Das römische Gesprächin a New Key: Hannah Arendt, Genocide, and the Defense of Republican Civilization

Abstract

contended that all of them were run by rootless adventurers who "exterminated or reduced to servitude all the peoples of Palestine" (in the Roman case) or "massacred or enslaved coloured peoples" (in the Spanish and British cases).15 This long-term recuperation of the distant European past for present purposes was identified in 1946 by fellow German (though non-Jewish) émigré Eric Voegelin as a manifestation of das römische Gespräch-which he translated as "the Roman debate"-that he said had been underway in the West since the eighteenth century.Das römische Gespräch is perhaps better rendered as "the Roman discussion," connoting a political language or discourse.Its origins, wrote Voegelin, lay in the western European states' rupture with Christianity and Roman traditions, which, ironically, compelled commentators to assess the new states' fate against the cautionary example of Rome's demise: henceforth, "the Roman debate becomes one of the most important instruments for this critique of the age, with the implication that in the decline of Rome we find the forces at work which also determine the decline of the West."Spengler and Toynbee, declared Voegelin, stood in a tradition of pessimistic reflection stretching back to "Vico and Montesquieu, Ferguson and Gibbon, Niebuhr and Mommsen, Edward Meyer and Rostoftzeff."16 To this list one might add an impressive cast of nineteenth-century British thinkers who agonized over the question of whether Greece or Rome was their empire's appropriate ancestor and model.17 That das römische Gespräch is by no means an arcane discussion confined to the academy is indicated, as we have noted, by the contemporary debate about American empire, in which Leo Strauss and his followers have been accused of virtually urging the adoption of "fascist, authoritarian, and imperial principles" at the expense of the republic's liberties.18 Non-Americans also participate in the debate when they depict the United States either as a rapacious oppressor of smaller peoples, in the manner of Weil, or, like Talmon, as a beacon of tolerance and law that benevolently bestows cosmopolitan civilization on ethnocentric smaller nations.Whatever the view, the compulsion to analogize with Rome-das römische Gespräch-continues as never before.This is a context in which Hannah Arendt's work can be profitably studied.Hailed once again as a thinker for our "dark times" in offering guidance on all manner of pressing issues, her star shines in the firmament.19 While she has long been regarded as a champion of Greek thought who advocated the polis as the antidote to modernity's corrosions-a reading based foremost on her book The Human Condition-Arendt's broader oeuvre also reveals a preoccupation with the republican lineage that crystallized in ancient Rome.20 She was familiar with Roman sources not only from her grammar school education and dissertation on Augustine (1929)-"an extraordinary tradition of Roman thought still lived on in him," she wrote later-but also because the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century authors she read were steeped in the tradition.21 Thus, in addition to routinely

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