The leaders of the French Revolution, on the other hand, were too focused on subsistence (what Arendt called their "demands for bread"), as opposed to "action." And this kind of freedom demands equality, it is possible only amongst peers. . No doubt, it is obvious and of great consequence that this passion for freedom for its own sake awoke in and was nourished by men of leisure, by the hommes de lettres who had no masters and were not always busy making a living. Take Hannah Arendt’s Final Exam for Her 1961 Course “On Revolution”. The point of the matter is that revolutions rarely are reversible, that once they have happened they are not forgettable—as Kant remarked about the French Revolution at a time when terror ruled in France. The first stage of the revolution is much better characterized by disintegration rather than by violence, and when the second stage was reached and the National Convention had declared France to be a republic, power already had shifted to the streets. As an exploration of human nature, Arendt's work is philosophical. ARENDT, Hannah. We know from practically all revolutions that the opposite is the case—that it is relatively easy to seize power but infinitely more difficult to keep it—as Lenin, no bad witness in such matters, once remarked. This elementary experience of irresistibility—as irresistible as the motions of stars—brought forth an entirely new imagery, which still today we almost automatically associate in our thoughts of revolutionary events. Restoration, the consequence of an interrupted revolution, usually provides not much more than a thin and quite obviously provisional cover under which the processes of disintegration continue unchecked. The complexity comes when revolution is concerned with both liberation and freedom, and, since liberation is indeed a condition of freedom—though freedom is by no means a necessary result of liberation—it is difficult to see and say where the desire for liberation, to be free from oppression, ends, and the desire for freedom, to live a political life, begins. In America, on the other hand, the Founding Fathers never betrayed the goal of Constitutio Libertatis. What was require… And though many revolutions have ended in tyranny, it has also always been remembered that, in the words of Condorcet, “The word ‘revolutionary’ can be applied only to revolutions whose aim is freedom.”. The point of the matter is that liberation from oppression could very well have been fulfilled under monarchical though not tyrannical government, whereas the freedom of a political way of life required a new, or rather rediscovered, form of government. Clips from a program on Hannah Arendt, from many years ago (I believe from the 1980s). First, freedom from fear is a privilege that even the few have enjoyed in only relatively short periods of history, but freedom from want has been the great privilege that has distinguished a very small percentage of mankind throughout the centuries. Moreover, the dangers Machiavelli expected to arise have proved to be quite real up to our own day, despite the fact that he was not yet aware of the greatest danger in modern revolutions—the danger that rises from poverty. Liberty now had come to mean first of all “dress and food and the reproduction of the species,” as the sans-culottes consciously distinguished their own rights from the lofty and, to them, meaningless language of the proclamation of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. On Revolution – Arendt, Hannah. This absence follows from Arendt’s understanding of the Russian Revolution as a social revolution that follows the model of the French Revolution, and thus one that failed to offer anything new to our understanding of revolutions. READ PAPER. Since then, and more markedly after the Second World War, nothing seems more certain than that a revolutionary change of the form of government, in distinction to an alteration of administration, will follow defeat in a war between the remaining powers—short, that is, of total annihilation. I don’t need to follow this development in detail; it is sufficiently well known, especially from the history of the Bolshevik party and the Russian Revolution. between the two classes that split society,” Marx noted that revolution now meant “the overthrow of bourgeois society, whereas before it had meant the overthrow of the form of state.” The French Revolution of 1789 was the prelude to this, and though it ended in dismal failure, it remained decisive for all later revolutions. But it depends most of all upon subjective qualities and the moral-political success or failure of those who are willing to assume responsibility. Arendt starts her novel with the controversial claim that the American Revolution is to thank for the French Revolution, and the American Revolution was more, in a certain sense, "revolutionary". Precisely because revolutions put the question of political freedom in its truest and most radical form—freedom to participate in public affairs, freedom of action—all other freedoms, political as well as civil liberties, are in jeopardy when revolutions fail. A Heroine of the Revolution (Review) – New York Review