Encounters: Rahel Varnhagen, Friedrich von Gentz, Hannah Arendt

Rahel Varnhagen née Levin (1771–1833) hosted a prominent Enlightenment salon in the early nineteenth century in Prussia. Her gatherings in Berlin's Jägerstraße were visited by figures such as Schlegel, Schelling, the Humboldts, Schleiermacher, Tieck, and Brentano, and many other luminaries of the age. In 1801, Friedrich von Gentz (1764–1832) began frequenting the salon and made quick friends with Rahel. Gentz was a Prussian diplomatic aide and man of the world. He served as Metternich's secretary at the Congress of Vienna (1815), where he staunchly defended the old order against the onslaught of Napoleonic modernity. Gentz's aims often shifted to fit context, but he served the peace of Europe and so held one target constant: Napoleon. Many have noted the slipperiness of his character, but his pursuit of everything that opposed Napoleon was unquestionable, as British prime minister George Canning sums up nicely here: “I know he is very much distrusted by many people—and though I admit him to be … somewhat profligate and a great spendthrift … he is and has always been in good political principles … and [he] has this certain recommendation and guarantee for his sincerity[:] that he would infallibly be shot, if Bonaparte should catch him.”Footnote ¹¹ Though Gentz was Prussian, he was a man for hire, which was not unusual for the age. At various points he worked for Austria, Britain, and Russia, and spent time in England. Gentz was also an intellectual; he was a student of Kant, a translator of Burke, and an early theorist of the balance of power (politisches Gleichgewicht), which he understood as the lynchpin of European stability. His particular brand of conservatism eschewed nationalist awakenings as dangerous, pitting him against Prussian contemporaries such as his protégé Adam Müller.

Gentz was among Rahel Varnhagen's intimates and, as Arendt was quick to see when she acquired Rahel's correspondence, their letters are riveting. The friendship between the two seems to have been a case of “opposites attract.” Where Rahel, a woman and a Jew, was barred access to worldly affairs, Gentz gained entrance. Rahel was a pariah despite her position in the salon; Gentz, on the other hand, moved through ranks and circles easily, perhaps too easily, so that he “was never able to rid himself of the reproach that he could be bought.”Footnote ¹² Their natures were also different. According to Arendt, Rahel was intellectually spontaneous, “anarchic,” and original, while Gentz was receptive, sensual, vain, a collector of experiences.Footnote ¹³ Their relationship was intimate but never consummated, though not for lack of effort on Gentz's part.Footnote ¹⁴ It was an intimacy apparently unperturbed by Gentz's anti-Semitism, and as Arendt describes it, Rahel's attitude towards him seems to have been forgiving.

Hannah Arendt (1906–75) first encountered the two friends in the 1920s when a childhood friend gave her a copy of Rahel's Andenken (1834), a collection of correspondences put together by her husband after her death.Footnote ¹⁵ The Andenken drew Arendt to the figure of Rahel, to whom she related, and whom she later called “my closest friend, though she has been dead for some one hundred years.”Footnote ¹⁶ In 1928, the young Arendt began research on German Romanticism intended for a Habilitationsschrift (second dissertation). The work was cut short by the rise of Nazism, completed in exile in 1937–8, and finally published in 1959 as Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess.Footnote ¹⁷ Gentz figures prominently in the biography, as Arendt vividly captures his friendship with Rahel and displays a canny interest in the riddle of their affection.

Arendt's praise of Gentz—especially in her laudatory 1942 essay—strikes oddly given his anti-Semitism, his defense of autocracy, and his brazen social climbing, a quality which usually repulsed Arendt.Footnote ¹⁸ Why does she acknowledge these aspects of the man and yet not reject him? One possible explanation is that Arendt's affection for Gentz was derivative of Rahel's. Those who have read the Rahel biography will understand the emotional identification that underscores Arendt's study of her predecessor. However, her interest in Gentz also goes beyond her trust in Rahel.

Who was Gentz for Hannah Arendt? Arendt's stance is remarkably difficult to decipher. Her depiction of him in the Rahel biography is contradictory and dizzying. Over the course of a long passage introducing the man, she shifts back and forth wildly: “Gentz wanted to conserve everything that existed, but he was no conservative … He defended reaction as a man of the Enlightenment … But Gentz was by no means a liberal … He was the last Romantic … But Gentz was also no Romantic.”Footnote ¹⁹ The reader has trouble finding her bearings, but this is Arendt's intent: she is performing the disorienting effect of Gentz's refusal to fix himself into the ideological camps of his age. For example, while he rejected the nationalist Romanticism of figures like Müller, Arendt sees his intense desire for experience (Erlebnis) as essentially Romantic.Footnote ²⁰ Driven by his need for experience, Gentz sought to “know everything” about the world of affairs: “Gentz, like Schlegel and Humboldt, was in search of reality. He surrendered himself to pleasure, to the beautiful world, naïvely … But … he had succeeded in doing what remained impossible for either Friedrich Schlegel or, at bottom, Humboldt: intervening actively in the world of reality, and adjusting constantly to circumstances.”Footnote ²¹ Thus Gentz's thirst for experience drove him towards power, which for him had the deepest sense of reality. Arendt writes, “In the world he recognized only real power.”Footnote ²² In her analysis, Gentz's desire for an insider's view of “the world of reality” pulled him into the waves of political affairs, where, in his quest to “know everything,” he succumbed to a current that washed over his early principles and made him impossible to pin down.

