Read the full transcript of Hannah Arendt’s interview on politics, freedom, and tyranny. Featuring her analysis of Eichmann, Watergate, and the difference between a republic and a democracy.
Table of Contents
The Banality of a Clown
Introduction
What follows is a transcript of a wide-ranging interview conducted in the early 1970s with Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th century’s most influential and provocative political thinkers. With unflinching clarity, Arendt engages with a French journalist on the foundational themes of her life’s work. From the unique nature of totalitarianism and the “greatness of evil” to the singular character of the American Republic and the modern dangers of “national security,” she challenges conventional wisdom at every turn. This conversation captures her fearless intellectual engagement and serves as a powerful testament to her core belief: that thinking itself is a difficult, critical, and utterly essential human activity.
Interviewer: Your first book, published in 1951, was titled The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this book, you wanted not only to describe a phenomenon but also to explain it. Hence this question: what, for you, is totalitarianism?
Hannah Arendt: Yes, well, I would like to start by making certain distinctions that not everyone agrees on. First of all, a totalitarian dictatorship is neither a simple dictatorship nor a simple tyranny. When I look at a totalitarian system, I try to analyze it as a new form of political system, previously unknown. To do this, I try to list its main characteristics.
Among these, I would like to remind you of one that is entirely absent from all current tyrannies: the role of the innocent. The innocent victims. Under Stalin, it was not necessary to do anything to be deported or executed. The dynamic of history assigned a role to this victim, and they had to play that role, whatever they had done. Before that time, no government killed people for saying “yes.” Generally, a government or a tyrant killed people because they said “no.”
A friend of mine reminded me that a very similar idea was expressed in China several centuries ago: “The men who have the impertinence to approve fare no better than those who disobey and oppose.” This, obviously, is the essence of totalitarianism: the fact that there is total domination of man by man.
In this sense, there is no totalitarianism today, not even in Russia, where the worst tyranny we have ever known nevertheless reigns. You have to do something to be sent into exile, or to a labor camp, or to a psychiatric asylum. Totalitarian regimes were always born when the majority of European countries were already subject to a dictatorship. A dictatorship, in the original sense of the concept and the word, is not a tyranny. It is a temporary suspension of laws in an emergency, usually during a war or civil war. A dictatorship is limited in time; a tyranny is not.
When I wrote my book on Eichmann in Jerusalem, one of my main objectives was to destroy the legend of the greatness of evil, of the demonic force, and also to strip people of the admiration they have for great wrongdoers like Richard III. I found in Brecht the following thought: “Great political criminals must at all costs be exposed, and above all, be delivered to ridicule. They are not great political criminals, but men who have committed great political crimes,” which is something entirely different.
Hitler’s failure does not indicate that he was an imbecile. The fact that Hitler was an imbecile was a common and false idea throughout the opposition before he took power. The scale of his enterprises does not make him a great man. Neither one nor the other. That is to say, this whole notion of greatness has no application.
If the ruling classes, says Brecht, allow a small-time crook to become a big-time crook, he is not entitled to a privileged position in history. That is to say, the fact that he becomes a big-time crook and that what he does has serious consequences does not make him great. Then he says, on a general level and abruptly: “One can say that tragedy deals with the sufferings of humanity in a less serious way than comedy.” This is obviously a shocking statement, but at the same time, I think it is perfectly right. If you want to keep your integrity in such circumstances, you can only do it if you remember that whatever he does, even if he has killed ten million people, he is just a clown.
Interviewer: When you published your book on the Eichmann trial, it provoked very violent reactions. Why was there such a reaction?
Hannah Arendt: The causes of this controversy were partly due to the fact that I had attacked the bureaucracy. When you attack a bureaucracy, you must expect it to defend itself, to attack you, to try to make your life impossible. That was more or less a nasty political affair. I could understand that. But suppose they hadn’t organized this campaign; even so, the opposition to this book would have been very strong because Jews were offended, and by that, I mean people whom I really respect and whom I can understand.
They were especially offended by what Brecht said: by the laughter. My laughter at that moment was more or less innocent; I didn’t think about it. For example, Eichmann never blamed himself for what he had done to the Jews. He blamed himself for one incident: he had slapped the president of the Jewish community in Vienna during his interrogation. And I know that many people suffered worse treatment than that. Yet Eichmann never forgave himself. He had given in to an impulse; he thought it was very wrong to have lost his temper.
Interviewer: Why do you think we see a whole body of literature emerging, particularly concerning Nazism, that often describes the perpetrators’ crimes in a way that tries to humanize them, and thus indirectly justify them? Do you think there’s a commercial reason for such publications, or do you think they have a deeper meaning?
