Theodor Adorno, Hans Morgenthau, Billy Wilder, and Arnold Schoenberg were among the hundreds of intellectuals and artists who escaped the horrors of Hitler’s Reich by fleeing to America. Many of these refugees ultimately returned to Europe. But others remained in the United States, adapting to and, in some cases, adopting America.
What did America mean to these émigrés-turned-immigrants? Was it a place, a culture, an idea? How did America shape their work? And how, in turn, did their work shape it? What, in short, was the interplay between European and American ideas and culture in the postwar era?
Richard H. King’s Arendt and America is one of several recent intellectual and cultural histories motivated by such questions. As their titles suggest, many of these other studies — like Jean-Michel Palmier’s Weimar in Exile, Ehrhard Bahr’s Weimar on the Pacific, and Udi Greenberg’s The Weimar Century — emphasize the influence of European intellectuals on American ideas. King’s book, by contrast, foregrounds the impact of American ideas on a European intellectual: Hannah Arendt. The book, as King writes, is a “meditation” on the question of whether, over the 30 years between her arrival in 1941 and her death in 1975, Arendt ever “became an American.”
These were intellectually vibrant years, and Arendt, a public intellectual par excellence, contributed to them in a way that is difficult to summarize, let alone survey. Moving between New York, Chicago, and Berkeley, Arendt mixed with socialists, conservatives, and revolutionaries: Dwight Macdonald, Daniel Bell, Mary McCarthy, Ralph Ellison, Sidney Hook, Reinhold Niebuhr, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and many more were her interlocutors, her advocates and opponents. Her work appeared in Partisan Review, politics, Commentary, Dissent, Commonweal, The Nation, and elsewhere. Topics including civil rights and school desegregation, conscientious objection, and sexual liberation commanded Arendt’s attention and analysis. It’s impossible not to get drawn in as King maps this landscape and locates Arendt within it.
Living and working among the Americans, King argues, Arendt became an American. This argument is driven by King’s claim that Arendt styled herself after the 19th-century French political observer and social thinker Alexis de Tocqueville. Like Tocqueville, Arendt saw both promise and peril in the United States. Enthusiastic about its political institutions, she was deeply skeptical of its mass society. And, like Tocqueville, Arendt aimed to mediate between the intellectual heritage of Europe and the experiential novelty of the United States. Explaining each place to the other, Arendt hoped to reveal both to themselves. King argues that this mediating role turned Arendt from a detached observer to a full participant in American life. Initially emulating Tocqueville, that is to say, Arendt ultimately departed from him.
King’s argument works best when he delves deep into Arendt’s ideas, tracing their development through the reciprocal interaction of European and American thought and experience. Here Arendt appears in her full Tocquevillean role. King convincingly shows, for instance, that Arendt shaped her theories of German collective guilt for the Second World War by studying the American tradition of thinking about individual and societal responsibility stretching from Henry David Thoreau to Randolph Bourne and C. Wright Mills. He persuasively demonstrates that Arendt formed her views on race and politics by reading and rereading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. And King, a professor emeritus of intellectual history at the University of Nottingham, deftly argues that Arendt’s theory of mass society changed in response to a continuing exchange of ideas with the sociologist David Riesman.
These are just some of the varied and illuminating insights in Arendt and America. Taken together, they amply reveal the influence of American ideas and intellectuals on some of Arendt’s most important theories. They ably contradict Marshall Berman’s claim about émigré intellectuals, that “America had taken them in but played no essential role in the growth of their minds and ideas.” This strikingly superficial generalization is King’s bête noire. And, while it doesn’t take a book as thorough and accomplished as Arendt and America to debunk such a claim, King’s history does so many times over.
Does America’s influence on Arendt show, as King hopes it does, that Arendt “became an American”? To really answer this question, King would have to venture answers to several others: What does it mean to be American? Who counts as American? How does someone become American? When is the process complete? King — perhaps wisely, perhaps disappointingly — never addresses those difficult questions.
King could, perhaps, show that Arendt became an American by tracing the continuity and change in her interests and identity over time. Arendt arrived in America with considerable training in European philosophy from masters like Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. Her first book, Love and Saint Augustine (1929), was published in Germany and reflected her European philosophical interests. If Arendt abandoned this training and these interests after her immigration to the United States it might suggest that she did, somehow, become an American. So, did she?
The answer is a resounding no. Arendt expanded the themes of Love and Saint Augustine into the arguments of her most important book, The Human Condition (1958). Though written in New York City, the book’s focus clearly lies on the other side of the Atlantic with Aristotle, Cicero, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Other of Arendt’s writings from her American decades — essays and extracts collected in Between Past and Future (1961), Men in Dark Times (1968), and The Life of the Mind (published posthumously in 1978) — clearly reveal her sustained interest in European philosophy and politics. Even as she integrated herself with the New York intellectuals, Arendt remained in contact with European existentialists; alongside her interest in the Watergate scandal, Arendt remained attentive to the fate of Europe’s New Left.
King is perplexingly and disappointingly silent about The Human Condition and, indeed, about all of Arendt’s writings not explicitly connected to American political, cultural, or intellectual life. Absent a consideration of these texts, King’s book presents Arendt’s interaction with American intellectuals as a process of conversion; it relies on an artificially narrowed corpus that allows him to argue that Arendt became an American. This is confirmation bias at its most insidious.
This same myopia permits King to ascribe an outsized importance to Arendt’s thought about America. Arendt’s well-known theory of civic republicanism, for example, becomes, in King’s hands, another example of her becoming an American. Arendt’s On Revolution (1963), which most clearly articulates her republican theory, was certainly attentive to the nation’s initial foundation and early success. But the theory has its roots in Arendt’s understanding of ancient philosophy and classical politics — a context King misses because he fails to read On Revolution alongside The Human Condition. Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine were more important to Arendt than Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton.
This isn’t to say that America as physical place and intellectual context doesn’t warrant careful study or sustained attention within Arendt’s oeuvre. It most certainly does. And King’s book, with its detailed research and insightful analysis, is both a salutary exhortation and praiseworthy contribution to this effort. King’s book oversteps, however, when it mistakes this historical research for interpretive evidence of an American Arendt. It’s both more accurate and more compelling to say that, though Arendt lived and wrote among the Americans, she never became fully one of them.