of Books 7/5 (6 October 1966): 21-27. History. It came to the fore in the experiences of revolution, and it has influenced, though again rather inexplicitly, what one may call the revolutionary spirit. It demanded the constitution of a republic. Had the revolutions aimed only at the guarantee of civil rights, liberation from regimes that had overstepped their powers and infringed upon well-established rights would have been enough. “The perplexities of beginning” is a phrase from Arendt's book On Revolution (1963g, 208). The first stage was characterized by violence, but the second stage was a matter of deliberation, discussion, and persuasion, in short, of applying “political science” as the Founders understood the term. And no revolution was ever the result of conspiracies, secret societies, or openly revolutionary parties. On Revolution Hannah Arendt’s penetrating observations on the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, have been fundamental to our understanding of our political landscape. Conversely, military interventions, even when they were successful, have often proved remarkably inefficient in restoring stability and filling the power vacuum. For, since it can no longer be decided by war, the contestation of the great powers may well be decided, in the long run, by which side better understands what revolutions are and what is at stake in them. Arendt presents a comparison of two of the main revolutions of the eighteenth century, the American and French Revolutions. But no matter whether it is a question of birth or rebirth, what is decisive in Virgil’s line is that it is taken from a nativity hymn, not prophesying the birth of a divine child, but in praise of birth as such, the arrival of a new generation, the great saving event or “miracle” which will redeem mankind time and again. It is, I believe, a secret from nobody, at least not since the Bay of Pigs incident, that the foreign policy of this country has shown itself hardly expert or even knowledgeable in judging revolutionary situations or in understanding the momentum of revolutionary movements. In addition to all this, we have witnessed the supreme danger that out of the abortive attempt to found the institutions of freedom may grow the most thoroughgoing abolition of freedom and of all liberties. It is that the idea of freedom and the actual experience of making a new beginning in the historical continuum should coincide. This was known in both Greek and Roman antiquity, albeit in an inexplicit manner. . The failure was in misunderstanding what it means when a poverty stricken people in a backward country, in which corruption has reached the point of rottenness, are suddenly released, not from their poverty, but from the obscurity and hence incomprehensibility of their misery; what it means when they hear for the first time their condition being discussed in the open and find themselves invited to participate in that discussion; and what it means when they are brought to their capital, which they have never seen before, and told: these streets and these buildings and these squares, all these are yours, your possessions, and hence your pride. In the course of the American Revolution, the stage of liberation meant liberation from political restraint, from tyranny or monarchy or whatever word may have been used. The difference, then, was that the American Revolution—because of the institution of slavery and the belief that slaves belonged to a different “race”—overlooked the existence of the miserable, and with it the formidable task of liberating those who were not so much constrained by political oppression as the sheer necessities of life. From the eighteenth-century rebellions in America and France to the explosive changes of the twentieth century, Arendt traces the changing … The aim was to establish an order based on freedom. In On Revolution (1963), Arendt made the provocative claim that the American Revolution was actually more ambitious than the French Revolution, although it failed to set the world ablaze. I said before that the revolution’s original goal was freedom in the sense of the abolition of personal rule and of the admission of all to the public realm and participation in the administration of affairs common to all. 11, by Hannah Arendt, edited by J. Kohn, to be published by Schocken Books in January 2018, under the title: “The Freedom to Be Free”, Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature, “A large number of revolutions during the last two hundred years went to their doom.”, “The fact that the word “revolution” originally meant restoration is more than a mere oddity of semantics.”, “Revolutions always appear to succeed with amazing ease in their initial stages, and the reason is that those who supposedly “make” revolutions do not “seize power” but rather pick it up where it lies in the streets.”, “No doubt, it is obvious and of great consequence that this passion for freedom for its own sake awoke in and was nourished by men of leisure who had no masters and were not always busy making a living.”, It Costs $55 to Learn How to Bend a Spoon with Your Mind, Systemic Cruelty, Mass Sadism, and