Hannah Arendt: I think they have a meaning. They show that what happened once can happen again. Tyranny has been known for a very long time, yet that has never stopped a tyrant from becoming a tyrant. That didn’t stop Nero and Caligula, and Nero and Caligula did not prevent recent examples, such as the massive intrusion of criminality into political life.
Interviewer: You arrived in this country in 1941. You came from Europe, so you have lived here for 32 years. When you reflect on America, what is your dominant impression?
Hannah Arendt: The dominant impression is that America is not a nation-state. Europeans have a very hard time understanding this simple fact, which they should theoretically know. This country is united neither by heritage, nor by memories, nor by soil, nor by language, nor by common origin. There are no authentic Americans here, apart from the Indians. Everyone else is a citizen, and these citizens are united by only one thing—and it is a lot.
One becomes a citizen of the United States by simple acceptance of the Constitution. The Constitution, from the French or German point of view, is just a piece of paper; you can change it. But here, it is a sacred document. It is the constant memory of a single, sacred act: the act of foundation of the United States. The foundation consisted of bringing together entirely disparate ethnic minorities and regions into a whole, without leveling and erasing these differences. All of this is very difficult for a foreigner to understand. So we can say that in this political system, it is the law that rules, and not men.
Interviewer: For the good of the country—I almost said “the nation”—for the good of the United States of America as a whole, for the Republic, in the last ten years, America has experienced a wave of political violence marked by the assassination of the President and his brother, by the Vietnam War, by the Watergate affair. Why can America overcome crises that in Europe would have led to changes of regime, or even very serious internal unrest?
Hannah Arendt: The Watergate affair has revealed one of the deepest constitutional crises America has ever known. This constitutional crisis represents, for the first time in the United States, an open conflict between the legislative and executive branches. And here, it is the Constitution itself that is partly responsible. The Founding Fathers did not think that tyranny could arise from the executive branch because they saw in it nothing more than the simple execution of what the legislator had decided.
We know today that the greatest danger of tyranny comes from the executive. But if we take the spirit of the Constitution literally, what did the Founding Fathers think? They thought they had freed themselves, first of all, from the domination of the majority. That is why it would be a serious mistake to think that what we have is a democracy. What we have here is a republican system.
The Founding Fathers were above all concerned with preserving the rights of minorities because they believed that in a healthy body politic, there must be a plurality of opinions. The “union sacrée,” what the French call the sacred union, was precisely for them what should not be; it would already be a kind of tyranny. And the tyrant could very well be a majority. Therefore, the entire political system is organized in such a way that even after the victory of the majority, there is always an opposition. This opposition is necessary because it represents the legitimate opinions of one or more minorities.
“National security” is a new notion in the American vocabulary. It is a translation of raison d’état [reason of state]. This notion of raison d’état has never played any role in America. “National security” now covers all sorts of offenses. For example, the President has all the rights; he is above the law. The king can do no wrong. That is to say, he is like a monarch in a republic; he is above the law, and his justification is always that whatever he does, he does it for the sake of national security.
Interviewer: In what way, according to you, are these modern applications of raison d’état—what you call the intrusion of criminality into the political domain—specific to our time? Is this specific to our era?
Hannah Arendt: What is specific to our era is the massive intrusion of criminality into political life. I am talking here about something that goes far beyond those crimes that one always tries to justify by raison d’état, pretexting that they are exceptions to the rule. Here, on the contrary, we are suddenly confronted with a style of political action that is in itself criminal. It is no longer an exception to the rule. They do not say, “We are in such an emergency situation that we must wiretap everyone.” They say, “Wiretapping is part of normal political proceedings.” They do not say, “We are exceptionally burglarizing a psychiatrist’s office and we will never do it again.” No, absolutely not. On the contrary, they affirm that such a break-in is absolutely legitimate.
This “national security” affair comes directly from the notion of raison d’état. This notion of national security that is invoked is directly imported from Central Europe. Of course, the Germans, the French, the Italians recognize it as entirely justified because they have always lived under this rule. But it was precisely the European heritage that the American Revolution intended to break with at all costs.
Interviewer: In your essay on the Pentagon Papers, you describe the psychology of what you call the “problem solvers,” who were at the time the advisors to the American government. You say: “The problem solvers were defined as very self-assured men who rarely seemed to doubt their ability to impose themselves. They were not content to show intelligence, but boasted at the same time of their rationality, their love of theory, of the purely intellectual universe, making them reject all sentimentalism.” This is frightening.
