Hannah Arendt was born in Germany in 1906 and lived in America from 1941 until her death in 1975. Thus her life spanned the tumultuous years of the twentieth century, as did her thought. She did not consider herself a philosopher, though she studied and maintained close relationships with two great philosophers-Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger-throughout their lives. She was a thinker, in search not of metaphysical truth but of the meaning of appearances and events. She was a questioner rather than an answerer, and she wrote what she thought, principally to encourage others to think for themselves. Fearless of the consequences of thinking, Arendt found courage woven in each and every strand of human freedom. In 1951 she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, in 1958 The Human Condition, in 1961 Between Past and Future, in 1963 On Revolution and Eichmann in Jerusalem, in 1968 Men in Dark Times, in 1970 On Violence, in 1972 Crises of the Republic, and in 1978, posthumously, The Life of the Mind. Starting at the turn of the twenty-first century, Schocken Books has published a series of collections of Arendt's unpublished and uncollected writings, of which Thinking Without a Banister is the fifth volume. The title refers to Arendt's description of her experience of thinking, an activity she indulged without any of the traditional religious, moral, political, or philosophic pillars of support. The book's contents are varied: the essays, lectures, reviews, interviews, speeches, and editorials, taken together, manifest the relentless activity of her mind as well as her character, acquainting the reader with the person Arendt was, and who has hardly yet been appreciated or understood. (Edited and with an introduction by Jerome Kohn)

Introduction by Jerome Kohn ix Acknowledgments xxxi Publication History xxxiii   Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought 3    I. The Broken Thread of Tradition    II. The Modern Challenge to Tradition The Great Tradition 43    I. Law and Power    II. Ruling and Being Ruled Authority in the Twentieth Century 69 Letter to Robert M. Hutchins 92 The Hungarian Revolution and Totalitarian Imperialism 105 Totalitarianism 157 Culture and Politics 160 Challenges to Traditional Ethics: A Response to Michael Polanyi 185 Reflections on the 1960 National Conventions: Kennedy vs. Nixon 192 Action and the “Pursuit of Happiness” 201 Freedom and Politics, a Lecture 220 The Cold War and the West 245 Nation-State and Democracy 255 Kennedy and After 262 Nathalie Sarraute 265 “As If Speaking to a Brick Wall”: A Conversation with Joachim Fest 274 Labor, Work, Action 291 Politics and Crime: An Exchange of Letters 308 Introduction to The Warriors by J. Glenn Gray 316 On the Human Condition 322 The Crisis Character of Modern Society 328 Revolution and Freedom, a Lecture 332 Is America by Nature a Violent Society? 355 The Possessed 360 “The Freedom to Be Free”: The Conditions and Meaning of Revolution 368 Imagination 387 He’s All Dwight 395 Emerson-Thoreau Medal Address 403 The Archimedean Point 406 Heidegger at Eighty 419 For Martin Heidegger 432 War Crimes and the American Conscience 433 Letter to the Editor of The New York Review of Books 434 Values in Contemporary Society 438 Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt 443 Remarks 476 Address to the Advisory Council on Philosophy at Princeton University 485 Interview with Roger Errera 489 Public Rights and Private Interests: A Response to Charles Frankel 506 Preliminary Remarks About the Life of the Mind 513 Transition 517 Remembering Wystan H. Auden, Who Died in the Night of the Twenty- eighth of September, 1973 525   Index