ERRERA: But isn’t the big threat these days the idea that the goals of politics are limitless? Liberalism, after all, presupposes the idea that politics has limited objectives. These days, doesn’t the biggest threat come from the rise of men and movements who set themselves unlimited objectives?
ARENDT: I hope I don’t shock you if I tell you that I’m not at all sure that I’m a liberal. You know, not at all. And I really don’t have any creed in this sense. I have no exact political philosophy which I could summon up with one ism.
ERRERA: Of course, but all the same your philosophical reflections lie within the foundations of liberal thought, with its borrowings from antiquity.
ARENDT: Is Montesquieu a liberal? Would you say that all the people whom I take into account as worth a little… I mean, “moi je me sers où je peux” [I help myself to what I can]. I take whatever I can and whatever suits me. I think one of the great advantages of our time is really, you know, what René Char has said: “Notre héritage n’est garanti par aucun testament” [Our inheritance is guaranteed by no testament].[d]
ERRERA:… is preceded by no testament…
ARENDT:… n’est précédé par aucun testament. This means we are entirely free to help ourselves wherever we can from the experiences and the thoughts of our past.
ERRERA: But doesn’t this extreme freedom risk alarming many of our contemporaries who would prefer to find some ready-made theory, some ideology they could then apply?
ARENDT: Certainement. Aucun doute. Aucun doute.
ERRERA: Doesn’t this freedom risk being the freedom of a few, those who are strong enough to invent new modes of thought?
ARENDT: Non. Non. It rests only on the conviction that every human being is a thinking being and can reflect as well as I do and can therefore judge for himself, if he wants to. How I can make this wish arise in him, this I don’t know. The only thing that can help us, I think, is to réfléchir. And to think always means to think critically. And to think critically is always to be hostile. Every thought actually undermines whatever there is of rigid rules, general convictions, et cetera. Everything which happens in thinking is subject to a critical examination of whatever there is. That is, there are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise. So how I can convince… I think, nonthinking is even more dangerous. I don’t deny that thinking is dangerous, but I would say not thinking, ne pas réfléchir c’est plus dangereux encore [not thinking is even more dangerous].
ERRERA: Let’s go back to René Char’s words: “Our inheritance is preceded by no testament.” What do you think the inheritance of the twentieth century will be?
ARENDT: We are still there, you know—you are young, I am old—but we are both still there to leave them something.
ERRERA: What will we leave to the twenty-first century? Three quarters of the century have already gone by…
ARENDT: I’ve no idea. I’m pretty sure that modern art which is now rather at a deep point… But after such an enormous creativity as we had during the first forty years, especially in France, of course, this is only natural. A certain exhaustion then sets in. This we will leave. This whole era, this whole twentieth century will probably be one of the great centuries in history, but not in politics.
ERRERA: And America?
ARENDT: No. No, no, no…
ERRERA: Why?
ARENDT: You know, this country… You need a certain amount of tradition.
ERRERA: There isn’t an American artistic tradition?
ARENDT: No, not a great one. A great one in poetry, a great one in novels, in writing, et cetera. But the only thing that you could really mention is this, the architecture. The stone buildings are like tents of nomads which have been frozen into stone.
ERRERA: In your work, you’ve frequently discussed the modern history of the Jews and anti-Semitism, and you say, at the end of one of your books, that the birth of the Zionist movement at the end of the nineteenth century was the only political response the Jews ever found to anti-Semitism.[e] In what way has the existence of Israel changed the political and psychological context in which Jews live in the world?
ARENDT: Oh, I think it has changed everything. The Jewish people today are really united behind Israel.[f] They feel that they have a state, a political representation in the same way as the Irish, the English, the French, et cetera. They have not only a homeland but a nation-state. And their whole attitude towards the Arabs depends, of course, to a large extent on these identifications, which the Jews coming from Central Europe made almost instinctively and without reflection; namely, that the state must necessarily be a nation-state.
Now this, that is, the whole relationship between the Diaspora and Israel, or what formerly was Palestine, has changed because Israel is no longer just a refuge for those underdogs in Poland, where a Zionist was a guy who tried to get money from rich Jews for the poor Jews in Poland. But it is today really the Jewish representative of the Jewish people all over the world. Whether we like that or not is another question, but… This doesn’t mean that this Diaspora Judaism has to always be of the same opinion as the government in Israel. It’s not a question of the government, it’s a question of the state and so long as the state exists, this is of course what represents us in the eyes of the world.
ERRERA: Ten years ago, a French author, Georges Friedmann, wrote a book called The End of the Jewish People?,[g] in which he concluded that in the future there would be, on the one hand, a new state, an Israeli nation, and on the other, in the lands of the Diaspora, Jews who would be assimilated and would gradually lose their own characteristics.
ARENDT: Cette hypothèse sounds very plausible, and I think it’s quite wrong. You see, in antiquity, while the Jewish state still existed, there was already a great Jewish Diaspora. Through the centuries, when there were many different forms of government and forms of state, the Jews, the only ancient people that actually survived these thousands of years, were never assimilated… If Jews could have been assimilated, they would have been assimilated long ago. There was a chance during the Spanish period, there was a chance during the Roman period, there was, of course, a chance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Look, a people, a collective, doesn’t commit suicide. Mr. Friedmann is wrong, because he doesn’t understand that the feeling of the intellectuals, who can indeed change nationalities and can absorb another culture, et cetera, does not correspond to the feeling of the people as a whole, and especially not of a people that has been constituted by those laws which we all know.
ERRERA: What does it mean for Jews to be assimilated into American society?
ARENDT: Well, in the sense in which we spoke of assimilated Jewry, by which we meant assimilation to the surrounding culture, it doesn’t exist. Would you kindly tell me to what the Jews should assimilate here? To the English? To the Irish? To the Germans? To the French? To the… you know, whoever came here…
d
The correct quotation from Char is “
f
This should be read against the background of the events of the day: on October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria had attacked Israel, unleashing the Yom Kippur War.