Arendt’s most detailed discussion of a paradigmatic example of politics is the American Revolution. In On Revolution she analyzes the modern meaning of revolution and draws a sharp contrast between the American and the French Revolutions. Revolution in the modern sense is not to be confused or identified with rebellion. There has been a long history of rebellions that aim at liberation from tyrants and oppressors. But the modern idea of revolution that emerges in the eighteenth century involves both liberation and freedom – and by freedom Arendt means the public tangible freedom elaborated in her conception of politics. The end of rebellion is liberation, but the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom. Although both the American and the French Revolutions started in this way, Arendt argues that the French Revolution was overwhelmed by the “social question” – the misery of mass poverty that eventually led to violence and the Terror. There was certainly poverty and slavery in the American colonies, but it was obscured and hidden; it wasn’t comparable to the extreme situation in France. Unlike the French, who had suffered under absolute monarchy and had no real experience of the practices of self-government, the American colonies had experienced a long tradition of self-government, going back to the Mayflower Compact.
Originally, the American colonists, in their opposition to British rule, wanted to restore their rights as Englishmen; they were not revolutionaries. “[T]he acts and deeds that liberation demanded from them threw them into public business, where, intentionally or more often unexpectedly, they began to constitute that space of appearances where freedom can unfold its charms and become a visible, tangible reality” (Arendt 1965b: 26). The war of liberation from the British is not what constitutes the heart of the revolution. Rather, the Founding Fathers gained awareness that they were in the process of creating something new, founding a new body politic, a new republic that had never existed before. This revolutionary spirit was expressed in the fever of constitution-making that emerged almost as soon as the colonies declared their independence: “For in America the armed uprising of the colonies and the Declaration of Independence had been followed by the spontaneous outbreak of constitution-making – as though, in John Adams’s words, ‘thirteen clocks had struck as one’ – so that there existed no gap, no hiatus, hardly a breathing spell between the war of liberation, the fight for independence which was the condition for freedom, and the constitution of the new states” (Arendt 1965b: 139–40).
Unlike many historians who identify the American Revolution with the war of liberation, Arendt emphasizes that the truly revolutionary element is to be identified with constitution-making. “Constitution” is an equivocal term. It can mean the act of constituting or the laws of government that are constituted. The process and the result are both important, but Arendt emphasizes the act of constituting. This is where debate, deliberation, contesting, and sharing of opinions takes place; this is where public freedom is manifested. She endorses Thomas Paine’s definition, which sums up the American experience of constitution-making: “A constitution is not the act of government but of a people constituting a government” (Arendt 1965b: 143). Public freedom made its appearance when the colonies wrote their own state constitutions and again when the federal Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia. The draft of the Constitution required ratification by at least nine colonies. In specially convened state assemblies, the merits and defects of the new Constitution were debated vigorously. No question preoccupied the drafters of the Constitution more than the separation of powers and the balance of power between the states and the federal government. The true objective of the American Constitution was not to limit power but to create new power – not power over, but empowerment of a federal government. This, of course, was combined with the Bill of Rights, which was designed to limit the abuse of power by the new government. The American Constitution finally consolidated the power of the Revolution. The combination of limited government, separation of powers, balancing power between the states and an empowered federal government, was the unique achievement of the American Revolution.
This brief sketch of the American Revolution exemplifies what Arendt takes to be distinctive about the dignity of politics. The Founders were acting in concert to create a new polity, a new republic. They were empowering a new form of government. Although there was a long tradition of local self-government, the Founders created new public spaces in which they could appear and argue with each other. They viewed this not as a burden but as a joy in experiencing their public freedom, what they called “public happiness.” The Founders had many sharp and bitter differences, but they nevertheless treated each other as political equals. They were engaged in vigorous argument and persuasion. When necessary, they compromised. Violence was, of course, involved in the war of liberation, but violence plays no role in the revolutionary achievement of creating a new republic. The American Revolution is one of the privileged moments in history when the meaning and dignity of politics is concretely manifested.
Arendt celebrates the American Revolution and speaks of its “success,” but she is extremely critical of what happened after the ratification of the Constitution. There was a failure to remember and to understand conceptually what was distinctive about the revolutionary spirit. There was also a failure to provide it with a lasting political institution. No space was reserved for the exercise of the very qualities that had led to the founding of the republic. There was a deep perplexity that seemed unresolvable. “This perplexity, namely, that the principle of public freedom and public happiness without which no revolution would ever have come to pass should remain the privilege of the generation of founders” (Arendt 1965b: 235). The problem was how to create stable and enduring political institutions such that the public freedom and public happiness that were so cherished by the revolutionary Founders could continue to flourish. Thomas Jefferson was the person who most acutely recognized and struggled with this issue. He felt that even though the Revolution had given freedom to the people, it had nevertheless failed to create political institutions where this freedom could continue to be exercised by succeeding generations. “Only the representatives of the people, not the people themselves, had an opportunity to engage in those activities of ‘expressing, discussing, and deciding’ which in a positive sense are the activities of freedom” (Arendt 1965b: 238).
Late in his career, Jefferson proposed a system of local wards or “elementary republics” in which the people themselves, not just their representatives, could express their public freedom. This was not a complete novelty in America; it had been practiced in town meetings in which local citizens directly participated in their self-government. Jefferson’s great fear was that without such active “elementary republics” the spirit of public freedom would wither away.
