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Hannah Arendt Interview on “Un Certain Regard”

Broadcast July 6, 1974

Q: You’ve been here in the U.S. thirty-two years, what are your dominant impressions?

A: My dominant impression is that the U.S. is not a nation state. Europeans have a hard

time understanding this simple fact which they should, however, theoretically know. This

country is united neither by a heritage, nor by a memory, nor by a soil, nor by a language,

nor by a common origin. There are no authentic natives here, except for the Indians. All

the rest are citizens and they are united by one thing that is a great one; one becomes a

citizen by simple consent to the constitution. The constitution, that is, a simple scrap of

paper; according to the French or German point of view, one can modify it. But here it’s

a sacred document. It’s the memory of a unique sacred act, the act of foundation. And

the act of foundation is to make a union between all the ethnic minorities and all the

disparate geographic regions without nevertheless leveling and making disappear these

differences. And we do not assimilate or level down these differences. And all of this is

difficult for foreigners to understand. We can say that in this political system, it’s the law

that reigns and not men. To the extent that this is true, it is necessary for the good of the

country, I almost said the nation, for the good of the U.S. as a whole, for the republic,

really.

Q: Over the last ten years, one has seen a wave of political violence across America,

marked by the assassination of a president, his brother, the war in Vietnam, by the

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Watergate affair. Why can the U.S. surmount these troubles, whereas they would bring a

change of regime in European countries, even very serious internal disorders.

A: Ah, let me see. I would like to pose the problem slightly differently. I see the turning

point as the assassination of President Kennedy. However you see it, for whatever we

know, or will know, it was absolutely evident that for the first time in a long time in the

history of American politics, a crime had been mixed up with the political process and

had transformed it. And other assassinations have followed. (Martin Luther King,

Bobby Kennedy, etc.) Lastly, the attempt against Wallace is part of that same category of

act. Watergate reveals the most profound constitutional crisis that this country has ever

known. And if I say “constitutional crisis,” it’s much more important here than in

France. I don’t know how many constitutions you’ve had since the Revolution but as far

as I remember at the time of World War I you had had fourteen. I am not going to get

into all the details; you know this better than I. On the other hand, here there is only one

constitution, which has been in force for almost 200 years. The context is, therefore,

entirely different. It is the whole political structure that is at stake. And this

constitutional crisis consists for the first time of an open conflict between the legislative

and the executive. Now, there the constitution itself is somehow at fault. The Founding

Fathers didn’t think that tyranny could emerge from the executive office, because they

could not foresee any more than the executive carrying out of decisions made by the

legislators. We know today that the greatest danger of tyranny comes from the executive.

But if we take the spirit of the letter of the constitution --- what were the Founding

Fathers thinking – they were thinking primarily of freedom from the domination of the

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majority. Therefore, it is a grave error to think that we have a democracy, a mistake that

many Americans share. It’s a republican system, and the Founding Fathers were most

concerned with preserving the rights of minorities, because in a healthy political body,

there must be a plurality of opinions. It was a French concept, L’Union Sacrée, that was

for them exactly what they should not be, a sort of tyranny, and that the tyrant might very

well be the majority. As a result, the whole government is organized in such a way that

even after a victory of the majority there is still an opposition. And the opposition is

necessary, because they represent the legitimate opinion or opinions of a minority or

minorities. National security is a new word in the American vocabulary. It is already a

translation of the notion of raison d’état, and this notion of raison d’état has never

played a role in this country. It is a new import. And national security now covers

everything, all kinds of offenses. It covers the crimes of Mr. Ehrlichman, all sorts of

crimes. For example, the president has all rights (power). He is above the law. He can

do no wrong. He is like a monarch in the republic. He is above the law, and whatever he

does he does for the security of the nation.

Q: In what sense would you say that these modern applications of the raison d’état, what

you call intrusion of criminality into the affairs of the state, is characteristic of our times?

A: I think it is propre à notre époque just like this statelessness business is propre à notre

époque. And it repeats itself again and again in different aspects and different countries

and different colors. But if you come to these general questions, what is also propre à

notre époque, is this massive intrusion of criminality in politics. I’m talking about

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something that goes far beyond those crimes which one always intends to justify by the

rights of the state on the pretext that these are exceptions to the rules. But here we are up

against a type of politics that in itself is criminal. Here it is by no means an exception.

