Robert Fine
Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution was published in 1963 shortly after her controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It offered a critical assessment both of the modern revolutionary tradition and of the mainstream view that it was no longer relevant to modern political thought. She portrayed revolution as a developmental and unfinished project, the nature of which could not be understood by those who froze it at any one point in time—be it America in 1776, France in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949, or Cuba in 1958. The key question she posed was how the modern revolutionary tradition is to be understood if it is to remain alive in our own times. Her approach was not to prescribe what revolutionary thought and action ought to be, but to understand what it is and how it evolves over time.
The structure of On Revolution is triadic. The three main sections address in turn the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and the “lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition.” At first sight, it may appear that Arendt repudiated the French Revolution for its authoritarian populism, endorsed the American Revolution for its constitutional advances, and embraced the radical democracy put forward by revolutionary communes, councils, and soviets on the margins of every revolutionary movement. On closer inspection, we see a different picture. In all cases, Arendt explored the contradictions of the revolutionary tradition, contrasted those of one stage with those of others, traced the uneven development of revolutionary consciousness, and dispelled the illusion of any final synthesis. The final chapter of the book was not a statement of Arendt’s own political views but an analysis of a particular stage of revolutionary thought. The key to re-appropriating this text today is to read it in terms of the immanent development of the revolutionary tradition itself. Arendt’s informing idea is that in the development of the modern revolutionary tradition, the more advanced forms may offer solutions to the contradictions present in the less developed forms, but they also reproduce them and call in turn for new solutions.
Arendt begins On Revolution with a discussion of the concept of revolution abstracted from its practical application in the world. In the chapter “The Meaning of Revolution,” she argues that the modern concept of revolution broke radically from the traditional definition. The latter was grounded in astronomical metaphors likening political events to the cyclical movement of the planets. It implied restoration of a preordained order disturbed by external sources, such as the despotism of kings or abuses of colonial government. In its modern form, the concept of revolution signifies the end of an old order and the birth of what she terms a “new beginning.” She held that this conception of revolution was unknown prior to the modern age and was irreducible to a generic concept like “social change.”1 The raison d’être of modern revolution is to give political form to the human capacity to begin anew, exemplified by the French revolutionary calendar in which the year of the execution of the king was designated year one. Its aim is not the replacement of one power by another but isonomia, a Greek term Arendt defines in terms of overcoming division between rulers and the ruled.2 It replaces the traditional language of the poor overthrowing the government of the rich by challenging the belief that poverty is inherent in the human condition or a brute fact of life.
Arendt maintains that “nothing comparable (with modern revolution) in grandeur and significance has ever happened in the whole recorded history of mankind,” but she spoke also of its “pathos” and “perplexity.” Its dilemma was that “the setting of a new beginning . . . seemed to demand violence . . . the repetition of the old legendary crime (Romulus slew Remus, Cain slew Abel) at the beginning of all history.”3 Modern revolution contains both a new beginning that dissolves “rule” and the violence required to make a new beginning possible. Revolutionaries appear as “agents of history,” but also as “fools of history.” It was the “sad truth” of the French Revolution that it ended in tyranny, of the American Revolution that it lost sight of its revolutionary origins, and of council democracy that it could never escape its own marginality. There are echoes here of Walter Benjamin’s observation in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that the idea that humanity could take control of its own political destiny can no longer be decoupled from an image of human beings swept backward by a revolutionary storm, faces turned toward the catastrophe of the past, propelled into an uncertain future while piles of debris grow skyward.4
Arendt begins her history with the French Revolution because 1789 represented an attempt to translate the modern idea of revolution into reality. Standing for a clean break from the absolutism of the old order, its Declarations of the Rights of Man and Citizen represented a leap forward in inclusiveness and universality. The idea was that everyone is born free and equal and that solidarity must encompass the nation as a whole. While multiple exclusions continued to operate in practice—affecting slaves, colonized peoples, Protestants, Jews, women, servants, foreigners, etc.—the normative expectations associated with the Rights of Man and Citizen pointed toward the equal freedom of all human beings. While inclusion had to be fought for by the excluded classes and their supporters, their struggles were made possible by the logic of universality put in place by the revolution. Arendt contrasted negatively Edmund Burke’s conception of the superiority of the “rights of Englishmen” over the “rights of men” with the “practical attempts” of the European Enlightenment to “include all the peoples of the earth in their conception of humanity.”5
