with Rahel. The phrase was to become an epigraph for the last, unfinished section of The Life of the Mind (1978), “Judgment,” which was found in Arendt's typewriter at the time of her death in 1975.
50 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 231. Later exemplary revolutionaries in Arendt's oeuvre include Rosa Luxemburg, World War II resistance fighters (e.g. René Char), the Hungarian revolutionaries of 1956, and the American founders.
51 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1998; first published 1958), 50.
52 Ibid., 51.
53 Ibid., 52.
54 Arendt, “Friedrich von Gentz,” 35.
55 Ibid., 33.
56 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 148.
57 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1989).
58 Gerhardt, “Einleitung,” 15.
59 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 254.
60 Ibid., 150, original emphasis. This passage is also discussed in Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 31; and Gerhardt, “Einleitung,” 22–5.
61 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 149.
62 Other conscious pariahs identified by Arendt include Franz Kafka and Heinrich Heine. She borrowed the phrase from the French journalist Bernard Lazare. Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” in Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York, 2007; first published 1944), 275–97.
63 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 85. Note that Arendt edits down Rahel's deathbed confession, which also expresses Rahel's gratitude for having found Christ.
64 Ibid., 209.
65 Ibid., 258.
66 The main part of the manuscript was finished in 1933; the last two chapters were completed in 1937–8.
67 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 257.
68 Ibid., 258.
69 Ibid., 254.
70 Ibid., 259.
71 Ibid.
72 As discussed in note 47 above, she also read Gentz's essay on Kant, which is referenced in Between Past and Future.
73 Judith Shklar, “Hannah Arendt as Pariah,” Partisan Review 50/1 (1983), 64–77, at 74. Cited in Seyla Benhabib, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (Princeton, 2018), 235 n. 48.
74 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, ix.
75 On Arendt's turn to federations I rely on Selinger, William, “The Politics of Arendtian Historiography: European Federation and The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Modern Intellectual History 13/2 (2016), 417–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
76 Jonathan Schell, “Introduction,” in On Revolution by Hannah Arendt, ed. Jonathan Schell (New York: Penguin, 2006), xviii.
77 Memo to Mary Underwood of Houghton Mifflin, 24 Sept. 1946, Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress. Cited by Young–Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 202; Schell, “Introduction,” xviii-xix.
78 Ibid.
79 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 124.
80 Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, 88. Bernstein's analysis of Arendt's schematic of regimes influences my analysis in this section.
81 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, ix.
82 Jurkevics, “Hannah Arendt Reads Carl Schmitt's the Nomos of the Earth.”
83 Hannah Arendt, “The Minority Question: Copied from a Letter to Erich Cohn-Bendit, Summer 1940,” in Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 125–33, at 129. See Selinger, “The Politics of Arendtian Historiography,” 422.
84 Hannah Arendt, “Approaches to the German Problem,” in Arendt, Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954. Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York, 1994; first published 1945), 106–20.
85 Hannah Arendt, “Can the Jewish–Arab Question Be Solved?”, in Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 186–98.
86 Schell, “Introduction,” xix.
87 Arendt, Hannah, “Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution,” Journal of Politics 20/1 (1958), 5–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The essay was also published as an epilogue to the 1958 (second) edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism. It was taken out of later editions.
88 Note that Arendt excised explicit references to Clausewitz in the On Revolution introduction that had been present in the earlier version.
89 Arendt returns to Clausewitz in the 1950s–1960s by way of Lenin, whom she reads in the context of her renewed interest in Rosa Luxemburg. In a footnote to the essay on Rosa Luxemburg in Men in Dark Times, Arendt writes, “Lenin read Clausewitz's Vom Kriege (1832) during the First World War … Lenin was under the influence of Clausewitz when he began to consider the possibility that war, the collapse of the European system of nation states, might replace the economic collapse of the capitalist economy as predicted by Marx.” Hannah Arendt, “Rosa Luxemburg: 1871–1919,” in Arendt, Men in Dark Times (San Diego, 1968), 33–56, at 53. Perhaps Arendt picked up Clausewitz in 1940 for the same reason that Lenin had during the previous world war, to understand the crisis that had led to systemic collapse. And doesn't Arendt agree with Lenin's assessment in some sense? She agrees that the structural contradictions of the system (albeit of the nation-state system, not capitalism per se) were released into crisis by the world wars, causing the nation-state system to collapse.
90 Friedrich von Gentz, The Origins and Principles of the American Revolution Compared with the Origins and Principles of the French Revolution, trans. John Quincy Adams (Philadelphia: Asbury Dickins, 1800), 53.
91 Arendt, On Revolution, 82.
92 On Gentz and Rousseau see Paul Friedrich Reiff, “Friedrich Gentz: An Opponent of the French Revolution and Napoleon” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Illinois, 1912).
93 Green, Jonathan, “Friedrich Gentz's Translation of Burke's Reflections,” Historical Journal 57/3 (2014), 639–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
94 Arendt, On Revolution, 98–9.
95 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 147. I will leave aside the question whether Arendt was correct, but suffice it to say she imposed her own heavy interpretive lens on both.
96 See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 299.
97 Gentz, The Origins and Principles, 56.
98 Arendt, On Revolution, 144.
99 Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 201.
100 The importance of horizontal power within and across council democracies has been identified by Peter Verovšek as an important component of Arendt's cosmopolitanism in Verovšek, Peter J., “Integration after Totalitarianism: Arendt and Habermas on the Postwar Imperatives of Memory,” Journal of International Political Theory 16/1 (2018), 2–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
101 Verovšek's essay, in focusing on the horizontal aspects of Arendt's cosmopolitan vision, does not adequately treat her suggestion of the federative combination of councils, which she saw as the work of diplomacy. Still, he is correct that Arendt's approach to cosmopolitanism is strictly bottom-up and grassroots.
102 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 298. Arendt was searching for an institutional basis for “the right to have rights,” but she did not trust international human rights conventions to guarantee that right. See also Seyla Benhabib, “International Law and Human Plurality in the Shadow of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin,” in Benhabib, Dignity in Adversity: Human Rights in Turbulent Times (Cambridge, 2011), 41–56.
103 On Arendt's idiosyncrasies see Jeffrey Isaac, “Hannah Arendt as Dissenting Intellectual,” in Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times (Ithaca, 1998), 59–73. On Arendt and the Cold War see Markell, Patchen, “Politics and the Case of Poetry: Arendt on Brecht,” Modern Intellectual History 15/2 (2018), 503–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
104 Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York, 1979), 334. Interestingly, Arendt is clear about one ideological position. Later in the exchange she comes back to it: “I never was a liberal … I never believed in liberalism.”