Here it is important to note that Arendt does not have Gentz quite right. Jonathan Green has recently shown that Gentz's transformation from early supporter of the French Revolution to archconservative is more subtle than is often acknowledged.Footnote ²³ In fact, Gentz did not abandon his principles, but developed a complex approach to “prudential Enlightenment” over the course of his career, coming to believe that the realities of statecraft must be brought together with moral principles in order to make the latter practicable. Gentz's problem with the French Revolution was not its principles, “but that [the revolutionary founders] thought these rights sufficed—that they hoped to build a state with these mere rights when, in fact, it calls for different materials as well,” especially the “demands of prudence.”Footnote ²⁴ But Arendt is no such subtle reader of Gentz, indeed may not have read him at all at the point when she writes this, and so this fact escapes her. What is interesting for my purposes is that Arendt's obscure and contradictory depiction of Gentz is intentional. She means to forge Gentz into an unfixed point; it is, for her, the essence of his character.

Interestingly, in the same passage, after she performs the chaos of a man driven by desire for experience rather than inner principle, Arendt nevertheless comes to a definitive conclusion, one which reveals what she admired about Gentz. He may have been a “moving target,”Footnote ²⁵ but Gentz did have a point of orientation within the chaos of real power: his commitment to the “magnificent old world,” i.e. Europe.Footnote ²⁶ She concludes, “He was interested as little in one principle as the other; at most he was concerned with the ‘great old world’ whose decline he had been forced to watch, and could not endure.”Footnote ²⁷ This magnificent old world is none other than the precariously balanced family of European states, which Gentz saw threatened by Napoleon. In this, his one commitment, Arendt finds in Gentz something more than a man seduced by worldly affairs; she finds a defender of European unity.

Gentz the conservative: defender of Europe, preserver of the magnificent old world

Already in the early 1930s, before the events of 1933 that forced Arendt's escape into exile, Arendt is pleased by Gentz's commitment to European unity. In her 1932 commemorative essay, which precedes the completion of the Rahel biography, she marks Gentz out for his devotion to Europe: “He … devoted his efforts entirely to the ‘magnificent old world’ whose decline he was witnessing. This ‘magnificent old world’ was Europe.”Footnote ²⁸ In 1932, Arendt understands herself to be witnessing a new and terrifying episode of European decline.Footnote ²⁹ In the preface to the Rahel biography, which she was writing at the time, she explains, “The present biography was written with an awareness of the doom of German Judaism.”Footnote ³⁰ A decade later, Europe is at war. By that time, she responds to the 1942 publication of a biography of Gentz by remarking that it “is of a strange and exciting timeliness, since, again, the question of European unity presents one of the most important political tasks.”Footnote ³¹

Arendt's language of timeliness suggests that she believed that Gentz's lessons could be of use in her own time. Before I draw out these lessons, however, it is important to distinguish Gentz's and Arendt's conceptions of Europe. Not only did they live in different times, but they sympathized with different ideals. Where Gentz labored to preserve European stability and unity through balance among already powerful players, Arendt is committed to European ideals of revolutionary cosmopolitanism and antifascist resistance. Her heroes are not heads of state but individuals like Rahel Varnhagen, Rosa Luxemburg, and René Char (I will have more to say on this below).

Differences aside, they share a number of commitments. One of the positions that sparks Arendt's attention is Gentz's abhorrence of national awakenings. When Napoleon swept through German lands in 1806, rousing widespread “national feeling,” Gentz was wary of proposals for national German unification.Footnote ³² This stance intensified after he played a key role in restoring the pre-Napoleonic order at the 1815 Congress of Vienna. At the height of his power, Gentz helped craft policies such as the reactionary Carlsbad Decrees (1819), which censored nationalist revolutionary groups, such as the student-led Burschenschaften, of which Gentz wrote, “Thus it is revolutionary in the most extreme and dangerous sense of this term. For think what one may, theoretically or historically, of the present organization of the German states, the unification toward which these true and consummate Jacobins have been striving for six years cannot be achieved without the most violent revolutions, without the overthrow of Europe.”Footnote ³³ Gentz's position made him highly unpopular among his intellectual contemporaries, and permanently marked him as a conservative henchman to Metternich, with whom he wrote the decrees. While Arendt has nothing nice to say about Restoration-era conservatism, she nevertheless admires Gentz's refusal of national political projects: “At a time of growing nationalism, the cause which Gentz served was highly unpopular. All his life he was advancing the idea of Europe—the Europe he had still known in the 18th century and which was seriously threatened by the Napoleonic wars and the ruthless nationalism they had created.”Footnote ³⁴ Gentz's concern was ever with the precarious balance of power among European states, a balance that not merely pitted power against power, but was a precondition of peace and friendly relations, later referred to by Arendt as the “comity of nations.” Arendt agrees with Gentz's assessment. She writes that the “growing nationalism of the 19th century” did nothing less than “destroy the unity of Europe.”Footnote ³⁵

