The collection represents approximately 4,000 volumes, ephemera and pamphlets that made up the library in Hannah Arendt’s last apartment in New York City. Of particular significance are the 900+ volumes containing marginal notes or lining, endnotes or ephemera, as well as many volumes inscribed to her by Martin Heidegger, Gershom Scholem, W.H. Auden and Randall Jarrell, among others.

Thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2008), the collection is cataloged and stabilized. We are now working to digitize all volumes containing marginalia, a project that is freely shared with the international scholarly community in order to expand the rich contemporary dialogue on Arendt’s significant contribution to public discourse.

Arendt’s two-volume work The Life of the Mind, published posthumously in 1978.

the Arendt Papers include letters to and from Hanan J. Ayalti (pen name of Hanan Klenbort), Walter Benjamin, Rosalie Littell Colie, Robert and Elke Gilbert, J. Glenn Gray, Waldemar Gurian, Rolf Hochhuth, Hans Jonas, Lotte Kohler, Judah Leon Magnes, Mary McCarthy, Ruth H. Rosenau, Gershom Gerhard Scholem, Paul Tillich, Eric Voegelin, Ernst Vollrath, Anne Weil, Helen and Kurt Wolff, and many others.

Arendt often typed replies on the reverse side of the original letters that she received.

The collection was digitized in 1998-2000 through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Initially, some digital content was limited to onsite access through dedicated work stations available only at the Library of Congress, The New School in New York City, and the Hannah Arendt Center at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. This updated digital presentation of the Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress is now available publicly online in its entirety.

Arendt studied with Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg University

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

Rich in manuscripts and correspondence for Arendt’s productive years as a writer and lecturer after World War II, the papers are sparse before the mid-1940s because of Arendt’s forced departure from Nazi Germany in 1933 and her escape from occupied France in 1941.

The Library of Congress received the Hannah Arendt Papers as a gift and bequest from Arendt in various installments from 1965 to 2000. Small additions have been subsequently received, including those made by Klaus Loewald in 1981, Roger Errera in 1994, Jochen Kölsch, International Verbindungen, 2007, and Patchen Markell, 2018.

The ideas expressed in Creative Experience continueto have an impact. Follett’s process of integration, for example, forms the basisof what is now commonly referred to as a ‘‘win-win’’ approach to conflictresolution; and her distinction between ‘‘power-with’’ and ‘‘power-over’’ hasbeen used by so many distinguished thinkers that it has become a part of ourpopular vocabulary. ≤

Instead, we focus on the relationship between the human mind and the mechanics underlying allsocial systems. The search for the locus where the distribution of governing powers can be shiftedhas brought us thus to the human mind itself. Only by affirming the human as different from thesocial persona it enacts can we see the golden thread along which the human takeover can and musthappen. This golden thread runs in the usually unperceived gaps between thoughts, communicationsand decisions that are preconditioned, preprogramed, prethought [5 ,43 ,44 ]. It brings to the light ofconsciousness the thinking, speaking and acting that are present and living. ‘What I propose, therefore,is very simple’—Hannah Arendt [ 45 ] wrote—‘it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.’To think, to voice, to enact each time anew, is the vehicle of the human takeover. To secure the continuityof this golden thread, of this very flow into the governance of society—is our existential challenge.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

The Banality of Evil

Literally everyone is just following orders from the machine.

The remedy which the tradition of Western thought has proposed for the unpredictability and irreversibility of action has consisted in abstaining from action altogether, in the withdrawal from the sphere of interaction with others, in the hope that one’s freedom and integrity could thereby be preserved. Platonism, Stoicism and Christianity elevated the sphere of contemplation above the sphere of action, precisely because in the former one could be free from the entanglements and frustrations of action. Arendt’s proposal, by contrast, is not to turn one’s back on the realm of human affairs, but to rely on two faculties inherent in action itself, the faculty of forgiving and the faculty of promising. These two faculties are closely connected, the former mitigating the irreversibility of action by absolving the actor from the unintended consequences of his or her deeds, the latter moderating the uncertainty of its outcome by binding actors to certain courses of action and thereby setting some limit to the unpredictability of the future. Both faculties are, in this respect, connected to temporality: from the standpoint of the present forgiving looks backward to what has happened and absolves the actor from what was unintentionally done, while promising looks forward as it seeks to establish islands of security in an otherwise uncertain and unpredictable future.

Enrollment was small, around twenty, but a number of future intellectual luminaries, like Hannah Arendt and Jacques Lacan, either took the class or sat in on it.