En su prontuario-notas del curso "From Maquiavelli to Marx", de 1965 en la Universidad de Cornell, encontramos dos invaluables precisiones de Hannah Arendt para sus estudiantes... (y para nosotros). Las comparto aquí:
From Machiavelli to Marx-Fall 1965
(Cornell)
1st session
(...)
5. “You’ll read the authors and the
commentators and the historians. The authors are those who are concerned with
the same things we are concerned in our daily lives and we read them only to
the extent that they had things to say which rightly survived their own time.
With the commentators you leave the world in
which we live and you enter the world of books – to be sure also very
important. The object of a commentator is a book, the object of an author is
the world. Finally, you’ll read the historians, and they will tell you the
story.”
6. Machiavelli distinguished three types of
people –those who understand things unaided, those who need and know how to use
help, and those who don’t understand even when helped. We hope to belong to the
2nd category”.
(Énfasis mío).