On August 18, 1963, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) described in a letter to Dan Jacobson (1929-2014), a South African writer residing in London, what she believed was “the greatest difference between South Africa and the [United] States.” She had just returned from a rejuvenating vacation in Europe, only to find herself in a ferocious firestorm over Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). Readers of this “report” were accusing her of antisemitic self-hatred, historical inaccuracy, heartlessness, and rhetorical flippancy. The “banality of evil”—her most controversial phrase—became a lynchpin for acrimonious criticism in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But confronting this opprobrium was not the only source of distress for Arendt. In a year where everything seemed to be happening, she witnessed racial violence breaking out again on both sides of the Atlantic.

Two months earlier, only a few hours after President John F. Kennedy’s historic delivery of the Report to the American People on Civil Rights, a Ku Klux Klan member had murdered civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi. This mobilization of white terror in opposition to the federal regulation of racial equality exposed the nation’s moral crisis, culminating in the assassination of the president in November of 1963. Meanwhile, public outrage over the Sharpeville massacre (1960) had reinvigorated the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. But Nationalist Afrikaners struck back, passing more racist laws and conducting sweeping arrests. This terrifying development across the Atlantic worried Arendt. It required intervention. 

As Arendt explained to Jacobson, though, one should be cognizant of one major difference when it came to Black Power in America.

[I]t is not simply a question of ‘ideals’, this country is governed by laws, and the real danger point here comes when the Negroes, very understandably, demand more than the law can possibly grant them. We are very far from having reached this point, but we may reach it sooner than anybody thinks now; and then the real trouble will start in the big cities, not in the South, where it is still a question of unconstitutional legislation, and we may witness for the first time in this country the real appearance, and not only the intellectual talk, of the social question.[1]

Arendt’s concern was that the American Republic would collapse under the weight of a foreign import. As she spelled out in On Revolution (1963), “the social question” supposed “poverty,” “constant want,” and “acute misery.” These conditions prevented “freedom” in a political sense from taking shape in the public realm. A key example for her was the French Revolution. In pursuit of social equality, its revolutionaries had lost sight of political freedom as the foundation for a new beginning. The tragic outcome was terror as opposed to a stable body politic. By contrast, the American Revolution exemplified political action. It marked a new beginning in Augustine’s sense of initium as opposed to divine principium. Since the American revolutionaries were “poor but not miserable,” they could concentrate on forming a new government whose constitution separated the three branches—executive, legislative, judicial—and divided power between the national government and the states. Rich in wisdom and satisfied with their social lot, they could declare a republican constitution and remain free from monarchical rule.

But now, Arendt feared, this republican covenant was in danger. Calls for Black Power were understandable, she wrote to Jacobson. Anti-Black racism, like antisemitism, threatened the world’s plurality. Yet proponents of Black Power were making a mistake. Their obsession with the social question sought to bestow dignity to the lowest of human activities: labor. They reminded her of the French “malheureux” and “enragés” at the end of the eighteenth century.[2] They dangerously repeated Marx’s “elevation of labor” to the most defining feature of humanity.[3] Wanting to replace human “deed” in political freedom with slavish “conformism” in mass society, they desired social equality beyond what the law of the land could guarantee.[4] In a letter to Karl Jaspers, Arendt’s former teacher and lifelong confidant, on December 26, 1956, she had noted this perilous march of prosperity among fellow Americans, especially African Americans:

Now every person has not just two cars, but three in the garage, and I’m not talking about rich people but, for example, a Negro family in which the husband is a chauffeur and the wife a maid for a family in the countryside. I find it troubling [unheimlich], and I can hardly imagine how it can be for the good.[5]

Drawing on her philosophical explanations in The Human Condition (1958) and On Revolution (1963), Arendt condemned the absence of America’s originary spirit from the Black Power movement. In chasing social equality as opposed to political consent, this revolutionary movement destabilized the constitutional republic. On July 20, 1963, Arendt alerted Jaspers once again to this crisis. She described white mobs terrorizing Black communities and Black mobs committing the same crime in white neighborhoods.[6]

