Arendt, Social Change, and History

On a trip last year to the Hannah Arendt Collection housed in Bard College's Stevenson Library, we came across this copy of Robert A. Nisbet's Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development:

In his book, Nisbet presents the essential sources of the Western idea of social development and according to some artfully challenges evolutionary theory on epistemological, methodological, and substantial grounds.

Arendt made several annotations to her copy of this book. For example, as is evident in the image below, she placed a vertical line in the margins adjacent to a passage found on page 78 that proceeds as follows:

"It is the union of all of these aspects in one single, great design that lights up the City of God and gives this book historical priority in the tradition I am referring to. The Gulf between the God-intoxicated Augustine and the materialism-driven Karl Marx is a broad one, to be sure, but not so broad that it cannot be bridged by the single doctrine of history conceived as working itself out through what Marx was to call iron necessity.

On the opposite page, she similarly marked another passage that reads:

"Nothing of this sort existed in Greek and Roman historiography."

Here Nisbet refers back to the previous paragraph's concluding sentence:

"We have an insistence that all that has actually happened, in the sense of all events and persons in time, has necessarily happened; that, not merely the development of forms and types, but the history of events, acts, and motives, has bee necessary."

Finally, some 20 pages later, she places a vertical line adjacent to the following paragraphs on page 92:

"There is nothing, Augustine tells us, 'so social by nature, so unsocial by its corruption' as mankind, and it is the conflict indeed between these two spheres of sociality and unsociality--what Kant was to call man's 'unsocial sociability'--that has supplied the motive force of mankind's actual development.

"'And human nature has nothing more appropriate, either for the prevention of discord, or for the healing of it, where it exists, than the remembrance of that first parent of us all, whom God was pleased to create alone, that all men might be derived from one, and that they might thus be admonished to preserve unity among their whole multitude."

What follows next is this paragraph:

"Thus the beginning of that most Western of ideas: the unity of the human race, of mankind, of civilization. Thus the beginning too of the conflict between good and evil, concord and discord, justice and injustice that would, for long after Augustine, seem inherent, inalienable conflict in the human condition."

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The Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College is maintained by staff members at the Bard College Stevenson Library. To peruse the collection's digital entries, please click here.

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