Jefferson himself knew well enough that what he proposed as the “salvation of the republic” actually was the salvation of the revolutionary spirit through the republic. His expositions of the ward system always began with a reminder of how “the vigor given to our revolution in its commencement” was due to the “little republics,” how they had “thrown the whole nation into energetic action,” and how, at a later occasion, he had felt “the foundations of the government shaken under [his] feet by the New England townships,” “the energy of this organization” being so great that “there was not an individual in their States whose body was not thrown with all its momentum into action.” Hence, he expected the wards to permit the citizens to continue to do what they had been able to do during the years of revolution, namely, to act on their own and thus to participate in public business as it was being transacted from day to day. (Arendt 1965b: 254)
In citing Jefferson, Arendt is speaking in her own voice – not just about the American Revolution, but about the spontaneous outbreak of the revolutionary spirit ever since the eighteenth century. These revolutions created “islands of freedom” (Arendt 1977: 6). In each instance there was a spontaneous creation of councils by the people themselves. She cites the examples of the French societés revolutionnaires, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian soviets created in 1905 and again in 1917, and the Räte that emerged in the Spartacus uprising in Germany as manifestations of the revolutionary spirit. Each time these councils appeared, they sprang up as the spontaneous organs of the people, and they were also quickly destroyed – frequently by “professional revolutionaries.” She felt that this rare creation of an “island of freedom” sprang up once again in the French résistance. Suddenly, once again “without premonition and probably against their conscious intentions,” the participants in the résistance constituted “willy-nilly a public realm where – without the paraphernalia of officialdom and hidden from the eyes of friend and foe – all relevant business in the affairs of the country was transacted in deed and word” (Arendt 1977: 3). One of Arendt’s favorite French poets and writers was René Char, who particpated in the the French résistance. She frequently cited his aphorism “Notre héritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament” (our inheritance was left to us by no testament). Arendt interpreted this as referring to “the lost treasure” of the tangible freedom that the participants of the résistance had experienced.
Despite Arendt’s warnings about the subterranean elements that crystallized in totalitarianism, many of which still exist today, she also claimed that the history of revolutions from the summer of 1776 in the U.S. and the summer of 1789 in Paris to the autumn of 1956 in Budapest – politically spells out the innermost story of the modern age. Yet this story “could be told in parable form as a tale of an age-old treasure which appears abruptly, unexpectedly and disappears again, under different mysterious circumstances, as though it were a fata morgana” (Arendt 1977: 5). It is this “lost treasure” that Arendt wants to recover in order to keep alive its memory. But not simply as a memory of something that happened in the past, but rather as naming a real possibility that is rooted in our natality, our capacity to act, to initiate, to begin something new.
Arendt’s most enthusiastic and vivid description of the outbreak of the revolutionary spirit and the emergence of the council system is her essay on the Budapest uprising of 1956. Although it only lasted for twelve days and was crushed by Soviet tanks, it nevertheless exhibited the exhilarating experience of people acting together and creating their own public freedom. There was the spontaneous creation of revolutionary and workers’ councils, “the same organization which for more than a hundred years now has emerged whenever people have been permitted for a few days, or a few weeks or months, to follow their own political devices without a government (or a party program) imposed from above” (Arendt 1958a: 497).
In Hungary, we have seen the simultaneous setting-up of all kinds of councils, each of them corresponding to a previously existing group in which people habitually lived together or met regularly and knew each other. Thus neighborhood councils emerged from sheer living together and grew into county and other territorial councils; revolutionary councils grew out of fighting together; councils of writers and artists, one is tempted to think, were born in cafés, students’ and youths’ councils at the university, military councils in the army, councils of civil servants in ministries, workers’ councils in factories, and so on. The formation of a council in each disparate group turned a merely haphazard togetherness into a political institution. (Arendt 1958b: 500)
For all Arendt’s praise of the council system, I don’t think that she ever solved the problem that so worried Jefferson – how to find a stable enduring political institution that would house the revolutionary spirit. Whenever the councils spontaneously emerged, they were quickly destroyed. But she captures something important about the spirit of these councils that is still relevant for us today. She gives expression to what many people deeply feel today when she writes:
The councils say: We want to participate, we want to debate, we want our voices heard in public, and we want to have a possibility to determine the political course of our country. Since the country is too big for all of us to come together and determine our fate, we need a number of public spaces within it. The booth in which we deposit our ballots is unquestionably too small, for this booth has room for only one. The parties are completely unsuitable; there we are, most of us, nothing but the manipulated electorate. But if only ten of us are sitting around a table, each expressing his opinion, each hearing the opinions of others, then a rational formation of opinion can take place through the exchange of opinions. (Arendt 1972: 232–3)
Arendt expresses what was always fundamental for her and should be fundamental for us – the desire of people to have their voices heard in public, to become genuine participants in shaping their political life. She sought to recover and to conceptualize the revolutionary spirit wherein public freedom becomes a living reality. Arendt had an acute sense of the prevailing tendencies in modern society that undermine, distort, and suppress politics and public freedom. But she never gave up her conviction in the power of the revolutionary spirit to burst forth again. In her own lifetime, she saw it come alive in the Budapest uprising of 1956 and in the early days of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. If she had lived to see the emergence of the political movements that spread across Eastern and Central Europe in the 1980s, she would have cited them as further evidence of the power of the revolutionary spirit – the power that springs forth when individuals act together. These were movements that began with small groups of people sitting around tables, debating and sharing opinions. Leaders of these movements, such as Adam Michnik in Poland, drew their inspiration from the writings of Arendt. What makes Arendt so relevant today is the combination of her dire warnings about prevailing tendencies in society that are so like those that crystalized in totalitarianism together with her deep conviction about the possibility of people coming together and acting in concert, exercising their public freedom and changing the course of history.