Hannah Arendt: In the Pentagon Papers, there is a very good example of this pervasive scientific mentality. You know the Domino Theory. It was the official theory throughout the Cold War from 1950 to 1969. The truth is that among the very sophisticated intellectuals who created the Pentagon Papers, very few believed in this Domino Theory. In the highest positions of government, there were only two or three people who really believed in it, and they were not exactly among the most intelligent. In fact, they didn’t even believe it themselves, but all their actions adhered to this theory. They acted not out of falsehood or because they wanted to be well-regarded by their superiors, but because it gave them a framework within which they could work. They had adopted this framework, knowing that it was in contradiction with the events and analyses that proved to them every morning that this point of view was simply false.
Interviewer: Our century seems to us to be dominated by a persistence of modes of thought based on historical determinism.
Hannah Arendt: There are very good reasons for this belief in historical necessity. We do not know the future. Everyone acts with a view to the future, and no one knows what they are doing because the future is made by us, not by me. It is only if I acted alone, if I were the only one, that I could predict what will happen as a result of my actions. So it seems that what really happened is entirely in the domain of contingency, and in fact, contingency is one of the greatest factors in history. No one knows what will happen simply because there are so many things that depend on an enormous quantity of variable factors, that is to say, on chance.
On the other hand, if we look at history retrospectively, we can say that history is logical. How was that possible? This is the real problem of any philosophy of history. How is it possible that after the fact, it always seems that things could not have happened otherwise? Reality has such a powerful impact that we cannot be bothered to consider an infinite variety of possibilities.
Interviewer: If our contemporaries maintain their attachment to deterministic modes of thought despite the denials of history, would it be, in your opinion, because they are afraid of freedom?
Hannah Arendt: But they don’t say so. If they said so, we could immediately open the debate. If only they said, “We are afraid.” For example, we are afraid of being afraid—one of the main motivations. But “we are afraid of freedom.”
Interviewer: Can you imagine in Europe a minister, seeing his policy on the point of failing, commissioning a study from a team of experts outside the administration, whose purpose would be to know how this happened?
Hannah Arendt: Because of raison d’état? No. He would have immediately started to conceal his mistakes. McNamara’s attitude was different. I quoted at the beginning of my essay on the Pentagon Papers one of his remarks: “It is not a very pretty sight to see the first of the superpowers killing and wounding thousands of non-combatants every week. How did we get here?” That is an American attitude, and it shows that the situation was still healthy because there was still a McNamara who wanted to learn a lesson from it.
Interviewer: Do you think that currently, American leaders placed in other situations still have the desire to know?
Hannah Arendt: No, no, no. I believe, if I am not mistaken, that McNamara was on Nixon’s enemies list. I read it today in the New York Times. That already shows you that this whole attitude no longer exists in American political life at the highest level. These people already believed in the image they had to create of themselves. Now they want everyone to believe in their image and no one to look beyond it. We then enter a completely different political universe. After what could be called the arrogance of knowledge, a third stage, which would be arrogance, period. It’s rather the will to dominate. So far, it has not succeeded. I can still sit at this table today and speak to you freely, so they have not dominated me yet. And I feel perfectly free in this country.
Interviewer: Someone called the whole Nixon enterprise “the aborted revolution.”
Hannah Arendt: We don’t know yet if it has been aborted. He may have said that prematurely. But we can certainly say one thing: it has not been successful either.
Interviewer: What threatens our era is the idea that the goals of politics are unlimited. Liberalism, after all, I believe, rests on the idea that politics has limited objectives. Isn’t the arrival in power of men and movements who assign themselves unlimited objectives the greatest threat to our era?
Hannah Arendt: I hope I won’t shock you if I tell you that I am not at all sure that I am a liberal. I really have no creed in the matter. No, I do not profess a political philosophy that I could summarize with a term.
Interviewer: But surely your philosophical reflection is situated within the foundations of liberal thought, with borrowings from antiquity. Would you say that Montesquieu is a liberal?
Hannah Arendt: I take what I can and what suits me. One of the great advantages of our time is what René Char said: “Our inheritance was left to us without a testament.” This means that we are entirely free to use the experiences and thoughts of the past wherever we want.
Interviewer: But doesn’t this extreme freedom risk frightening many of our contemporaries who would prefer to find everything ready-made in an ideology?
Hannah Arendt: No doubt.
Interviewer: The freedom you define risks being the freedom of a few, of those who will have the strength to invent new ways of thinking.
