On Revolution

“The sad truth of the matter is that the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has made world history, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has remained an event of little more than local importance.”

Arendt believes the French Revolution ended in disaster because the Jacobins replaced institutionalizing political freedom with eradicating mass poverty as their chief goal. She believes that the French Revolution’s misguided idealism has captured the imaginations of later revolutionaries, to the world’s detriment. The American Revolution, on the other hand, did succeed in establishing freedom, but foreign intellectuals in subsequent generations ignored it—an oversight Arendt seeks to redress in this book.

“The Revolution had come to its turning point when the Jacobins, under the leadership of Robespierre, seized power, not because they were more radical but because they did not share the Girondins’ concern with forms of government, because they believed in the people rather than in the republic, and ‘pinned their faith on the natural goodness of a class’ rather than on institutions and constitutions.”

The Jacobins made the fateful error of embracing Rousseau’s belief in the innate goodness of people in the “state of nature” and his theory of the “general will.” Just as the King’s will had been law, so now was the people’s will, and there was no need to codify it in written documents or in the establishment of strong, democratic state institutions. Since the “people’s will” was unitary and undivided, there was no perceived need for institutions (like the US Constitution) to protect minorities from tyranny of the majority—a failure of political structuring that Arendt believes enabled the French Revolution’s ultimate failure.

“It was of greater relevance that the very word ‘consent’, with its overtones of deliberate choice and considered opinion, was replaced by the word ‘will,’ which essentially excludes all processes of exchange of opinions and an eventual agreement between them. The will, if it is to function at all, must indeed be one and indivisible […] there is no possible mediation between wills as there is between opinions.”

The most important feature of Rousseau’s “general will,” Arendt asserts, is its unanimity. If “the people” is imagined as a single, unitary being, by definition there can be no diversity of opinions. In other words, Robespierre and his allies were rejecting The Importance of Pluralism—one of the very things that Arendt believes made the American Revolution so successful by contrast.

“Only in the presence of the enemy can such a thing as la nation une et indivisible, the ideal of French and of all other nationalism, come to pass. Hence, national unity can assert itself only in foreign affairs, under circumstances of, at least, potential hostility.”

In actual practice, the entire population of a country is rarely unified in opinion, except when it is facing a common enemy. Arendt notes that Rousseau’s solution to this problem was to conceptualize the enemy as the “particular will and interest” (68) of each individual, which had to be overcome to promote the general will. This passage once again emphasizes the French Revolution’s rejection of The Importance of Pluralism.

“Since the days of the French Revolution, it has been the boundlessness of their sentiments that made revolutionaries so curiously insensitive to reality in general and to the reality of persons in particular, whom they felt no compunctions in sacrificing to their ‘principles,’ or to the course of history, or to the cause of revolution as such.”

Arendt here argues that while the idealism and expansiveness of the French revolutionaries’ “sentiments” has won them lasting appeal, such abstract idealism is dangerous in practice because it enables the dehumanization of individuals in the name of achieving revolutionary ideals. This is how Robespierre—and subsequent revolutionaries such as Lenin—was able to justify the mass executions of the Terror, including executions of his own friends and allies, in the name of the common good.

“No revolution has ever solved the ‘social question’ and liberated men from the predicament of want, but all revolutions, with the exception of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, have followed the example of the French Revolution and used and misused the mighty forces of misery and destitution in their struggle against tyranny or oppression. And although the whole record of past revolutions demonstrates beyond doubt that every attempt to solve the social question with political means leads into terror, and that it is terror which sends revolutions to their doom, it can hardly be denied that to avoid this fatal mistake is almost impossible when a revolution breaks out under conditions of mass poverty.”

Here, Arendt argues for Poverty as a Pre-Political Problem. She believes that the Jacobins were misguided in their replacement of freedom with abundance as their chief goal. This shift led inevitably into the Reign of Terror, because the goal was unachievable since the technological means to eliminate poverty did not exist at that time, and therefore scapegoats were held accountable for this inevitable failure. She does, however, also acknowledge how hard it is to evade focus on “the social question” in a society overwhelmed by abject poverty.

“Where the breakdown of traditional authority set the poor of the earth on the march, where they left the obscurity of their misfortunes and streamed upon the market-place, their furor seemed as irresistible as the motion of the stars, a torrent rushing forward with elemental force and engulfing a whole world.”

Here, Arendt is explaining why Marx and like-minded theorists explained the French Revolution in terms of “historical necessity.” The spontaneous eruption of mass protests was viewed as the inevitable culmination of historical processes, and the very massiveness of the protests made them seem like a force of nature.

“All rulership has its original and its most legitimate source in man’s wish to emancipate himself from life’s necessity, and men achieved such liberation by means of violence, by forcing others to bear the burden of life for them. This was the core of slavery, and it is only the rise of technology, and not the rise of modern political ideas as such, which has refuted the old and terrible truth that only violence and rule over others could make some men free.”