“On Behalf of Peace Between the Races”

This harsh assessment of Black Power was actually prompted by a rare opportunity. Since 1961, Jaspers had been serving on the selection committee of a new international award, which rivaled the Nobel Peace Prize. It was called the Balzan Prize for Humanity, Peace, and Fraternity among Peoples. This biannual “peace price [sic]” recognized significant “efforts on behalf of peace between the races,” she told Jacobson.[7] The first two recipients in 1961 and 1963 were the Nobel Foundation and Pope John XXIII. Since Jaspers wished to nominate someone for the next Balzan Prize, he asked Arendt for recommendations—most likely in person during her visit to Basel in February 1963.

Arendt, for her part, cared deeply about this prize. In June 1963, she traveled to Rome and witnessed Pope John XXIII’s moving funeral. In Men in Dark Times (1965), she would go on to commemorate his “enormous strength” in “faith,” as well as his “enormous self-confidence.”[8] Apparently, nobody expected Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli to be a consequential pontiff. But his accomplishments and virtues inspired many across the world to imitate Christ with passion. Because of his faithful legacy, Arendt wanted to do her part in shaping the selection of the next Balzan Prize recipient. Hence, she proposed to Jaspers that an anti-apartheid activist from South Africa would be ideal: “This coming peace prize should proclaim expressly the necessity for peace between the races.”[9] She was thinking about a South African nominee who married the Christian faith with a commitment to racial equality and nonviolence.

Arendt did not stop there. She requested a confidential meeting with Jacobson in Paris through their common friend Mary McCarthy.[10] The goal was to collect more information for Jaspers. So this meeting took place in July 1963 and Arendt learned about Trevor Huddleston (1913-1998), Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), and Alan Paton (1903-1988). A few days later, Jacobson followed up in writing, providing Arendt with additional information about two of these candidates: Huddleston and Mandela. Paton was no longer considered a strong candidate. Jacobson’s letter arrived with the following supporting materials: a copy of his own book Time of Arrival (1962), a copy of Huddleston’s book Naught for Your Comfort (1956), a copy of Huddleston’s unverifiable article for The Observer in England, a one-page-long typewritten biography of Mandela, and copies of two statements that the future president of post-apartheid South Africa had made during the Treason Trial between 1956 and 1961.

One would be forgiven for surmising that, after the meeting, Arendt put forward Mandela for the Balzan Prize. He was the only Black anti-apartheid leader whom Jacobson had brought to her attention. He was the only opposition figure incarcerated by the apartheid regime. But on August 9, 1963, Arendt forwarded most of Jacobson’s materials to Jaspers in Basel with a biographical summary of her own, recommending Huddleston, the white Anglican bishop originally from England, for the prestigious award. Mandela came in second.

Remarkably, this series of events is unknown to scholars and students. Arendt is a well-studied, canonical thinker in our contemporary world. As Andrew Silow-Carroll has recently suggested, she is being quoted—rightly and wrongly—almost every day.[11] Mandela, too, is a universally recognized icon of racial justice. And yet, academics in cultural studies, history, political theory, and philosophy have overlooked their entangled connection. I will give a more detailed explanation for this gap in knowledge, but let me preface it with a general observation. 

In pursuit of disciplinary specialization, researchers devote themselves to narrowing “the horizon of expectations and rules.”[12] Consequently, border-crossing encounters between persons, ideas or things tend to fall through the cracks of disciplinary consciousness. The same, it seems to me, has happened here. Arendt’s fleeting references to “Mandela (the Negro)” (Mandela [den Neger]) in private letters elude longstanding scholarly practices and norms.[13] In the siloed constellation of many disciplines at Euro-American universities, such references are set aside as oddities unworthy of historical or theoretical consideration, not least because they do not belong to sanctioned print culture.