Reading "The Lottery" in 2017. Such events included the expulsion of Krushchev in the Soviet Union; the construction of the Berlin Wall dividing Germany into two states; the Cuban missile crisis; the so-called “Quiet Revolution” in Canada, nationalistic in character; … And obviously, this mysterious human gift, the ability to start something new, has something to do with the fact that every one of us came into the world as a newcomer through birth. For Arendt, this was the lowest form of human activity (all living creatures are capable of this). On the contrary, it was a passion for this new political freedom, though not yet equated with a republican form of government, which inspired and prepared those to enact a revolution without fully knowing what they were doing. Revolutions always appear to succeed with amazing ease in their initial stages, and the reason is that those who supposedly “make” revolutions do not “seize power” but rather pick it up where it lies in the streets. Critics of On Revolution include Eric Hobsbawm, who argued that Arendt's approach was selective, both in terms of cases and the evidence drawn from them. Hannah Arendt: Conditions and meaning of the revolution | Culture 2 years ago . The lesson, as simple as it was new and unexpected, is, as Saint-Just put it, “If you wish to found a republic, you first must pull the people out of a condition of misery that corrupts them. It might have been given at the University of Chicago where Arendt was teaching at the time in the School on Social Thought. Historically speaking, it was as if the Renaissance’s revival of antiquity was suddenly granted a new lease on life, as if the republican fervor of the short-lived Italian city-states, foredoomed by the advent of the nation-state, had only lain dormant, so to speak, to give the nations of Europe the time to grow up under the tutelage of absolute princes and enlightened despots. The American Revolution was fortunate that it did not have to face this obstacle to freedom and, in fact, owed a good measure of its success to the absence of desperate poverty among the freemen, and to the invisibility of slaves, in the colonies of the New World. When establishing a new political order, people try to break free from the chains of history and … And even in this new and revolutionary extension to all mankind, liberty meant no more than freedom from unjustifiable restraint, that is, something essentially negative. Because of this, Hobsbawm finds the link between Arendtian revolutions and history to be "as incidental as that of medieval theologians and astronomers". Whether it ends in success, with the constitution of a public space for freedom, or in disaster, for those who have risked it or participated in it against their inclination and expectation, the meaning of revolution is the actualization of one of the greatest and most elementary human potentialities, the unequaled experience of being free to make a new beginning, from which comes the pride of having opened the world to a Novus Ordo Saeclorum. 37 Full PDFs related to this paper. Yet Arendt believes the revolutionary spirit of those men was later lost, and advocates a "council system" as an appropriate institution to regain it.[4]. The surprising phrase is taken from Virgil who, in his Fourth Eclogue, speaks of “the great cycle of periods [that] is born anew” in the reign of Augustus: Magnus ab integro seclorum nascitur ordo. . The discussion took place in 1965. 2 Jonathan Schell in the Introduction to Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, [1963] 2006), p. xiv (hereafter referred to as OR) 4 consensus-based model of democracy which stresses the deliberative and moral elements in Arendt’s political theory, agonists like Bonnie Honig and Dana R. Villa offer a conflict-based model of democracy stress its agonistic and aesthetic outlook. But there is, on the other hand, a great potential future stability inherent in consciously formed new political bodies, of which the American Republic is the prime example; the principal problem, of course, is the rarity of successful revolutions. [5], Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=On_Revolution&oldid=1007828840, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 20 February 2021, at 03:45. Or what the spectators reported—a “majestic lava stream which spares nothing and which nobody can arrest,” a spectacle that had fallen under the sign of Saturn, “the revolution devouring its own children” (Vergniaud). But what is perhaps less obvious is that one would have to change only a few words to obtain a perfect description of the ills of absolutism prior to the revolutions. Hannah Arendt's penetrating observations on the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, have been fundamental to our understanding of our political landscape. .” Well, that this is how it turned out—except for Stalin’s  totalitarian rule, for which it would be difficult to hold either Lenin or the revolutionary tradition responsible—no one is likely to deny. For if violence pitted against violence leads to war, foreign or civil, violence pitted against social conditions has always led to terror. Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a German political theorist who, over the course of many books, explored themes such as violence, revolution, and evil. According to her book, these two aims can only be achieved if citizens create an atmosphere of public freedom in which they can engage in political activity and inquiry inspired by an originating revolutionary spirit. This, and not the accumulation of wealth, was the core of slavery, at least in antiquity, and it is due only to the rise of modern technology, rather than the rise of any modern political notions, including revolutionary ideas, which has changed this human condition at least in some parts of the world. La Monarchie? Prior to the revolutions, these men on both sides of the Atlantic were called hommes de lettres, and it is characteristic of them that they spent their leisure time “ransacking the archives of antiquity,” that is, turning to Roman history, not because they were romantically enamored of the past as such but with the purpose of recovering the spiritual as well as institutional political lessons that had been lost or half-forgotten during the centuries of a strictly Christian tradition. Twelve years after the publication of her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951),[1] looking at what she considered failed revolutions, Arendt optimistically turned her attention to predict nonviolent movements that would restore democratic governments around the world. Whatever the French Revolution did and did not achieve—and it did not achieve human equality—it liberated the poor from obscurity, from non-visibility. For a revolution to be truly successful, it must allow for—if not demand—that these publics be created. We have little reason to hope that at some time in the not too distant future such men will match in practical and theoretical wisdom the men of the American Revolution, who became the Founders of this country. For Arendt, Achilles embodies "action." [2], In On Revolution[3] Arendt argues that the French Revolution, while well studied and often emulated, was a disaster and that the largely ignored American Revolution was a success, an argument that runs counter to common Marxist and leftist views. Revolution, Like any other term in our political vocabulary, it can be used in a generic sense, without taking into account neither the origin of the word nor the moment in time when the term has been applied for the first time to a specific political phenomenon. Through your works, people may remember you; and if your work is great enough, you may be remembered for thousands of years. In her essay On Revolution (') Hannah Arendt has tried to settle accounts with both the liberal-democratic and the Marxist traditions, that is, with those two dominant traditions of modern political thought which, in one way or the other, can be traced back to the European Enlightenment. Arendt’s blindness to questions of exclusion within this context has given way to a set of critical debates in Arendt studies concerning the viability of her political project. And it is true that the revolutions of the 18th century began by claiming those old rights. The The power and originality of her thinking wasevident in works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism,The Human Condition, On Revolution and The Lifeof the Mind. In other words, they enjoyed the privileges of Athenian and Roman citizens without taking part in those affairs of state that so occupied the freemen of antiquity. The marchers, he said, “played the genuine part of mothers whose children were starving in squalid homes, and they thereby afforded to motives, which they neither shared nor understood [i.e., concern with government] the aid of a diamond point that nothing could withstand.” What le peuple, as the French understood it, brought to the revolution and which was altogether absent from the course of events in America, was the irresistibility of a movement that human power was no longer able to control. But in France something altogether different happened. There are no political virtues without pride, and no one can have pride who is wretched.”. In an earlier book, The Human Condition, Arendt argued that there were three states of human activity: labor, work, and action. comment. Even the 18th-century revolutions cannot be understood without realizing that revolutions first broke out when restoration had been their aim, and that the content of such restoration was freedom. Her major works include The Origins of Totalitarianism , The Human Condition , and the controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem , in which she coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” This too has proved to be the case, for such weakness, i.e., the power vacuum of which I spoke before, may well attract conquerors. In both cases, men and women stood up to free themselves from oppression and eventually demanded a new political order. On Revolution (Hannah Arendt) On Revolution. Let me, by way of concluding, just indicate one more aspect of freedom which came to the fore during the revolutions, and for which the revolutionaries themselves were least prepared.