They don’t say that it’s a situation of such urgency that we need to plug everyone into a

“listening table” (= system to spy on private phone calls). Here, the “listening table”

belongs to the normal political procedure. They never say that we’ll do this (burgling a

psychiatrist’s office) once (exceptionally) and never again… absolutely not! They say,

on the contrary, that every infraction is absolutely legitimate. This whole affair of

national security comes directly from the notion of raison d’état. This national security

business comes directly from central Europe. Surely, the Italians, Germans, French

recognize this as absolutely justified, since they have lived by this rule. But this is

precisely the European heritage that the American Revolution had the intention of

breaking.

Q: Your essay on Pentagon Papers was devoted to the psychology of what you call “the

specialist in the solution of problems,” who at the time were counselors of the American

government. And in it you say they are men who are by definition men who are quite

sure of themselves and who seldom seem to doubt their ability to impose themselves and

who don’t content themselves to display (faire preuve) intelligence but pride themselves

on their rationality, love of theory, of the purely intellectual universe, in effect rejecting

all sentiment to a frightening extent. You would add?

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A: May I interrupt you? I think that’s enough. You see, I have a very good example. In

the Pentagon Papers there is a very good example of this scientific mentality which

finally overwhelms all other insights. You know about the Domino Theory, which was

the official theory during The Cold War from 1950-69. The truth is that among the very

sophisticated intellectuals who had written the Pentagon Papers, very few believed this

Domino Theory. Only about two or three believed in it, and they weren’t among the

most intelligent ... at the highest positions of government. Actually, they didn’t even

believe in it. But all their actions held to this theory. Not because they were liars – or to

be well considered by their superiors--but because it gave them a framework in which to

work. And they had adopted this framework, even knowing that it was contradicted by

the analyses and evidence they were provided every morning that proved that this point

of view was quite completely wrong. These assumptions were quite simply factually

wrong. They took these because they simply didn’t have any other framework.

Q: Our century seems to me to have been dominated by the persistence of a mode of

thought founded on historic determinism.

A: Yes, and I think this has very good reasons. This belief in this historical necessity,

this is really an open question in the following: We don’t know the future. We act into

the future and no one knows that which he does because the future is done by “we” and

not by “I.” I could foretell what follows from my acts only if I were the only one. It

seems that that which has already passed is truly of the realm of contingency. And in

fact, it’s contingency that is one of the greatest factors of history. No one knows what is

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going to happen, simply because there is such an enormous number of variable factors

which depend upon chance. On the other hand, if you look back, you can say history is

logical… you can’t tell a story that makes sense. How is that possible? It’s the true

problem of all philosophies of history. How is it possible that retrospectively it always

seems that things could not have gone differently? All the variables have disappeared

and reality is of such an overwhelming impressiveness that one cannot imagine such an

infinite variety of possibilities.

Q: If your contemporaries maintain their attachments to these determinist modes of

thought, in spite of the contradictions of history, that remains, according to you, because

they are truly afraid of freedom?

A: Yes, and gladly so. But they don’t say it. If they said it, one could immediately open

the debate. If they just said, “We’re afraid to be afraid.” It’s one of our principal

motivations, that we are afraid of freedom.

Q: Do you imagine in Europe a minister, seeing his politics about to fail ordering a team

of experts from outside the administration to do a study with the aim to find out…

A: (interrupts) ...and if they were taken from everywhere and also from…

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Q: Sure, and with people from outside of the administration, therefore, could you

imagine a European minister in this situation, ordering a study to know how this

happened?

A: Of course not.

Q: Why?

A: Because of raison d’état. He would have felt – he would have started immediately

to lie about his errors. The McNamara attitude was different. I cited at the

beginning of my essay on the Pentagon Papers one of his remarks: “It’s not a pretty

sight to have to be the first superpower to kill or wound thousands of

noncombatants each week. How did we get to that point ?” This is an American

attitude and it shows you that the situation was still sane because there was a

McNamara who wanted to learn a lesson from this.