Arendt displays a fascination with the fact that Gentz, who had Romantic sensibilities and ran in Romantic circles, never embraced nationalism. Even in the circles of power at the Congress of Vienna where national interests were at play, Gentz remained nationally disinterested: “While Metternich stood for Austrian interests, Talleyrand for French, Castlereagh and Canning for English ones, the Prussian Gentz labored to defend the interest of Europe.”Footnote ³⁶ Later in The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt describes these realpolitik nationalists—she almost always chooses a Frenchman as their representative (Talleyrand or the later Clemenceau) because she associates France with the national principle—as fundamentally mistaken about their own objectives. If their aim was to bolster the power of their respective nation-states, they failed to see how nationalism undermined the stability of Europe as a whole. Not only that, but they failed to see how the nation would eventually cannibalize the achievements of the modern liberal state, e.g. rule of law, enforceable rights and legal equality, and constitutionalism.Footnote ³⁷ In The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt explains, “the state inherited as its supreme function the protection of all inhabitants in its territory no matter what their nationality, and was supposed to act as a supreme legal institution. The tragedy of the nation-state was that the people's rising national consciousness interfered with these functions.”Footnote ³⁸ While it is too much to say that Gentz alone brought Arendt to this position, there is nevertheless an identifiable Gentzian language—the language of “national consciousness” and suspicion of national emancipations—that remains in Arendt's mature works as a reminder of her early encounter with his thought.

In the end, Arendt's critique of nationalism is more complex than Gentz's. In Origins, Arendt discusses nationalism in the context of the “nation-state system,” whose crises, contradictions, and fragilities would become exposed in the disasters of the twentieth century. She distinguishes the “national principle” from race imperialism and totalitarianism and argues that the latter two emerged from the failures of the nation-state.Footnote ³⁹ Arendt agrees with Gentz's assessment of nationalism as destructive in the early nineteenth century, but as she extends this analysis through time, she sees how this same force would later become impotent in the face of its own failures, opening the door for far more pernicious political movements in the twentieth century.

The complexity of her theory notwithstanding, Arendt agrees with Gentz that a Europe of nation-states cannot be a stable, cooperative Europe, and therefore unity is the foremost geopolitical task for the continent. In Origins, Arendt mirrors Gentz's commitment to diplomatic unity in her repeated references to “comity” among European nations.Footnote ⁴⁰ “Comity of nations” is a legal term that refers to the friendly diplomatic preconditions of peaceful international coordination, and Arendt's use of the term signals her agreement with Gentz's conclusion that it is a sine qua non of peace. As I explore below, she ultimately deems comity of nations within a Westphalian system to be too fragile to address the crises of her age, a conclusion which leads her to explore federations. Interestingly, Gentz was also drawn to federations. When Arendt reviews his biography in 1942, she is thus delighted to learn that “the forces Gentz thought fit to counterbalance [ruthless nationalism] were, at first, the English policy of ‘balance of power’ and, later, the Austrian federate monarchy which was based on a principle opposed to the national one and whose interests, for several reasons coincided with the general interest of Europe.”Footnote ⁴¹ Thus political unity, and unity of Europe in particular, whether through comity or federation or both, is perhaps the single most important thread in Arendt's Gentzian thought-train.

Due to her early and abiding concern with the issue of European cooperation, Arendt does not, therefore, cast off Gentz's preoccupation with stability as mere conservatism. And this even though Gentz was an ardent supporter of Metternich's policy of “calm at any price.”Footnote ⁴² Arendt herself did not support calm at any price—she sympathized with revolutionaries and resistance fighters, and she believed that Europe's problems required a revolutionary answer—yet she finds something redeeming in Gentz's position. The redeeming element is a political attitude that can be confused with conservatism, but is not the same for Arendt: a commitment to world preservation. A commitment to world preservation is, in turn, borne of love of the world (amor mundi). In Arendt's eyes, Gentz did not support the status quo for the sake of existing power, but to hold back the destruction of Europe. Arendt steadfastly insists that this attitude should not be confused with genuine conservatism: “he did not advocate [conservatism] for its own sake, but used it only as a means of maintaining a ‘balance.’”Footnote ⁴³

Gentz provides for Arendt an example of how power politics and balance-of-power theory can be harnessed for the sake of the world. The distinction between power for power's sake and power for the sake of the world is important for Arendt. It resurfaces in her critique of imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she traces imperialism's inner principle of “expansion for expansion's sake” to pathological forms of Hobbesian politics in which power is glorified.Footnote ⁴⁴ In that work, Arendt praises the principled power politics advocated by twentieth-century defenders of the state (e.g. Clemenceau) while exposing the scandal of “completely unprincipled power politics” employed by racist–imperialists and totalitarians.Footnote ⁴⁵ Her embrace of Gentz's instinct for world preservation can help us make sense of why Arendt, who was a cosmopolitan by nature and who supported principle-driven politics, never rejects theories of the balance of power and realpolitik out of hand. For example, she briefly supported Nelson Rockefeller's Republican candidacy in the 1960 presidential election because of his support of federation in Latin America, which he defended on realpolitik grounds.Footnote ⁴⁶ It also explains her later sympathy for theorists of power like Hans Morgenthau, whom she held in high intellectual esteem. Arendt could be sympathetic to theories of realpolitik because she never drew an opposition between political principles (e.g. equality, human rights, freedom) and power. She, like Gentz, did not think within the bounds of a strict Kantian opposition between Enlightenment principles and the realities of power.Footnote ⁴⁷

