welcome my name is Roger Berkowitz and I'm the founder an academic director of the Haaretz Center at Bard College welcome to the virtual reading group today we are reading continuing our reading of Hannah Arendt's book on revolution we are nearing the end were in Chapter five of six and as we discussed last time chapter five is part of two chapters chapters four and five that are both called by the title foundation chapter four is foundation one and chapter two is chapter five is foundation two and chapter five carries the subtitle Novus Ordo seclorum this is a Latin phrase that is taken yet changed from the fourth eclogue of Virgil lines five to eight and the line of Virgil is Magnus odd integral secular 'm na c tour or doe or the great cycle of the ages is born again born a fresh with a new order the the Novus Ordo seclorum which is the phrase that's on our dollar bills what that means is a new order of the ages and it was to reflect the newness of America but Arendt is here with this subtitle Novus Ordo seclorum is is trying to do something else is trying to show us and argue for us that America was not just a new thing a new political entity a new city on the hill that it was in important ways a rebirth and that the tie-in to Virgil is deeply important in this regard the last part of this chapter the last five or six pages is very much about Virgil's play the amid our I'm sorry poem the Aeneid which is a tale of or tells the tale of the birth of a Rome through Aeneas but in such a way that it is not just a birth that's new but is a rebirth of Troy and thus carries a continuity and is a way of a combination of Troy and the people who are living in the area of Rome at this time and so the idea of the great cycle or integration Magnus up integral the integration of a new age a new order into an already existing cycle of ages is what RN sees as the topic of Virgil's poem and what she's here arguing about the United States is that the way the United States established itself was not to simply imagine it as something new but as the rebirth of an ancient order in this in this regard not as the rebirth of Troy but as the rebirth of the Roman Republic and in doing that it borrowed some of the authority of the Roman Republic for the American the new American Republic but more importantly it explicitly in Ourense view borrowed the idea and the way in which the old Roman Republic imagined it as have imagined its authority and thus was an attempt to create authority in a in which authority is largely absent if you read her wonderful essay what is Authority in between past and future which begins with the line we should actually say not what is authority but once what was authority because authority has lost has been lost um you'll get a sense of the way these two essays this chapter chapter five and the essay what is Authority need to be read in in conjunction with one another because the argument here is that even though Authority has been lost in the modern age the United States was the one successful founding not only of a republic and not only of power as we talked about in Chapter four but of authority and and and so it's important to remember that at the end of chapter four Arendt makes this distinction between power and authority and and she says that um America was the rebirth of the Roman idea of the power in the people the protest us in popular and that this was natural in many ways to America because of the townships and this spirit of self-government this which he following Tocqueville calls the spirit of freedom which came out of the townships and out of the local governments that is she found so deep and abiding and and powerful in in the United States but what she says is that it wasn't just the rebirth of power and Ruhlman ideas of power it was also the rebirth of the roman idea of authority and whereas power was in the people on authority was in the Senate and so you have this famous phrase Sonata spoken do way roll Manos as PQR which means that the Roman Senate and the people combined together to form the Roman Republic and it's in the Senate she argues that we have Authority and in the people that we have power and so for Arendt the the chief problem of the American Revolution and this is a quote from page 171 the chief problem of the American Revolution turned out to be the establishment and foundation not of power but of authority and so this is what chapter 5 is in a sense power was easy because in America power was was almost natural in its in the forms that the townships took but Authority how do you create a thority and and and that requires us to ask what is authority to a certain extent and for her authority is is is when one obeys or follows something um not because of reason or power or violence but simply because it's right or it seems to have that kind of Magisterial reverential authority that one follows and outside of religion and and customs you know how do you create a thority in an age of the Enlightenment where people have their own ask always why what is what is at stake why should I follow this why should I obey the law why should I grant these people the authority to govern me on the text in English is broken into two parts on interesting enough in the German Edition which aren't herself translated and oversaw this chapter is divided into three sections the third section is just an extra section it that the text is the same but it starts on on page 190 in your text and and a line-break so I'll point it out when we get there um part one is is largely background and historical she says that the problem is to find a form of government which puts the law above men how do we um and why do we need to do that well because if we are constantly through our power making laws the laws can always be changed they could always be serving human interests and there'll be no stability in the world how do we create a constitutional authority that gives rise not only to power but also to a series of laws that will be in some sense lasting and that we make them today and tomorrow people say we should have made those laws not well those were made by our ancestors let's make new ones we need to be able to change them but we also need to have some sense that we're in a continuous cycle and the what she says is what the revolutions taught us the French Revolution and the American Revolution together is that there's always a need for an absolute you need a kind of God to give you these laws otherwise the laws seem like arbitrary exercises of power by people from the past or people from another country uh and why should we obey them and in France they found this absolute in the people um and this was as we talked about in the last session dangerous insofar as that the people was unitary and