LEON BOTSTEIN
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capable of change onl y through politi cal action , not social acti on ,
action characteristi c of the
polis,
action based on the Enlightenment
concept of citizenship and law. Not surprisingly, Arendt 's political
vision is again p art Kanti an in its implicit hope for a cosmopolitan
world , on e transcending nati onalism (and cl earl y therefore, Zi onism ),
where all egian ce
to
the public realm is shared through equal political
sta tus by peoples of different races, languages, mores and economics.
As a res ult of her disappointment regarding nineteenth-century social
change with respect
to
Jews, the social plurality of cultures appeared
immutable. Therefore, equality and freedom, if they were
to
affect
Jews, could be achieved essentiall y onl y in politi cal terms.
The self-deception inherent in European Jewi sh assimil a tion
demonstra tes the consequenses of an inadequa te political solu tion.
Rahel Varnhagen 's Jewishness was not transcended by wealth , mar –
r iage or intell ectuality. Likewise, Stefan Zweig's Jewishness was no t
eradica ted by fame, interna tional literary acclaim, wealth , or by his
own lack of
co~sciou sness.
Despite a link between worl dlessness and
pariah sta tus, and the development of the feelings of compassion and
so lidarity, the worldl ess pari ah was politi cal testimony to the failure of
Jewish integra tion and the politi cal con sequences of the economic and
social transforma tions and ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuri es.
One fin al aspect of Jay's interpreta ti on remains: his ch arge of
po li ti cal exi stentialism and hi s related asserti on that Arendt, despite
appearances, succumbed somehow
to
fascism and was parti all y, by
associati on , res ponsibl e for fascism. It is, I think, an outrageous and
glib claim on several accounts, whether or no t one has sympa thy or
admira tion for Arendt's work . First, Jay's identifi ca ti on of Arendt with
existenti alism is drawn primaril y from her 1946 essay on
Ex istenzphi–
losophie
whose real purpose was to exp li ca te a movement to an
Ameri can and English audi ence, an audience quite unfamili ar with a
body o f work written in often impenetrabl e German . She clea rl y had
more sympa thy with Jaspers, her teacher. But her own writing does no t
support Jay's view that, like the exi sten tiali sts, she admired the self–
centered and melodrama ti c reasons behind politi cal action , mere
heroi sm and g lory. Her use of the noti on of glory is ancien t, not
modern . Arendt uses it in the Roman and biblical sen se, which endows
glo ry with ethi cal rather than n arrow self-serving qualities.
Likewi se, Jay 's notion tha t Arendt somehow succumbed
to
fascism
leads him
to
compare Rahel Varnhagen to Arendt. Jay claims tha t
Arendt , like Rahel, absorbed the values (i.e. fascist ) of her hos til e
environment. Although Arendt saw Rahel as su rrounding herse lf with