While Arendt agrees with Gentz about the dangers of the national principle and the importance of European unity, and respects his world-preserving attitude, she nevertheless departs from his worldview, which she deems naive. There was never any hope for the magnificent old world. It was an unjust order that had to crumble, and its replacement—the nation-state system—was equally flawed. Gentz had enough foresight to know that the magnificent old world was a lost cause, but he could not see beyond it. In the 1932 essay, Arendt describes him as a man both desperate to be part of the world, to “know everything,” and yet paralyzed as he watched his world disappear. He could not fight for a new order, an alternative to the new “national feeling,” and so had necessarily to cling to the old order. But in this, he clung to a failing project and was thrust back on his judgment as a spectator of looming disaster. Without a new project to fight for, with only regret and no vision, Gentz became “indifferent.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Thus Arendt ends the 1932 essay by invoking Gentz's motto, that favorite phrase which she later appropriates for different purposes: victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Cato (The victorious cause pleases the gods, but the defeated one pleases Cato).Footnote ⁴⁹

For Arendt, Gentz's judgment was inadequate because, unlike his friend Rahel Varnhagen, he was not an original thinker, and his vantage point from within worldly affairs positioned him badly to critique existing power. He could not imagine how things might otherwise be. Therefore, however instructive Arendt finds Gentz, he is not able to offer alternatives to the nation-state system, alternatives she eventually hashes out in On Revolution. However, already at the time of her early encounter with Gentz, there is another figure who helps Arendt begin to think through the alternative. Rahel Varnhagen, the first exemplary revolutionary in Arendt's oeuvre, thoroughly understood Gentz, even loved him, but could not agree with him about the “magnificent old world,” which to her was nothing other than a “rotten old order.”Footnote ⁵⁰

The allure of reality

To understand Rahel Varnhagen's early influence on Arendt, we first have to pinpoint the difference between Rahel and Gentz. How did Rahel come to insights from her excluded position that Gentz could not muster from his vast political experience? The key lies in their differing relationships with “the world of reality.”

To begin with, it will help to review Arendt's philosophy of reality, which she begins formulating in the Rahel biography, and which comes to fruition in The Human Condition (1958). In the latter work, Arendt writes, “for us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality … The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.”Footnote ⁵¹ Reality, then, arises between and among humans. It depends on a plurality of individuals, who can confirm the reality of the world by confirming that they are seeing and hearing the same things from different perspectives.

Politically speaking, reality depends on a public realm in which things can appear, so that we can see and hear the same things together.Footnote ⁵² The worldly interests which gather us together in the public realm are things which quite literally lie between us, inter-est. Because the public realm is in between us, Arendt likens it to a table which “relates and separates men at the same time … gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak.”Footnote ⁵³ The open negotiation of our interests in the public realm, founded on our access to a common reality, is a condition of political freedom for Arendt. Individuals barred from the shared reality of the public realm are subject to “worldlessness.”

Rahel's political exclusion as a woman and a Jew meant that she suffered worldlessness and that she therefore had a difficult relationship with reality. Gentz, on the other hand, sought out reality with passion and success. Nevertheless, Arendt argues that Gentz's service of reality was pathological. He did not merely seek reality, he drowned in it. To describe the pathology, Arendt compares Gentz to the spirit of Friedrich Schlegel's controversial and disliked novel Lucinde, a work that embodies the Romantic quest for Erlebnis (experience): “Gentz gave himself to the world immediately and directly, and it consumed him … This total passivity is why he could be called ‘the spirit of Lucinde incarnate.’”Footnote ⁵⁴ A firm grip on reality is, for Arendt, a sine qua non of both good judgment and political freedom, but this requires that we have our grip on reality and not the other way around.

The problem was that Gentz “threw in his lot with reality” without maintaining a critical distance from the affairs he wanted to “know everything” about, and this was a perilous move.Footnote ⁵⁵ Without proper distance, reality consumes the individual, destroying the worldly in-between necessary for good judgment. To judge the world well, we have to step back and see it, in all its errors and perplexities. This viewpoint was, for much of his life, unavailable to Gentz. In the end, he did pull back far enough to see the totality of the magnificent old world as it descended, but by then he was “indifferent.” He could not answer it.