Q: Do you think that, today, the American leadership faced with other such situations

would still want to know…

A: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that a single one is left. No, I take that back. I don’t

believe, I think that McNamara… I think I’m not mistaken, that McNamara was on

Nixon’s “Enemies List.” I read it today in The New York Times. I think that it’s true.

And this shows you already that this whole attitude doesn’t exist anymore in American

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political life at the highest levels. This is no longer – they believe in image-making. But

in wondering, why have we succeeded in creating an image for ourselves ? One could

say that only image mattered, but now they want everybody to believe in their image and

that nobody look beyond it. We are now indeed in a completely different political

universe.

Q: After what Senator Fullbright calls the arrogance of power, after that which you could

call the arrogance of knowledge, a third state that you could call “arrogance,” simply

(tout court)….

A: Yes, I don’t know if it’s “arrogance,” simply. It is really the will to dominate, for

heaven’s sake. Until now, it has not yet dominated, just because we can sit here and

discuss this freely. So, they haven’t yet dominated me. I am not afraid. Maybe I am

mistaken, but I feel completely free in this country. Someone, I think, Morgenthau called

the enterprise of Nixon “the abortive revolution.” Now we don’t know yet if this is

premature, but one can certainly say that something was not successful.

Q: What is scary in this age is that the ends of politics are unlimited. Liberalism

nonetheless proposes the idea that politics must be limited. In our age, the access to

power of men from movements that asign unlimited objectives is not the greatest

menace?”

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A: I hope that I don’t shock you when I say that I’m not at all sure that I am a liberal.

Not at all. I have no substantial credo in this sense. I do not profess a political

philosophy that I would be able to sum up with a term as an “ism.”

Q: Certainly. But just the same, it’s at the foundation of liberal thinking with the

borrowings from antiquity where one situates your philosophical system.

A: Would you say that Montesquieu is a liberal ? I mean, all of the people whom I take

into account, and so ultimately, je me sers où je peux (I help myself wherever I can. ...

with whatever I can that suits me) I don’t really believe…I think that one of the great

advantages of our time is what René Char said. Do you know what René Char said ?

“Notre héritage ne garantit aucun testament.” That means that we are entirely free to use

wherever we want experiences or thoughts from the past.

Q: (interrupting) “… n’est précédé par aucun testament. » Doesn’t this extreme liberty

risk frightening many of your contemporaries who prefer to find all, set a theory, an

ideology, and be able to apply it? (mutual interruption.)

A: No doubt…

Q: …This liberty you define risks to be the liberty of a few, those who will have the

power to invent a new mode of thought?

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A: No, no. It rests only on the conviction that each human being, as a thinking being,

can reflect as well as I can and can form on his own judgments if he wants. What I don’t

know is how to give rise to this desire in him. The only thing that can help us, I think, is à

réfléchir. And to reflect means to always think critically. It means that every thought is

absolutely made of rigid rules and general convictions, etc. Everything that happens

when one thinks is submitted to critical examination. That is to say that there is no such

thing as “dangerous thoughts,” simply because thinking itself is such a dangerous

enterprise. But non-thinking is even more dangerous.

Q: This word of René Char, our heritage, is not preceded by any testament. In your

opinion, what is the heritage of the twentieth century?

A: You are young, I am old, but we are here together to leave them something…

Q: (interrupting) What will we leave to the twenty-first century? Three quarters of the

twentieth century have already passed…

A: I have no idea. I’m pretty sure that modern art, which is rather stagnant at this point,

but after such an enormous creativity of the first forty years of this century, especially in

France, it is natural that it would produce in itself a certain exhaustion…No, this we will

leave. This whole era, the twentieth century, will be one of the great centuries in history,

but not in politics.

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Q: And in America?

A: No, no. This country… you need a certain amount of tradition…

Q: There is no artistic tradition?

A: No, not a great one. A great one in poetry. In novels, in literature, etc. The one thing

that one can mention is architecture, these buildings of iron are like tents of nomads

frozen in stone.