Hannah Arendt: No. It rests only on the conviction that every human being, as a thinking being, can reflect as well as I can and can form their own judgment if they want to. What I do not know is how to awaken this desire in them to reflect. To reflect means to always think critically, and to think critically means that every thought undermines what there is in fact of rigid rules and general convictions. What happens when one thinks is subjected to a critical examination. That is to say, there are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that the act of thinking is in itself a very dangerous enterprise. But not thinking is even more dangerous. And not reflecting is more dangerous still.
Interviewer: To René Char’s words, “Our inheritance was preceded by no testament,” what, in your opinion, is the inheritance of the 20th century? We are three-quarters of the way through the century.
Hannah Arendt: I am old, but we are both still here to leave them something. What will we leave to the 21st century? I am almost certain that there will be modern art, which is rather stagnant at the moment, but after the great creativity of the first 40 years of this century, especially in France, it is natural that a certain exhaustion occurs. The 20th century will probably be one of the great centuries of history, but not in politics.
Interviewer: You have repeatedly dealt in your work with 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 19th century was the only political response that the Jews had ever found to anti-Semitism. How has the existence of Israel changed the political and psychological context in which Jews live in the world?
Hannah Arendt: I believe it has changed everything. Today, the Jewish people are truly united behind Israel. They feel they have a state, a political representation, just like the Irish, the English, or the French. They have not only a homeland, but they have a nation-state. Their whole attitude towards the Arabs depends in large part on an identification that Jews from Central Europe have always made instinctively and without thinking: that the state must necessarily be a nation-state.
The relations between the Diaspora and Israel, or what was previously Palestine, have changed because Israel is no longer simply a refuge for Polish Jews. A Zionist was then a man who tried to get money from rich Jews for poor Polish Jews. But today, Israel is the representative of the Jewish people throughout the world, whether we like it or not. That is another question. This does not mean that Diaspora Jewry must always be of the same opinion as the Israeli government. It is not a question of government; it is a question of state. As long as this state exists, it will obviously be what represents us in the eyes of the world.
Interviewer: The French author Georges Friedmann wrote a book about ten years ago titled The End of the Jewish People? where he concluded that in the future, there would be, on the one hand, a new Israeli nation-state and, on the other hand, in the countries of the Diaspora, Jews who would assimilate and gradually lose their own characteristics. Does this hypothesis seem plausible to you?
Hannah Arendt: I believe it is completely false. In antiquity, when the Jewish state still existed, there was already a large Jewish diaspora. Over the centuries, through a very large number of different forms of government and state, the Jews—the only people of antiquity who survived through the millennia—have never been assimilated. If the Jews could have been assimilated, they would have been long ago. There was one opportunity during the Spanish period, there was another during the Roman period, and obviously in the 18th and 19th centuries. A people, a community, does not commit suicide. Mr. Friedmann is mistaken because he does not understand that the feelings of intellectuals, who can indeed change nationality and absorb another culture, do not correspond to the feelings of the people as a whole, and particularly not to those of a people who have been created by laws that we know.
What does assimilation mean in American society? There is no assimilation to a culture. Would you be so kind as to tell me what the Jews should assimilate to here? To the English? The Irish? The Germans? When one says that American Jews are very Americanized… they are excellent American citizens. But in their private life, their social life, they are today more Jewish than they have ever been. A large number of young people are learning Hebrew, even if their parents have long since forgotten it.
The essential thing is Israel. For example, the German Jews of my own generation who emigrated to the United States, in a very short time, they became very nationalist Jews, much more nationalist than I have ever been, despite the fact that I was a Zionist and they were not. I never said, “I am German.” I always said, “I am Jewish.” But now, what are they assimilating to? To the Jewish community. Since they were used to assimilation, they assimilated to the American Jewish community with the fervor of new converts. They became ultra-nationalist and pro-Israel.
Interviewer: Throughout history, what has ensured the survival of the Jewish people has essentially been a bond of a religious nature. We are in an era where all religions are experiencing a crisis and where the religious bond tends to weaken. In these conditions, what, in the contemporary era, constitutes the unity of the Jewish people?
Hannah Arendt: I believe here you are slightly mistaken. When you say “religion,” you obviously think of the Christian religion, which is a creed, a belief, a faith. This is absolutely not the case for the Jewish religion. It is a national religion in which religion and nation coincide. You know that Jews, for example, do not recognize the baptism of Jews converted to Christianity. It is as if this act did not exist. According to Jewish law, a Jew always remains a Jew. A person born of a Jewish mother is a Jew.
The notion of religion is completely different. It is much more a way of life than a religion in the particular and specific sense of the Christian religion. I had a Jewish education, and I remember when I was about 14, I rebelled against our teacher and I wanted to shock him. I stood up and said, “I don’t believe in God.” He then answered me, “Who asked you to?“
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