Resisting reality: Rahel Varnhagen and the revolutionary impulse

Distance from the world was not a problem for Rahel Varnhagen. She was in no danger of being consumed by the reality available to people in the know. Arendt writes, “to yield without reserve to reality did not lie within her power; the world would not accept her.”Footnote ⁵⁶ It is true that she had friendships with many luminaries of her time, but these friendships should not be confused with worldly acceptance. While the German salons offered some respite from the rigid social hierarchies of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Prussia, they were a very fragile precursor to what Jürgen Habermas has described as “the public sphere.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The salons were a site of escape from societal roles, but did not erase them.Footnote ⁵⁸ Outside the walls of Rahel's Dachstube (attic apartment) in the Jägerstraße, she faced bitter exclusion. Moreover, when in 1806 the wave of post-Napoleonic “ruthless nationalism” roused anti-Semitic sentiments in all ranks of society, Rahel was forced to disband her salon. Rahel, who, Arendt tells us, had neither the beauty nor the wealth to aid assimilation in dark times, remained a pariah, both socially and politically. She was thrust back on her Jewishness, which she bore as a mark of shame. She called it her “disgrace.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Rahel openly acknowledged the tragedy of her situation. However, in Arendt's eyes, Rahel's “disgrace” also bred capacities within her. Because she was excluded from the world and suffered its injustices, she could see its errors and develop a feeling of resistance. Moreover, since she could not immerse herself in the world, she labored intellectually to create a reality of her own. Rahel's unique character traits—her intellectual spontaneity, her creativity, her eccentricity—were in part, according to Arendt, a response to her pariahdom. Gentz recognized her productivity in this titillating passage from their correspondence:

Given that the two were never lovers, the statement is striking. Interestingly, Gentz understood himself to lack the productive (masculine) quality required to be a man of action, to change the world. He was immersed in the world, but he could not remake it. Rahel, on the other hand, had a world-making quality. For Arendt, Rahel's productive nature gave her capacity to resist reality. Her will to resist reality, which is something more, was borne of the feeling of injustice which pariahdom bestowed on her. This combined capacity and will to resist the injustices of the world comprise the beginnings of what we might call a revolutionary impulse.

Therefore, what Rahel had, which Gentz lacked, was a revolutionary impulse, the result of a productive nature in discord with the world:

Importantly, Rahel's exclusion from the world drew her attention to those things universally accorded to all humans regardless of political status: a sun that equally shines on all, things that are beautiful to all. Arendt depicts Rahel as irresistibly drawn to the notion of universality. Therefore, as Rahel despaired over her exclusion from the world, she became acquainted with the universal aspirations of equality that may have remained hidden to her had she been able to immerse herself in the virtues and pleasantries of Gentz's magnificent old world.

According to Arendt, Rahel's stance on pariahdom changed at the end of her life. She stopped yearning for assimilation and discovered the advantages of perspective accorded to the “conscious pariah,” the pariah who embraces Jewishness and refuses the indignities of assimilation.Footnote ⁶² Arendt, for whom this embrace of pariahdom is an apotheosis, thus begins the biography with these words from Rahel's deathbed: “The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life—having been born a Jewess—this I should on no account now wish to have missed.”Footnote ⁶³ Rahel's realization, which came quite late, was that in order to be for humanity she must consciously admit the injustice of her exclusion from it, and to do this she had to affirm what had been her “disgrace”: the inescapable fact of her Jewishness. Arendt writes,

This principle of equal human rights that Rahel discovered, and that Arendt discovered through her, gave her resistance to reality a revolutionary, cosmopolitan aim. In the later years of her life, Rahel settled into her critical perspective. She became a Saint-Simonist. She befriended Heinrich Heine. Her letters became politically engaged. Arendt notes one in which she writes, “One thing is certain: Europe no longer desires to conquer pieces of ground, but something more serious: pieces of equality.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In other words, Rahel decided that the world had to change to realize the promises of the Enlightenment.

Writing through Rahel, Arendt is developing her own views on the Jewish Question. In this context, the last two chapters of the biography, which were written in exile years after the rest of the manuscript, are the most fascinating.Footnote ⁶⁶ In them, Arendt imposes a heavy interpretive framework on Rahel; her voice intertwines with Rahel's and the two become indistinguishable at points. In particular, Arendt imputes to Rahel the following judgment, which resurfaces in The Origins of Totalitarianism: that the fate of Europe was inextricably linked to its pariah people, the Jews. Arendt writes, “the fate of the Jews was not so accidental and out of the way … on the contrary it precisely limned the state of society, outlined the ugly reality of the gaps in the social structure.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The inability of states to incorporate Jews as Jews revealed a fundamental flaw, namely “gaps” of membership, in the structure of the nation-state system. Arendt tells us that Rahel saw this, and realized that the system suffered an illness. She writes that Rahel “realized that the ‘diseased matter’ which had to ‘get out of us’ was not contained in the Jews alone; that the pox only broke out on the Jews, infecting them by contagion.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Thus Rahel was not only a revolutionary because she embraced the idea of equal human rights, but because she realized that the change required to realize equality would have to be systemic; that is, it would require a revolution in the nation-state regime. This idea, which becomes an abiding theme of Arendt's international thought, was surely not as much Rahel's as it was Arendt's.