The aim of my three-part article is to investigate the considerable stakes in Arendt’s parallel conversations with Jacobson and Jaspers. Here are five reasons why Arendt’s decision not to nominate Mandela for the Balzan Prize with great conviction is illuminating for cultural, social or political thought:

First, Jaspers relayed everything he had received from Arendt to the Balzan Foundation. Due to ill health, though, he resigned from the committee.[14] In 1963, the Balzan Prize was also put on hold, as the Foundation underwent reorganization. Only in 1978 would the prize be awarded again, with Mother Teresa being the recipient after a fifteen-year-long hiatus.[15] Without awardees between 1965 and 1976, the world forgot about the Balzan Prize, presuming that there was nothing instructive to learn from its earliest history. During these decades of decolonization prior to the rise of international human rights in the 1970s, the Nobel Peace Prize was mostly alone on the western world’s stage in recognizing individuals and organizations devoted to humanism and peace.[16]

Second, when it comes to the Balzan Prize, the circumstances are unfavorable to scholarly examination. The announcement of winners every couple of years attracts public attention. In comparison to the Nobel Foundation, though, the Balzan Foundation is relatively unknown. The prize itself lacks an awe-inspiring tradition, although the list of recipients is stellar and the bestowal of 750,000 Swiss Francs (roughly $819,000) is life-changing.[17] Since nominations and deliberations of the selection committee are confidential, scholars are unable to study them for cultural, political or social significance.

Third, Arendt’s brief correspondence with Jacobson remains unpublished. The original typescripts are stored at the German Literature Archive (Deutsches Literaturarchiv) in Marbach. This limited accessibility explains, in part, why no one has scrutinized Arendt’s mention of Mandela. Originally, the documents were catalogued in reference to Arendt, Jacobson, and Jaspers only. There was no mention of Huddleston, Mandela or Paton in their cataloguing. After my archival work in 2021, the German Literature Archive added Mandela to the bibliographic reference for the library catalog, but Huddleston and Paton remain unmentioned.

Fourth, the original letters between Arendt and Jaspers are deposited at the German Literature Archive. She stored them there in 1974. Since then, they have been published, but both the German edition and the English translation leave out supplemental documents crucial for deciphering some of the exchanges. What I have begun to analyze is a case in point. Without access to the larger context, it is impossible for readers to make sense of the reason why Arendt does not nominate Mandela for the Balzan Prize in 1963. If readers do not know German, her concise biography of the three candidates for Jaspers and other members of the selection committee won’t be comprehensible either.

Last but not least, the German edition and the English translation of Arendt’s correspondences with Jaspers identify Pope XXIII as the recipient of the Balzan Prize in 1963. That is correct. But the editors make a mistake. They erroneously suggest that the discussion between Arendt, Jacobson, and Jaspers ends with Pope XXIII’s selection.[18] That is incorrect. In 1962, the Balzan Foundation announced the pontiff as the awardee.[19] On March 7, 1963, a few months before passing, he accepted the prize in a private ceremony at the Vatican. The following month, he issued Pacem in terris, professing “universal peace in truth, justice, charity, and liberty.” The subsequent communication between Arendt, Jacobson, and Jaspers focused on the next cycle of the Balzan Prize to be awarded in 1965, but due to the aforementioned restructuring of the foundation, this process did not come to fruition.

As these points make clear, tracking Arendt’s references to Mandela in 1963 comes with important insights. As I explain in Arendt’s Solidarity, “Her responses to complex problems are not just found in books but originate in journal articles, notes for public lectures, diary entries, and conversations with friends.”[20] Accordingly, her decision to pass over Mandela in favor of Huddleston is only decipherable when unpublished archival documents complement published writings.

In Part Two of this article, I examine Jacobson’s career at greater length, as well as Arendt’s communication with him about potential South African recipients of the Balzan Prize. Part Three draws upon the preceding investigations to explain Arendt’s arguably controversial decision not to nominate Nelson Mandela for the prestigious prize.