At the same time, Arendt highlights the contradiction between the normative progress achieved by the French Revolution and its empirical disfigurements. Regarding the social question, she acknowledged that liberation from political absolutism and liberation from material poverty were equally urgent—one for “building freedom” and the other for “satisfying material needs”—and she held that “no revolution was possible . . . where the masses were loaded down with misery.”6 Nothing deprives people of “public happiness,” she wrote, more than poverty.7 The attempt to solve the social question by political means, however, proved “futile” and “dangerous” inasmuch as it identified the people with a “unanimous cry for bread” and blamed “enemies of the people” for their suffering.8 Arendt’s argument was not that revolutionaries were wrong to address the social question but that they did so wrongly through a conspiratorial blame-game.9 Arendt acknowledged that the Rousseauian principles adopted by the revolutionaries were democratic in impulse—individuals had the right to participate in person in the making of laws, and mere representation robbed them of public life—but in practice, the idea of the “general will” was used to treat the people as a single “multiheaded monster” always in the right, to subsume the rights of individuals to the general interest, and to undermine all genuine public life in favor of universal suspicion. Arendt argued that while the French Revolution actualized the spirit of universalism in the right of every human being to have rights, it also glorified the French nation and stipulated that citizens had an unconditional duty to the nation that granted their rights. The Rights of Man and Citizen were “supposed to be independent of all governments,” but they turned out wholly dependent on having a government to support them.10
Arendt turned to the American Revolution of 1776 after the French of 1789 to show how it dealt with the perplexities raised by the latter. Like the French revolutionary tradition, the American also presented itself in an illusory form, this time as a restoration of the ancient liberties British colonial forces had suppressed. It concealed actual innovation: “the framing of a constitution.”11 The American revolutionary tradition constructed a constitutional framework in which power was balanced against power, government was based on the consent of the people, and a bill of rights guaranteed rights of personality and property. The revolution no longer consisted of a moment of liberation followed by reliance on the “natural goodness of the people,” but bound itself to the ever-present possibility of constitutional amendment and augmentation. Arendt saw this as a massive step forward, but argued that the doctrine of “constitutionalism” converted the constitution into an absolute principle. Its effect was to defend the private realm against public power, but not to defend the public realm against private power. In a society marked by the colonization of the public sphere by private interests, in which the public sphere was in need of guarantees, a different kind of constitutional framework was required: one designed to guarantee public life as well as private interests. Beneath the ideals of constitutionalism, Arendt saw that the shortcomings of the actual constitution were evident in its disregard of slavery and of poverty more generally. It demonstrated the gulf that existed between the universal idea of civic and political rights and the concrete norms of social and political exclusion that were practiced. Following Marx, Arendt argued that constitutionalism could provide a more or less accurate empirical description of how law and government functioned, only to posit the idea of “right” in every institution it discovered. The equivocations of constitutionalism were exemplified by a system of representation that granted only to representatives, not to ordinary people, the opportunity to engage in activities of “expressing, discussing and deciding which in a positive sense are the activities of freedom.”12 Arendt put it thus, “What we today call democracy is a form of government where public happiness and public freedom . . . become the privilege of the few.”13
Arendt traced the origins of the third stage of her inquiry, the “lost treasure” of the revolutionary tradition, back to the sociétés révolutionaires and Communes of 1789, the Paris Commune of 1871 that Marx held up as a model of working-class democracy, the town-hall meetings Ralph Waldo Emerson dubbed “units of the Republic” and “schools of the people,” and the factory councils, rank and file movements, communes and, soviets of twentieth-century working class history. She described this movement as marginal to, but embodying the “true spirit” of, modern revolution. She maintained that it created a modern form of government that would have no convergence with the inner tendencies of totalitarianism.
