In Part One of this essay, I introduced the Balzan Prize for Humanity, Peace and Fraternity among Peoples, along with Hannah Arendt’s involvement in the potential selection of the 1963 prize winner. I highlighted that her correspondence with Dan Jacobson and Karl Jaspers regarding potential nominees represented an overlooked, yet critical component of cultural, political, and philosophical inquiries. In this part, I focus on her correspondence with Jacobson. How did that dialogue inform her decision not to recommend Nelson Mandela as a worthy recipient of the Balzan Prize?

When Arendt found out in early 1963 that Jaspers was generating a short list of nominees, she deliberately turned her attention away from her adopted homeland. There were several reasons for this move. First, her attention was drawn to South Africa. In the wake of the Sharpeville massacre, the anti-apartheid movement had caught global attention, even garnering international support. In Arendt’s calculation, the jury would pay attention to nominations that endorsed this liberation struggle. Awarding the prize to an anti-apartheid activist would be a timely acknowledgement of this country’s much needed peace. Second, she was growing critical of the civil rights movement in the United States because its focus on racial equality blurred boundaries between the private, the social, and the public. As she outlined in The Human Condition, inequality was natural and necessary under certain conditions. In the private sphere, parents had authority over children. In the social realm, some were more gifted or wealthier than others. In spite of these inevitable rules, Black Power sought equality in the sense of sameness through desegregation.[1] Third, Arendt was hoping that President Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general, would succeed in passing the Civil Rights Act. Thus, Blacks and whites could find peaceful ways of living together in the United States.[2] But unlike Jaspers, she ruled the Kennedys out as viable candidates for the Balzan Prize; for they were in power. They held public offices. As she wrote to Jaspers on July 20, 1963, awarding them the prize could be misperceived as a foreign attempt to interfere “in American politics.”[3] And that could backfire. From her perspective, politics proper had to be local or national. It needed to be free of foreign meddling.

Given these considerations, seeking Jacobson’s input seemed like an erudite thing to do. Born in Johannesburg to Jewish Latvian and Lithuanian immigrants, he had a keen awareness of apartheid’s injustice. He lived through the Union of South Africa and, later, through its reinvention as a republic. After college, he worked in Israel and England before returning to South Africa. In 1954, Jacobson permanently moved to London to pursue a career in writing. His first literary breakthrough came in the United States, with illustrious magazines such as Commentary, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New Yorker publishing his short stories about life in South Africa. By the 1960s, he had also authored several novels. Examples included The Trap (1955), A Dance in the Sun (1956), The Price of Diamonds (1957), and The Beginners (1966). They depicted complicated racial histories of his native country, as well as reflections on these violent developments. In 1963, Time of Arrival received the esteemed Somerset Maugham Award from the British Society of Authors. Proud of this recognition, he sent Arendt a copy of his latest work.[4]

Jacobson on South Africa and the United States

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With Time of Arrival, Jacobson sought self-understanding as “an ex-South African” and “a Jew” in England. Based on his international experiences, he believed that he could see “the problem of colour” in multiple ways. As a South African Jew, he had witnessed Afrikaners discriminating against Africans. In Afrikaner society, he had experienced antisemitism himself. But since he was neither an Afrikaner nor an African, he claimed that he understood racial prejudice, patriotic nationalism, and xenophobic fear “both from within and without.”[5] While residing temporarily in the United States, he came to understand the difference between South Africa’s apartheid regime and America’s anti-Black racism as well.

Arendt’s copy of the book at Bard College does not contain any marginalia. Still, two chapters must have caught her attention: “South Africa” and “James Baldwin and the American Negro.” In the first essay, Jacobson described South Africa as a “self-divided” country consisting of “the English-speaking whites, the Afrikaans-speaking whites, the black-skinned peoples.” To him, one of these groups—the Afrikaners—seemed the “most lost.” They were incapable of acknowledging the past, accepting the present or having a vision for the future. Resentment about their situation hampered any effort to secure a more promising place in the racially divided country. By contrast, white South Africans of English or Jewish descent lived mostly in cities and enjoyed material wealth. Although this minority no longer had “political power” due to the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which had granted legislative sovereignty to South Africa, it owned “most of the wealth.” In comparison, Afrikaners yielded political power, but they were poor. This incongruity, according to Jacobson, explained why the Boers segregated themselves from British and Jewish South Africans, not to mention Black Africans. They defended racial purity and white civilization, trying to claim South Africa for themselves only. In reality, they had “always shared South Africa with the Africans.” Apartheid was their racist answer to this inevitable sharing: separate communities within one and the same country. Afrikaners treated Blacks as “‘visitors’” in “‘white’ areas” without “political rights whatsoever.” Due to pass laws, separate facilities, and development projects, different ethnic communities lived separately in “white South Africa.”[6]

Jacobson did not know Arendt personally when he wrote this essay in 1961. But he mentioned her explicitly to remind readers that the South African government—the National Party (Nasionale Party)—made use of totalitarian strategies, including communication technologies, rallies, youth movements, and secret dealings—to spread “the Big Lie”: “Students of totalitarianism, like Hannah Arendt or George Orwell, have told us that in order to make effective use of the great delusion, one needs a press, a radio, mass rallies, youth movements, secret hierarchies of power within the Party itself; and all these the Afrikaner Nationalist movement has.” Even fact-based information could not dissuade its blind, delusional supporters. They were willing to “sacrifice their goods and their lives” for it.[7] Later, in his letter to Arendt, Jacobson directed her attention to this reference. Without prior personal contact, he had not dared to contact her. But now that they knew each other, he felt comfortable sharing his latest book with her.

