Gauss Materials. Part II. A Compilation of Texts Presented in the Context of the Gauss Seminar in Criticism (October / November 1953)

This part, the second half of the Second New York Fragment, shows handwritten additions and corrections for one of the Gauss seminars. While the handwritten additions suggest that this typescript was used in Princeton, all the major layers of reworking und restructuring (inserts 13b-13h, 18a-18c) had been written for the book chapter.

While this text was written to summarize a lecture series in preparation for its last installment, it fits awkwardly in the context of the Gauss seminars. Especially the first points refer to arguments that we do not find in any of the texts and notes from the Princeton engagement that have come down to us. Perhaps Arendt had improvised or brought them up during the discussions. Not only is the content of the “Summary” somewhat surprising; the reader may also stumble over the tone. It sounds as if the author is addressing a general audience attending a series of public lectures, not a restricted group of people who had gathered together for rather intimate meetings. But, with the exception of the spring lectures in the New School on the “Nature of Totalitarianism,” which do not coincide with this summary at all, we know of no other lecture series Arendt delivered in those months. We must assume, then, that the “Summary,” despite its anomalous tone and content, was indeed written for this occasion.

The text was written in one flow; the first page was probably given the number 4 because it was supposed to follow the three-page “Summary.” The renumbering, though, highlights the text’s independent status. Pages 13 and 14 were imported from an older text: They were originally pages 32 and 33 of “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought: The Modern Challenge to Tradition.”