Arendt acknowledged, however, that here, too, the revolutionary tradition was beset by contradiction. While its achievement was to form “spaces where freedom could be realized,” they proved in practice to be better suited to “participation in public life” than to the performance of governmental functions that require more organized structures.14 Revolutionaries could either draw these “spaces of freedom” into the governmental domain of welfare, redistribution and public works, in which case they destroyed them through their own excess, or divest them of social functions, in which case their first rule was to forbid citizens from addressing the oppressive social conditions that led them to participate in the first place. Arendt observed the emergence of a new “aristocracy” among those who are politically “the best” and who show “a taste and capacity for speaking and being heard,” while the masses are granted only the consolation of exercising the negative liberty of freedom from politics.15 Council democracy changes the way elites are selected but not elite-selection itself. In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt had already described the creation of public space as a vital component of freedom—today we may think of Tahrir Square in Cairo, Taksim Square in Istanbul, or Syntagma Square in Athens—but not as a foundation for government. She wrote that the public space “comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and forms of government.”16 Its limit, however, is that it “disappears with the arrest of the activities themselves.”17
Subsequent to the publication of On Revolution, Arendt was able to analyze the 1968 American New Left along similar lines. She celebrated its “joy in action,” its assurance of being able to “change things by one’s own efforts,” its rediscovery of what the eighteenth century called “public happiness,” and its “indignation” over the colonial practices and legacy of Western powers. But she also discerned a “theoretical sterility” and “curious despair” in its “conviction that everything deserves to be destroyed, that everyone deserves to go to hell”; in its hostility and contempt for “bourgeois rights”; and in its conception of a “Third World” that merely inverted “European-American prejudices” about “subject races.”18 Arendt re-affirmed the role played by constitutional frameworks in upholding civil, political and social rights:
What protects us in the so-called “capitalist” countries of the West is not capitalism, but a legal system that prevents the daydreams of big business management on trespassing into the private sphere of its employee from coming true. . . . Freedom is freedom whether guaranteed by the laws of a “bourgeois” government or a “communist” state. From the fact that communist governments today do not respect civil rights and do not guarantee freedom of speech and association, it does not follow that such rights and freedom are “bourgeois.”19
If we compare Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) with Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951), we find illuminating parallels. Both confronted the specter of “absolutism” in the modern world: the propensity to convert the people into populism, the nation into nationalism, the constitution into constitutionalism, the state into statism, private property into what we now call neoliberalism, public freedom into disregard for private right, and so on. Against the dominance of “isms,” Camus wrote in praise of moderation: “Moderation is not the opposite of rebellion. Rebellion in itself is moderation. . . . Moderation can only live by rebellion.”20 Arendt steered her own middle path between the temptation to idealize the revolutionary tradition despite its betrayals and to repudiate it because of its disfigurements. While Camus identified the modern revolutionary tradition as a whole with its French wing, Arendt emphasized its diversity and developmental potential. While Camus constructed a categorical opposition between “top-down revolution” and “bottom-up rebellion,” Arendt faced up to the pathos of revolution without any categorical bolt-holes. The call Arendt heard was to face up to the equivocations of the revolutionary tradition, to humanize it, and thus to preserve it.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 21.
2 Ibid., 30.
3 Ibid., 38–40.
4 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. H. Arendt and trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 253–64, 257–58.
5 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, NY : Harcourt Brace, 1979), 176.
6 Arendt, On Revolution, 222.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Barrington Moore, Moral Purity and Persecution in History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
10 Arendt, Origins, 298.
11 Arendt, On Revolution, 136–39.
12 Ibid., 235.
13 Ibid., 269.
14 Ibid., 255.
15 Ibid., 279.
16 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 199.
17 Ibid.
18 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1968), 35.
19 Ibid.
20 Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 301.