Q: You have treated several times in your work on the modern history of the Jews and

anti-Semitism, you say at the end of one of your works that the birth of the Zionist

movement at the end of the nineteenth century was the only political response that the

Jews ever found to anti-Semitism. How has the existence of Israel changed the political

and psychological context in which the Jews of the world live?

A: Oh, I think that it has changed everything. Today, the Jewish people are completely

united behind Israel. They feel that they have a state, a political representation just like

the Irish, the English, or the French. They have not only a homeland but a nation state,

and their whole attitude against the Arabs depends in large part on an identification that

the Jews coming from central Europe always made instinctively and without reflection.

The state must necessarily be a nation. Now this has…it is the whole relation between

the Diaspora and Israel in that which was entirely Palestine has changed, because Israel is

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no longer just a refuge for the Jewish Poles. A Zionist was a guy who tried to get money

from rich Jews for poor Polish Jews, but it is today the representative of the Jewish

people all over the world. Whether we like that or not is another question. This doesn’t

mean that the Jews of the Diaspora have to agree with the Israeli government on

everything. It’s not a question of government but of state. So far as it will exist, it will

certainly represent us in the eyes of the world.

Q: A French author, George Friedman, wrote a book ten years ago entitled End of the

Jewish People, where he concludes that, in the future, there will be, on the one hand, a

modern Israeli state and, on the other, in the countries of the diaspora, Jews who will

assimilate and will lose, little by little, their peculiar characteristic.

A: Yeah, cette hypothèse sounds very plausible. Yet, I think it is quite false. In

antiquity, when a Jewish state still existed, there was already a great Diaspora. Through

the centuries, across so many different forms of government and state, the only people of

antiquity to have survived over thousands of years were never assimilated. It seems that,

as long… if Jews could have been assimilated it would have happened a long time ago.

There was an opportunity during the Spanish period. There was another during the

Roman period. There was of course also a change during the period of the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries. A people, a collectivity, does not commit suicide. Mr. Friedman is

mistaken because does not understand that the sentiment of intellectuals, who can change

their nationality and absorb another culture, etc., does not correspond to the sentiment of

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a people in their collectivity, and particularly not to a people who were created by laws

which we know.

Q: What does assimilation in American society mean for the Jews?

A: In the sense in which we spoke of assimilated Jewry, there is no assimilation in a

culture. There was a surrounding culture that doesn’t exist. Would you kindly tell me

just what the Jews should assimilate here? Among the Irish? Among the English?

Among the French? The Germans?….whoever came here….

Q: When one says that the American Jews are “Americanized,” not only “American” but

“Americanized,” what is the meaning of this allusion?

A: It means a way of life, and all these Jews are very good American citizens. It signifies

their public life, not their private life. Their private life is more Jewish than it ever was

before. A large number of the young learn Hebrew even though their parents have

forgotten it for long. The main thing is Israel, to be against or for Israel. Take, for

example, the German Jews of my own generation who immigrated to the U.S. In very

little time they became very nationalistic Jews, much more nationalistic than I ever was,

in spite of the fact that I was a Zionist and they never were. I never said, “I am a

German,” I always said, “I am a Jew.” But now, to what do they assimilate? To the

Jewish community, since they are accustomed to assimilation, they are assimilated to the

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Jewish American community. With the fervor of the newly converted, they have become

ultra-nationalist, and pro-Israeli.

Q: Throughout history what has assured the survival of Jewish people has been

essentially a link of a religious nature. We are in an age where all the religions are

experiencing a crisis, that the tie to religion tends to weaken. In this condition, what does

this contemporary era do to the unity of the Jewish people ?

A: I think you are slightly wrong. Because when you say “religion,” you were obviously

thinking of the Christian religion that is a creed, a belief, a faith. This is not at all the

case for the Jewish religion. It’s a national religion through which religion and

nationality coincide. You know that Jews, for example, do not recognize the baptisms of

Jews converted to Christianity. It’s as if it didn’t happen. According to Jewish law, a

Jew always remains a Jew. So long as someone is born by a Jewish mother, la recherche

de la paternité interdite, he is a Jew. This notion of religion is completely different. It

has to do much more with a way of life than the notion of a particular specific religion in

the Christian sense…

*****

…when I see a totalitarian system, I try to analyze it as a new form of political system

formerly unknown. For that reason, I try to enumerate its principal characteristics, and

among these, I would just like to remind you of one that has been absent from absolutely

all forms of tyranny, and that is the role of the innocent, of innocent victims. Under