sovereign and thus tyrannical and what she's trying to argue here is that in America there was a different discovery of the absolute and she goes through a series of of historical contrasts so that robes Pierre says you need a an immortal legislature someone who Stan outside and above to make the laws so that the laws are not just the laws of another people but I have an immortal divine sanction John Adams said we need a Supreme Being or a great legislature of the universe and Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence says that they are the laws of nature and of nature's God Aaron thinks that it was an error to think that throughout history authority was always and only given by divine sanction and so on page 178 she said that it was John Adams error too to think that the ancients the Greeks and the Romans had derived the authority of law from divine authority and she says on page 178 for the point of the matter is that Adams was an error and that neither the Greek Nomos nor the Roman Lex was of divine origin the Greek lawgiver she says was pre political and outside the polis but it wasn't above the polis was a stranger who came in and and gave laws but it wasn't a divine entity and the Roman law was a bond alexxa joint something which use means a joint or a connection it was a system of alliances rather than a system of sovereignty and this fits for Montesquieu as well from whom and we've talked about this law was a rapport of bridges and connections that held things together and so she says there's a long tradition of law that is not seen as imposed from above but as a kind of series of connections and bonds and and and and things that hold us together and that the law the idea of law that this comes from above is she thinks of a judeo-christian law a divine law but is not the only one we could imagine okay that's that's part one of this chapter in part 2 which is really the extraordinary argumentative center of this chapter um she makes a number of points she says that America has escaped the absolute authority of the nation-state and but but and it has done so as she talked about in Chapter four with this multiplication of powers through federalism but you still need a thority because even with all these multiple powers how are we ever going to have any kind of stability in the country and so we need a foundation we need an absolute and yet it has to be an absolute that's not divine because we're a enlightenment country and so she wants to look for that absolute in an act of founding and that's the question of this chapter and it's the really and and the argument of the chapter is that the Americans really are the only successful modern attempt of revolutionary founding where the act of founding in some way leads to a veneration of the founding and this veneration venerable act authorizes a new Authority and gives the political union a patina of perpetuity and justice in a sense it immortalizes the Union as deserving of being revered and celebrated and that's uh that's an extraordinary act to happen and she says that the Americans were successful in this part by accident and part by good study and thought and the study part was that they studied Rome and they were inspired by Rome and the lock part for the good fortune part is that somehow they hit on this idea of a written constitution that would be the seat of authority and it worked um why it worked she's not sure uh-huh and I don't think there's an answer for it but but she says the number of things on pages 192 193 so take a look on 190 she writes many historians especially in the 20th century I found it rather disconcerting that the Constitution which in the words of John Quincy Adams quote had been extorted from the grinding necessity of a reluctant nation and quote should have become overnight the object of quote and undiscriminating and almost blind worship as Woodrow Wilson once put it so it's a fact she says however it happened that the Constitution became an object of undiscriminating and blind worship on 192 91 she says quote the simple fact that the revolution here succeeded where all others were to fail namely in founding a new body politic stable enough to survive the onslaught of centuries to come one is tempted to think was decided the very moment when the Constitution began to be worshipped even though it had barely begun to operate and this is really the key move in the chapter is to say this Constitution became worshipped and as an object of worship it was a absolute but not a divine absolute one that had a collective buy-in to it how did that happen right again partly good fortune but also partly some thought and the first step of that is that the institutional locus of the constitutional Constitution's Authority was the Supreme Court and so she writes on 192 institutionally it is lack of power combined with permanence of office which signals that the true seat of authority in the American Republic is the Supreme Court and this authority is exerted in a kind of continuous Constitution making for the Supreme Court is indeed in Woodrow Wilson's phrase a kind of constitutional assembly in continuous session and so this is um very much central a constitutional assembly in continuous secession there is an institutional space the Supreme Court which is not just about interpreting the Constitution but it's a powerless body as no well certainly no violence that it can exert but it has no power to change anything except the fact that it can sit and argue and make decisions and it's this powerless body that in in in in certain ways is the seat of authority and we need to understand why that is and we do so or she does so through the analogy of the Supreme Court to the Roman Senate so she writes on pages 192 to 193 while the American institutional differentiation between power and authority bares distinctly Roman traits its own concept of Authority is clearly entirely different in Rome the function of authority was political and it consisted in giving advice while in this American Republic the function of authority is legal and it kisses in interpretation so just so we understand what we're saying here is in Rome power was the people but authority was in the Senate and what the Senate could do was advise consent and at times veto rules made by the people but it was not in itself a power full body it was more an advisory body similarly in America the seat of authority is not in what the American Senate which is also a powerful body along with the House of Representatives and part of the Congress but power is moved from the legislature to the judiciary and so she continues the Supreme Court derives its own authority from the Constitution as a written document while the Roman Senate the pot race or fathers of the Roman