In summary, Rahel, over the course of coming to terms with her “infamous birth,” found that the only dignified stance towards the world would have to be a revolutionary one.Footnote ⁶⁹ Gentz was right. Rahel was anarchic. Arendt therefore ends the biography with a description of Rahel passing the torch to Heinrich Heine at the end of her life. She tells us that among all her friends and lovers, only the equally anarchic Heine was able to “save the image of her soul.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Heine could carry Rahel's revolutionary mantel into the future because he promised “to be enthusiastic for the cause of the Jews and their attainment of equality before the law. In bad times, which are inevitable, the Germanic rabble will hear my voice ring resoundingly in German beer halls and palaces.”Footnote ⁷¹

1940–62: in search of “a new law on earth”

So far we know that by the time she finishes drafting the Rahel biography in 1938, Arendt believes that the nation-state system is fundamentally flawed and that a proper appraisal of it requires a critical and revolutionary stance, embodied in Rahel's emancipatory impulse. Arendt's own emancipatory impulse takes on Rahel's cosmopolitan principle: equal human rights. We also know from her interest in Gentz that she is developing the idea that a revolutionary approach to equal human rights must be deployed for the sake of the world, and for the preservation of Europe as a whole, which will require a balance of power through political unity. She has also taken on Gentz's position that national emancipation will obstruct this goal because it undermines unity.

After the 1942 essay, Arendt goes silent on Gentz for many years. He reappears in the footnotes of Between Past and Future (1961) and On Revolution (1963). By this time, Arendt has finally read his actual works, including The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution, Compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution (1800, translated into English in 1801 by John Quincy Adams).Footnote ⁷² On Revolution mimics the premise of Gentz's piece, and so it is sensible that Arendt returns to him for guidance as she writes it. Judith Shklar takes note of the similarity between the two works in a particularly savage review from 1983, where she writes, “the only really interesting thing about this embarrassing book [On Revolution] is that it's a new version of Friedrich Gentz's comparison of the two revolutions.”Footnote ⁷³

On its face, a comparison of revolutions may appear unrelated to Arendt's international thought. However, I would like to contend that Arendt's return to Gentz and the Age of Revolutions is intricately tied to the same concerns—European preservation and unity—that sparked her earlier interest in the man. Arendt returns to the Age of Revolutions—the age in which Gentz “knew everything” and everyone, the time when he moved through the circles of power and labored in the interest of Europe—in order to seek political alternatives to the failures of her own time. On Revolution is not only an appraisal of domestic revolutions, but also a search for possibilities and forgotten solutions to the problem of political unity that could be useful in a new age of revolutions. Arendt's focus on non-sovereign federalism in this later work, I will argue, ought to be read as the answer to her own earlier demand in The Origins of Totalitarianism that Europe (and not only Europe) must be unified under a “new law on earth” in order to be preserved.Footnote ⁷⁴

To tether this thought-train through time, I need to explain how Arendt's nascent revolutionary cosmopolitanism from the Rahel era (1930s) takes a federative turn in the 1940s–1960s.Footnote ⁷⁵ This requires that we understand how Arendt schematizes international regimes. Arendt features three international regimes in her works: the nation-state system, totalitarianism, and her own alternative, which I will call cosmopolitan federalism. To understand where her thoughts about cosmopolitan federalism come from, we have to understand how the first two are related.

In 1946, Arendt wrote a letter to her editor, Mary Underwood, explaining her intent behind The Origins of Totalitarianism. In it, she describes totalitarianism “as a horrific, misbegotten ‘solution’ to the age's problems—problems that remained very real and thoroughly unsolved.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Arendt understood totalitarianism as a solution to a set of problems of the age. Which problems? Arendt names the following: (1) “the Jewish Question,” (2) “the unsolved problem of a new organization of peoples,” (3) “the unsolved problem of a new concept of mankind,” and (4) “the unsolved problem of [economically] organizing a constantly shrinking world.”Footnote ⁷⁷ In Origins, Arendt poses these problems as “perplexities” of the nation-state system; they are crises that arise but cannot be resolved within the framework of the Westphalian system.

The German totalitarians provided convincing, albeit horrifying, solutions to all of these problems, and this was part of their appeal. Their answers were: (1) anti-Semitism (answer to the Jewish Question), (2) the destruction of the nation-state in favor of the imperial totalitarian state (answer to the question of political organization), (3) racism (answer to the question of how to conceive of mankind), and (4) expansion for expansion's sake (i.e. imperialism, which answers the question of resource distribution in a shrinking world). Thus totalitarianism was, according to Arendt, a geopolitical alternative to the nation-state system that solved its problems. It “was based on a wide-spread, frequently conscious, conviction that it provided the answers to these problems and [would] be able to master the tasks of our time.”Footnote ⁷⁸

According to Arendt, the advocates of the nation-state system—defenders of sovereign states such as Clemenceau, and bourgeois idealists who sought wealth abroad while retaining a commitment to liberal rights at home—failed to provide a convincing set of solutions to these problems. They sank into the perplexities of the fragile system that housed the nation-states they championed. Most prominently, their system promised equality before the law, but could not deliver it because equality depended on impossible national homogeneity. Nor could they respond to economic crises that overran borders. She explains that early twentieth-century nationalists “had lost touch with reality and did not realize that trade and economics had already involved every nation in world politics. The national principle was leading into provincial ignorance and the battle fought by sanity was lost.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Like Gentz before them, who was thrust into impotent spectatorship as he watched the old order descend, so the nationalists of the twentieth century, men like Clemenceau—who, by the way, were far saner than racist imperial totalitarians arising in their midst—were forced to watch Europe break on the shoals of a set of realities with which it could not reckon.

