Hannah Arendt and the Working Class

On a recent trip earlier this month to the Hannah Arendt Collection housed in Bard College's Stevenson Library, we came across this copy of E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class:

As you can see below, Hannah Arendt made several annotations to her copy of this book. On page 204, for example, she underlined and placed two "X's" in the margin next to the following passage:

"Since the conditions which gave rise to these events are assumed, they appear not only as explicable in their own terms but as inevitable."

On the opposite page, Arendt places an equal sign next to the passage that reads:

"In the scrutiny of credit facilities or of the terms of the trade, where each event is explicable and appears also as a self-sufficient cause of other events, we arrive at a post facto determinism. [underline Arendt's]"

She also places a "?" next to the sentence:

"By what social alchemy did inventions for saving labour become engines of immiseration?"

Finally, she marks two "X's" in the margin beside the following passage:

"When we encounter some sonorous phrase such as 'the strong ebb and flow of the trade cycle' we must be put on our guard. For behind this trade cycle there is a structure of social relations, fostering some sorts of expropriation (rent, interest, and profit) and outlawing others (theft, feudal dues), legitimising some types of conflict (competition, armed warfare) and inhibiting others (trades unionism, bread riots, popular political organization)--a structure which may appear, in the eyes of the future, to be both barbarous and ephemeral."

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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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