Republic held their authority because they represented or rather reincarnated the ancestors whose only claim to Authority in the body politic was precisely that they had founded it that they were the founding fathers through the Roman senators the founders of the city of Rome were present let me read that again just make sure you are catching this through the Roman senators the founders of the city of Rome were present and with them the spirit of foundation was present the beginning the Principia mand principle of those arrests yesterday which from then on form the history of the people of Rome there's an incredible and I mean that in many ways incredible argument going on here that I think has been not fully understood by most people who talk about this book the argument is that in Rome the authority that the Senators held was that they were the nobility and that they traced their ancestry back all the way to the founders of Rome and that they in a sense as she said represented or rather reincarnated the ancestors whose only claim to Authority was that they had founded the body politic this speaking of reincarnation is an extraordinary thing to see in a book of political thinking by Hana Aaron but what she's arguing is that the theory of representation the idea of representation that the Romans employed was not simply one of voting or lots which are two of the main ways and that we think of representation happening but through the nobility and through descent imagining that the people who are now the the heirs of the founders are actually reincarnation of them and in some way speak for them combining both the original founding moment the principle of foundation of the founding fathers with the modern need to govern today and it's this bringing together of these two different sides the need for permanence and the need for change the need for a founding moment and the need for augmentation that is the great challenge of authority and that the Romans solved from this idea of reincarnation and I think what Arendt is saying I'm fairly confident is that the American Supreme Court in its being a constitutional assembly in constant meeting with their big robes and fancy things is not simply a bunch of nine justices to interpret the Constitution but is like a reincarnation of the founding moment and when then they speak and they interpret the Constitution there again merging the founding moment with the present moment that there's a kind of the principle of beginning is brought forward into the present and the present is returned back always inspired by that principle of beginning and so which he then goes on to gloss this to say is that on 193 she writes for Arcturian toss authority whose etymological root is Al Gore a to augment and increase depended upon the vitality of the spirit of foundation by virtue of which it was possible to augment to increase and enlarge the foundation the foundations as they had been laid down by the ancestors Authority augur a to augment and increase means that the vital principle of the beginning has to be there and it can be enlarged and increased but you have to always have the ancestors present and that the Constitution when it became worshipped became in a sense the ancestors and the Supreme Court is this weird body of representative reincarnated ancestors who augment and increased that moment but are always inspired by that moment um she writes on 193 again the very coincidence of authority tradition and religion all three simultaneously springing from the act of foundation was the backbone of Roman history from beginning to end the coincidence of Authority Algar a augmentation but back and tradition which is the carrying over trod did Co and religion the bonding really get real agarre there rebonding to the to the beginning all of these are part of the act of foundation that when you found something you create authority through tradition and religion and thus she continues on 193 by virtue of Akhtar a tardis permanence and change were tied together in this augmenting we have change and permanence and we tie him together and that's the magic and she writes on one 93 to 94 because Authority meant augmentation of foundations Cato could say that the constitutes constitutes your a république a was the work of no single man and of no single time by virtue of Victoria's permanence and change were tied together whereby for better and worse throughout Roman history change could only mean increase an enlargement of the old and that's the secret sauce of authority that change was never changed it was not a new order of the ages right despite what's on our currency but it was an integration of the ages with a fresh with a new order and that's the change she really wants to make on 194 I'm just gonna end with one or two last observations she writes the last point namely that foundation augmentation and conservation take me seriously foundation Authority augmentation and conservation all go together are intimately related might well have been the most important single notion which the man of the revolution adopted not by conscious reflection but by virtue of being nourished by the classics and having gone to school enrollment antiquity the very concept of Roman Authority suggests that the act of foundation inevitably develops its own stability and permanence and authority in this context is nothing more or less than a kind necessary augmentation by virtue of which all innovations and changes remain tied back to the foundation which at the same time they augment and increase thus amendments to the Constitution augment and increase the original foundations of the American Republic needless to say the very authority of the American Constitution resides in its inherent capacity to be amended and augmented this is I think clearly her argument that the American Constitution follows the Roman model of authority and that the active foundation are created a constitution written Constitution which was to be constantly augmented by amendment and interpretation in a way that the spirit of the foundation would stay alive and the changes would be tied back through this magical reincarnation such that the changes were still seen as acts of the founding fathers and so she can say in addition that as long as the American Constitution continues to be worshiped she thinks that it is highly likely that authority in America will in some sense remain whereas throughout most of the world Authority has been diminished so that's the argument about the foundation to the source of American thought authority in a Novus Ordo seclorum actually you know modulus of integral secular 'm nacet or or doe I leave you with that I look forward to discussing the text with you thank you very much enjoy reading ha all right