This quotation reflects Arendt’s argument for Poverty as a Pre-Political Problem, with technical problems needing to be solved by technocratic elites instead of being political problems requiring public deliberation. Before the advent of modern technology, people could attain material abundance only by exploiting the labor of other people, which is why she believes eliminating poverty was an unattainable goal in 18th-century France.

“Generally speaking, we may say that no revolution is even possible where the authority of the body politic is truly intact, and this means, under modern conditions, where the armed forces can be trusted to obey the civil authorities. Revolutions always appear to succeed with amazing ease in their initial stage, and the reason is that men who make them first only pick up the power of a regime in plain disintegration; they are the consequences but never the causes of the downfall of political authority.”

Arendt argues that no revolution was launched either by poor people protesting their condition or by professional revolutionaries deliberately inciting them to protest, because revolutions are always first ignited by the government’s loss of authority, which is often manifested in military mutinies. Revolutionaries do not themselves cause that loss of authority; they simply capitalize on it.

“The point is that the Americans knew that public freedom consisted in having a share in public business, and that the activities connected with this business by no means constituted a burden but gave those who discharged them in public a feeling of happiness they could acquire nowhere else.”

This is a succinct statement of Arendt’s key argument about The Virtues of Direct Democracy: Participating actively in debate and decision-making in public affairs is the fullest form of freedom, and it is deeply gratifying to those who are drawn to it. The American revolutionists “knew” this because of the colonial experience of self-governance.

“Tyranny, in other words, deprived of public happiness, though not necessarily of private well-being, while a republic granted to every citizen the right to become ‘a participator in the government of affairs’, the right to be seen in action.”

Arendt explains that before the revolutions, “tyranny” was defined by a ruler ruling according to his own will and interests rather than abiding by the law, and often acting against his subjects’ personal interests. A law-abiding monarch, by this definition, was not a tyrant. However, the French and American revolutionists came to define tyranny explicitly in terms of a ruler denying his subjects the right to participate in public affairs and “banishing” them to the private realm.

“Freedom and power have parted company, and the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun.”

Arendt argues that Robespierre abandoned the focus on expanding political participation and argued instead that the most important function of a constitution is to protect individuals from a government’s power. Reversing the revolutionary definition of freedom seen in Quotation 12, he now described citizens as being free only in their private lives, and government as being something external and coercive.

“For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery […] The hidden wish of poor men is not ‘To each according to his needs,’ but ‘To each according to his desires.’ And while it is true that freedom can only come to those whose needs have been fulfilled, it is equally true that it will escape those who are bent upon living for their desires.”

Arendt is here criticizing the rampant consumerism that was seen as a defining feature of “mass society,” where advertising constantly manufactures new desires for more consumption. The French Revolution failed because it was overtaken by the “social question” in the form of extreme poverty, but here Arendt is saying the spirit of the American Revolution has been drowned out by the pursuit of affluence, which distracted citizens from caring about public affairs.

“However, the liberties which the laws of constitutional government guarantee are all of a negative character, and this includes the right of representation for the purposes of taxation which later became the right to vote; they are indeed ‘not powers of themselves, but merely an exemption from the abuses of power’; they claim not a share in government but a safeguard against government.”

This is a concise statement of Arendt’s notion that active participation in self-governance is the fullest expression of political freedom, echoing The Virtues of Direct Democracy, whereas civil rights and liberties, such as voting for representatives, represent a lesser form of freedom—the freedom from oppression.

“The constitutional history of France […] could easily be read as one monotonous record illustrating again and again what should have been obvious from the beginning, namely that the so-called will of a multitude (if this is to be more than a legal fiction) is ever-changing by definition, and that a structure built on it as its foundation is built on quicksand.”

Here, Arendt is lamenting the fact that the French revolutionists, following Rousseau, substituted the “people’s will” for the will of the King, who in an absolute monarchy was above the law because his will was law. Just as the king can change his mind whenever he feels like it, so too can “the people,” if they are not bound by any higher laws. Arendt’s mistrust of the “will of the multitude” also complements her belief in The Importance of Pluralism.

“Those who received the power to constitute, to frame constitutions, were duly elected delegates of constituted bodies; they received their authority from below, and when they held fast to the Roman principle that the seat of power lay in the people, they did not think in terms of a fiction and an absolute, the nation above all authority and absolved from all laws, but in terms of a working reality, the organized multitude who power was exerted in accordance with laws and limited by them.”

For Arendt, the crucial difference between the two revolutions was that the Americans did not understand “the people” as embodying a fictional general will or wielding absolute power, like that of the king. Instead, they had in mind actual individuals, in all their diversity, who had organized themselves into governing bodies that derived their authority from the mutual promises of those who established them. The passage reinforces The Importance of Pluralism.