In sum, the adherents of the flawed nation-state system lacked convincing answers and a way forward. The totalitarians had answers, and proposed a geopolitical system to supersede the nation-state, but it resulted in a “descent into hell.”Footnote ⁸⁰ But which regime, which “new law on earth … rooted and controlled by newly defined territorial entities,” could deliver freedom?Footnote ⁸¹ This is Arendt's question. With it, she is approaching the terrain that Carl Schmitt is handling in the same period in Nomos of the Earth (1950), though she opposes his proposals entirely.Footnote ⁸²

For Arendt, the regime that can deliver freedom is federation. Her concern is, as ever, with preservation through unity, but she knows that the Westphalian “comity of nations” is too fragile to deliver it, and it is for this reason that federationist thinking sparks her interest when she encounters it in the 1940s. In that decade, federations become a focal point for Arendt's emancipatory impulse. Her many proposals for federative solutions to international politics—in Europe, in Palestine, in Latin America, in the United States—are attempts to think through the contours of a geopolitical order which could answer the still-unanswered questions of the nation-state system.

Will Selinger traces Arendt's support for federation as early as 1940. He cites a letter from that year in which she writes, “Our [the Jews’] only chance—indeed the only chance of all small peoples—lies in a new European federal system.”Footnote ⁸³ Throughout the 1940s, she advocates the position that Europe's hope lies in federation. In “Approaches to the German Problem” (1945), she lauds World War II resistance fighters for their claim that “the German problem” could not be solved by extinguishing Germany, but only by liberating it from its current regime through European unification and a post-national federation.Footnote ⁸⁴ In other works, she argues that the road to peace and freedom in Palestine will require a federation comprising local democracies, and that a national Jewish state is a mistake.Footnote ⁸⁵ The national principle, she decides, can have no place in Palestine without dire consequences. Indeed, this is the issue that brings about her break with Zionism.

Though Arendt eventually becomes exasperated with Palestinian politics, she never abandons hope that revolutionary political movements can ground new orders of freedom beyond the nation-state. The 1956 Hungarian revolution is a turning point for Arendt, both because it stirs her revolutionary instincts, and also because the spontaneous emergence of democratic councils provides her a new institutional form to theorize alongside federations. Jonathan Schell explains, “The fact was that the revolution gave her a first moment of relief from the crushing weight of the totalitarian phenomenon and stirred the most far-reaching hopes in her heart.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Having seen freedom spontaneously arise in the midst of totalitarianism, Arendt sets out to articulate an alternative order of freedom. Indeed, Arendt's 1958 essay on the Hungarian revolution is among the early draft materials for On Revolution.Footnote ⁸⁷ In the next section, I turn to that work, and trace how Arendt fleshes out the alternative geopolitics she has been musing about since her first encounters with Gentz and Rahel Varnhagen.

Arendt's answer: revolutionary federations

Whereas the Arendt of 1942 is deeply concerned with the stability and comity of nations in Europe, the Arendt of 1963 has turned her focus to the possibility of revolutions and a new geopolitical order. In this later period, she never abandons key elements of Gentzian thinking, in particular the priority of unity and rejection of national interest. Indeed, her rejection of the nation only intensifies in this period, culminating in her rejection of national sovereignty as a form of tyranny.

To see how Arendt's encounter with Gentz influenced On Revolution, we have to understand what makes this work a geopolitical treatise. Take, for example, the introductory chapter, which is based on an earlier essay, “The Cold War and the West,” written for the Partisan Review in 1962. In the earlier version, Arendt asserts that the international system “based on national sovereignty” is one in which interstate war is the primary mode of violence. She points us to the classic treatise on violence among nation-states, Carl von Clausewitz's On War (1832), and asks, what if war as the last resort of politics becomes impossible under conditions of nuclear deterrence? In the second version of the essay, the introduction to On Revolution, Arendt takes the possible disappearance of interstate war as the source of a new possibility: the rebirth of the revolutionary tradition, a tradition primarily concerned with the question of bringing freedom into the world. Interstate war within the nation-state system is not, according to Arendt, a matter of freedom.

At first glance, it is perplexing that Arendt introduces her revival of the revolutionary tradition with a discussion of interstate war. However, within the context of the schematic of regimes discussed in the last section, the continuity becomes clear. Whereas Clausewitz's treatise was for the age of the nation-state, hers is intended for a geopolitical future in which new political forms, like council democracy and non-sovereign federations, might arise. Indeed, it is possible that Arendt named her book On Revolution in reference Clausewitz's title On War to signal a paradigm shift.Footnote ⁸⁸ Arendt, who was reading On War during her last weeks in France in 1940 before escaping to the United States, thus comes full circle decades later to rewrite his classic work.Footnote ⁸⁹

Arendt is also rewriting Gentz's Origin and Principles of the American Revolution, Compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution. Her preoccupation with the Age of Revolutions is one of the threads that connects her early and later interest in Gentz. He is, for Arendt, the man of the revolutionary period who best understood the priority of European unity, though his mechanisms for attaining this unity (balance and comity) were inadequate. Gentz also helps Arendt riddle out a tricky position, which is pro-revolution, but which rejects the two most prominent philosophies of revolution: republican sovereigntism, championed by Rousseau, and national emancipation, championed by Fichte and Müller.

