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PARTISAN REVIEW
"few," the"masses" and the" elite." Even Jefferson passed muster
because he wanted our politics to remain local. All this appeared in
On Revolution,
which compares the American to the French Revolu–
tion much to the disadvantage of the latter. Like Mandeville and
many other eighteenth-century liberals, Arendt discovered that pity
is out of place in politics, and that to cure "misery" is to overstep the
bounds of the "public" into the "private," which, she claimed, was
what led the J acobins astray.
The only really interesting thing about this embarrassing book
is that it is a new version of Friedrich Gentz's comparison of the two
revolutions. Arendt had written an essay on him before she left
Germany, and she drew an extremely unflattering picture of him in
Rahe!.
He had been one of the several hollow men who had betrayed
poor Rahel.
If
this was Arendt's revenge, one must regret it.
Arendt's later articles on American politics read like dutiful efforts
to remain a "committed intellectual," a stance she greatly admired,
especially among the French. Her best essays were wonderful
biographies, most of them on women, especially Rosa Luxemburg
and Isak Dinesen .
Many writers love to cover trials, which seem to inspire the best
novelists. In our time Rebecca West and Sybille Bedford have been
notable courtroom reporters. And so Arendt decided that she too
would write up a trial-Eichmann's. She wanted to get a good look
at a Nazi murderer and she intended to discuss, as in fact she did,
some of the great puzzles raised by the trials of war criminals. How
should one assign responsibility for acts committed by public agents,
not on their own initiative, but as members of governmental organi–
zations? Who can try such people? These are not minor issues in
contemporary political theory. Arendt had nothing very new to say
about them in
Eichmann in Jerusalem,
where they are discussed in a
derivative and amateurish way. Legal theory was not her forte . As
for the banality of Eichmann's evil, it was really only a return to a
point she and many others have made about the Nazi regime: there
was a complete disproportion between its causes and its conse–
quences. To look at any of the defendants at Nuremberg and at the
Europe in which they were being tried gave one a far more vivid
sense of the distance between them and what they had brought about
than did Eichmann in his glass booth in Jerusalem.
What Arendt really did in
Eichmann inJerusalem,
however, was
to assert her pariah status in an outburst of self-centered "resistance
