Instead of thanking again the many friends, mentors, and helpmates acknowledged in previous volumes of Hannah Arendt’s unpublished and uncollected writings—which like this one have been seen into publication by Daniel Frank—here I will mention only a few new names. This by no means implies that my gratitude to those previously cited has diminished; on the contrary, it has grown greater, not least to the few who have since disappeared from the world we shared.
The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College is a dynamic organization under the direction of the open-minded, generous, and indefatigable Roger Berkowitz. The Center has attracted scholars and students from around the world, creating a sort of international commons in which today’s problems and predicaments are discussed and interpreted from a grand diversity of points of view. The Center’s activities are frequently anchored in what Arendt wrote and warned of more than forty years ago.
In the north of Germany, the Karl Jaspers Gesellschaft is situated in Oldenburg, the city of Jaspers’s birth. The head of the imposing Jaspers Haus, Matthias Bormuth, is a psychologist and a philosopher, as was Jaspers himself. Matthias Bormuth has written and spoken of the depth of understanding between Jaspers and Arendt, examining the meaning of the friendship they exemplified with special regard for the millions upon millions—more today than ever before—of the world’s uprooted and homeless people. We are all in his debt for that.
Hannah Arendt speaks and writes in a voice that attracts both scholars and those more active in the play of the world. Of course, as no one knew better than she, those are not two entirely distinct classes. It has been my good fortune to have encountered two people inspired by Arendt, one of whom, Thomas Wild, for me chiefly represents scholarship, and the other, Fred Dewey, chiefly represents action. Thomas Wild is the subtlest reader of Arendt I have encountered in many years; his teaching and writings cast new light on her spoken and written words, a light that reveals hitherto unanticipated relations of her way of thinking to the world in and about which she thinks. Fred Dewey, the great grandson of America’s premier philosopher, is devoted to Arendt, and, which is rare, finds it urgent to put her thought into action, not in some envisioned future, but amidst the insecurity and instability of the world in which we live now. To that end, he has performed her thinking—no easy undertaking—for audiences whom he regards and addresses as citizens of poleis, in this country and throughout Western Europe. With deepest appreciation this book is dedicated to Thomas Wild and Fred Dewey.
Jerome Kohn