Hannah Arendt said she wasn’t German.
The Germans didn’t want her anymore, ‘cuz, you know, they went nuts.
Why’d they go nuts?
One reason for sure is that American greatness was ignored.
Ask yourself, “How did Hitler come to power?” And the answer has to include the constitution Woodrow Wilson offered to Germany at the end of World War I.
Why didn’t Wilson offer the Germans a constitution like ours, like the one George Washington and the founders made?
Where’s the thirty Thousand?
Where’s the Enumeration?
Not in Wilson’s constitutional offering, so how could it be great? This is no small matter, given what happened to Hannah Arendt and millions of others.
When Arendt got to America she wrote about revolution. One commentator noted something new about her thoughts: “The new paradigmatic political actors are the American Founders, whose debates and deliberations concerning the drafting and adoption of the Constitution are presented by Arendt as every bit as exemplary as anything in Homer or Thucydides.”
As exemplary as anything in Homer or Thucydides: in other words, American greatness is not found in the boom-boom of rebellion and the 4th of July; American greatness is found in the law of revolution, the US Constitution, and 17 September.
*Next Up: A celebration of the 7th Amendment on 7/20 with Part 2 of Hannah Arendt, American Greatness and Constitutio Libertatis.
Posted by Bryan W. Brickner