George Washington, John F. Kennedy and Hannah Arendt’s Constitutio Libertatis ~ New on the Bryan William Brickner Blog

Celebrating Presidents Day via Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, Bryan W. Brickner highlights Arendt’s work and America’s revolutionary heritage ~ and finds a (quiet) revolution by constitution. Brickner has a 1997 political science doctorate from Purdue University and is the author of The Promise Keepers (1999), Article the first of the Bill of Rights (2006), and The Book of the Is (2013).

In “George Washington, John F. Kennedy and Hannah Arendt’s Constitutio Libertatis,” new on the Bryan William Brickner Blog, Arendt’s theory that the American Revolution was a success and the French Revolution a failure, is honored this Presidents Day.

“Arendt was trained in Europe before World War II,” noted Brickner, “and she worked with the likes of Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. She fled Germany to France in 1933 – she was Jewish. When the Nazis took over France in 1939, she was labeled an enemy alien and detained; she soon after escaped, making her way to the US and New York City in 1941. She became an American in 1950.”

“She knew politics,” continued Brickner, “and wrote about it.”

Arendt authored several political theory books, to include: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil (1963); On Revolution (1963); and On Violence (1970). Arendt also wrote about President John F. Kennedy’s death for the December 1963 issue of the New York Review of Books, The Fate of the Union: Kennedy and After.

“Arendt also knew evil,” closed Brickner, “and she argued for constitutionalism as its counter: time has shown her to be correct.”

The Bryan William Brickner Blog is a collection of published works and press coverage and an ongoing resource for the political science of constitutions and the biological science of cannabinoids.