Stalin, it was not necessary to have done anything to be deported or executed. The victim

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was given the role according to the dynamism of history, and he had to play that role no

matter whatever he had done besides. In earlier times, a government never killed people

for saying “Yes.” Usually, a tyrant or a government killed people for saying “No.” Now,

I was reminded by a friend that a very similar idea was formulated in China several

centuries ago. Men who have the impertinence to approve are no better than those who

disobey or oppose. The quintessential sign of totalitarianism is the total domination of

man by man. In this sense, there is no totalitarianism today, even in Russia where the

worst tyranny ever known reigns nevertheless. You’ve got to do something in order to

have been exiled to a work camp or to a psychiatric hospital. The totalitarian regime was

always born when the majority of the European countries had already submitted to

dictatorships. Dictatorships, if we take them in their original sense, is not a tyranny, it’s

the temporary suspension of the laws in the case of an emergency, generally during a war

or a civil war. But anyhow, the dictatorship is limited in time, and tyranny is not. And

these are really important enough to pay attention to. When I wrote my Eichmann in

Jerusalem, one of my greatest tasks was to demolish the legend of the greatness of evil, of

the demonic force, to take away from people the admiration they had for the great

wrongdoers, like Richard III, etc. I found in Brecht the following reflection: “The great

political criminals should be stripped naked and especially submitted to laughter.” They

are not great political criminals, but men who have committed great political crimes,

something that is entirely different. The failure of Hitler does not say that he was an

idiot. Now, of course, that Hitler was an idiot was a prejudice of all, and false, among

those before he took power. A number of books that followed tried to justify him and to

make him a great man. The fact that he had failed did not indicate he was an imbecile

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and the scope of his enterprise did not make him a great man. Neither the one nor the

other, that is to say that this whole notion of greatness has no application. “If the ruling

classes,” says Brecht, “allow a small crook to become a big crook, he is not entitled to a

privileged position in history.” It’s that the fact that he’s become big crook and what he’s

done has had grave consequences does not aggrandize him. And generally speaking and

in an abrupt fashion one can say that tragedy treats human suffering in a manner less

serious than comedy. This, of course, is a shocking statement, but at the same time, I

think that it is perfectly right. If you want to keep your integrity under these

circumstances, one can only remember whatever he did and even if he killed 10 million

people, he is still a clown.

Q: When you published your book about the Eichmann trial, that work provoked a

violent reaction. Why this reaction?

A: As I said before, this controversy was partly caused by the fact that I was attacking the

bureaucracy. And if you attack a bureaucracy, you have to expect that they will defend

themselves and that they will attack you and try to make your life impossible…that is

more or less dirty political business. I was able to understand this. But let’s suppose that

they had not organized that campaign. In spite of this, the opposition to this book would

have been very strong. Because Jews were offended - I mean people I really respect and

can understand. They were chiefly offended by what Brecht said, by the laughter. My

laughter was at that time somewhat innocent. I didn’t think about it. What I saw was that

Eichmann was a clown. Eichmann, for instance, never was bothered by anything he had

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done to the Jews. He was bothered by an incident: he had slapped the face of the

president of the Jewish community in Vienna during his interrogation – God knows,

much worse things were happening when this happened – however, Eichmann could not

forgive himself; he had ceded to an impulse, and he thought it was very bad to have lost

his composure. He thought this was very bad, he had “lost his cool,” so to speak.

Q: Why do you think that we are seeing the appearance of a literature about Nazism

described often in romantic terms, its leaders, its forfeitures, trying to humanize and

justify them. Do you think that such publication is for commercial reasons or do you

think it has a deeper significance?

A: I think it is significant. It shows that that which once happened can happen again.

Tyranny has been discovered very early. But it has never prevented a tyrant from

becoming a tyrant. It has prevented neither Nero nor Caligula. Nero and Caligula have

not prevented recent examples, such as intrusion of criminality in the political process.

REVISED 3-31-13 PL/jc

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