“The really astounding fact in the whole story is that their obvious fear of one another was accompanied by the no less obvious confidence they had in their own power, granted and confirmed by no one and as yet unsupported by any means of violence, to combine themselves together into a ‘civil Body Politick’ which, held together solely by the strength of mutual promise ‘in the Presence of God and one another,’ supposedly was powerful enough to ‘enact, constitute, and frame’ all necessary laws and instruments of government.”

This is Arendt’s admiring description of the authors of the Mayflower Compact, who dared to abandon European civilization and venture forth into new settlements protected only by their commitments to one another. Arendt views this moment as the seed from which grew the American revolutionists’ commitment to public freedom.

“[T]he colonists themselves, with a hundred and fifty years of covenant-making behind them, rising out of a country which was articulated from top to bottom [. . .] into duly constituted bodies, each a commonwealth of its own, with representatives ‘freely chosen by the consent of loving friends and neighbours,’ […] knew of the enormous power potential that arises when men ‘mutually pledge to each other [their] lives, [their] Fortunes and their sacred Honour.”

Arendt maintains that true power springs from the collective action of people joined together through mutual promises by The Virtues of Direct Democracy. The American Founders learned this from their colonial experience of making covenants and electing assemblies, whereas the French revolutionists, operating in the context of an absolute monarchy, could understand power only in terms of violence and control.

“[I]t was precisely the revolutions, their crisis and their emergency, which drove the very ‘enlightened’ men of the eighteenth century to plead for some religious sanction at the very moment when they were about to emancipate the secular realm fully from the influences of the churches and to separate politics and religion once and for all.”

French and American revolutionists both believed they needed a source of transcendent authority to legitimize their law-giving bodies, which they conceived of as a Supreme Being that Robespierre called an “Immortal Legislator” and John Adams called “the great Legislator of the Universe.” While these men believed in the importance of separating church and state, their invocation of an enlightened supreme being reflects the widespread influence of deism among Enlightenment intellectuals.

“[C]onstitution-worship in America has survived more than a hundred years of minute scrutiny and violent critical debunking […] the remembrance of the event itself—a people deliberately founding a new body politic—has continued to shroud the actual outcome of this act, the document itself, in an atmosphere of reverent awe which has shielded both event and document against the onslaught of time and changed circumstances.”

Here, Arendt is building up to her argument that the American founders were mistaken in believing they needed a transcendent source of authority for their new governing institutions. The legitimacy of the US Constitution derived not from above, but from below—from the fact that it was the product of citizens organizing themselves over many years into duly constituted self-governing bodies, from the municipal level to the national, through The Virtues of Direct Democracy.

“[I]f foundation was the aim and the end of revolution, then the revolutionary spirit was not merely the spirit of beginning something new but of starting something permanent and enduring; a lasting institution, embodying this spirit and encouraging it to new achievements, would be self-defeating. From which it unfortunately seems to follow that nothing threatens the very achievements of revolution more dangerously and more acutely than the spirit which has brought them about.”

Here, Arendt is noting the paradox inherent in the American revolutionists’ goal of creating institutions that were entirely novel—which she calls the “revolutionary spirit”—but that would also withstand the test of time. If the revolutionary spirit was about giving men the public freedom to establish a novel form of government, then the very stability of that government would deny subsequent generations the opportunity to experience the revolutionary spirit by establishing their own new beginnings.

“Both Jefferson’s plan and the French sociétés révolutionnaires anticipated […] those councils, soviets and Räte, which were to make their appearance in every genuine revolution throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each time they appeared, they sprang up as the spontaneous organs of the people, not only outside of all revolutionary parties but entirely unexpected by them and their leaders. Like Jefferson’s proposals, they were utterly neglected by statesmen, historians, political theorists, and, most importantly, by the revolutionary tradition itself.”

In Arendt’s telling, the desire to participate in self-governance is an innate urge that resurfaces whenever a government’s authority has been eroded, ushering in The Virtues of Direct Democracy. However, these local institutions of direct democracy have never fully lasted because the new rulers always fear they will threaten their own power.

“Freedom, wherever it existed as a tangible reality, has always been spatially limited. […] Freedom in a positive sense is possible only among equals, and equality itself is by no means a universally valid principle but, again, applicable only with limitations and even within spatial limits.”

Here, Arendt is talking about “public freedom,” defined as the ability to participate in public deliberation and decision-making. Such freedom exists only within the institution in which the deliberation and decision-making are taking place, because only in this jurisdiction are its members endowed with the authority to make decisions. For this reason, Arendt suggests that freedom is something that must be deliberately constructed and safeguarded through democratic institutions within a particular place or state.