The second essay that must have struck Arendt made up the final chapter of the book. It was titled “James Baldwin and the American Negro” and it was a review of Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name (1961). Jacobson’s assessment was that this collection of essays was not as “complex,” “forceful” or “inward” as Notes of a Native Son (1955). Both works described the trepidations and braveries of African Americans in white America. Baldwin illustrated in poignant terms how he, an African American writer, refused to be defined by others. Ultimately, though, he did not seem to be able to escape from the pressures of “the external world” or from “public issues.” He seemed caught up “in the middle of the American market-place,” the desegregated “school,” “the restaurant,” and “the United Nations building,” where his “patriotism” and love for “fellow-Negroes” and “fellow-Americans” were renegotiated. From Jacobson’s perspective, there was another weakness in Baldwin’s writing: it suffered from an overly moralistic impulse. His essays foregrounded “the voice of his will rather than the voice of his sensibility” with “too many examples of rhetoric, of exhortation, of uplift, of reproach.”[8] Baldwin should have explored a shared political foundation upon which white Americans could listen more carefully to the plight of African Americans.

Along with this critique, Jacobson drew attention to two lessons from Baldwin’s book. First, there was no doubt that Blacks were suffering in the American South, but “the Northern Negro,” too, encountered daily racism. What tormented them were poverty in the ghettoes, drug addiction, unemployment, and political powerlessness. Anti-Black racism existed above the Mason-Dixon Line as well. On this point, Arendt was in agreement with Baldwin and Jacobson. Second, Jacobson appreciated that Baldwin exposed the hypocrisy of a country professing individual liberty, national unity, and equal justice, all the while segregating colored peoples. Given this contradiction, Jacobson wondered whether the United States was any less oppressive than the open racism in South Africa. Baldwin happened to refer to South Africa “as the worst place of all” for Blacks, a place where racism was rampant, but Jacobson presented an alternative and identified another “greatest difference.”[9]

In Jacobson’s view, Black South Africans were “the most cheerful people” because they made up “the majority within South Africa itself, and overwhelmingly so within the entire continent.” They were convinced that the arc of justice would eventually bend in their favor. Taking control of the country was only a matter of time. In contrast, Black Americans lacked optimism because they constituted a minority. Based on this quantitative difference, Jacobson argued that Baldwin’s most obvious failure was related to “power,” which he considered an “ugly word.” For Baldwin, the African American condition was one of immutable “powerlessness.” They had no prospect of economic prosperity or political freedom. In his narratives, much of the blame fell upon whites who refused to take meaningful action in realization of constitutional promises. Baldwin also explored the moral claim of African Americans who were no longer content with the status quo. They were committed to changing their fate across the country. But what should be done collectively? What would happen if Black Americans were not granted equal political rights and economic opportunities? What if America did not accept the end of white supremacy? To exemplify how Baldwin had nothing to say in response to these urgent questions, Jacobson distilled his criticism into the following question:

What I am asking for, I suppose, is that Mr. Baldwin should tell us what he imagines those ‘extreme and unlucky repercussions’ might be, within himself and among American Negroes—leaving aside, for the moment, what they may be among the coloured nations of the world.

The lack of clarification in this regard was the reason why, according to Jacobson, Baldwin did not go beyond “making moral appeals” or “issuing warnings.” Such arguments were justified to a certain extent. They asked readers to be compassionate with Black Americans in pain. But they failed to point to a concrete future. Consequently, readers did not feel obligated to heed Baldwin’s words. Dependent on voluntary reaction, he fell short of outlining what needed to be done next.

With this incisive intervention, Jacobson underscored the need to clarify politically why the Black freedom struggle in America mattered to white Americans and “whites all over the world.”[10] He explained why it was important for self-professed “liberals” to take a careful look at their commitment to changing “the operations of brute power in human affairs.” He stated that, for obvious reasons, the burden of antiracism did not rest on the shoulders of Black citizens alone. It needed to be shared with whites who were willing to interrogate their own “pity and anxiety, guilt and automatic benevolence towards people with black skins.” The problem with Baldwin’s abandonment of political solutions in favor of ethical or moral appeals was that accusations of racist “mythologies and demonologies,” though accurate and perceptive, did not have transformative effects on white liberal readers. Jacobson used himself as an example: “Yet it would be less than honest if I weren’t to admit that I found myself offering these agreements, almost invariably, on behalf of others, not on my own behalf.” He thought that his own reaction was not simply a matter of “liberal complacency and self-righteousness,” but an indication of the urgency with which the unequal power dynamic needed to change between Blacks and whites. Since the major issue for African Americans was their “lack of political and economic power,” it was crucial to redress the powerlessness of Black America beyond moralistic analyses of racist “fantasies and rationalizations.”[11]

Contrary to Baldwin, Jacobson believed that it was not “impossible for a white man to have any conception of the inwardness of Negro experience.” Since some “black politicians and intellectuals” had managed to claim “direct power for themselves,” a binary opposition between Blacks and whites was not some sort of unamendable law. Depending on the individuals in interaction, there was hope for “brute power” to be rebalanced. With this shift in focus, Jacobson called for a more precise investigation of power. What was needed was a clearer understanding than what Baldwin offered of “alternative powers of principle, persuasion and example” in the United States.[12] Jacobson wanted to understand how the welfare and security of white Americans depended on those of Black Americans.

The third and final part of this essay discusses Arendt’s thought process, as she reflects on Jacobson’s work and their correspondence and decides to recommend Trevor Huddleston, not Nelson Mandela, as recipient of the Balzan Prize.