This new form of government is the council system, which, as we know, has perished every time and everywhere, destroyed either directly by the bureaucracy of the nation-states or by the party machines. Whether this system is a pure utopia—in any case it would be a people’s utopia, not the utopia of theoreticians and ideologies—I cannot say. It seems to me, however, the single alternative that has ever appeared in history, and has reappeared time and again. Spontaneous organization of council systems occurred in all revolutions, in the French Revolution, with Jefferson in the American Revolution, in the Parisian commune, in the Russian revolutions, in the wake of the revolutions in Germany and Austria at the end of World War I, finally in the Hungarian Revolution. What is more, they never came into being as a result of a conscious revolutionary tradition or theory, but entirely spontaneously, each time as though there had never been anything of the sort before. Hence the council system seems to correspond to and to spring from the very experience of political action.
In this direction, I think, there must be something to be found, a completely different principle of organization, which begins from below, continues upward, and finally leads to a parliament. But we can’t talk about that now. And it is not necessary, since important studies on this subject have been published in recent years in France and Germany, and anyone seriously interested can inform himself.
To prevent a misunderstanding that might easily occur today, I must say that the communes of hippies and dropouts have nothing to do with this. On the contrary, a renunciation of the whole of public life, of politics in general, is at their foundation; they are refuges for people who have suffered political shipwreck—and as such they are completely justified on personal grounds. I find the forms of these communes very often grotesque—in Germany as well as in America—but I understand them and have nothing against them. Politically they are meaningless. The councils desire the exact opposite, even if they begin very small—as neighborhood councils, professional councils, councils within factories, apartment houses, and so on. There are, indeed, councils of the most various kinds, by no means only workers’ councils; workers’ councils are a special case in this field.
The councils say: We want to participate, we want to debate, we want to make our voices heard in public, and we want to have a possibility to determine the political course of our country. Since the country is too big for all of us to come together and determine our fate, we need a number of public spaces within it. The booth in which we deposit our ballots is unquestionably too small, for this booth has room for only one. The parties are completely unsuitable; there we are, most of us, nothing but the manipulated electorate. But if only ten of us are sitting around a table, each expressing his opinion, each hearing the opinions of others, then a rational formation of opinion can take place through the exchange of opinions. There, too, it will become clear which one of us is best suited to present our view before the next higher council, where in turn our view will be clarified through the influence of other views, revised, or proved wrong.
By no means does every resident of a country need to be a member of such councils. Not everyone wants to or has to concern himself with public affairs. In this fashion a self-selective process is possible that would draw together a true political elite in a country. Anyone who is not interested in public affairs will simply have to be satisfied with their being decided without him. But each person must be given the opportunity.
In this direction I see the possibility of forming a new concept of the state. A council-state of this sort, to which the principle of sovereignty would be wholly alien, would be admirably suited to federations of the most various kinds, especially because in it power would be constituted horizontally and not vertically. But if you ask me now what prospect it has of being realized, then I must say to you: Very slight, if at all. And yet perhaps, after all—in the wake of the next revolution.
THE LAST INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW BY ROGER ERRERA
UN CERTAIN REGARD, ORTF TV, FRANCE
OCTOBER 1973
TRANSLATED BY ANDREW BROWN
In October 1973, Hannah Arendt was interviewed by Roger Errera for the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF). Recorded over several days, the interviews were later worked into a fifty-minute television feature directed by Jean-Claude Lubtchansky for the series Un certain regard, and first broadcast on July 6, 1974.
For the film, Arendt’s answers were translated into French and dubbed, with Arendt’s original voice behind it. By using this soundtrack and various transcripts and translations of the interviews, Arendt scholar Ursula Ludz reconstructed Arendt’s original answers and assembled an authoritative manuscript of the interview as it was televised. Stars indicate places where there was a cut in the film and where different sessions of the interviews have been pieced together.
Roger Errera’s questions have been translated from French for this publication. Arendt occasionally replied in a mixture of German, French, and English—her responses in French have been left, with translations in brackets where deemed necessary. Though the other interviews in this collection were edited before their original publication, and Arendt’s general practice was to go over anything she wrote in English with a friend or editor to fix her mistakes, this interview has been only lightly edited to correct some grammatical mistakes and eliminate repetitions. Arendt’s unique style of English and the conversational tone of the interview have been respected.
What follows is the text of my filmed interview with Hannah Arendt, which took place in New York in October 1973. My own interest in Arendt’s work began in 1965. I had reviewed the French translations of Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Revolution, and The Origins of Totalitarianism, and I published French translations of Antisemitism and Crises of the Republic in the Diaspora series at Calmann-Lévy in 1972 and 1973. I had also met Arendt several times, first at her apartment in New York in the winter of 1967, then in Cologne in 1972, and near Ascona in Switzerland, when she stayed in Tegna.
The initiative for the film came from a good friend, the late Pierre Schaeffer, then head of the Research Service of ORTF (French public radio and television). He asked me whether I would be interested. My answer was yes, while Arendt’s was, first, a categorical no. She later accepted. The fact that we had met earlier no doubt helped.
In October 1973, we went to New York. I had spent the summer in Greece reading her books again and preparing the interview. I sent her a short list of topics, which was accepted. We agreed on the procedure: two hours of interviewing every day, over several days, in a rental place, a TV studio or at the office of her publisher (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). She strongly refused to be filmed at home.