Hans Morgenthau and Hannah Arendt

On a recent trip to the Hannah Arendt Library, we came across Arendt's collection of the writings of Hans Morgenthau. These volumes previously owned by Arendt--The Decline of Democratic Politics, The Impasse of American Foreign Policy, and The Restoration of American Politics--are shown in the image below.

Hans Morgenthau was one of the leading twentieth-century figures in the study of international politics. He is most well known for his book Politics Among Nations, in which he lays out his "Six Principles of Political Realism."

Just as she respected his work, Morgenthau respected Arendt's writings. Indeed, among other praise, Morgenthau described Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem as “superb,” “concise,” “incisive,” and “powerful” in a review for the Chicago Tribune shortly following the book's release.

Eventually, these two singular thinkers met at a conference. As guest blogger Arie Amaya-Akkermans explains in a 2012 post to our blog:

During a conference organized in her honor in Toronto, Hannah Arendt was asked by Hans Morgenthau, to categorize herself as such: “What are you? Are you a conservative? Are you a liberal? Where is your position in the contemporary possibilities?”

Arendt replied: “I don’t know and I’ve never known. And I suppose I never had any such position. You know the left think that I am conservative, and the conservatives think that I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say I couldn’t care less. I don’t think that the real questions of this century will get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.”

We at the Hannah Arendt Center are joyed to hear that these two intellectual figures were able to discuss politics at one point in their lives, and we are honored today to embody the tradition of thought elucidated by Arendt in the quotation above.

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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.

For more Library photos, please click here.