Arendt, like Gentz, favors the American Revolution over the French. Like Gentz, she lauds the American revolutionaries for their commitments to constitutionalism and rule of law. Gentz repeatedly emphasizes that the American Revolution, unlike the French, never approached “the precipice of lawlessness.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Arendt emphasizes the same:

Furthermore, they are both highly suspicious of Rousseau and admire Burke.Footnote ⁹² Gentz brought Burke to German-speaking audiences with his 1794 translation of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). One might think that this convergence solidifies Arendt's conservatism (and Gentz's, for that matter), but that would be a hasty judgment. To begin with, it is questionable how conservative Gentz's own reading of Burke was. According to Green, Gentz's translation of Reflections was heavy-handed and imposed his approach to “prudential Enlightenment” on the text.Footnote ⁹³ The result is that Burke is less critical of Enlightenment principles in German than he is in English. Though Arendt herself reads Burke in English, she also resists his conservatism. In On Revolution, she claims that Burke's critique of the Rights of Man was not “reactionary,”Footnote ⁹⁴ echoing her earlier assertion that Gentz was “no conservative.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Arendt's interest in Burke stems from her agreement with his argument—against Rousseau—that human rights do not arise in nature, but are an artifice, i.e. the product of politics, and so have to be constituted.Footnote ⁹⁶ Where Arendt departs from Burke is in her argument that rights can be established not only through tradition, as Burke claims, but through revolutionary founding. Gentz, on the other hand, was opposed to revolt in principle, and it drives him to great lengths to prove that the American Revolution was carried out on lawful grounds. He writes, “Never, in the whole course of the American revolution, were the rights of man appealed to for the destruction of the rights of a citizen; never was the sovereignty of the people used as a pretext to undermine the respect due to the laws.”Footnote ⁹⁷

Arendt's aim in On Revolution also departs from Gentz's text. While the Age of Revolutions brings them together, Arendt never sides with the status quo and does not share Gentz's commitment to the magnificent old world. Gentz weathered the Age of Revolutions, but unlike Arendt (and Rahel), he did not have a revolutionary instinct. There are two elements of Arendt's study on revolutions that I would like to highlight in this context: first, her pointed critique of sovereignty; and second, her tentative glances towards council democracy. These innovations are not ones Gentz would have agreed with, but they help Arendt envision how his ideal of unity beyond the nation might be attained.

In Arendt's early works, she takes aim at the national principle, and those familiar with the chapters on the French Revolution in On Revolution know that this line of critique does not abate. However, with her focus now turned to the American project, she extends her analysis into a pointed critique of sovereignty. The genius of the American founding, according to Arendt, was its rejection of sovereignty. She writes, “in this respect, the great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same.”Footnote ⁹⁸ According to Arendt, the Americans accomplished the abolition of sovereignty via three mechanisms: federalism, separation of powers, and dispersed local democratic fora. Arendt is comfortable with the idea of a republic made up of a chaotic tangle of overlapping and diffused sources of democratic power. It is debatable whether Arendt is correct about the American project, but for our purposes here what is important is that she believes that the Americans, by banishing the sovereign, had invented and constituted an alternative to the nation-state.

The American federal republic is not the only non-sovereign political form Arendt looks to for inspiration. She is also interested in Thomas Jefferson's never-adopted proposal for a ward system and generational constitutional conventions. She relates these proposals to the emergence of councils in times of revolution. Council democracy plays a central role in Arendt's answer to the perplexities of the nation-state. Arendt's biographer Elizabeth Young-Bruehl writes, “On the ground she prepared in her first book [Origins], Hannah Arendt later built the intellectual foundations for an answer. She based this answer on the council system.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Councils capture Arendt's preference for direct democracy and horizontal organization of power.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In On Revolution, Arendt describes the possibility of aggregating councils into a non-sovereign federative regime through a process of diplomatic, legal combination (via lex).

The last chapter of On Revolution, “The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure,” is thus Arendt's most direct proposal of an alternative to the nation-state system. In that chapter, she suggests an order of federal republics, federations, and confederations based on the legal combination of local council democracies, which are themselves based on direct participation and delegation rather than parties.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In this proposal, sovereignty and the nation are nowhere to be found. It is a vision she had more or less already suggested in the 1940s for the Middle East, and which she lauded World War II resistance fighters for suggesting for postwar Europe. It is also a starkly cosmopolitan vision, though it diverges from top-down, legalistic approaches to global unity. Arendt was skeptical of such approaches, agreeing with Kant than a world-state would be despotic.Footnote ¹⁰² Finally, Arendt's cosmopolitan federalism steadfastly insists on the right to “equal human rights,” which her dear friend Rahel Varnhagen had discovered centuries earlier. The last chapter of On Revolution is thus Arendt's most sustained meditation on what it would mean to found international political unity on the basis of a new law of the earth, a new nomos of the earth. In this sense, it is the final chapter in her encounter with Friedrich Gentz, indeed it is also the moment she overcomes him, and so it is fitting that this work returns to mirror one of his best-known.