Between Past and Future

Between Past and Future is book written by the German-born Jewish American political theorist, Hannah Arendt. It was published for the first time in 1961 by The Viking Press in the United States and by Faber and Faber in Great Britain. The first edition consisted of six essays, and two more were added to a 1968 revision. The book is a collection of various essays written between 1954 and 1968. The final version of the book includes essays dealing with different philosophical subjects including freedom, education, authority, tradition, history and politics. The subtitle of the final version is Eight exercises in political thought.

All of the essays share a central idea. Humans are living between the past and the uncertain future. They must permanently think to exist, and each man is required to learn thinking. For a long time humans have resorted to tradition, but in modern times, this tradition has been abandoned, there is no more respect for tradition and culture. With her essays, Hannah Arendt tries to find solutions to help humans think again today. According to her, there is no way to live again with tradition, and modern philosophy has not succeeded in helping humans to live correctly.

The title of the preface is The Gap between Past and Future. The first sentence of the preface is a citation of French poet and résistant René Char: "Notre héritage n'est précédé d'aucun testament," translated by Arendt herself as "our inheritance was left to us by no testament." For Arendt, this sentence perfectly illustrates the situation in which European peoples are left after the Second World War. It also illustrates the crisis in culture–the main subject of the sixth essay. Indeed, the absence of testament means the current breaking-off with tradition.

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