Hannah Arendt and America's Blood-Won Liberty

On a recent trip to the Hannah Arendt Collection housed in Bard College's Stevenson Library, we came across this copy of Lectures on the French Revolution, which was written by Sir John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, KCVO (1834-1902):

Hannah Arendt made a number of annotations to her copy of this book. For example, on page 32, she underlined two separate passages, the first of which reads:

What the French took from the Americans was their theory of revolution, not their theory of government--their cutting, not their sewing.

The second section underlined by Arendt proceeds as follows:

"The American Revolution," says Washington, "or the peculiar light of the age, seems to have opened the eyes of almost every nation in Europe, and a spirit of equal liberty appears fast to be gaining ground everywhere."

Finally, and on that same page, Arendt inserted two vertical lines and an "X" adjacent to this passage:

"...You will carry our sentiments with you, but if you try to plant them in a country that has been corrupt for centuries, you will encounter obstacles more formidable than ours. Our liberty has been won with blood; you will have to shed it in torrents before liberty can take root in the old world."

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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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